WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:01.560 --> 00:00:07.750
In 1871, a fleet of 33 whaling ships were
lost off the north coast of Alaska in what

00:00:07.750 --> 00:00:13.370
would be termed one of the greatest disasters
in the history of American whaling.

00:00:13.370 --> 00:00:18.480
When those ships sailed up in 1871, they were warned
by the local Inupiat people that this was

00:00:18.490 --> 00:00:24.089
going to be a bad weather year. They didn’t
listen. And when the wind shifted and the

00:00:24.089 --> 00:00:27.229
ice came in, 33 ships were trapped.

00:00:28.300 --> 00:00:30.300
NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries Maritime

00:00:30.310 --> 00:00:36.610
Heritage Program is working in the Arctic
off the coast of North Alaska to try to locate

00:00:36.610 --> 00:00:41.910
the remains of shipwrecks lost in one of the
epic disasters in the history of American

00:00:41.910 --> 00:00:49.590
whaling. Finding these ships not only talks
about those times, it reminds us of how we

00:00:49.590 --> 00:00:55.120
as Americans not only created an industry,
but how we adapted to changes in industry,

00:00:55.120 --> 00:01:01.500
how we adapted to changes over time. Any mission
like this requires a fair amount of preparation.

00:01:01.500 --> 00:01:06.869
It also requires a great deal of hard
work. This mission was one that saw people

00:01:06.869 --> 00:01:11.450
with different skills coming together, from
archaeologists and surveyors to the boat crew

00:01:11.450 --> 00:01:17.569
themselves. And the payoff was the discovery
of at least two of these ships sitting on

00:01:17.569 --> 00:01:23.549
the bottom, broken, chewed by the ice, but
still there and identifiable. When you look

00:01:23.549 --> 00:01:30.590
at books like Moby Dick, when you think of
how whaling figured big in the American consciousness,

00:01:30.590 --> 00:01:34.109
to know that now only one of these whaling
ships survives

00:01:34.109 --> 00:01:36.560
one,  out of all those hundreds. And yet on the

00:01:36.560 --> 00:01:43.179
bottom are these broken remains of these other
whaling ships, which are a reminder that sanctuaries,

00:01:43.179 --> 00:01:46.589
as well as the rest of the ocean, can be a
big museum at the bottom of the sea.