Up next in 10
HMS Victory is the only shipwreck on which I've seen human remains.
It's a very odd feeling
#wreckdiving #maritimehistory #shipwreck #deepwreckdiver #technicaldiving
Show More Show Less View Video Transcript
0:00
Human remains are really unusual to see
0:03
on shipwrecks. I think HMS Victory is
0:06
the only shipwreck that I've ever seen
0:08
them on.
0:09
That's
0:10
really incredible when you consider the
0:12
number of shipwrecks I've dived and the
0:14
number of people that have died on those
0:16
shipwrecks that I actually see human
0:18
remains. I think what you can see in
0:20
this photo here is is two really obvious
0:24
pieces of of human beings. In the top
0:26
left there, that looks like a long bone,
0:28
so maybe a leg bone.
0:30
And in the bottom there is a skull,
0:33
which is quite a sobering thing to see
0:36
on a dive. And And when you see it, you
0:38
don't actually, or I didn't anyway,
0:40
immediately realize that was a skull. It
0:43
took me a while to kind of come to terms
0:45
with that. Now Now the kind of question
0:46
is, I guess, how those uh how that
0:50
organic matter
0:52
um you know,
0:53
bones and also wood, how come it
0:56
survives down there so long and it
0:58
doesn't survive on other wrecks that are
0:59
much, much younger? The The view is that
1:03
these were buried under sand and
1:05
therefore
1:06
they were protected from the kind of
1:08
things that causes decay.
1:11
But what has happened is sometime
1:13
relatively recently, the sand has been
1:15
cleared off and that has exposed all
1:17
these kind of things. So here is another
1:20
photo of that skull that we've seen
1:22
already. I I think it's pretty clear.
1:24
And this we also believe is a piece of
1:27
skull as well.
1:29
And uh obviously you can see a couple of
1:31
hermit crabs there for scale.
1:34
Uh you may not think that's skull. Um I
1:36
don't know what else it could be, but
1:38
but we certainly did.
1:39
And there you go. There's There's
1:41
another piece of of skull. Now the
1:42
interesting thing is, we saw these on
1:45
the first dive and although we looked
1:47
for them on the second dive, we didn't
1:50
see them. How do I feel about diving a
1:52
wreck which has human remains? It It
1:54
doesn't really bother me, although I can
1:56
understand why it would bother other
1:58
people.
1:59
I
2:01
you know, take fairly pragmatic view on
2:02
this. These are dead people. They aren't
2:06
going to scare anyone. Um in terms of
2:09
respect, yeah, clearly we shouldn't mess
2:11
around with them, but they have been on
2:13
the seabed for 300 years and therefore
2:17
you know, they're not This isn't a
2:18
cemetery. This isn't a graveyard. This
2:20
just happens to be a place where there
2:22
are lots of of bones and stuff around.
2:24
What should we do about it? That's a
2:26
really good question and I'm going to
2:28
come back to that one later on.
#Sports