US marine archaeologists have found the sunken whaling ship belonging to the captain who inspired Herman Melville’s classic 19th Century novel, Moby Dick.

The remains of the vessel, the Two Brothers, were found in shallow waters off Hawaii.

Captain George Pollard was the skipper when the ship hit a coral reef and sank in 1823.

His previous ship, the Essex, had been rammed by a whale and also sank, providing the narrative for the book.
‘Pretty amazing’

The remains of the Two Brothers were found by researchers from America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), about 600 miles (965 km) northwest of Honolulu in the remote chain of islands and atolls.

The wooden vessel has disintegrated in the warm waters, but the researchers found harpoons, a hook for stripping whales of their blubber, and cauldrons used to turn whale blubber into oil.

“To find the physical remains of something that seems to have been lost to time is pretty amazing,” said Nathaniel Philbrick, an author, and historian, who has been researching the Two Brothers, the Essex, and their captain.

“It just makes you realize these stories are more than stories. They’re about real lives.”

The sinking of the Two Brothers was relatively uneventful compared with Essex’s run-in with the sperm whale in 1821.

After the Essex sank, Capt Pollard and his crew drifted at sea without food and water for three months and even resorted to cannibalism before they were rescued.

Pollard – who gave up whaling and became a night watchman in Nantucket, Massachusetts – is not thought to have been the basis for the novel’s obsessive Capt Ahab

Source: BBC News

A film centred around the do-or-die efforts of a group of cave divers.

The $30 million-budgeted Sanctum was directed by Alister Grierson and shot in 3-D with the input of co-producer James Cameron, whose previous hits include the 3-D Avatar and Titanic.

The film, which opens on 4 February, follows the trials of a team of cave divers who enter a large, remote cave system in Papua New Guinea.

They struggle with raging currents and an unknown terrain as they try to find a way out of their potential tomb after a tropical storm unleashes floods.

The film is both action thriller and rites-of-passage movie, a centrepiece partnership involving cave divers Frank McGuire (Richard Roxburgh) and his son Josh (Rhys Wakefield).

The cast is fundamentally Australian, exceptions including Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd who plays the project’s financier.

Sanctum was shot in Queensland, Australia, using a Warner Bros studio with dry-cave sets and a further cave system structure in a flooded tank.

Filming employed 3-D techniques which Cameron used to produce Avatar.

Sanctum‘s co-producer/co-writer Andrew Wight and co-writer John Garvin are both highly experienced divers and trainers in open-circuit, rebreathers and cave diving.

Their experience was invaluable in bringing a sense of diving reality to the film.

The film and Garvin’s contribution to it feature in the February issue of DIVER magazine.

Furthermore, John Garvin will be talking about the making of Sanctum at the London International Dive Show (LIDS 2011) and TEK 2011 conferences, both at the ExCeL Centre on 26/27 March.

Source: http://sanctummovie.com

Map of caves: http://www.nationalgeographic.com