SEATTLE –– Today is the last chance to see an anchor believed to have broken free from a ship in Capt. George Vancouver’s 18th-century exploration of the Pacific Northwest before the anchor is shipped off to Texas to be studied and dated.
The relic is on display through 5 p.m. today at the Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. North in Seattle.
Admission is $5, and tickets are available at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-anchorMOHAI.
On June 9, a retrieval expedition led by Scott Grimm, a medical equipment salesman and amateur historian from Seattle, and Port Angeles diver and fisherman Doug Monk pulled the anchor off the floor of Admiralty Inlet off Whidbey Island’s west coast.
Come July 18, the pair will pack it into a truck and drive it to College Station, Texas, where researchers at Texas A&M University will try to prove the anchor’s age and settle a longstanding historical dispute.
Monk and Grimm believe the anchor is the one that log books from Vancouver’s expedition report was torn from the HMS Chatham by a quickly changing tide in the early morning darkness of June 9, 1792.
Monk discovered the anchor while diving for sea cucumbers in 2008 when his air hose snagged on it
For decades, experts have believed the anchor that broke off the Chatham, companion to Vancouver’s HMS Discovery, was carried into Bellingham Channel.
The Chatham and the Discovery explored the North American west coast for four years beginning in 1791.