188-yr-old shipwrecked whaler linked to ‘Moby-Dick’ discovered

LONDON - Marine archaeologists have discovered a 19th-century shipwrecked whaling ship ‘Two Brothers’ - which went down in 1823 - from the Hawaiian waters.

Slammed into coral reef about 600 miles northwest of Honolulu, the vessel was skippered by Captain George Pollard Jr.

Two years earlier, Pollard commanded another ship that was rammed by a whale and sank in the South Pacific. Many know that as the inspiration for Herman Melville’s writing the 1851 novel ‘Moby Dick’.

Iron and ceramic scraps from the Nantucket whaling ship ‘Two Brothers’ were located in shallow waters nearly 600 miles from Honolulu in the remote chain of islands and atolls that make up the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, reports the Telegraph.

According to expedition leader Kelly Gleason, a marine archeologist, the area protected by the U.S. government as the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, was key in helping to preserve the site.

The discovery was unveiled on Friday by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which led the initial 2008 expedition to the wreck and subsequent explorations of the site during the past two years.

This is the first discovery of a sunken whaler from Nantucket, Massachusetts, birthplace of a U.S. whaling industry that played a key role in America’s economic and political expansion into the Pacific, according to NOAA. (ANI)