Hundred-year-old anchor found at dockyards
Posted Oct 20, 2014 03:50:32 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
At an event Monday, the Navy showed off an anchor found by an excavation crew demolishing a building under the MacDonald Bridge.
The 900-kilogram (2000-pound) anchor was found last Tuesday, and Richard Sanderson, director of the Naval Museum of Halifax, says he’s pretty sure he knows where the anchor came from.
“I’m 85 to 90 per cent sure that that’s what we’ve got here, is the anchor that was used to hold Niobe,” he said.
HMCS Niobe was the first Canadian warship to enter Canadian waters on Oct. 21, 1910. Sanderson says Niobe lost its anchor during the Halifax explosion, and he believes the one found last week replaced that anchor. He explained that this is a sheet anchor, used to hold a ship to shore, as opposed to a sea anchor.
Sanderson says he got a call last week to come down and look at the anchor. He says it was half-uncovered when he got there, and as it was pulled completely out of the ground, the chain attached to it pulled up the concrete around it. He believes the chain still goes right to the water. He says the anchor is in very good shape, considering it’s over 100 years old.
Rear Admiral John Newton says this is “real history of the Royal Canadian Navy.” He says it will be put in a museum somewhere between Halifax and Ottawa.
“Our Navy I think really has in its hand, in Niobe, in this anchor, a piece of memorabilia, an artifact that ties us to our foundation and allows us to reconnect with all our history” he said.
