Nelson's Trafalgar uniform conservation update

[anteros_lmc]

The National Maritime Museum has posted a couple of short updates on the conservation of Nelson's Trafalgar uniform coat, covering the attachment of the silk lining and the removal of Nelson's orders.

* Reattaching the silk lining
* Stitching and orders

This little video showing the removal of the orders is particularly fascinating as you get to see the orders themselves close up along with the hole from the bullet that killed Nelson. Although I must say I though the jaunty music at the end of the video is rather inappropriate given that the conservator has just been pointing out the bullet hole and the bloodstains from the fatal wound!

Comments

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

The sight of that little coat gives me the strangest achy, nearly weepy feeling. Not because it is specially Nelsons, but because it was there, and then.

Have you ever read "Frozen in Time'? It is about the discovery and excavation of three sailors of the Franklin expedition. They were buried on Beechy island, dead before most of the trouble started. They are so well preserved, that you can see what they wore/looked like. Down to the fingernails. They died of TB.

Same shivers from that.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what you mean. It's not the connection to Nelson, it's the connection to the time and the place and all the other people who lived and died through such a momentous event.

I have read Frozen in Time, and posted a review of it here. I've excavated human remains in the past but seeing those bodies was really moving because they didn't look like anonymous archaeological remains, they looked like sailors and that made the connection to them as real people so much more powerful.

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I knew you would know what I meant about the coat feeling. I am not at all surprised that you have read Frozen in Time. Wonder where I was, to have missed your review?

I agree with you, of course that being able to see their features, and clothing, made them much more real.

They had been buried with care, and I remember thinking that they had been treated as people who would be missed. Nobody had any way of knowing that they were actually the lucky ones!

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

I suspect I posted that review before you appeared on LJ, I think it was one of the first things I wrote.

Somehow it was the preservation of the clothes and the fact that they are identifiably sailors clothes that really moved me, and still does. It makes these men's lives seem so much more real and immediate.

Nobody had any way of knowing that they were actually the lucky ones!
Aye. It's a terrible thought isn't it? I've also often thought about the seaman who was dropped off in Stromness in Orkney on the voyage north because he was ill. It's hard to imagine what he must have felt in later years.

[marwanthefirst.livejournal.com]

This is the Franklin expedition to find the Northwest passage? I saw a BBC special covering (and dramatizing) the expedition, and I believe they showed the actual bodies in that. I hadn't realized there was a book as well. I'll have to read it!

I find most all of the arctic/antarctic expeditions fascinating--it's remarkable what people are capable of doing when it's truly a matter of survival--both the good and the disturbing.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Yes, Frozen in Time is about the Franklin expedition and it's fascinating. It's very much a book of two halves and I thought the writing in the second half was a bit ropey. It's still really worth a read though.

The history of polar exploration is definitely fascinating and disturbing in equal measure isn't it?