Discovery
During the late afternoon of 6 February 1942, lookouts on Christmas Island spotted an object out at sea. Initially thought to be a Japanese submarine, closer inspection from a pilot boat found that it was a carley float with a dead person inside, which was then towed ashore.
After brief examinations by the island's harbour master, the medical officer, and the gentleman in charge of the radio station, the body was buried in an unmarked grave near Flying Fish Cove. Reports were written by these men, but were destroyed when Japanese forces occupied Christmas Island, and later recreated from memory.
Read more about this topic: Unidentified Body On Christmas Island
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.”
—Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)