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 early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn’t love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country ...”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“The discovery of the North Pole is one of those realities which could not be avoided. It is the wages which human perseverance pays itself when it thinks that something is taking too long. The world needed a discoverer of the North Pole, and in all areas of social activity, merit was less important here than opportunity.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)