Rare Discovery Original Refit Plans

Following its iconic 1901 voyage to Antarctica with Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton and later adventures with the Hudson Bay Company, in 1923 Discovery began a refit for a new era; an era of oceanographic research.

The Royal Research Ship Discovery was indeed completed in time, and boasted many of the advances in technology required to equip her for oceanographic exploration. The construction of chemical and biological labs, adjustments to the positions of the main mast and fore mast in line with suggestions from Captain Scott, and the addition of sounding machines and three powered-reels are amongst the alterations made to the ship during the refit period; an undertaking that cost nearly £114,000 (including the purchase cost of the vessel).

Visitors to Discovery Point and the Royal Research Ship Discovery will note many indicators of the 1920s refit, as she remains in many aspects, almost an exact image of this state. As well as understanding the refit period through the ship’s features and design, we are very lucky to have over 100 of Vosper’s original plans and sketches available to us in our Recognised Collections.

For the 100^th anniversary of the start of the refit, there has been a huge amount of work (with many thanks to Dundee’s Sailors Home and Hostel) to enable the plans in the collection to be easily viewed by everyone, everywhere, from the comfort of their home.  Due to the volume of plans, images are phased. The first five can be viewed now!

The first step of this was to look at the three collections we had and list the plans. When we knew what we had, we were able to catalogue them into the museum’s database with the plan name and number.

With a such a large archive, it makes sense for the museum number to run in line with the plan number – making life easier for everyone.  The second consideration for this is that when it comes to a number in a museum, it is important to make sure the number links with the collection. As this case is made of three collections, we needed to give three numbers: DUNIH 2022.19 for the largest collection; DUNIH 2022.20 for the mid sized and DUNIH 2022.21 for the smallest. The hope is that this brings this archive together whilst ensuring the unique collections are recognised.

However, it was still tricky to safely use the collection. The size of the plans (each would cover a small desk!) meant that it was difficult to look at more than one at any one time. For such historically informative and important objects, we do everything we can to protect the plans themselves.

Digitising these became an obvious option. So, they were packaged up and sent away to be scanned at a very high resolution.  This immediately made life easier! No more having to find the right plan in the chart chest and put it on a table big enough – and try doing it for three at a time!

Now, all anyone needs to do is to simply go into the digital file and see it from the comfort of your chair. The other bonus of this is that the plans themselves are being kept safe all the while.

The final step in the digitising process was to create smaller digital images for the online catalogue; these are about 1/10^th of the size of the super high resolution images.