After getting in touch with the filmmakers, married duo Yvonne Drebert and Zach Melnick, the family was invited to see the shipwreck and to document their journey for TVO’s YouTube channel. They were finally ready to sail the same waters their great-grandfather Hans had sailed 129 years before.
“Completing a story that we’ve been told from the time that we were young is pretty lovely and it just sort of puts things at peace and at rest,” says Inkster.
On a rainy Sunday morning this past June, Janet and her siblings Doug Inkster, Eleanor Nielsen and her nephew Leandre Vigneault set out on Drebert and Melnick’s boat off the coast of Larsen Cove, Ont. The rough water crashed against the sides of the small boat, echoing the waves that swallowed the Africa over a century ago.
When the boat neared the location after about half an hour, Drebert and Melnick lowered their new 25-kilogram robotic camera deep below the surface of the water, controlling it from a console above. As Inkster watched a computer set up in the back of the boat, the figure of a shadowed ship emerged from the deep blue.
“It was just an unreal situation,” says Inkster of that moment. “I just wish my parents and my grandparents were alive to know that it was discovered, it would have been really special for them to know that.”
For Melnick and Drebret, reconnecting Captain Larsen’s descendants with the 1895 tragedy touched them deeply.
“I do sense from them that it was quite a meaningful experience, and it certainly was for us,” says Melnick. “There’s only a few times in our lives where we get to do truly cool things, and this is one of them.”