Ship of legendary explorer Shackleton found in Antarctica 107 years after it sank

It's the "finest wooden shipwreck I've ever seen," one marine archaeologist commented.

The Endurance was finally uncovered, over a century after it sank in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. The ship was part of a famous expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton but got trapped in pack ice, forcing the expedition members to camp for months in the Antarctic and make a heroic escape.

Despite laying under 3km (10,000 feet) of frigid water for over a century, the ship seems to be in impeccable shape, almost frozen in time. The ship was discovered just several kilometers from where it was abandoned after a search mounted by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust (FMHT) investigated the area for two weeks.

Using a South African icebreaker, Agulhas II, the search team deployed submersible units to comb the area. After coming across various interesting targets, they finally uncovered the wreck site on Saturday, spending the next few days documenting and photographing the site.

In a blog post announcing the find, Director of Exploration Mensun Bound couldn’t contain his excitement:

“Ladies and Gentlemen,

I don’t know how else to say this, so I am going to come straight to the point.

We have found the wreck of the Endurance!”

“In a long career of surveying and excavating historic shipwrecks, I have never seen one as bold and beautiful as this.”

The mission’s leader, the veteran polar geographer Dr. John Shears also told the BBC that this is an incredible achievement, describing the moment when they saw the ship as “jaw-dropping”. Shears also emphasized that this was “the world’s most difficult shipwreck search”, battling blizzards, bitterly cold temperatures, and constantly shifting sea-ice. “We have achieved what many people said was impossible,” Shears said.

Pristine shape

The ship looks much like it did when it was last photographed by Shackleton’s filmmaker, Frank Hurley, in 1915. While some things have obviously broken down, you can still see the hull, the deck, and the porthole window from Shackleton’s cabin. The anchors are still around, as are some of the boots and crockery the crew abandoned with the ship.

“Most remarkable of all was her name – E N D U R A N C E – which arcs across her stern with perfect clarity. And below is the 5-pointed Polaris star. Just as in Hurley’s famous photographs,” Bound adds.

Some sea creatures (such as filter feeders) have colonized the wreck but there don’t seem to be any wood-eating worms that would degrade the ship structurally.

The wreck itself cannot be moved or disturbed in any way, as it is a designated monument under the international Antarctic Treaty. Therefore, researchers can’t bring anything to the surface, and all they’ve done now was to document the position and situation for the ship.

A legendary expedition

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton led three expeditions into the Antarctic. The one that employed the Endurance was launched in 1914, and Endurance departed from South Georgia, British Overseas Territory in the southern Atlantic Ocean, for the Weddell Sea on 5 December. But the situation quickly took a turn for the worse, as the ship became trapped in an ice floe. The crew waited until February and then realized that the ship would be trapped until spring (in the southern hemisphere, spring starts in September).

Shackleton ordered the conversion of the ship to a winter station, and the crew managed to tough it out until September. But when the ice started to release, the crew’s hopes that the ship would be freed safely were destroyed. The ice put extreme pressure on the ship’s hull, damaging it, and the ship was taking water. In November, the crew abandoned the ship.

The next two months, Shackleton and his crew camped on a large, flat ice floe (basically an ice island), hoping that it would drift towards Paulet Islands 250 miles (402 km) away, where some stores were cached. This too failed. Shackleton decided to set up a more permanent camp on a different flow, hoping to drift to a safe island. This too did not happen. The floe broke in two, and Shackleton’s crew was forced into lifeboats, heading towards the nearest island.

The exhausted men managed to end up their three lifeboats at Elephant Island, 346 miles (557 km) from where the Endurance sank, after being adrift on ice for almost 500 days. Shackleton gave his mittens to photographer Frank Hurley (who had lost his) and suffered severe frostbites as a result. In a desperate last-ditch attempt, Shackleton decided to take one of the three lifeboats and head for whaling stations 720 nautical miles (1,334 km) away.

Shackleton packed minimal supplies and head out with a handful of people, only to be met by a hurricane. They landed on an island and Shackleton and two members braced a yet-untried land route over dangerous, uncharted mountainous terrain. Ultimately, they were able to reach a whaling station and after several tries, rescue the surviving members of the expedition.

The fact that researchers now have such a connection to this expedition is a spectacular achievement. “We will pay our respects to ‘The Boss’,” said Dr. Shears, using the nickname the Endurance crew had for their leader.

Still, the current expedition hopes they can uncover even more from the ship and will now embark on thorough scientific research of the vessel.

“You can even see the holes that Shackleton’s men cut in the decks to get through to the ‘tween decks to salvage supplies, etc, using boat hooks. In particular, there was the hole they cut through the deck in order to get into “The Billabong”, the cabin in “The Ritz” that had been used by Hurley, Leonard Hussey (meteorologist), James McIlroy (surgeon) and Alexander Macklin (surgeon), but which was used to store food supplies at the time the ship went down,” Bound concluded in an article for the BBC.

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