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The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 1915,...
The Endurance is a 2000 documentary film directed by George Butler about Ernest Shackleton's legendary Antarctic expedition in 1914. It is based on the book of the same name.
- Overview
- What was Shackleton’s goal?
- Why was Endurance so difficult to find?
- Final chapter revealed in the Shackleton saga
"Endurance" is discovered beneath sea ice, nearly two miles beneath the ocean.
For more than a century, Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Henry Shackleton's 144-foot long ship "Endurance" was lost off the coast of Antarctica beneath the icy Weddell Sea. In 2022, the ship was found in remarkably good condition 10,000 feet underwater.
In the fall of 1915, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance sank off the coast of Antarctica, stranding its crew on drifting sea ice and setting in motion one of history’s most dramatic tales of overcoming seemingly hopeless odds. While all of the expedition’s 28 crew eventually were rescued, the ship’s final resting place has remained a much-discussed maritime mystery—the unwritten last chapter in a legendary story of survival and triumph. That is, until today. A team of researchers has announced they’ve located the wreck at the bottom of the treacherous Weddell Sea, adjacent to the northernmost part of Antarctica.
The first images of the ship were transmitted via autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) from nearly two miles down on March 5. As the camera glides over the wooden deck of the ship, video captures century-old ropes, tools, portholes, railings—even the masts and helm—all in nearly pristine condition due to cold temperatures, the absence of light, and low oxygen in the watery resting place."
Left: Ernest Henry Shackleton left behind the crew of "Endurance" on Elephant Island to await rescue while he and five others traveled 800 miles to seek help at a whaling station on South Georgia island. When he arrived, he was so gaunt and unkempt that he’d been rendered unrecognizable.
Right: Expedition dogs survey the wreckage of "Endurance" as it sinks into the sea, 10 months after it first became stuck. "It was a sickening sensation to feel the decks breaking up under one's feet, the great beams bending and snapping with a noise of heavy gun fire,” wrote Frank Wild, Shackleton’s right-hand man, of the moment the ship was crushed by sea ice. "Shackleton was on the lookout platform and everybody else in the tents when we heard him shout, 'She's going boys!'
Endurance was part of Shackleton’s grandly named Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Backed by the British government and private donors and supported by Winston Churchill, who was then the First Lord of the Admiralty, the plan was to deliver a group of explorers to the coast of Antarctica, where they would disembark and then travel overland across the continent via the South Pole.
A 144-foot, three-masted barquentine specially built for polar waters, Endurance had solid oak hulls that were two-and-half feet thick. It set out from South Georgia on December 5, 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. Even at the bottom of the planet, war was close by. As Endurance entered the Weddell Sea, British and German fleets squared off north of them in the Battle of the Falkland Islands.
But the enemy that Shackleton and his men faced was of a different sort. The Weddell Sea, covering an area of more than a million square miles, is one of the most remote and unforgiving environments in the world, littered with icebergs and roiled by strong surface winds. Shackleton called it “the worst sea in the world.”
But if anyone was prepared for such an endeavor it was the Anglo-Irish adventurer Ernest Shackleton: A veteran of previous Antarctic explorations, he’d been part of the great race to reach the South Pole before Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen claimed it.
For this ambitious cross-continent journey, he’d handpicked the crew and endeared himself by dining with the men, telling jokes, leading sing-alongs, and organizing games. They affectionately referred to him as “the Boss."
The expedition made good progress at first, but as the Antarctic winter of 1915 closed in, the men found themselves trapped in the sea ice. “At 7 p.m. very heavy pressure developed, with twisting strains that racked the ship fore and aft,” Shackleton wrote on Tuesday, October 26. “We could see from the bridge that the ship was bending like a bow under titanic pressure.”
And that’s where Endurance remained, entombed beneath the polar ice at a depth of 10,000 feet. In 2019, the Falklands Heritage Maritime Trust mounted its first expedition to find the ship but had been unable to locate the wreck. This winter, they tried again, organizing and funding Endurance22.
One of the knottiest problems was establishing the ship’s location. After Endurance was initially trapped in the ice, it continued to drift as the floes moved with the current. When the vessel was eventually crushed and sank, the captain of Endurance, Frank Worsley, took measurements of the location using a sextant and recorded it in his diary. Due to poor visibility on the day the men abandoned the ship, however, Worsley had been unable to take proper measurements that would help calculate the direction and speed of the floes.
One of the first tasks of Endurance22’s team of scientists and navigational experts was to review Worsley’s records to come up with a more accurate location.
“Worsley’s last observation was November 18, then he made another on November 20, the day after the ship sank,” Bound says. “He made another on the 22nd, but by then he was some distance away. So, he had to guess at the speed of the ice drift.”
There was also the question of the crew’s chronometers. Using today’s far more accurate sky maps, researchers calculated that Endurance’s clocks were running faster than the crew accounted for, an error that would shift the location of the vessel west of Worsley’s last recorded position. Using these calculations, the expedition narrowed their search but still faced long odds of finding the vessel.
“We were down to three or four days left and still hadn’t found it,” Bound said. “There were three areas still to look at. But often the ice decides where we look. And it was running west to east, which took us across the southern portion of our search area. And there it was!”
Shackleton famously said, “What the ice gets, the ice keeps.” But Endurance’s story did not end with the ship’s sinking. Shackleton’s journey back across the Weddell Sea to get help for his stranded crew would become one of the most celebrated narratives of exploration and survival.
On April 4, 1916, Shackleton left his crew on Elephant Island, and he and five others set off in one of Endurance’s modified lifeboats for the island of South Georgia. It was an 800-mile,16-day journey across freezing, rough seas whipped by hurricane-force gales. “The wind simply shrieked as it tore the tops off the waves,” Shackleton wrote. “Down into valleys, up to tossing heights, straining until her seams opened, swung our little boat.”
Arriving on South Georgia’s south coast, they then faced a 36-hour hike across the rugged, mountainous island to reach a whaling station at Stromness. Shackleton willed himself to make it, even though, as new research suggests, he probably had a hole in his heart.
When the men staggered in, the station manager, Thoralf Sorlle, could hardly believe his eyes. “Our beards were long and our hair was matted,” Shackleton wrote. “We were unwashed and the garments that we had worn for nearly a year without a change were tattered and stained.”
Nearly six years later, as he prepared for another expedition to Antarctica, Shackleton would die of a heart attack on South Georgia. He was buried there on March 5, 1922. Exactly 100 years later the Endurance22 team captured its first images of Endurance.
Bound says that he and his fellow crew members will stop in South Georgia on their way home to visit Shackleton’s grave. “We are sad to be leaving the site,” he said. “But there is a great sense of pride and achievement. And we’ll stop to pay our respects to the Boss.”
In August 1914 Ernest Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven sailors and scientists left Britain for the Antarctic on the Endurance. The plan was to cross the Antarctic on foot. Only 80 miles from Endurance’s destination, the ship was caught in thick pack ice that splintered and sank it.
Aug 9, 2021 · This book recounts the ordeal of Ernest Shackleton and his crew who attempted to make the first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent but who became trapped on the ice floes for twenty months in the attempt
Together, text and image re-create the terrible beauty of Antarctica, the awful destruction of the ship, and the crew's heroic daily struggle to stay alive, a miracle achieved largely through Shackleton's inspiring leadership.
- Paperback
- Caroline Alexander
Packed into the steam-powered ship Endurance, which was little more than 140 feet long, the 22-strong crew pooled their talents and propelled South, but caught in seriously heavy ice – much more than had been expected – had to abandon their vessel.
