![]() ![]() ![]() The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust/National Geographic "Agulhas II" deployed two Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) into the sea to search for "Endurance." The devices are able to operate up to 100 miles away from the ship. “We could see from the bridge that the ship was bending like a bow under titanic pressure.” very heavy pressure developed, with twisting strains that racked the ship fore and aft,” Shackleton wrote on Tuesday, October 26. 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. They affectionately referred to him as “the Boss." Shackleton called it “the worst sea in the world.”īut 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.įor 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. 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. I could feel the breath of Shackleton on my neck."īut the enemy that Shackleton and his men faced was of a different sort. It was “one of those wormhole moments when you tumble back in time. “You see that, and your eyes pop out on stalks,” Bound says. But unequivocal proof soon came literally into focus: a closeup of the stern revealed shiny brass letters spelling out Endurance above a polar star. “You could see the bolt holes, and everything.”ĭirector of exploration for the Endurance22 expedition, Bound says when they saw the first images beamed from the AUV, he and other members of his 65-person team were confident it was Endurance and not another wreck. “I’ve been hunting for wrecks since my mid-twenties, and I have never found a wreck so coherent as this one,” marine archaeologist Mensun Bound, 69, said via satellite phone as he and fellow crew members began their long journey back to Cape Town after more than a month of searching for Shackleton’s ship. "Shackleton was on the lookout platform and everybody else in the tents when we heard him shout, 'She's going boys!' Photograph by Frank Hurley, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Getty Images "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. Right: Expedition dogs survey the wreckage of "Endurance" as it sinks into the sea, 10 months after it first became stuck. 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." The first images of the ship were transmitted via autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) from nearly two miles down on March 5. ![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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