The Garden of Learning

Geography

Which Antarctic explorer's ship Endurance was found in 2022?

  • Ernest Shackleton
  • Robert Scott
  • Douglas Mawson

The answer is Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton's — 3,000 m down in the Weddell Sea.

The ship Endurance under full sail, photographed by Frank Hurley
Endurance under sail, by Frank Hurley, before the ice took her. Frank Hurley, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Ernest Shackleton's Endurance was caught in the Weddell Sea pack ice in January 1915 before the expedition had even landed, drifted with it for ten months while the ice slowly crushed her, and sank on 21 November. That left twenty-eight men on the floes with three lifeboats and no possibility of rescue, because nobody knew where they were.

What follows is the reason the story is told. They camped on the ice until it broke up, sailed the boats to the uninhabited Elephant Island, and then Shackleton took five men eight hundred nautical miles across the Southern Ocean in a twenty-two-foot boat to reach the whaling stations of South Georgia. Frank Worsley navigated it with four sextant sightings in sixteen days of overcast. They made landfall on the wrong side of the island and crossed its unmapped mountainous interior in thirty-six hours without proper equipment. Every one of the twenty-eight survived.

The wreck was found on 5 March 2022, sitting upright on the sea floor at 3,008 metres, about four miles from the position Worsley had written in the log - which after a century is a considerable posthumous compliment to his navigation. She is astonishingly intact, because the Weddell Sea has no wood-boring molluscs; the name ENDURANCE is still legible in brass letters across the stern above a five-pointed star. She is protected under the Antarctic Treaty and nothing was touched or taken.