Dan Snow's History Hit - ENDURANCE22: Dan Sets Sail for Antarctica!

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

The expedition has begun and Dan is here to answer your questions about all things Endurance22, the expedition to find Shackleton’s lost shipwreck! For the first time, Dan is the subject of his own podcast as he’s interviewed by History Hit’s producer Mariana Des Forges about all things Endurance. They talk about how he’s feeling about the perilous journey across the southern ocean, what listeners can expect over the coming weeks and he answers your questions. He also speaks to Mensun Bound of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust who is the lead marine archaeologist on the expedition about his greatest discoveries and what they’re expecting to find when they make it to Antarctica.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. As you listen to this, I have just set sail from Cape Town in South Africa. We are steering south east towards the Weddell Sea. We've got a 10-day journey across the Southern Ocean with the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust on their expedition to find Endurance Shackleton's missing shipwreck. It is the most exciting thing I have ever done. But fear not, the podcast will continue uninterrupted. We've got quite the month coming up for you. In this episode of the podcast, you are going to hear from the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust's

lead marine archaeologist, Mensen Bound, veteran of marine archaeology, legend. And after that, we've got history hits, Mariana Desforges. She is the producer of this brilliant podcast, and she is going to be asking me some questions submitted by all of you. Not all of you, but many of you on the social medias. And she's got questions asking me about this exposition and what we might find and what it's going to be like.

So enjoy this very special kickoff episode of our Endurance 22 season. Please go and subscribe to History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. It's a digital history channel where there is hundreds of hours of history documentaries and thousands of podcasts all without the ads. Go and subscribe if you follow the link in the information of this podcast. You can do that two weeks free if you subscribe today. In the meantime though, sit back, relax, spare a thought for me as I sit in my tiny cabin getting battered by gigantic waves crossing the Southern Ocean and enjoy this interview with Menson Bound. Menson, great to have you on the podcast. Great to be here, Dan. We're going to be shipmates soon and I'm looking forward to it.

I know, it's so great. People will hear this maybe, I know it's so exciting. Menson, you are one of the world's leading marine archaeologists and you'll be our shipwreck finder. My question to you is, have you got the coolest job on this planet? Yeah, I mean, sometimes I do think that actually, not so much the coolest job, but I just sort of love my life. You know, it's so great. You never know where the next wreck's going to be. And as an archaeologist, one of the things I love about ships is you really never know

what era you're going to be in next. You know, most archaeologists, you know, if you're a medievalist, well, you stick with medieval archaeology all your life. Or even smaller than that, you might be an urban medievalist or something like that. And that's your niche kind of thing. But with shipwrecks, you just don't know where you're going to be next. The phone rings, and it's a museum, or it's a navy, and asking to evaluate or survey or even excavate a shipwreck. And you never know. And I just love that, you know, just getting into a new historian. Well, you're a historian. You know how it feels. You and I both, I'm very flirtatious all different periods.

And it's so fun. You and I have chatted over beer about Mediterranean archaeology, First World War. It's wonderful. Give me some of your greatest hits. Don't be bashful. Okay. Greatest hits. Okay.

The one I probably like the most, in fact, was my first. I was 27 years old at the time. And quite by chance, I just blundered into this incredible wreck. I was working on the Mary Rose at the time. I was a student. And I'd gone to see Alexander McKee, who was the man who discovered the Mary Rose. And I'd gone to see him about some ships in the Falklands, one of which I was trying to rescue, and he said he couldn't help. But Alex was a writer and he had this little library which was covered completely in books. Every single wall was covered in books. But the top shelf of every wall was an array of little bibelots, little mementos of his

time as a diver underwater. And you know, it was all bits and pieces of Roman amphora and bits of coral and stuff like that. And there was one piece there though, that really sort of piqued my fascination, my interest. And I turned to Alex and I said, where did that piece come from? And I pointed to it and he turned to me and he said, Menson of all the pieces up there,

why did you select that one? And so I told me and he said, Mensen, of all the pieces up there, why did you select that one? And so I told him. I said, well, it's an Etruscan amphihandle. I know that from its shape. I can see that it comes from the sea because it's covered in marine deposits. You know, I know its date. It's about 600 BC. So if that piece came from a wreck,

that would be the oldest post-Bronze age shipwreck ever to be found. And he started to tell me this really incredible story about how in 1961, some, what, 20 years before, he'd been on this little island called Giglio, which I'd never heard of before. And he told me how he had been there at a dive school, which is run by a man called Reg Valentine, and they'd found this wreck. Now, there's lots of wrecks in the Mediterranean and stories like this. But the thing was, Reg Valentine was a famous British diver, and I very much wanted to meet Reg for his own sake. So I went to see Reg and to talk about this wreck with him.

And after about half an hour, Reg went up the stairs and came down with some old photographs which he'd taken, just snapshots. And it was of him and his students on this ship holding up bits of pottery. And at that moment, I knew that I'd just blundered into a major archaeological discovery, a ship from 600 BC full of Greek-painted pottery. It's amazing. And for four years, I worked on that. I went back to Oxford, got the permission of the university. They helped me get the permission of the Italian government. I was only 27 at the time, and I found myself running this huge excavation.

And these days, if you go to the National Underwater Museum in Italy, the entire top floor is all about the Giglio wreck. And I just love it. I go in there and there's photographs of my wife on the wall and, you know, great memories. It's fabulous. That's probably my number one. I got number two and number three, if you want, but I know this is a podcast. We've only got so much time. We've got a long ship journey together. We may, I think we're going to get down, hopefully give it to your top hundred. And what about ones when you were diving and you find a wreck that's wonderful that's just using the old mark one eyeball is there a challenge to when you're trying to piece together the location

of wrecks from log books the paper record the archival record left by navigators yeah i do spend a lot of time in the archives that's for sure it's my number two rule about wreck hunting, and it's that wrecks are never where they say they are. So you find locations in the archives and things like that, but they're never there. And then the hunt begins. First of all, what's your number one rule? Oh, my number one rule is the sea is a very big place. Okay, good. Number two rule? I haven't got a number three rule yet, but I mean, if somebody out there in Radioland

has a number three rule, I mean, if it's good, I will adopt it and call it my own. Never go on a vessel with Dan Snow for six weeks. Why are they never in the place where they're supposed to be? Is that a reflection of poor navigation, dead reckoning and things? Or is that because what happens to a wreck when it slips beneath the waves?

Does it go to strange places? It's all those things, Dan. And, you know, at the time when the ship's sinking, nobody's really thinking about taking their latitude and longitude. That's probably the last thing they're thinking about. But then the inquiry comes along and they have to give a position. So it's a lot of educated guesswork goes into it. And, you know, sometimes they're way, way off.

And other times, not so bad. I mean, the endurance is a real challenge, that one. Because when I was first tasked with finding the endurance, I thought, oh, that's great. You know, you have Worsley's, the captain of the endurance, a great master navigator. You got his coordinates of 68, 39, 30, south, 52, 26, 30, west. And I thought, okay, great. You know, we just go down there,

go down the line, find the wreck. It's simple, you know, nothing of the kind. The closer I got into the study of Worsley and how we got those coordinates, the whole thing just started to unravel. And in the end, I devised a search box, which was kind of trapezoidal shaped. It was longer side was 13.7 nautical miles. It covered an area of 107 square nautical miles.

And that was my search box. It sounds big, but actually in search terms, that's a very small search area. Okay, well, let's get into it. Let's get into Shackleton. Now, why is this a difficult one to find? Let's rehearse what happened to the Endurance. They get to within miles of Antarctica. They're almost on land.

It's unbelievably dramatic. They get frozen in. The sea ices up around them. But it doesn't stay in the same place, does it? No, they're caught up in the pack. And the pack is constantly mutating. It's constantly on the move. It's a gyre which moves in, let me think, a clockwise direction.

Yeah. And also it's moving in a northerly direction at the same time. And that's what happened with the Endurance. It got caught in the ice. But Shackleton knew that the gyre would carry him towards the mouth of the Weddell Sea, and that was what he was depending upon. Several years before, the great German explorer Wilhelm Fichner and his ship, the Deutschland, that had been caught in the ice in very much the same area, but about, I don't know, I guess about 30 to 50 miles to the east of where Shackleton was.

And Fyfner, he had actually escaped the ice, and Shackleton thought he would too. But of course, as everybody knows, very different story. The pack crushed the ship, and it sank, and we all know the rest. So the gyre is what, the ocean current there? Yeah, the gyre is driven by two things, really, the wind and the current. And it's moving with those two phenomena. And basically, if you're in it, you get pushed left and up. Yeah, that's right. It's a hard perennial shield of ice. And when you're in it, you are in trouble. I mean, hopefully we'll be okay when we go down the Dan because we're in one of the biggest, best icebreakers in the world. But, you know, last time we were down there, we did get stuck.

Not once, but several times. And it was a little bit nervy. Okay, well, that's good. I've given my wife quite a firm return date, so I may have to suggest that in the comms. And so Shackleton, he keeps his spirits up, but privately particularly, he's dismayed. He's come so close to Antarctica, he's now being sucked north in the pack.

He's also, am I right, in his writing, he strikes me as quite negative. He says, once the ice has got you, it tends not to let you go. He did say that, Dan, absolutely so. He said it to Worsley in his cabin, and Worsley later reported that, of course, in his own writings. But by and large, no, almost always, Shackleton was incredibly optimistic. Pessimism and low spirits was something he couldn't abide. And he just knew that he had to keep the men's spirits up. And so he didn't really go around saying things like that to the team.

He did say it to Worsley and to Frank Wilde and his cabin, because they were his friends and his right-hand men kind of thing. But Shackleton was incredibly optimistic, and optimism was something he was always preaching about, banging away about that and loyalty. And winter is coming, the days are getting shorter, and the ship is in danger of getting crunched, and they're moving away from Antarctica. They're being pushed north. How far do they travel

before the ship is finally stove in? Yeah, it would have been a couple of hundred nautical miles, I would guess. They're averaging four nautical miles a day. So yeah, it would have been something like that. They were well on their way to the mouth of the Whale Sea. They got caught, became icebound on the 18th and 19th of January. They abandoned ship on the 27th of October, and the ship sank on November the... So it was a long time that she was caught in the ice and was constantly moving. And the captain's a brilliant navigator,

which we can talk about later. He proves that. He's obviously being very careful with the charts. He's taking his noonday sights. Well, you tell me, how's he fixing his position? Yeah, it was traditional sexant navigation at that time. Well, he had to grab the weather when he could, of course. I mean, there were many days he couldn't get a sighting, but he'd take morning time sights whenever he could. He'd take afternoon sights whenever he could. And of course, he'd try to get his midday latitude, try to get a snap on the sun when the opportunities arose.

And that actually is part of my problem because when the ship sank, the position which Worsley gave was actually an estimated position because he hadn't been able to get a site for almost three days before the ship went down. And that means sun. It was just too cloudy. Yeah, too cloudy. Absolutely so. You've been down around the

Falklands. You know when the clouds come in down there, it is seriously dense stuff. It's all coming at you from Cape Horn. So we're not talking a few little bits of cirrus up there. No, this is dense cloud and low. For three days, he can't take a reading, so he's not sure where he is. That's right. They're sitting on the ice. The ship is eventually crushed and goes up by the stern, slides beneath. They watched that happen. Yeah, it was like the Titanic just, what, three years before. And Shackleton describes this in his diary. He doesn't go into a lot of detail, but he does mention how the stern went up. So it was like the Titanic in the movie.

You know, the stern rose, and so it was with Shackleton. Or so it was with Endurance. Up she went, down she went, and she was taken at one gulp, and Shackleton saw it all. And how deep was the water there? 3,000 metres. A touch over, but 3,000. And that's the funny thing, of course. Our modern obsession with shipwrecks and finding them and filming them and possibly even raising them and retrieving things from them, absurd in those days. So there wasn't this kind of perhaps the same obsession that we might have with where's the shipwreck?

Yeah, I mean, Shackleton could never have conceived that someday that people like us would be going down there looking for it. You're absolutely right. that people like us would be going down there looking for it. You're absolutely right. I mean, even within my lifetime, when I think about the kit that was available to me when I left university, I mean, if I had any concept of what I'd be dealing with right now

at the back end of my career, what I got now would have been science fiction to young men back in the early 70s. Well, we're going to crawl over the kit now. I hope you're going to talk me through it when we go aboard. What's the seabed look like around there? Well, we don't actually know in detail, but we're talking about the abyssal plain of the Weddell Sea. It will be relatively flat, although when we were down there last time, I did notice that the echo sounder was bouncing

about quite a lot. So there are features there, rock outcrops, things of that nature. But by and large, I expect the seabed to be fairly featureless. There will be drop stones from icebergs. That we know for certain because we did actually take borings from the seabed. And indeed, it was full of little stones. So there'll be a lot of that. But it is an interesting question because it does affect interpretation of the side scan results. I mean, what is the reflectivity of the seabed going to be like down there?

And how will that contrast with the soft woods of the endurance itself? We're not going to see like a picture of a ship as people imagine it. What we're going to be seeing is a lot of shadows, and we have to interpret the shipwreck from those shadows. We talk about shadows. Does the consistency of the hull, the integrity of the hull matter? Because we have these images of it being crushed slowly in the ice. shadows. We talk about shadows. Does the consistency of the hull, the integrity of the hull matter? Because we have these images of it being crushed slowly in the ice. And by the last couple of images, the ship looks like it's taken a good beating. I mean, what condition are you expecting it to be in? Yeah, you're right. She did take a beating. You know, parts of the ship were crushed inwards a bit. Shackler's team cut holes in her at certain places. The masts rolled down.

So, yeah, she was in a mess when she left the surface. And that mess will still be there on the seabed when we find her. But as for her conservation, that should be pretty good. What went down with the endurance should still be there on the seabed. I don't expect her to be enveloped by the sediments. I mean, she will, of course, sink a little bit into the sediments, but I expect to find her proud of the seabed. I expect to find her in semi-intact state, let's say. I mean, she might have broken up on impact, but I think if she did that, then she would probably broken up into two, perhaps three pieces rather than to a lot of debris. two, perhaps three pieces rather than to a lot of debris. You know, I've seen a lot of shipwrecks in very, very deep water,

and half of them break up on contact. Sometimes they break up longitudinally. The most recent shipwreck I was looking at a few weeks ago, which was six miles down the Atlantic, that had broken up, I can't explain this, between the decks, which is something I'd never seen before. The upper deck and tween deck had separated from the lower decks, which is really bizarre. And I don't know how to explain that. But, you know, if it does open up, it may not be such a bad thing from an archaeological standpoint, because then

we'll be able to look inside the ship. If she's there intact, then we won't be able to see inside her. And, you know, she did go down stuffed with everything imaginable. And it'd just be able to see inside her. And, you know, she did go down stuffed with everything imaginable. And it'd just be great to see that, all the boxes and all the stuff they left behind when they left the ship. What's the temperature like at that level? It's pretty low. It won't be below, what's it, 1.0 minus 1.8 degrees, because then the water would freeze. And actually, the low temperature is important to the conservation of the wood. The lower the temperature, the better the preservation of organic materials. That, together with the fact that we have no wood-consuming green parasites in the Weddell Sea,

that promises that the ship should be in pretty good state of conservation. So if you're going to sink a ship anywhere in the world, this is the best place to do it in terms of conserving it? Yeah, indeed so. You could say that. And what about the visibility when we get down? Are we going to have cameras on these underwater drones? Yeah, we're going to have cameras. Although, you know, they're not sort of cameras as you and I know them on land. Although we will have some of those too. These will be more sophisticated cameras. They will be sort of acoustic cameras, and we'll be using laser cloud camera technology, that kind of thing. So if we do find her, we will have brilliant,

millimeter-perfect imagery of the ship from which we will be able to reconstruct models afterwards, both 3D notional models as well as museum exhibition type models. But visibility, you've got to remember, it's black down there. Once you get beneath, let's say, 260 meters, you're into what we call the aphotic zone. There's just no light whatsoever. No photosynthesizing plant life can exist beneath that depth because there's no sun. But the clarity of the water, that should be absolutely brilliant. The Weddell Sea has the clearest water anywhere in the globe. I mean, they talk of visibility. If there was light down, they'd be able to see for about 70 meters,

which is just incredible. I mean, I've worked on shipwrecks in, let's say, the River Plate and places like that where you couldn't read your instrumentation. You couldn't see your watch. I mean, you couldn't see your finger if it was in front of your nose. But, you know, to be able to see like that, you know, 70 meters underwater, that would be just incredible. When we turn on our lights, it should just be just amazing. I'm so excited. What do you think are your chances of finding the insurance? Do you think are your chances of finding the insurance? Okay, she's there. Will we find her?

What keeps me awake at night is the technology. We're using the most advanced underwater robotics in the world. But because it is such advanced technology, it's also very, very fragile technology. And that is our Achilles heel and I think if something fails it will be that let's remind everyone because the Weddell Sea is covered by the Antarctic what are you allowed to do to the wreck what you have to take from it what you're allowed to fiddle with yeah actually that's that's an important question uh and I need to be clear about this this is absolutely a non-disturbance project. We're not going to be touching anything.

We're not going to be taking anything. Totally non-intrusive. We're there to find the wreck and to record the wreck and to protect the wreck. You remember when the Titanic was found, it sort of became like a free-for-all, a kind of help yourself site afterwards. And the last thing we want is people going down there and just sort of helping themselves, the endurance. We want to see the site protected. But also we want to see it preserved and monitored into the future.

And for that, we need baseline information, which is what we will be gathering. You're not allowed to take anything from the Antarctic anyway, are you? That's true. So it's going to be safe and sound down there. Minson, we are going to spend lots of time together in the next six weeks, so I've got to let you go now, because otherwise I will monopolise you, and you've got better things to be doing preparing for this expedition. Just quickly, though, are you allowed to tell me what sort of dreams,

what shipwrecks are out there as yet undiscovered for all the naval history geeks listeners? I know which ones I want to go for. They're not a million miles off the coast of chile but what about you okay i know the ones you're talking of yes we're going to go after those but i'm coming and we'll take you with us dan how's that but there is one other uh just uh three years ago after many many years of searching we found that is say the falcon islands maritime Trust, under the auspices of its wonderful chairman, ex-governor of the Falklands, Donald Lamont,

we found the Scharnhorst, which was the flagship of von Spee's World War I battlecruiser fleet. But we did not find his number two ship, the Gneisenhau. And I have a very good idea where that must be. So I think that's probably the next one we'll go after. Oh my God, so exciting.

Okay, Mensenbaum, thank you very much. No, thank you, Dan. I've really enjoyed this. You listen to Dan Snow's history, more coming up. How can toilet training cows help save the planet? Should we start renting our clothes? And why on earth is Bez from the Happy Mondays now keeping bees? I'm Jimmy Doherty, TV presenter, farmer and conservationist.

And these are just a few of the questions we'll be answering on my new podcast on Jimmy's Farm from History Hit. Join me on the farm to hear from the likes of the founder of the Eden Project, Sir Tim Smith. It is only people who don't know what they're doing that can do marvellous things in some areas, because received wisdom will sometimes, you'll talk yourself out of it if you've got lots of people who've done it before. Professor Dieter Helm on how to stop climate change. There may be all sorts of products like avocados and everything will have palm oil in it etc and these have not just long distances involved in it but they're not actually producing what could be produced on the land and the frame that it's set. And my old friend Jamie Oliver.

I think I was stupid enough, naive enough and unspoiled enough about the world that we live in. Listen to On Jimmy's Farm now, wherever you get your podcasts. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. That was a very brilliant Menson Bowne, marine archaeologist and explorer, a man I am really excited that I'm going to be accompanying to the Weddell Sea, to Antarctica, over the next few weeks.

I can't believe it. But before we go, the team here at History Hip thought we had an idea, which is that we get Mariana, our brilliant producer. Hello, Mariana. Hello, hi. On the podcast to ask me a few questions and to channel some of the questions that you have all sent in

because you've been asking questions across social media and email and stuff so Mariana what have you got for me? Has anyone ever interviewed you before

on your podcast? No No this is the first time No pressure then Yeah I thought it would be a good opportunity to tell all your listeners

how we're going to be making a podcast from the Antarctic in real time and what the endurance expedition is all about so this is really i think the most exciting thing i've ever done in my career i got a call about a year ago from an expedition that were on their way to the weddell sea or planning to go to the weddell sea after covid allowed on a survey vessel to search the 3,000 metre deep ocean bed for evidence of endurance, which is Shackleton's lost ship, which was crushed in the ice in 1915. And the loss of endurance then obviously led to the extraordinary survival story that people know and love and read about endlessly. So this exhibition is going to the Weddell Sea, trying to find that shipwreck,

conducting all sorts of really interesting, important science as well around there, as it does so for lots of scientists on board as well. And we will be there podcasting, broadcasting, social media-ising, and spreading the word in the great tradition of Shackleton, trying to make as much noise as possible about this expedition, engage people all over the world, and tell people what's going on. And so when they told me about this a year ago, I said, this is the reason I set up History Hit. This is everything I've been building through my whole career. This is a kind of globally significant history event, which we can partner up and be a partner broadcaster for and reach millions and millions of people. And so, yeah, I am very excited, but also quite nervous.

Why is it so important to go and find the shipwreck? Or, you know, why wouldn't we just leave it where it is? We know it's there somewhere. Well, we're certainly absolutely, of course, going to leave it where it is. And we're not going to interfere with the shipwreck at all or try and raise it or raise any parts of it. Absolutely, of course. It's good to identify where it is

because that can help in future with preservation. It's probably good to have a dot on the map where we know where it is. And apart from that, also, it's about imagination. It's about inspiration. I wrestle with this a lot because I understand there's lots of things in the world you're solving at the moment and people say what are you going to go look for this shipwreck for but i can't help the fact that millions of us around the world find this story of shackleton find the

story of this ship and it's lost profoundly moving inspiring we want to know more about it we want to know details and as we're doing so, trust me, because I've already had, as you know, lots of interaction with kids around the world, kids in classrooms and schools who've been sending messages and cards and stuff. This is something that will inflame a passion for history, a passion for the past, a passion for preservation, passion for Antarctica, and just a life less ordinary, I think, in hopefully millions of young people as well. So it is on the one hand, I agree, like a pretty niche activity. But on the other hand, it's what makes life so wondrous.

You said it's probably the most exciting thing that you've ever done in your career. One of the things I learned while we've been researching Shackleton and all of this for our podcast series is that when Shackleton was younger, he was obsessed with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea the epic by Jules Verne was there a story or a poem or a book something that got you excited for adventure and like it did for Shackleton? I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and the books on their bookshelves were of the time you know they were full of kind of daring do imperial heroes quote-unquote and story like Jay Henty, King Solomon's Mines like like, you know, these kind of stories now, which appear ridiculously outdated and inappropriate in many

ways. But I was brought up to admire these sort of heroic acts, whether it's the explorers, I'm half Canadian, explorers who would open up the Canadian backcountry, extraordinary canoe journeys they took along the rivers and lakes of Canada, the stories of Stanley in Africa, of, of course, the Antarctic exploration. In a weird way, the Antarctic heroes have stood the test of time better because it's uncontested. There's no indigenous peoples there who would suffer so terribly with the advent of European arrival. So in many ways, you can still, I think,

take that kind of celebrating attitude when it comes to the Antarctic in a way that you can't with some of these other explorers that we were brought up to admire. But I read the same books, probably Shackleton, Jules Verne books. My dad also read, he read aloud till I was embarrassingly old. It was a secret I never told my school friends, but we loved reading aloud in our family. And he'd read accounts of history. He made me learn Tennyson poetry when I was little, again, pre-Edwardian. I love that uh that Shackleton would have loved and known if by Rudyard Kipling's a classic you know dad loved reading us that and then yes Ulysses by Tennyson my dad made me and my recalcitrant teenage cousin learn that one summer and we both embarrassingly can still remember it to this day and we're both like secretly quite glad he made us learn it. It's kind of a cool thing to learn poetry and you can

kind of quote it. It makes you sound clever occasionally. And it's all about Ulysses voyaging and wandering and never being settled and always wanting to live a life less ordinary and challenge himself even deep into old age. There are comparisons between Shackleton's cultural upbringing in mind. I guess you'll have a lot of time for reading on the ship because you're going to be sailing for 10 days from South Africa down to the Weddell Sea. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. How are you going to connect with the outside world? Will I be able to get you on WhatsApp? How are we going to connect with the outside world? Will I be able to get you on WhatsApp? How are we going to communicate?

Well, we are, interestingly, unlike Shackleton, of course, in so many ways. I mean, just this whole thing, by the way, as if we need another reminder, is just a lesson on how much the world has changed over the last century. First of all, by the way, humans have only seen Antarctica for the last 200 years. No one before 1820 had ever laid eyes on it. So the idea that we're now going on a big comfortable ship, it's a miracle this journey we're on, this technological trajectory that we're on.

So you will be able to WhatsApp me, I think. We have got the latest satellite equipment and the ambition is that I will be able to upload lots of audio and lots of video to History Hits TV and all our social feeds and of course, most importantly, Marianne, that's the audio to you. And so, yeah, I think we're going to be in close contact. So there's me thinking, I'm finally going to read War and Peace. I'm going to take it, I'm going to sit there in my cabin

in the Southern Ocean as the waves are crashing, as the boats are lurching through 50 degrees, and I'm going to be reading War and Peace. I think I'm probably going to be like Instagramming, unfortunately, and like recording trails for you. Yeah. So that's good. So luckily, we will be able to hear from you. What can listeners expect from the podcast while you are away? Because you'll be going from the, I think you're setting sail from the 4th of February, and it's going to be a six-week expedition. What can listeners expect over that period?

Before we go, as you know, you've done amazing work. We've recorded a really exciting miniseries where we've got dramatic reconstruction of lots of participants, Sh've done amazing work. We've recorded a really exciting mini-series where we've got dramatic reconstruction of lots of participants, Shackleton and stuff. We've got their words read by actors and it's a wonderful mini-series we've got going out. We have got interviews with many, many Antarctic explorers and scientists. And so we're going to have a real season of Antarctica,

of high latitudes exploration. So we're really going to celebrate and learn about and just marvel at the extraordinary endurance of those early pioneers of high latitudes exploration. So we've got lots of that. But on board ship, we've got the very brilliant marine archaeologist, Minson Bound, will be there the whole time.

So he and I will be geeking out, looking at charts, looking at records, trying to work out exactly where Shackleton's ship sank. It's a long story they don't exactly know where and so on board we're going to be talking to him we're going to be talking to the captain of the ship remarkable man who was picked out and given a scholarship from the South African townships and became the first black African ice pilot in history and is now the first black African captain of a Antarctic survey vessel so there's all sorts of really

interesting people on board the ship and I'll be talking through how we're going about looking for that ship, because it ain't cruising up and down, eating cornettos just with the old sonar on. It's a little bit more complicated than that. Also, there will be loads of episodes of Down Snow's History at the main podcast. You will know what's insurance and what isn't

because they're going to have different cover artwork. So look out for that. But if you're also looking forward to hearing our normal history output from everything, we'll be talking to all the great experts from the stone age right up to present day you'll get that on the history hit feed as well so fear not well i could ask you a bunch of questions but we actually have loads of questions from your listeners so i thought best way to find out um about the expedition is through their questions so the first questions are from

north muirton Primary School, whose class got together and wrote a bunch of questions for you. So I picked my favourites. The first one is, will you use a submarine to find it? It's a very, very good question. The answer is sort of, not a manned submarine. We're going to use two underwater vehicles. They are going to be operating at thousands of metres of depth, 3,000 metres of depth. They're tethered because they attempted to find this shipwreck a couple of years ago and they didn't have a tether. They didn't have a rope, a wire attached to the drone and it basically got lost. And they will be scouring the seabed, but they will be deployed through a hole in the ice. We think there's a reasonable amount of ice

in the Red Bull Sea this year. So we'll be taking a helicopter from the ship to a moving ice flow, drilling a hole through the ice flow. And then because the ice flow is constantly moving, every two days you get the helicopter, you have to move the camp to another ice flow, which will then drift over the possible location of the wreck. But if you get that wrong, the ice might ping off in a different direction and you'll be searching the wrong bit of seabed.

So it is incredibly difficult to predict the flow of ice. And there are scientists on board that do that. And then there's an amazing team that will reconstruct the ice camp every two days. And so the search can continue, but it is a heck of an operation. Whoa. I mean, what is the likelihood that you'll find it? Well, it completely depends on the ice flows, the stability of the ice and the camp. If the ice might crack, we might have to abandon the camp. If there was no storms and no sea ice, and we just deployed them off the back of the ship, and they just searched, we had 10 days, we'd probably find endurance. But instead, the temperature of the water seems to affect the

amount of time the drones can be down there. The stormy conditions in, you know, we are in the Antarctic, it is the most inhospitable place on planet Earth. The ice flows are moving, crunching together, grinding together. There's all sorts of different scenarios, so we can't be absolutely certain. But the team down there, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, are unbelievably good at doing this. And so I'm confident in it. To be honest, it was going to be so extraordinary to be down there and getting a chance to go onto the ice, look at the wildlife, and tell the story of Shackleton, which of course I'll be doing for you guys listening to this and watching History Hit TV in the place where the action happened. And that's what's so exciting to

me. So their next question is, how scared or excited will you be? I'm very excited, indeed, because it's been a lifelong ambition to go to Antarctica. I love anything to do with the sea and ships. From my team at History Hit, we've worked for years to turn this into a kind of operation that one day could mount something of this ambition. And having people like you involved is proof that we finally reached that point you know we've got the best people working on this so i'm excited and proud of that i'm a bit scared because it's very dangerous to operate on sea ice it might be about three meters thick but it can crack as you can see from the shackleton story it can crack you can fall into the sea and the sea will be at one or two degrees centigrade. Your survival

time in the sea is seconds really in minutes. So unless someone pulls you out pretty sharpish and gets you in a hot bath, you're going to be in real trouble. So it is dangerous. Also danger from the wildlife. Leopard seals can be a threat. The other thing I'm thrilled about but a bit nervous is the 10-day voyage down from Cape Town to the Weddell Sea you're crossing the so-called roaring 40s the southern ocean where the wind just goes spinning around the bottom of the planet and there's nothing really gets in the way and so you get these gigantic waves like 50 feet high waves and so I'm kind of interested to see how I'll fare in that and how badly seasick I'm going to get and whether I'll kind of cope and I'm always fancy myself as a bit of a sailor

but this will be the ultimate test. Do your kids know how cool this thing that their dad is doing? No, I don't think they do. I try not to tell the kids. I try and avoid showing off to my kids. I don't want them to feel like, I don't want to sort of, you know, hero worship their dad. And there's no danger of that at the moment. I can tell you that for free.

So I think it's important that they grow up and realize their dad's just a kind of flawed big-nosed idiot like everyone thinks their dad is and the last thing you want is for your kids to think that your dad is sort of in my case I'm lucky to be married to someone far more impressive than I am so my wife is probably the one that my kids know more about her career and things in criminal justice so I'm telling them I'm doing it but I'm not gonna, but I'm not sending back selfies of me in gigantic waves looking all cool. And the last question from the primary school kids is, how will you know if you have the right amount of resources to last you? That's a really good question. These kids are on fire. So if we get trapped in the ice like Shackleton did, we might be there for a year, in which case, I don't know, I need to go and check the inventory, how much tinned spaghetti

they got down there. But they can work out how many people on board and then they work out the probable length of time that will be there and they've got enough food for all of that of course and they've got spare parts and batteries and you have to be self-sustaining so if the helicopter goes wrong you've got everything you need on hand to fix the helicopter if our cameras and equipment and podcasting recording material goes down we can't fly it out We can't get Amazon to drop it. We are alone. We might be able to talk to the outside world, unlike Shackleton, but the outside world can't help us.

And Forces Wives Challenge asks, what kind of training are you doing to prepare, especially for the cold? Well, my dark secret is I hate the cold. It's really embarrassing because we always go out walking and everyone's like, well, look, there's Dan Snow. He does TV shows about going to hostile places. And I'm always the first person to get really cold. Maybe it's because I'm six foot five.

I'm very tall. I'm quite skinny, cold. I have to prepare myself. Often when I'm out filming, I don't tell the crew, Mary-Anne. I'm telling you this now. But I often stuff hand warmers and those patches you get for bad backs in The Chemist. I'll stick them at

the beginning of the day and just have them on me because otherwise i'll be one of the first to kind of go down with cold you know fatigue and cold weather so physically i'm just trying to stay really fit i am trying to avoid getting covid and i am also just making sure i've got the right stuff lots and lots of layers lots of merino wool i do remember you telling us about your tights that you wore on our charles dickens walk i'm a tight wearer in england i always i never go anywhere if i'm in canada or scotland or any further field tights is an essential part of my winter wardrobe really i'd say from october to april and what about training because you did one time we couldn't do interviews because you had to go and do some sort of water training. What was that?

Sea survival training, yeah. If the ship sinks and we end up in the lifeboats, life rafts. Or, of course, fire on a ship is always a great danger. And so you've got to know what to do in those situations. I mean, my main takeaway from that ocean survival course was if you sink in the Southern Ocean, you are in a whole world of pain. So the main thing is to try and not set the ship on fire and not let seawater come into it. So keep that baby floating. That's the main task.

Simon Beale on Twitter asks, how different will the conditions be to when endurance made its voyage? Has it been impacted by global warming? That's a great question from Simon. He's been a great friend of the podcast over the years. And Simon is right. So part of the expedition down there

is we're going to have lots of climate scientists on because we have this interesting phenomenon, I think at the moment, which is obviously certain parts of the world are manifesting changes during our climate breakdown, climate crisis more than others. So for example, the Sahel, the area in Sahara, sort of in North and West Africa is expanding, we know there. And the poles seem to be warming at quicker rates than some of the other parts of the world. So expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica are both really important to try and gather more details. We've got oceanographers, we've got climate scientists. They are going to be doing a lot of readings and measurement down there. The answer is that there is a lot less sea ice than there was in 1914, 1915.

But there is still, we think at the moment, the Weddell Sea has got plenty of ice in it. So we are expecting to go onto the ice and launch these underwater vehicles through the ice. But it will certainly be warmer than it was in Shackleton's day. However, Simon, that doesn't mean it's going to be T-shirt shorts weather. It's still going to be very, very cold. It will be 24-hour daylight, but we're expecting clouds much of the time, very grey and temperatures well below zero. I really hope you're going to send us some photos of penguins and actually uh just to finish john o'donnell asks a relevant question will you be able to tell us if penguins quacks echo john i that's never been something i've

spent much time dwelling on but now that that's on the radar you're going to get an answer to that thanks dan um that's all the questions i feel like i should salute you or something you're the one that i'm just gonna send a load of content back to and you're gonna have to untangle it all and make something out of it mariana so good luck to you doing that so dan how can listeners keep up with your endurance expedition right well listeners can listen to history podcast they can subscribe wherever they get their pods they can follow me on twitter i'm the history guy or instagram also the history guy or the history hits feeds facebook um tiktok youtube it's going to be on the social media and then look out because if we do discover it i think it's gonna be a global media event and

we're going to be reporting live on all sorts of platforms from the ice. Mariana, when's the miniseries coming out? Your masterpiece. It's coming out on the 7th of February. It's three episodes running consecutively, one after the other each day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So subscribe and tell your friends. We're going to tell the story of Shackleton's extraordinary expedition on there to get us all in the mood. Thanks, Marianna. Thank you, Dan. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know

it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors, that's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got the ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods. you