Dan Snow's History Hit - ENDURANCE22: Dan's Diary #02

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Dan gives a quick update on the expedition's progress towards Antarctica from a rather wet and windy deck as the crew prepare for a storm to hit.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.

It's dawn on the morning of the 12th of February. We're just passing the South Sandwich Islands, between that and South Georgia, and we've woken up to a big storm. It's blowing gusting up to, well, 50 or 60 knots apparently. So we're off Storm Force 10. It's coming in off our starboard quarter, so it's behind us. So these towering waves, like mountains, are rising up behind us, and we're corkscrewing over them. And I've come back to the stern deck here, and the French subsea crew are frantically trying to secure the equipment.

There is water just ankle-deep racing across the deck back here, and they're working in these conditions, jackets on harnesses on just below me now trying to lash down bits that inevitably have come loose trying to put extra tarpaulins over wiring over electronics and secure everything the absolute nightmare for this expedition is that we break something we damage something on route down here. It's an amazing scene the deck, the working deck here is awash, there's water crashing from one side to the other, the French crew heroically tying themselves and tying their equipment down and all the while you can't see the horizon you're going to see these pale blue monsters, these gigantic waves of breaking tops coming crashing down around the hull of the ship

some of them landing right on the deck. I've only been out in a force 10 monster twice before and you forget how the surface of the sea takes a very different aspect it becomes almost entirely white, spin drift breaking waves, light blue aerated water all around the ship. Spray carried for meters in the wind every time a wave breaks. There's no chance whatsoever of seeing the South Sandwich Islands because the visibility is probably only about a mile. It's getting very, very cold now, it's just hard holding my equipment like in this conditions. It

makes you wonder how on earth Shackleton was able to sail through these waters in an open boat day after day with none of the specialist equipment that we have today on board ship. Oh, another huge wave just crashed across the deck there. Whoa, I don't know if you can hear that. One of the French operators had to leap on top of the forklift truck to stop himself getting washed overboard. There's now a giant amount of water which is pouring out through the scuppers but we're swinging so violently from side to side that

much of it is staying on the deck and refusing to pour out back into the sea. What's more we're about to get icebergs coming past us now. We should be really minutes or hours away from seeing our first iceberg whizzing past. It would have broken off the Weddell Sea ice pack. Just think of Captain Cook down here, he named the South Sandwich Islands, the reason he called them South Sandwich Islands is partly because his boss, Earl Sandwich, was his boss at the Admiralty, sent him out in his second and third expeditions into the Pacific and down to these latitudes, but also because he named the Sandwich Islands Hawaii. That name didn't stick,

but these ones are still called the South Sandwich Islands.