Dan Snow's History Hit - The Hunt for the Endurance Shipwreck

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

In 2022 Dan was part of the international expedition that went in search of Shackleton's lost shipwreck Endurance in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica; what they discovered on the sea floor was more extraordinary than anything they could have imagined.It was no easy task, the Weddell Sea is one of the most remote and inhospitable places on earth and the crew found themselves facing the same dangers as Shackleton and his men. Dan tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Endurance22 expedition- the perilous storms and sea ice, the agonising close calls, the penguins, and the international incident Dan nearly caused...Written by Dan Snow, produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.This is the third episode in our Endurance season running through October & November to celebrate the release of the Endurance feature documentary on Disney+, Hulu and Nat Geo.For more Shackleton and Endurance content from History Hit, as well as AD-FREE content, sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here. You can watch the behind the scenes story of the expedition on History Hit. 

Hi, it is 1.30 or something on the morning of the 20th of February 2022. I've just woken up and just had someone bang on my door. Sondra's the producer, bang on my door. I'm putting my clothes on, I'm walking through the ship. Producer of Dan Snow's history hit, Mariana Desforges here. Hi. I got this voice note from Dan in the middle of the night. I think I woke up to get some water

and I saw I had a WhatsApp message from him. No one sends a message past midnight unless they're drunk or it's very important. So I played it. He tells me they have seen the acoustic signature of a shipwreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. It has to be endurance. It's inconceivable it could be anything else. What is beating like a drum? This is incredibly exciting.

Alright folks, welcome to History Hit. This is it. This is the story that I haven't been allowed to tell you for the last two years. But now it's out, the embargo has lifted, here we go. At the beginning of 2022, I was lucky enough to go on the expedition that sailed down to the Weddell Sea in Antarctica to try and find the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship. Endurance, it was the most famous,

the most celebrated yet-to-be-discovered shipwreck in the world. The reason it hadn't been discovered yet is because it is 3,000 metres down on the bottom of the Weddell Sea, one of the least studied and surveyed pieces of the Earth's surface. The surface of that sea is clogged with sea ice and we could not be sure about the accuracy of its final reported position, the latitude and longitude. So it's way down there under the sea ice in one of the most understudied unknown sections of the planet with the most shocking climate you'll find anywhere on Earth. Whilst we were there, the closest human beings to us would be the crew of the International Space Station. This is one of several podcasts in

your feed about Shackleton. There are more coming. This is all to accompany the release of the feature documentary in movie theatres and on the streaming platform Disney Plus all around the world. This is pretty much my unedited take on the whole thing. Here is Shackleton and the Hunt, one of the world's most famous ships. In 2021, I was standing on the platform of my local train station. I was waiting for the train and suddenly my phone rang and I answered it. The halcyon days when we answered calls from unknown numbers. And a gentleman was on the phone and he got straight to the point. He said, did I have any interest in Shackleton? And would I be interested in an expedition to go and find his missing ship, insurance? Friends, I was interested. Trains

came and went. I stood there shivering on that platform, channeling all of my energy, all of my persuasive abilities. I was not going to let this guy off the phone until I persuaded him that he needed me on that expedition. Was I interested in Shackleton? What a question. That inspired, that driven, that unstoppable force of nature, that deeply flawed, chaotic genius who drove himself and his men to the point of oblivion, to sate his desire to see what is unseen, to make his name, to carve himself in the history books. Yes, yes, I was interested. And that ship, Endurance as well, that iconic ship, the star of some of the most beautiful photographs ever taken, that ghostly

ship trapped in the ice, the guards and the mast, the rigging, etched in white, etched in frost. To see that once again on the seabed, to rescue her from the nothingness to which she'd been consigned, yeah, I was interested. And I must have done something right, because I got my spot on the expedition. And so, a few months later, Team History and I got on a plane to Cape Town to join the expedition. But before we leave Cape Town, it's important that you guys all understand why Shackleton left to go south back in 1914. He was an explorer. He was an Antarctic veteran.

He had been south twice. This would be his third trip. On the second trip, he'd broken the record for reaching the furthest south. Any human never got to that point. In the beginning of 1909, he stood around 90 miles or so from the South Pole. And he decided to turn back on that occasion, tragically. But he decided that he had to save the lives of his men. A couple of years later, obviously, he'd received the devastating news that Norwegians had reached

the pole, and shortly after that, Captain Scott had also done the same. So what now for Shackleton? What now for this man who'd really made his name in Antarctic exploration? And John's name, he'd known his fortune, he'd made his living. He needed Antarctica. That frozen waste was his route to fame and fortune. His business propositions weren't going very well. His speaking invitations were going to dry up. His marriage was rocky. In 1910, he wrote, I long for the unbeaten trail again.

And by 1913, well, he'd made up his mind. Perhaps I will try again to go south, he wrote. So he came up, and I always admire this, he came up with the real wheeze. He said the real prize was never the South Pole. The real prize is trekking 1,800 miles across the continent, via the pole, from sea to sea. He announced to everyone this was the last great polar journey that can be made. And he enthused people. He went around, he got enough backers, and he just about managed to everyone this was the last great polar journey that can be made. And he

enthused people. He went around, he got enough backers, and he just about managed to put this exhibition together. And he had all sorts of amazing ideas. He wanted to use new technologies. He looked at attaching aeroplane engines to sledges to blast him across the continent. Even without the aero engines, the plans were complex enough. He would need one ship to carry him as far south as possible in the Weddell Sea. He identified a place called Vashall Bay. He'd never seen it, one explorer had, and he hoped that might work. It had been described by an explorer called Filchner who'd speculated that you might be able to land there and climb up onto the ice sheet. That would get him as far south as he could on the Antarctic coast. He went to the government for money. They very reluctantly found

a very small amount of money. Winston Churchill, I think, summed up the mood of some when he was first Lord of the Admiralty. In January 1914, he said, enough life and money has been spent on this sterile quest. But Shackleton disagreed. He went for it. His sails were filled with the Atlantic breeze. He was now heading south.

In January of 2022, we headed south as well. We took a plane to Cape Town and we were sunbathing in the harbour beneath Table Mountain. We were drenched in southern hemisphere summer heat. But we, like Shackleton, were yearning for the cold. We, like Shackleton, had to beat the ice. We had a window. We had to get there before the Antarctic winter set in. Now, the expedition had decided to use a South African ice-breaking research vessel, the Agulhas II, state-of-the-art, best in the world, commanded by an interesting guy, the first black African ice pilot,

Captain Knowledge Bengu, who was fast-tracked into the merchant marine when Nelson Mandela came to power, and the ANC came to power, and is now one of the finest skippers in the business. Now, those of you who know boats and ships and expeditions generally will know the misery of waiting for departure. There's always something. Critical spare parts, slow to arrive, equipment failure, bureaucratic snares, the minutes really dragged by. And in retrospect, it was probably only a day or so, but it felt like essential hours were leaking away. Hours where we could be combing over the Antarctic seabed. But as you can tell, my neuroses were firing off in

every direction. And eventually, happiness of seeing those great warps cast off by the team ashore, and the crew of the Agulhas in their protective overalls, their white hard hats gleaming in the sun, flaking the horses, getting ready to put to sea as we slipped out of harbour. That red and green hull standing out against the blue of the sea. There were seals frolicking all around us as we gently pushed away from Cape Town. We pulled past Robin Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned imprisoned the sun got lower everything was rose color never forget that night there were whales breaking the surface as we entered the deeper water and then we felt that slow rhythmical lifting and falling of the deck the ocean rollers making themselves felt

behind us the great wide white wake stretched away pointing straight as an arrow at table mountain which slowly dipped below the horizon it was a great mood on board we took photos we recorded bits of podcasts for you guys i quoted shackleton's words he left civilization for the last time he was famous actually shackleton for being able to remember great chunks of poetry. He always had the right passages in his fingertips. I did not. I had them written down. He marked the occasion by quoting a few lines

from The Ship of Fools, which is a bit of modification, by St. John Lucas. We were the fools who could not rest in the dull earth we left behind, but burned with passion for the south and drank strange frenzy from the wind. The world where wise men sit at ease fades from my unregretful eyes,

and blind across uncharted seas we stagger on our enterprise. Well, we too were now heading south. And in one terrible, sad echo of history, as we sailed south, armies clashed once again in Europe for the first time in generations. Like Shackleton, we were leaving just as the world's gaze was gripped by war. Russia invaded Ukraine. Shackleton, back in 1914, had gone from the UK to Argentina and from there to South Georgia, which is a little outpost of humanity right on the edge of Antarctica. There's a few communities of whalers who cling to the edge of a mountainous, snow-capped wilderness. He managed to secure a few more supplies that whalers had urged him not to go.

Do not go south this year, they said. The Weddell Sea is full of ice, and Shackleton ignored them. The Weddell Sea into which they were heading is a very dangerous place. Around Antarctica in the winter, there's about 90 million square miles of sea ice. The surface of the sea just turns to ice. In the summer, that shrinks to about three million or so square kilometers. But most of that sea ice, most of that three million square kilometers, is in the Weddell Sea. Because if you look at a map of Antarctica, it's like a huge cul-de-sac, it's a huge bay into the continent. The ice gets trapped there, it's like an eddy. You get multi-year sea ice just crashing into each other, overlapping, raising little mountains and plateaus,

never quite melting. It's always moving. Joseph Hooker was a great friend of Charles Darwin. He went there on a Royal Naval Expedition in the 1840s, and he said it was simply repellent. on a Royal Naval Expedition in the 1840s, and he said it was simply repellent. And in the Antarctic summer of 1914 to 15, January, February, March, as the whalers had predicted, it was full of ice. Shackleton hit the ice just days out of South Georgia. I hadn't expected to find it so far north, he wrote. He'd hit the ice and there was still a thousand miles between him and Vashall Bay. Now we hit the ice a lot further south than Shackleton. We'd threaded our way between low pressure systems. 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've got a 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 they'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 lifejackets on, harnesses on. Just below me now trying to lash down bits 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. 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. 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. I'll never forget the day when we hit the ice. Suddenly along the horizon, you see it, bang, there's a line where the sea meets the sky. And then we reach the edge of the ice. It just begins. Floating plates of sea ice, seals there, endless penguins. I never need to see a bloody penguin again as long as I live. Yet for the first few days, my camera never left my hand. If anyone wants a cute penguin shot, DM me, folks. We were able to bat our way through the ice. We're in an astonishing 21st century state-of-the-art icebreaker. And it's a hypnotic process.

The cracks that shoot forward as the bow smash into the ice. They send the penguins and the seals running and slithering away. But Shackleton didn't have that luxury. He had to thread through the ice, work his way. Lookouts at the masthead calling out leads of clear water, is what they called them, between plates of ice. And by the 10th of January, endurance had done pretty well, actually, and he was within sight of the towering cliffs of Antarctica. You could see Coates Land. A few days later, he passed the most southerly place that had been chartered to that point in history. He was

into uncharted territory, and Shackleton called it immediately the Caird Coast after his biggest sponsor. Now, some of his men tried to get Shhtar to go to the coast there, land, and begin the overland leg, but he was desperate to minimise the distance they'd have to travel by land. He knew how awful it was sledging, travelling by land. Vashal Bay was 200 miles south. Far better to go by boat, warm and snug, than to add to the overland sledging journey. It was a momentous

decision he made, but he decided to press on. And in doing so, he condemned the expedition to failure. Because on the night of the 18th and 19th of January 1915, the ice closed around Endurance. In the morning, it was clear that they were locked solid solid wedged in about a million square miles of ice the nearest human being was in south georgia 1500 miles away now speaking of ships that iced in in 2022 i caused an international incident and surprise surprise it was with an indelicate use of social media we also got trapped in the ice. This is what thousands of horsepower sounds like in full astern. It is Monday morning on the Agulhas, during the night the temperature has fallen and like insurance we are now hemmed in on all sides by ice. The engines are in full reverse, they've been screaming for about 20 minutes, half an hour.

We're about to get the crane out, load up the crane and swing it from side to side and try and dislodge us. So, this story has got some ways to go. The plot thickens. The Agulhas was stuck. Not permanently, but it was stuck. I think we're about 36 hours. We could not go forward, we could not go backwards.

If this modern ship could get stuck in the ice, can you imagine a ship over 100 years ago with the technology they had available, the threat that faced those vessels? But we were fine because we knew that ice moves, it pinches and it loosens, and we would eventually get ourselves out. We knew that.

But I hopped on Instagram and I may admit that I made it sound a little bit more dramatic than perhaps it was. And before you knew it, the expedition searching for Shackleton's ship stuck in the ice is now stuck in the ice. We got phone calls from media all over the world. The South African government were absolutely furious, and rightly so, that their very capable ship was now in the media for being stuck. And the captain was mortified when offers of assistance came in from vessels operating in

and around Antarctica. The only person who was utterly unfussed during that whole drama was my wife. She knows me very well by now, after more than a decade of marriage, and she dismissed worried messages from friends and family, saying they should ignore absolutely everything I said. It was bound to be less dramatic, and she was right. But for Shackleton, well, there was no way out of that ice, and there was no one coming to help. He had no way of communicating, and anyway, there was no help that anyone in the outside world could possibly provide, even if they had known his whereabouts and his condition. They had no choice. They hunkered down for winter. He was solicitous.

He was ever-present. He made sure people were comfortable. He made sure people had the food they needed. He put on entertainments. He distracted them from their ordeal. But there's only so much that positive mental attitude can achieve. Everything came to a head on the 24th of October. Someone was playing a song on the gramophone when there was what felt like an earthquake. The rudder was torn off. Shackleton knew this was the beginning of the end. Timbers aboard snapped like rifle shots. Shackleton admitted defeat. It was 5pm on the 27th of October that they abandoned ship.

The temperature was about minus 8 degrees centigrade. They hoisted the ensign. They gave three cheers. It was the end of Endurance's maiden voyage. You listen to Dan Snow's history. There's more coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. 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. As they sat there waiting on the 21st of November, it happened on a Sunday, I think. Things always tend to happen on this expedition on a Sunday. Shackleton yelled at the members of the expedition because he'd noticed the endurance was moving. The stern of endurance lifted into the air

and with a single flowing movement, she plunged beneath the ice. Shackleton said simply, she's gone, boys. Frank Worsley, the New Zealander navigator, he took out his sextant as soon as there was any sun in the sky, which wasn't for a few hours, and he noted down where he thought the endurance had sunk. He never could have imagined that over 100 years later we would be at the coordinates that he left us, searching a box based on his coordinates, looking for that ship. But we were. By February 22, we were in the ice, we were searching. So today you scan the seabeds with

drones. They work brilliantly. You program them with a search pattern and they go and execute that just above the seabed. If they run out of batteries or something goes wrong, they have to abort. They just surface, they release a little GPS signal and they wait for the mothership to come and hoik it out of the water and sort it out. But not in the Weddell Sea, no. If it aborts, the drone gets wedged beneath the sea ice. So even if the mothership gets the signal that our drone is somewhere over there, wedged beneath the sea ice, we might not be able to get to it because we can't break all sea ice. There's a limit on the amount of sea ice even the Agulhas can break. If it gets beyond two or three meters deep, it cannot break that ice. And we rely on the thin ice to get

around. We have to bypass big, thick, multi-year sea ice. So we might not be able to get to that drone by the time its battery dies, the GPS signal fades, and the drone sinks to the seabed. So to overcome this problem, we took 25 kilometers of fiber optic cable on massive spools. That meant that we could control the drone, and we could switch it from autonomous mode to remotely operated mode, and we'd get real-time info. We could see what the drone is seeing.

But that cable is delicate. There's a lot of drag on that cable, so it reduces battery time. And also, you cannot tow this delicate array while the ship is moving and smashing through ice and sending great chunks of frozen water crashing along in our wake. So you have to come to a stop. And once we stop, the icebreaker's got an open channel of water behind it where we've moved through the ice, but that quickly freezes up. So we learned that we had to keep the engines on, ticking over, to keep water flowing and prevent

ice forming, which meant we had a kind of pool of water on the stern all the time when we were searching. And the whales discovered this, and these come up for air in our pool. So we saw a huge amount of wildlife, these beautiful whales coming up for air and then going back down below. We were then moving with the pack ice that we were encased in, so we could be moving up to one mile an hour. So by the time we get to the right place, we navigate our way into the search area, we avoid any massive icebergs that have carved off the continental shelf, or we avoid any multi-year sea ice which is too thick to break through.

We get the equipment deployed, we get the drone to the bottom, 10,000 feet below, 3,000 meters. By the time all that's happened, well, surprise, surprise, half the time we've drifted out of the search area. On the 21st of November 1915, endurance made history when she sank

here in the Antarctic. Today, we're making history as we send down that vehicle to see if we can find her. It just gets the tether now, and it is under its own power, and it is diving white water as the propellers stir it up. The day after endurance sank, Shackleton ripped the front cover off his Bible

that had a note from Queen Alexandra in it. She quoted Psalm 107, and she said, May you see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. I'm not a religious man, but that's why drones often do that. And after a slow start, we got more and more of that search box covered. And that's how it all began. There were day in, day out, temperatures plunging, the drone operating in far colder conditions than it had been designed for,

the team working tirelessly, working in conditions far below zero, ice on their clothing, on their beards. The search box, I think it's about 400 square kilometers, a little bit smaller than Philadelphia, about the area of the Isle of Wight, if you're listening, from the UK. And that drone moves at 2.7 knots. It flies above the seabed at 80 metres altitude. It's got an 800 metre range, so for every metre it moves forward, it can monitor around 1,600 metres of seabed. And luckily, that seabed is dead flat.

It's so featureless that when you do get a blob, when you do get an irregularity on the sonar, well then you can focus on it because it could well be something interesting. I was a nightmare. I paced the decks like a caged animal. I did burpees. I ate far too much. I walked around dozens of times a day. I listened to podcasts. I read War and Peace. I made podcasts that some of you will have listened to. I made Instagrams that people watched. And I gazed over the stern at that fiber optic cable, imagining the drone 3,000 meters below. And back in 1915, Shackleton's men were waiting too.

By early March, they had drifted north. They could feel the swell beneath the ice. And by mid-March, the ice flows had broken into separate chunks. There was clear water around them. It was a terrifying time. They were now camping on an island of ice. It was about 200 meters across. They faced constant danger. It was too icy for the rowing boats, not icy enough to be safe. People would fall in between the ice. They'd be rescued. They'd get back in the boats. It was a brutal time. They were stuck in a terrible limbo. By the 9th of April, thankfully, there was enough clear water, they were able to put the rowing boats to sea properly, and for the last time. After six months living on the ice, they were back at sea. They were on the

verge of death. They had cold weather injuries. They were seasick. They had little fresh water after they left the ice. They were rowing up to their knees in seawater. Their feet were white and flaking. They had boils on their backsides where it was rubbing against the wood. One experienced sailor said that half the group were insane, helpless, and hopeless. On the 15th of April, a huge wave sent them crashing onto the beach at Elephant Island. It had been 497 days since they'd been on land, and it was not a day too soon. One night, a member of my team hammered on my door. I sort of leapt out of bed, I fell over a chair, I pulled a shelf down on my head, tore open the door and I saw there, it was a huge wide grin. We had endurance, surely. The two of us galloped around the ship,

audio recorders running, cameras, iPhones, Osmos, GoPros strapped to every limb. I'm listening to the radio communications from the back deck, we're trying to give people space on the back deck so they can operate. You can hear it in the background there. We just get tense, terse messages between various crews that are working together to keep the ship in position and the unmanned vehicle on the seabed. As I'm speaking to you now, the survey of the wreck area has started. The drone will be trying to build a three-dimensional model of the wreck, then it will get closer if we dare and get some photographs, some moving images of the wreck itself. It feels like the entire expedition is on a knife edge. People kind of coming out of their pyjamas, wiping sleep out of their eyes,

we had it, we had endurance. They mentioned people cheering behind, word is spreading fast through the ship's company because you've just found endurance. How's it feel? Yeah, it's going to spread through the ship like wildfire, Dan Snow. Yeah, how's it feel?

This is, oh, so corny, but it's beyond words. What can I say? This has been your search. Your name's been on it. There's been criticism in places. There's been questions raised. What's this mean to you, Mensenbaum, personally? This is like, you know, it just feels like, you know,

your whole life has been converging on this moment, you know. It feels just brilliant. But then the light came up and we sent the drone back down and suddenly the mood got a little bit quieter and more sombre. Oh, no. It's not endurance. Actually, the words Dan has sent me are disaster, disaster. It's not endurance.

It's debris. Oh, my God. There was a degree of embarrassment. It turned out that what we had found was something, yes, but not really a shipwreck. There was some wood, possibly some coal. So possibly evidence for yes, but not really a shipwreck. There was some wood, possibly some coal, so possibly evidence for endurance, but not endurance itself. Friends, I had some restless nights after that because it was my job to be a spokesman for the expedition. So it was back to the drawing board, this time with some urgency. The temperature here in the Weddell Sea is plummeting. It will be minus 15 in a few days

time. There is a huge iceberg moving into the search area that is going to cover a huge amount of it. We are running out of time in the Weddell Sea. I think it's only a matter of time before the South African officers on the bridge, Captain Knowledge and the rest of the officers decide to abort. We'd not want to stay here all winter the ship's straining away to just about manage to get through ice that's growing seems to be going thicker by the day and we have just launched the underwater vehicle for a dive no one's really saying it but it feels like it could be the last dive of endurance 22 the nights were getting longer it It happens quickly down there.

And Shackleton would certainly have felt those nights drawing in in April 1916 on Elephant Island. They didn't have much time to celebrate when they got to Elephant Island because they had no chance of rescue there. No ships came that way. It wasn't on the route. There was no shelter. This was temporary respite at best. It was not a lasting solution. So Shackleton did something really quite extraordinary. He decides that he will take the most seaworthy of those three boats and he will make the greatest open boat voyage in history across the southern ocean to go and get help he will go to south georgia that's 800 miles away they made it through a storm on the last night at sea that was so powerful it sank a steamer in the same stretch of ocean hurricane force force winds. They made it through a unique combination

of skill, of tenacity, of strength, and of luck. A lot of luck. On the 10th of May, they beached themselves. They were out of fresh water, their tongues were swollen, they were utterly broken, and they were on the west side, the uninhabited side of South Georgia. Two of the men were particularly near death. The boat was pretty much unseaworthy. Shackleton made another extraordinary decision. He would hike up into the mountainous snowbound interior of South Georgia and down the other side to get to the whaling stations to seek help. No human being has ever done this before.

And now he would lead Frank Worsley and Tom Crean across with no specialist kit, no fitness, preparation, training, into a big blank space on the map. As dawn broke on the 30th, so just over 24 hours after they set off, and they'd been going all the time, they heard a steam whistle. Worsley reports that Shacklin said, Never did music sound so sweet to our ears as that whistle. It was the first sound they'd heard of the outside world since leaving South Georgia in December 1914. And they made their

way down into the whaling station. Children fled at their sight. The station manager had no idea who they were. Through cracked lips, Shackleton said simply, I am Shackleton. And the whaling station manager broke down in tears. That night, there was a blizzard. They'd have been killed up there if they'd been 24 hours later. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. More after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. To be continued... 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.

By March 2022, we were very used to blizzards they were coming in thick and fast we'd covered a lot of the search box we had not found endurance we had two days left before we'd have to bolt north we'd have to return to civilization with nothing to show for it and then i think it was about mid afternoon and there's a funny thing about ships. You feel the mood change aboard. Perhaps it's the noise, perhaps the patterns. A ship's life is routine, and so your brain gets used to them. So when things break that routine, you notice them. I'll never forget the moment. The moods certainly change. Perhaps the doors slam a little harder, a bit more often. Perhaps the footsteps in the corridors move a little quicker. I just, I knew something was up. I stuck my head out of our room where we had all our kit and laptops and the cameras.

Something was up. I went to the stern deck and then I knew straight away because the guys on the stern deck were grinning from ear to ear. Now, after the last false alarm, everyone was playing it a bit cool this time. I rushed into the port-a-cabin where all of the monitors were, all the outputs from the drone. And there were 15 people squeezed inside a space which held about two comfortably. And there on the screens was a massive and really obvious sonar signal.

Just come out here to this stern deck. There's a good feeling out here. You've got smiles on your face. What's going on? That's it, brother. The smell of success. That's what's going on. We finally found it. Finally found it it and we have it verified with the camera right now what we're doing is uh man i'm shaking right now we finally found it dude you know what i mean oh um so we're doing the the detailed survey right now on the sonar and the multi-beam uh once that's complete we'll bring the aev back up and then we're going to switch gears we're going to reconfigure the aev for the 4 camera, detail camera, and then the laser scanner.

What's it looking like? Just as Minson said. The sort of graph, if you like, the sonar readout showed it was flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, big, oval, flat, flat, flat. There was something mad made down there. There's something artificial. And no one else had dumped much in these waters over the years. Surely it was endurance. By the time it's the middle of the night, I am pacing around. Sleep is not coming easy. The technicians are fiddling with the drone. We have to reposition the ship, the Agulhas, of course, which have been pushed off the target. The weather is in constant danger of locking us out. The weather's horrific. It was terrible. It

was too much. It was too much. Eventually, though, the drone goes in, it gets the seabed, boom, we're on the seabed. We watch as the camera tracks along that featureless seabed. And then suddenly, suddenly there's a wall of wood sitting proud, straight up and down, planks running left to right, rivets shining. And then up and over the wood, look down, a deck, riggings, fittings. It's endurance. We've got to. Sitting there in the cabin that night, I really experienced the sensation of realizing that you're in possession of something

that within hours will be on every screen in the world, will be common currency. But for the next few moments, it's still your secret, you and the people in that room with you. And as the drone swept over the boughs and rose to show off that lovely sharp peak, the wood still golden brown, and then we moved the drone around to the stern and we saw the brass letters flashing in for light, E-N-D-U-R, Endurance, the gold star, the Polaris beneath. back to when it had been called Polaris in Norwegian ownership. When we saw those things, well, there were gasps. I think there were tears. It was like nothing else. She was keeled down,

intact on the seabed, sitting there like a toy on the sand. Gin clear water. No growth on her, really. There's no wood in Antarctica, so there's no animals that have evolved to eat wood. And so she's pretty pristine. I knew I'd probably never experience anything like that again. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for coming to this voyage briefing. I've got some very, very exciting news. This afternoon, the subsea team found the wreck of the Endurance. Woo! Just to finish off the Shackleton story,

he went back and rescued all his men. He went back to the other side of South Georgia. He made four attempts to get to Elephant Island. Sea ice, the terrible weather kept him out. The men were ferried aboard. He counted them all in. And finally, I think for the first time in months, he could relax. So I've come down to the ice now, got Emperor Penguin right next to me. He's interested in what's going on here. I was doing some podcasting, man. Nothing too exciting. He's sliding on his

tummy right round me. I can reach out and touch him actually. There you go. he's on the pod you're on the pod dude anyway i've come out to the ice the ship is about 200 meters away and we are over the site of endurance right now we're about 4.7 miles away from where Wolseley fixed the position of endurance a remarkable feat of navigation it's nice to be sitting here on the ice and to contemplate the experience we've just been through. It's overwhelming really, I can't believe it's just a few days to go. We found Endurance bizarrely, we found it yesterday afternoon or we got the first sense that there might be something down there. Yesterday afternoon it was the 5th of March and Tracton was buried on the 5th of March 1922, 100 years ago today, since his burial.

I can't imagine what they'd have thought, those 28 men that watched Endurance sank, if they knew that a century later people would come back to this spot and find Endurance and see her in much the same condition in which she sank. I think they'd have been amazed of course, but I think they'd have been happy that the story of Endurance had not come to an end. I'm thinking about how best to honour those men sitting here on the ice and I thought maybe I'd read a part of one of Shackleton's favourite poems. It's one of my dad's favourite poems. He made me learn it. It's Ulysses by Tennyson. We know that Shackleton and his men would recite bits of this poem on the various exhibitions they went on. In this poem Tennyson imagines an aged Ulysses, an old man but not happy

in Ithaca, desperate to travel again, desperate to have adventure. I think it would have spoken to Shackleton and lots of people like him. This is the end of the poem. and lots of people like him. This is the end of the poem. Come, my friends, it is not too late to seek a new world. Push off, and sitting well in order, smite the sounding furrows.

For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down. It may be we shall touch the happy isles and see the great Achilles whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides. And though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven,

that which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. To strive, to to seek to find and not to yield thanks for listening to endurance 22 everyone we did it and honestly folks all of it is thanks to you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting and subscribing, as ever.

Well, everyone, that gives you a bit of an idea of what it was like for Shackleton and his men, and for us, as we went to look for him. But to give you the full story of this extraordinary feat of survival, I need more than just one podcast episode. I'm going to tell you the entire story of the Trans-Antarctic Expedition. I'm going to be using Shackleton's own words. We'll be continuing our Shackleton series

where I tell you the whole story of the 1914 to 16 expedition. Do not miss it, folks. It begins on 3rd of November. Make sure to follow to get it into your podcast player automatically. you