Science Friday - The Lasting Allure Of Shackleton’s ‘Endurance’

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

In a conversation from March 2023, the maritime archeologist who found the storied wreck discusses the mission and his new book.There are few stories about heroic survival equal to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic rescue of his crew, which turned disaster into triumph. In August of 1914, 28 men set sail from England to the South Pole. Led by Shackleton himself, the group hoped to be the first to cross Antarctica by foot. However, their ship, the Endurance, became stuck in ice. It sank to the bottom of the frigid Antarctic waters, leaving most of the men stranded on a cold, desolate ice floe.Shackleton, with five of his crew, set out in a small boat to bring help from hundreds of miles away. Finally, after many months of fighting the cold, frostbite and angry seas, Shackleton was able to rescue all his men with no loss of life.Over the years, there have been many attempts to find the Endurance shipwreck. None were successful until a year ago, when the wreck was located for the first time since it sank back in 1915. Ira is joined by Mensun Bound, maritime archeologist and the director of exploration on the mission that found the Endurance. His new book, The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance, is out now.View more images of Shackleton’s last expedition from the Library of Congress.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

At the start of the 20th century, there was a frenzied race between explorers to reach the South Pole. And the team led by Ernest Shackleton almost won the prize. But he got to, what was it, 97 miles of pole, and he stopped. And he stopped because he knew that on the way back, men would die. It's Tuesday, January 16th. It's the 150th anniversary of Shackleton getting a pretty cool consolation prize. And this is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. The Geographic South Pole was elusive during the Nimrod expedition of 1909,

but Shackleton's team did reach the magnetic South Pole, or at least an estimate of where it was at the time. Five years later, his crew took off on another Antarctic mission that also somehow averted tragedy and left a mystery for modern explorers to discover. Ira Flato brings us this conversation from March of 2023 about the discovery of the endurance. There are a few stories about heroic survival equal to Ernest Shackleton's daring rescue of his entire crew that turned disaster into triumph. In August of 1914, 28 men set sail from England to Antarctica, led by Shackleton. They had hoped to be the first to cross the isolated continent by foot. However, their ship, the endurance became stuck in the ice, was crushed, sank to the bottom of the frigid Antarctic waters, leaving most.

of the men stranded on cold, desolate land. Shackleton, with five of his crew, set out in a small boat to bring help from hundreds of miles away, and finally, after many months of fighting the cold, frostbite, and the angry seas, Shackleton was able to rescue all of his men with no loss of life. Over the years, there have been attempts to find the endurance shipwreck, but none were successful until literally a year ago, when the endurance was located for the first time since it sank back. in 1915. Menson Bound is a maritime archaeologist, director of exploration on the mission that

found the ship, an author of the ship beneath the ice. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. Glad to be with you. Nice to have you. Let's talk about your personal history with the story of Shackleton. You wrote that you grew up on the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic and that everyone in my generation was a Shackleton enthusiast, and you joined a crew of like-minded Shackleton on your ship. You're right. We are a joyous bag of wunks on the ship, all card-carrying shackleton fanatics. Tell me more about this crew. Okay. I mean, at one level, we were a bunch of wanks, you're right. But, you know, we're also a bunch of very highly trained minds. I suppose in some respects you might compare this whole grand exercise to finding the injurious

as, you know, the Manhattan Project or the moonshot or the human, or the human, you know, the genome project by which I mean you had a group of technical specialists and very, very highly trained minds all brought together to track this problem. How did we find Shackleton's endurance? Yeah. And it took you two missions to find it, right? Yeah. We had to go in 2019. And that wasn't a success at all. That was a disaster. We were using AUVs, autonomous underwater vehicles. and our main search vehicle just disappeared without trace. And it was easily the worst moment of my life. And why did it take so long to find the wreck after all?

The main challenge was the ice. Not so much the depth. It doesn't really matter too much whether we're looking at 1,000 meters or 6,000 meters. But the ice was quite a challenge, especially in 2019. It was really aggressive. It was thick, old, multi-year ice is tough as teak. And it was really sort of, you could feel the pressure. It was like you're in the coils of borough constrictor.

And towards the end there, winter was coming on. The ice was getting more and more muscular. And in the end, we lost the vehicle. We spent three days charging around trying to find it. But in the end, the ice became too much. We had to get our tails out of there. So what did you do differently the second time in 2022? Yeah, we learned a few lessons from our failures in 2019.

Certainly there was a sea change in our attitude of mind. I can't speak for the others, but I do know this. I went in there sort of feeling quite, you know, arrogant about things. I went in there like a bunch of, you know, Renaissance Conduceri, sort of trampling all before us, thinking, you know, I can beat the ice. And in the end, it was completely the opposite. The ice beat us. And, you know, I was completely humiliated and hollery.

horsewhip by the whole experience. Second time round, the ice was not nearly so bad. I mean, I couldn't believe the change in just three years. Last year, the ice was there, yes, but it was loose, a very, very loose matrix, a lot of leads, a lot of breaks in the ice. We just wriggled our way through to the search area of no problem whatsoever. Whereas in 2019, we had to break our way through, and yes, we got caught in the ice not once but three times, but last year it was simplicity itself. And I'm afraid it's part of a trend. The ice is disappearing. But for that to have happened so fast in just three years, I mean, it was great news for us, but just terrible news for the planet. The journey of the endurance was well documented by its crew. You talk about that. They had

diaries that told the exact coordinates of the sinking. How far away from those coordinates did you find the wreck? Yeah, well, I couldn't say they were exact coordinates. I was the guy 10 years ago who was tasked for finding the wreck. And my first job was devising a search area. And I, like everybody else imagined, that a set of coordinates, which had been left by the ship's captain, a man called Frank Worsley, I, like everybody, thought that they were an observed position, by which I mean, they were taken using a sextant. In fact, they were nothing of the kind. It was an estimated position because he wasn't able to get a sight on the sun until the day after she sank. So he estimated his position.

He guessed how fast the ice was moving, what direction the ice was moving, and he applied what we call an offset to his position of the next day. But in the end, you know what? He wasn't far wrong. He was just over four notable miles away from where he said he was, which, you know, all things considered isn't bad. What was the reaction when the endurance was located? Believe it or not, myself and my friend John Shears were actually out on the ice at the time. We'd come through a period of really very difficult weather. Temperatures had dropped to minus 40 and minus 50, which is, this is centigrade, by the way, guys.

I think you do Fahrenheit in the States, but this is centigrade. This is seriously dangerous stuff. In my case, it popped some of my fillings. There was one guy there who was eyelids. got frozen closed. And the guys on the back deck, they were really, really suffering. And then shortly after 4 o'clock in the afternoon, an image appeared on the sonar cascade in the control booth at the end of the back of the ship.

And it was clearly something that was man-made. And, of course, the only man-made thing in the center of the Weddell Sea is the endurance. So they called one of the sonar experts, a guy called Francois. used to be a Cold War submarine chaser in the North Sea. He took one look at it and he said, Satell, it's her, a guy called Nicco Vincent, who's in charge of all subsea activities on the ship. He's an old friend of mine and he just strode up and he thrust his iPhone right into my face. And he said, gents, let me introduce you to the endurance.

And on the screen was this perfect little high frequency, high resolution image of the endurance seen from above, perfectly delineated. And it was just, I don't know, totally explosive it was that moment. I mean, it was just, I don't quite know what you can liken it to. It was just like sunbursts of just pure undiluted joy or euphoria. Let's talk about the condition of the endurance when you finally saw it. I know you specialize in diving on shipwrecks. You've seen a lot of them.

what condition was the endurance in? Yeah, you're right. I've seen a lot of shipwrecks in my time as all I've ever done my entire adult life. And I think I'm safe in saying I've probably seen more deep ocean shipwrecks and wooden shipwrecks than anybody I've ever met in my profession. And usually deep ocean wooden shipwrecks have broken up from impact. But when we launched this project back in 2018, it would have been, I did make four predictions. This is at the Royal Geographical Society in London. I said that she'd be upright.

I said that she'd be well proud of the seabird. I couldn't say any reason why she should be absorbed by the mud. And I knew that if she was sinking and dragging all those broken sails and masks behind her, that they would impose a drag on the fallen ship. So she'd go down keel first. And I also said that she'd be three-dimensionally intact. I was going out on a limb there, but I did say that the greater probability was that she'd be three-dimensionally intact rather than broken open, simply because we'd found her construction details at an archive in Norway. And she was, at the time, said to be the second best, or the second strongest non-naval wooden-built ship in the world.

When I looked at those plans, I realized if ever there was a ship that could withstand. the impact of the seabird than it was the endurance. I said she'd probably be three-dimensionally intact. And then I said she'd be in an excellent state of preservation. And there I knew I was pretty safe because there are no wood-consuming marine parasites in the Weddle Sea. I mean, yes, there's always bacterial degeneration. There's always chemical decay and mechanical decay. But the main things which destroy wooden shipwrecks are shiperms, tornado worms. They are to wooden ships, what Death Watch beetles are to timber frame houses or moths to cardigans, something like that. But we didn't have any of those in the Wedle Sea.

And sure enough, when we saw her for the first time, I just couldn't believe it. You could see her paint work. It was as if, as the captain said, Captain Oge Bengus said, it was if somebody just kind of laid her out on the seabed and just said, wait, wait until you're discovered. Yeah, you're right that water is a surprisingly good preserve. and how deep it was, where the lack of oxygen was there. And the cold.

And the cold. It looked like the day it went down. It looked. You can count the ship's fastenings, Ira. It was just unbelievable. I've never, ever seen the shipwreck as bold, as beautiful, as together as the endurance. You also write that if you were asked to choose what, for me, was the most Uber awesome moment of the archaeological inspection dive, I would without any hesitation say it was when

I found myself staring down three rough cut holes through the main deck. Why were those holes so important? Oh, yeah. Right. So yeah, we only did two dives on the ship, believe it, believe it or not. The first one was to secure the data, and the second was the archaeological dive. And this is when we're going to see the ship for the first time in real time, looking through. the cameras on the vehicle at it and we approached them the stern but then went up and over the stern and along the deck and as we're going along the deck one of the french guys guy called jim said to me look ice damage but i knew exactly what they were from the dires and i said to jim i said no it's on ice damage those the holes which saved their lives because when they left the ship they didn't

have very much at all in the way of supplies with them it was all down in the twine decks area and They very quickly realized once they left the ship, they didn't have enough to sustain them. Yes, there were seals and they were penguins, but with winter coming on, you know, those seals and penguins have become more and more sparse. So they suddenly realized they were in trouble. And it was a photographer, a guy called Hurley, who realized that maybe, just maybe, they could actually cut a hole through the deck of the ship. And he knew where a lot of the supplies were.

So that's what they did. At over two days, they extracted three tons of. food. And it was that food which saved their lives. When Bob Ballard, who discovered the Titanic was on our show years ago, he said that he was sorry that the exact location of the Titanic had been published as it led to a great commercialization of the site, which he believed to be a graveyard that should be respected, and he hated that people were scavenging, recovering objects from a graveyard. What are your feelings about bringing up the endurance or preserving it or, or

or anything about the future of it? I share Bob's feelings. In fact, I haven't said this before, but what happened to the Titanic and his personal upset, what happened to the Titanic, was one of the reasons why we were so anxious to find the endurance.

I mean, the endurance search was 10 years in the making. It was myself and a friend of mine. In fact, it was my friend who came up with the idea 10 years ago in 2012. And I knew that, you know, the time would come when she would be found. And I was anxious that she not be turned into this sort of help yourself wreck site, which is what pretty much happened to the Titanic. It sort of became a bit of a smash and grab afterwards.

And Bob really had no control over the Mayhem that followed. And I and my colleagues were very concerned that, you know, be found by a responsible body. with archaeological objectives and that it be protected quickly. So, yeah, I mean, I've read Bob's books and I sympathize with him completely. So what will happen? Do you think that people will scavenge the endurance? Well, not everybody would agree with me, but from a lifetime of experience of shipwrecks, I know this, that when they're found, I mean, right now it is protected by the ice and the cold,

But this year alone, we had one ship right over the wreck in January, and we see that in the satellites and the Falklands. The way the ice is disappearing, that protection will soon be gone. So it's a huge worry. It really is. I mean, I had some bitter experiences of having seen what happened to wrecks. I remember after the first wreck, I ever excavated a ship off the Tuscan Island of Gilea, north-west Italy. when I finished that job, the superintendency of archaeology for Tuscany told me about a new wreck which should be found, a medieval ship, absolutely intact and perfect. For various reasons, maybe because I was young and a bit ignorant, I didn't think it was that important.

I thought if it wasn't Roman or Greek, then it didn't have archaeological significance. And I turned that wreck down. And several years later, when I smartened up, I went back with my wife. We looked at that wreck again. And in the five years between when the superintendent of archaeology took us there, and when we saw it again, it had been completely erased. All that was left was just this brown stain in the sand. So, you know, I could tell other stories like that.

So I worry about this a lot. But, you know, right now it's safe. We have some very responsible organizations, in particular the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. We have other archaeological organizations within England, which are putting together a protection plan. So she's in good hands. I have no plans to go back, nor does the Fortland's Maritime Heritage Trust.

I want to end this interview, talking about the saga of Shackleton's journey. You weave it throughout the book, and at the end of your story, you're standing next to his grave on South Georgia Island, and you're right, he could have reached the poll, he could have claimed a prize,

but he did not. He got to within a hundred miles of it. Why did he not do it? it. He didn't do it because he knew that if he did on the way back, men would die. And that is who Shackleton was. Here, besides his grave, it occurs to me that in all Shackleton's expeditions into danger, which he himself led, the only life he lost was his own. A fitting epitaph, do you think, Benson? Yeah, especially when you read it. Yeah, that's precisely how I feel. he was a remarkable man he he could have reached out and claimed the prize the discovery of the south pole

but he got to what was it 97 miles of pole and he stopped and he stopped because he knew that on the way back men would die and indeed we know it would have happened because on the way back they had to leave a couple of the men behind and make a dash the ship to get help and then shackled and turned around and went back with the relieving party to pick up his men where he had left them. In other words, Shackleton could have made that last dash to the pole and he would have got back himself alive. But certainly those two guys, they would have died. Mention Bound, thank you for taking time to be with us today. It's a great pleasure. That's Ira Flato, talking to Mensen Bound, a maritime archaeologist and director of exploration on the mission that found the endurance. His book is called The Ship

beneath the ice. That's it for today. Coming up on our next episode, brain organoids. Yes, clusters of human brain cells that are grown in a lab. It sounds like science fiction, but they're real and they're being used to better understand brain disorders. I hope you can join us. I'm John Dankosky. We'll talk to you soon.