Shackleton himself described the place of the sink as "the worst portion of the worst sea in the world." The site stays one of the most problematic portions of the ocean to navigate. The explorers used underwater drones to search for, and film shipwrecks in the so-called "merciless Weddell Sea," which has a swirling current, sustaining a mass of thick sea ice that can defy even today's ice breakers. In spite of the hardships, all members of the crew survived. Then, they launched lifeboats to Elephant Island and then South Georgia Island, a British overseas territory lying around 1,400 kilometers east of the Falkland Islands. More so, the crew was able to escape by camping on the sea ice until it cracked. The voyage turned legendary because of the miraculous escape Shackleton and his crew made on foot and in boats. Just east of the Larsen ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula, the shipwreck turned ensnared in sea-ice for more than 10 months prior to crushing and sinking, a related Huffington Post report said. Organized by Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, the expedition left Cape Town in early February with a South African icebreaker, hoping to discover the Endurance before the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer.Īs part of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of Shackleton between 19, Endurance was meant to make the initial land crossing of Antarctica, although it fell victim to the unrestrained Weddell Sea. In fact it featured the crew at Ocean Camp in 1915.Members of an expedition team led by Irish explorer, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton pull one of their lifeboats across the snow in the Antarctic, following the loss of the 'Endurance'. An image embedded in an earlier version of this story was captioned as being the crew stranded on Elephant Island in 1915. This article was amended on 5 March 2023. His father had been a collector of Falklands memorabilia and they were in a folder on the 1914 Battle of the Falklands. He stumbled across the letters among his own Falklander parents’ papers. I should like to have had another yarn with him he is a most amoosin person and very good company but I fancy being amoosin and entertainin is part of his business and that he is quite ready to be amoosin behind your back if he thinks it will amoose the people he is with to hear you run down I may be doing the bloke an injustice.”īound’s account of his expedition was published by Macmillan in his acclaimed book The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance. “I don’t suppose he will be back here any more. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images Shackleton managed to get all his crew home. On 5 September 1916, days after the men had been rescued, he wrote: “We have just had news that Shackleton has got his party off Elephant Island all right, and it is good to hear it he has tried very hard and done everything he possibly could, although it seemed hopeless from the start I am very glad he has pulled it off at last. Writing to his mother in England on 12 July 1916, Goddard wrote of Shackleton: “I have seen quite a lot of him and he really is a most fascinating person and has kept us in roars of laughter night after night of course he is at present preoccupied about his party on Elephant Island and sometimes can’t sit still for thinking about them but when you can get his mind off it and get him on to telling yarns about his adventures, he is screamingly funny.” The letters were written by a young Oxford graduate, Thomas Goddard, who was in the Falkland Islands on his first overseas Colonial Office posting when Shackleton turned up seeking help. Locating this symbol of the “heroic age” of polar exploration at the bottom of the Weddell Sea had long seemed impossible because of the harshness of the Antarctic environment – “the evil conditions”, as Shackleton described them. He headed for Elephant Island to save his men but, unable to get through the ice, he headed for the Falklands, where he knew that there was a radio station to summon help.Īs director of exploration on the Endurance22 project, a major scientific expedition, Bound and an international team made polar history in March last year by finding the wreck in an extraordinary state of preservation. Shackleton travelled over a hideously dangerous stretch of the ocean in a whale-catcher obtained from Norwegian whalers.
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