“The end came with a sense of almost relief. November 21, 1915 – That evening as we lay in our tents we heard the captain call out. ‘She’s sinking, lads!’ We were all out in a second (…) and, indeed, there it was, our poor ship a mile and a half away, struggling in its death throes. It went down, bows first, stern high in the air.”
Words can make history somewhat relatable, especially when eyewitness accounts are as vivid as the British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. From the fall of endurance In his book “South” he tells of the expedition ship with which he sailed towards his great goal: Shackleton wanted to cross the South Pole, but the ship got stuck, sank and was crushed by the ice. The crew stayed behind, left to the wind and water on an ice floe.
The “Endurance” was crushed by the ice in the Wedell Sea.
(Photo: imago/Everett Collection)
History probably only becomes even more approachable when you suddenly face it, or if that is not possible, at least get very close with the help of a robot. And so the euphoria with which scientists announced on Wednesday that the wooden wreck of the endurance actually discovered more than 100 years after the shipwreck. “Polar history” has been written, wrote John Shears, leader of the expedition led by Britain’s Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust.
The researchers found the 44-meter-long three-master in the Antarctic Weddell Sea at a depth of 3008 meters, about four miles south of the last position that Captain Frank Worsley had noted in the log book at the time. A diving robot sent sharp images upwards, the wreck has been preserved in the cold of the ocean like in a refrigerator. Also the lettering endurance (German: perseverance) seems almost undamaged. The wreck stands “upright, very proud of the seabed and is intact and in brilliant condition,” said the expedition’s research director, Mensun Bound.
Even the lettering is perfectly preserved.
(Photo: Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust/picture alliance/dpa/PA Media)
His team set out from South Africa and spent more than two weeks searching a previously delimited area of almost 400 square kilometers – no easy task. The ice in the Weddell Sea is considered treacherous because it is extraordinarily thick. “Normally you find a closed sea ice cover here,” a German expedition member told the mirror. This year, however, there was a “sea ice minimum” in the southern summer, that of the icebreaker Agulhas II made navigation easier.
That people today still deal with the endurance that their fate still moves people has less to do with the ship and more to do with the history of the crew. It is the story of a unique struggle for survival. For months, the men camped out on huge ice floes after losing their ship. When the drift ice broke, they rowed their small lifeboats with them, despite excruciating exertion, to the nearest island, Elephant Island, an uninhabited and uninhabitable piece of land far removed from all shipping routes. Together with five men, Shackleton then tried the impossible: He wanted to reach the island of South Georgia 1,300 kilometers away with his puny boat and get help – he actually succeeded. Despite great hardship and frozen limbs, none of the crew of 28 lost their lives.
The find will also give hope to all those adventurers who cannot stop looking for famous ships that have been swallowed up by the sea; Remains of about the 1492 dismantled Santa Maria, on which Christopher Columbus sailed to America. In Lake Superior, the 130-year-old wreck of the Atlanta found, a transport ship loaded with coal, sunk in a storm in 1891.
She should be salvaged endurance By the way, it is protected as a historic site under the Antarctic Treaty anyway. With their photo and video recordings and Shackleton’s moving story, the researchers want to reach young people in particular, a generation, according to research director Bound, “to whom we entrust the necessary protection of our polar regions and our planet”. A bit of perseverance isn’t the worst thing you can give along the way.