Lecture
Endurance:
Finding Shackleton’s Ship Beneath the Ice
Less than two weeks after the start of World War I, Ernest Shackleton set sail with his crew in the Endurance, a three-masted, wooden vessel. Their goal was to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent on foot. Five months into the expedition and 10,000 miles from help, the Endurance became hopelessly trapped in ice. Ten months later the crushing, shifting pressure of the ice pack caused the Endurance to slip below the seal, leaving 28 men and 68 dogs on the ice with three small boats and the provisions they had saved. The expedition had turned into a rescue mission without any of the crew ever setting foot on the continent.
A fifth-generation Falkland Islander and renowned marine archeologist, Mensun Bound, was always connected to Shackleton. The explorer visited the Falkland Islands several times, once staying in the Bound family’s lodgings, his signature still visible in the guest book. In 2022, Bound was named Director of Exploration for the Endurance22 Expedition, an unprecedented 35-day mission through the heavy sea ice, freezing temperatures in a quest to be the first to successfully find the Endurance and survey the wreck using state of the art technology.
March 5, 2022, 100 years to the day after the burial of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Endurance was discovered upright, largely intact, and remarkably preserved nearly 10,000 feet beneath the icy waters of the Weddell Sea.
Join us as Mensun Bound, Co-President of the Atlantic Shackleton Global Foundation, recounts the extraordinary expedition that discovered Endurance.
From discovering Shackleton’s Endurance to helping shape its modern-day successor, Mensun is now at the heart of the ambition to build Endurance 2, a next-generation global flagship for ocean science, exploration, education and the development of future generations.
Image © Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic |
