An Expedition Photographs Shackleton's Legendary Ship 'Endurance' at His Grave in Antarctica

A scientific expedition aboard the ship

has found the

, probably the most legendary ship in the history of polar exploration with permission from the

, the

, the

and the tragic ships of Franklin (

and

), from which no one was spared.

The discovery, in the Weddell Sea, the gateway to Antarctica, and at a depth of 3,000 meters, is relative, since the whereabouts of the brig, which sank on November 21, 1915, crushed by the ice in which it was trapped for a year, it was registered by the crew, 28 men who were all saved thanks to their determination and courage and the masterful way in which they resolved the situation of being stranded in one of the most inhospitable places in the world their leader, Ernest Shackleton, in which it is considered one of the greatest feats of the polar adventure and that honored the name of the ship:

(Resistance).

More information

Australia announces that the 'Endeavour', the legendary first ship of Captain Cook's explorations, has been found

The ship's captain, Frank Worsley, made careful measurements with a sextant and a chronometer of where the ice engulfed his ship, while the expedition's photographer, Frank Hurley, painstakingly photographed the slow sinking on the pack ice and managed to save a hundred of negatives so that today we can see the end of the

In fact, the ship and its watery tomb are protected as a historic site and monument.

Still, it remained to see him down there, and find the place to which he had been swept away.

The ship has turned out to be, 106 years after her sinking, about 7.5 kilometers from the point noted by Worsley.

It may seem close, but finding it in the frozen Weddell Sea in the harsh conditions you can imagine was no (frozen) mucus.

The

took the opportunity to search for the

on a mission to investigate the Larsen ice shelf.

The expedition, which has had modern remotely operated underwater vehicles, has been able to photograph the

from which nothing can be extracted.

The “noble, brave, brave little ship with guts”, as her crew described her in her last moments, stands proudly in the background, and her name can still be read on the stern.

It does not seem that the blue flag that Shackleton hoisted before abandoning the ship is still waving, but from the immense cold depth of the Antarctic abysses, the cheerful echo of the farewell of his crew seems to reach us, who said goodbye to him while he sank with three cheers.

Historical photo of the 'Endurance' on the ice.

Those explorers recounted that shortly before sinking, the

received the visit of some unique spectators: a flock of eight emperor penguins that solemnly approached the trapped ship, looked at it intensely and then, raising their heads, emitted a ghostly wail.

It's all part of the legend of the three-masted

, built in Norway for Arctic sightseeing cruises (!) and hunting trips.

Shackleton recruited it as the ship of his Imperial Transantarctic Expedition, which after landing on the coast from the Weddell Sea, was to cross the continent to the Ross Sea via the South Pole, which had already been conquered by Amundsen in December 1911. Shackleton saw the new challenge as a way to vindicate British polar exploration after Scott's (heroic) failure and as "the last great adventure in the Antarctic."

They left with bad omens because just before setting sail World War I broke out and in fact Shackleton offered the

to the Royal Navy to go fight not with the ice but with the Germans.

Perhaps if it had been enlisted, the ship would not be sunk in Antarctica today but in the Cocos.

The

entered the ice zone around the continent in December 1914 and sailed 1,600 kilometers, until it was completely blocked 137 kilometers from its destination, Vahsel Bay, in the Weddell Sea, on January 19, 1915. It would no longer move, except for ice drift, for nine months that Shackleton and his crew passed with a cold optimism that faded as they saw that it did not open.

The ice that imprisoned her was clinging to the ship like the crew to the

in

(in other latitudes) and Shackelton realized that the

was doomed because "no ship built by man could resist that pressure".

The 'Endurance', imprisoned by ice, 300 miles from the mainland. Frank Hurley / The Royal Geographical Society / Courtesy of Atlas gallery.

Orders were given to abandon ship and make a graceful march across the unstable ice toward the mainland, half a thousand miles away.

Before, the expeditionaries, who had set up a camp a stone's throw from the ship, carefully extracted from it everything that could be useful and transportable, including boats and the famous small whaler

, which would be so useful to them and which they dragged on the pack.

What must be left on board the

today is what they couldn't take, including the

of which they only took a couple of volumes, in case they got bored.

Before leaving the explorers saw how the ship sank, at night.

"It's hard to say what I feel," Shackleton noted in his diary.

“For a sailor, his ship is more than a floating home.

Now cracking and shaking, her wood shatters, her wounds open, and she slowly departs from life at the very beginning of her career."

“We are homeless and lost in a sea of ​​ice,” Hurley wrote.

While another crew member pointed out that the noises of the pressure of the ice against the hull "looked like the screams of a living creature."

An image of the remains of the 'Endurance' under the sea. DPA via Europa Press (Europa Press)

The morning after the

disappeared , Shackleton had the luggage lightened and a multitude of objects remained on the ice (which we will not find on the ship): the leader himself left a handful of gold coins, his watch, his hairbrushes, silver, her vanity case and the Bible, a gift from Queen Alejandra, of which she only took a few pages of

and a few verses from the

, the reading of which would not exactly make the excursion happy for them and which sound like an epitaph for

: What does the ice come with?

/ And the white frost in the sky, who created it?

/ The waters are hidden, as by a stone / and the face of the depths is frozen.”

Sadder was having to kill the ship's pets: several dogs and the cat

, one of the few polar pets that has its own biography.

The expedition, now without a ship, experienced a true ordeal on the ice.

One of those trips that proves Apsley Cherry-Garrad right when he said that polar exploration is the most radical and loneliest form of having a hard time that has been conceived.

But all were saved.

They moved slowly through the ice and reached Elephant Island.

From there Shackleton and five companions sailed on the

on an epic journey of 1,287.5 kilometers to South Georgia, from where they organized the rescue of the rest.

With his courageous leadership, preventing discouragement from spreading and refusing to sacrifice his men for the achievement of objectives as Scott did, Shackleton has since stood as an example of leadership.

The

is located a few weeks after the whereabouts of another legendary ship in the history of exploration, Captain James Cook's

, was announced , and in the wake of the sensational discovery in Canadian waters of the ships of the ill-fated expedition of Franklin in search of the Northwest Passage, the

and the

Another great ship of the exploration of the poles, the

of Nansen and Amundsen is in a safe place in its own museum in Oslo and can be visited: the Norwegian ships, unlike those of the British, do not have to look for them under Water...