Endurance discovered intact after a century

As we speak, the research vessel S.A. Agulhas II is steaming back to port. Aboard is an international expedition tasked with finding the wreck of the ship Endurance. The project is led by John Shears, with over 25 years of experience working in the polar regions with the British Antarctic Survey and the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. Recently they’ve struck gold, as he explains to Robert Spencer. But to understand this find, we have to cast ourselves back to story which began over a hundred years ago...

Radio announcement - Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months in complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honour and recognition in case of success.

Robert - So ran the apocryphal advertisement calling for adventurers to join Earnest Shackleton on his fateful mission to cross Antarctica. Fresh out of St. John's College Cambridge, physicist Reginald W. James answered the call as his son, John recounts.

John - My father was visiting a friend in part of Cambridge that he'd never visited before. When somebody stuck his head out of a window and said, "Hey, Jimmy, do you want to go to the South Pole?"

Robert - After a brief interview with Shackleton where he was asked. Among other things, if he minded losing any toes, James and 27 other men set sail on the ship, Endurance.

John - The Endurance was actually a yacht that was built to take wealthy tourists hunting polar bears in the Arctic.

Robert - Pressed into this new scientific service, and despite the concurrent outbreak of the First World War, Endurance set sail from south Georgia for the Weddell Sea. The weather was rough and experienced 'sea-hands' had advised Shackleton to wait.

John - Shackleton said, 'No, we are going to go' in spite of the advice from the waiting captains.

Robert - It wasn't long before the ship was stuck in ice. Endurance broke free several times, but eventually the flow held it fast. The decision was taken to spend the winter in the ship and to try and complete the expedition the next year, but the elements would have different plans. Nonetheless, RW James got to work with his experiments.

John - There's a picture of him taking observations under the stern of endurance. He was doing magnetic observations, but he got very interested in the navigation side of it.

Robert - They observed eclipses of the stars by the moon, so-called occultations to maintain the time on their clocks, critical for navigation in the early 20th century. 9 long months passed.

John - But then, suddenly on Sunday afternoon, the ice opened, and it went down like a stone.

Robert - Endurance sank, 3000 meters to the bottom of the Antarctic Sea and into another world.

Adrian - The deep Antarctic is quite rich in biodiversity. You have a big range of invertebrate life, animals without backbones. For example, all kinds of sponges and corals and sea squirts. And then you have quite a high abundance of things like starfish and sea cucumbers and lots and lots of small worm-like things and molluscs in the sea bed as well.

Robert - Adrian Glover from the Natural History Museum has been studying Antarctic sea environments for years.

Adrian - All those animals are typically eating food, which has fallen from the surface layers of the ocean.

Robert - In any other waters, the sinking endurance would be part of that food chain.

Adrian - Wood gets eaten by these peculiar animals called ship worms.

Robert - Experiments run by Glover published in 2013, showed that ship worms were absent in these seas. Partly due to a lack of natural food and partly due to the strong circumpolar currents that act as a buffer between these waters and the rest of the Earth's oceans. Thus hope was high that the Endurance, if ever found by an expedition, would be in good condition. Earlier this year, such a mission set sail on the S.A. Agulhas II, a research icebreaker operated South Africa. The only clue was the rough last recorded position of the ship by his captain aided by James's timekeeping as the director for exploration, Menson Bound explains.

Menson - It wasn't like 'X marks the spot' at all.

Robert - They broke the search area up into sectors.

Menson - Eventually, just by really working in a very strict regiment manner, covering one box, then the next, then the next, we found the Endurance.

Adrian - The pictures are just remarkable. It's just sitting on the sea floor.

Menson - The ship is there. It's intact. You can see the paperwork. It's it's as good as that and doesn't get any better. It is a beautiful wreck.

John - It is quite emotional to see it again.

Robert - John's brother Viv describes a photo he has of the ship from his father's ordeal.

Viv - I'm looking at it on my wall here, right now. It just hangs there and it looks exactly the same, what we saw on the floor of the sea and what I can see on the wall here.

Menson - By definition, life after this has got to be kind of downhill.

Robert - The 28 men watching endurance sink in 1915 might have agreed. With little hope left, they set out across the frigid waters in the ship's lifeboats. They made land on Elephant Island before Shackleton and a small crew went further on to South Georgia. It's an epic tale of survival as frigid months passed for the men awaiting rescue. They were besiege by frostbite, heart attacks, mental breakdowns, and a diet almost entirely consistent of seals and penguins. Eventually at the end of August 1916, Shackleton returned on a Chilean Navy tug boat and rescued the crew. Over two years had passed since the Endurance sailed and despite the ordeal and having to shoot this sledding dogs and ships cat, not a single man perished. RW James would go on to become vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, and two of his students would win Nobel prizes. But the ship that could so easily have been as grave rests serenely at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, almost untouched sailing into immortality.