One man’s obsession with discovering the legendary Endurance ship

Time was running out for the Antarctic adventurers. This was their last shot at finding the Holy Grail. The fourweek expedition had been extended once but a storm was forecast to hit within days, bringing -40C temperatures and blizzards, heralding the start of the brutal Antarctic winter, and putting their very lives in peril.If the ice floes of the treacherous Weddell Sea closed around them, not even their mighty 400ft ice-breaker Agulhas II could break free and they would be trapped, just as Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance had famously been beset back in 1915.Shackleton and his team of 27 men watched helpless as the Endurance was slowly crushed by the ice and sank to its watery grave. It was this “greatest shipwreck of them all” that British marine archaeologist Mensun Bound – sometimes described as the “Indiana Jones of the sea” – and his 2022 expedition team were now battling against the odds to find.Some 9,800ft beneath the pack ice, the expedition’s subsea robot was probing the inky black depths with its sonar, exploring a seabed less charted than the Moon, and it was already close to the end of its Kevlarsheathed, fibre-optic tether.Three years earlier, Bound’s previous expedition lost contact with another multi-million pound unmanned submersible in the same area. Almost immediately, the Antarctic winter had closed in, forcing the Agulhas II to leave the area, abandoning the stateof-the art subsea robot.Now the team nervously steered their precious craft forwards, 250ft above the seabed, trying to suppress rising excitement and maintain concentration as its sonar picked out a major anomaly in the silt. Diving to just 30ft above the ocean floor, the image that filled their screens was unmistakable. It showed a wooden-hulled vessel sitting proudly upright, remarkably intact, as if sailing to a destination she would never reach.One hundred years to the day after Sir Ernest Shackleton had been buried on South Georgia, Mensun, 69, and his team had finally found the wreck of the Endurance. Staring at the sonar image, he was overcome by “a sunburst of undiluted euphoria”. Explorer Bound became obsessed with finding Shackleton’s Endurance ship (Image: PA)It took a minute or two for his brain to process the truth of what they had achieved but when asked for his thoughts, he explained: “I can feel the breath of Shackleton on my neck.”Now, eight months after that astonishing discovery on March 5, he has written the incredible story of how the seemingly impossible was achieved. It was the culmination of a decade of planning, millions of pounds of investment and the combined efforts of a team of the best scientists and technicians from around the planet in an expedition Shackleton himself would have been proud of.The explorer’s doomed Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led to one of the most incredible leadership feats in history as Shackleton and a small crew crossed more than 800 miles of wild sea in an open lifeboat to ensure all 27 members of his expedition survived their 16-month ordeal.Shackleton’s story had loomed large for Mensun since he was a schoolboy growing up in the Falkland Islands. Shackleton had visited the Falklands three times, once staying in a Port Stanley inn managed by Mensun’s great-great-uncle.More than 30 years as a marine archaeologist, discovering some of the world’s most famous shipwrecks, only heightened the allure of the Endurance and yet it had always seemed an impossible dream. Then, 10 years ago, over coffee, a fellow explorer suggested subsea robotic technology now existed to venture under the Antarctic ice.Mensun’s own research into the diaries of Shackleton’s men left him confident he could pinpoint where the wreck should lie, and they set about pulling together the equipment and team needed for the 24-hours-a-day, two-month expedition, before finding an icebreaker strong enough to smash its way through the ice-floes to the search area. DEPTHS OF DESPAIR: Crew’s last view of the Endurance as it sank (Image: Getty)After seven weeks battling “brutally aggressive” ice in 2019, the first expedition ended with the loss of the valuable submersible. Mensun took the failure hard, but, overcoming the obstacles of Covid, a new team was assembled and he declared: “Shackleton never gave up. Nor, it seems, do we.”Back aboard the Agulhas II at the start of this year, they set out once again for the Weddell Sea, manoeuvring around vast ice floes to try to get new robot submersibles – called Sabertooths – into the water beneath the ice. Once more the weather did its best to thwart them as temperatures plunged to -40C at night – “Cold enough to freeze the mercury in the thermometers, and to pop my tooth fillings,” Mensun explained.Then, there was a precious window of opportunity and the last one they were likely to get before winter would force them out of the search area. Director of exploration Mensun told the Daily Express how he and expedition leader John Shears had walked to a nearby iceberg while the subsea searching went on, returning to learn of the Sabertooth’s momentous sonar discovery.”That’s it. It’s the Endurance!” someone had exclaimed at the time. Mensun explains: “The high frequency confirmation images were absolutely crisp – a beautifully-defined ship, seen from above. The outline was just absolutely exquisite. It is so rare in archaeology or in acoustics that you get an image like that but it was just perfection itself.”Protocols demanded Mensun put the ship into an immediate communications lockdown to stop news leaking out before the authorities had been informed, but he texted a single codeword to wife Jo, who has been diving on wrecks with him since they were students.The word alone would mean success; one exclamation mark would mean Endurance was semi-intact. The word in capitals with double exclamation marks would mean she was “knock-your-socks-off, eyeballs-out-on-stalks, gob-smackingly spectacular”. Mensun texted: “BINGO!!” SUB-ZERO: Mensun’s ship Agulhas II lowers robot through the ice (Image: PA)He continues: “In my life I have had some incredible moments underwater. I have seen things nobody ever gets to see: great works of art lying on the seabed, chests spilling with treasure, skulls in the sediment. I remember finding a gold coin on the Mary Rose and slabs of gold mixed with Ming porcelain on a wreck off East Africa.These are moments of pure, undiluted astonishment that make your synapses crackle with surprise and wonder; moments that send you tumbling back over the decades and centuries; precious moments when you feel you have made some kind of mind-touch with people from other eras and civilisations. But nothing compares with finding the Endurance.”There was just time before the next vicious winter storm to send the submersibles down again to take pictures and video of what they had found with sonar. “There were just four of us in the control booth and we approached her from the stern and the first thing I really saw was the rudder, which was the source of all their problems,” Mensun recalls.”When the rudder was ripped off [by the ice] is when the water spilled in. They carried on fighting to save the ship for a couple of days but knowing that they were not likely to succeed. And it was just lying there, right under the tuck of the stern. I had always imagined that when the ice ripped it off it had been carried away.. and then, of course, we raised up over the stern and you see the name, Endurance, arched over the Polaris star.”That was just incredible. By then, all the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up. Then we were over the taffrail that circles the stern and looking down into the well deck and the ship’s wheel.”We used to joke about finding the ship’s wheel. I’ve never in my life found a ship’s wheel intact and it was just absolutely perfect with the sounding apparatus beside it and, behind the wheel, we could see a companion way going down to the accommodation deck and the doors were wide open and there were the pigeon holes where all the signal flags were. Bound and his team looking at sonar images of the Endurance from the control room (Image: PA)”And then we saw the two portholes of Shackleton’s cabin and that moment was probably the pinnacle of my life. You think, ‘Oh my God, what is there in that cabin?’ I know he got his case out, because that is mentioned by one of the diarists, but everything else must still be in there including, in between the portholes, his framed copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ which would still be there and still be legible.”The “most awesome moment” was seeing the three holes Shackleton’s team cut in the deck before Endurance sank. “Those are the holes that saved their lives – three tons of food stores came out through those holes,” he explains. Sadly, the Sabertooth did not have enough battery life left to look more deeply before it was time to go. So what happens next? Other teams may one day return and discover more but Mensun said, at 69, it would not be him. The site’s best protection is its extreme location. For now.Though the absence of older, thicker ice helped Mensun’s expedition, he says: “It was good news for us, but terrible for the planet.” If the Endurance is easier to reach in future it will be a scary sign for Earth.Before the discovery was announced to the world, and TV historian Dan Snow, who was part of the expedition, was allowed to broadcast, Mensun texted wife Jo with a photograph of the wreck and the message: “Behold, the Endurance”.He said: “Jo had received the picture just as she was entering the Playhouse theatre in Oxford. In the foyer, she broke down in tears and spent the entire first act in the mezzanine bar trying to get a grip of herself. The staff were worried about her, but she told them: “Don’t worry about me. I’m just very happy!” The Ship Beneath The Ice: The Discovery Of Shackleton’s Endurance by Mensun Bound (Macmillan, £25) is out now. For free UK P&P, visit expressbookshop.com or call 020 3176 3832. The Ship Beneath The Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance is available now (Image: )