Shackleton’s evil ice scuppers hopes of finding Endurance

The team seeking the resting place of Shackleton’s Endurance has announced it has given up, defeated once again by the ice.

SA Agulhas II the ship chartered to search for Ernest Shackleton's Endurance. Picture: Twitter

On November 21, 1915, Ernest Shackleton left Endurance for the last time, and watched as his ship — his only refuge in the bleakest spot in the world — was slowly crushed by the Antarctic floes.

“Huge blocks of ice, weighing many tons, were lifted into the air and tossed aside as other masses rose beneath them,” he wrote. “We were helpless intruders in a strange world, our lives depend­ent upon the play of grim element­ary forces that made a mock of our puny efforts.”

Over a century later, grim element­ary forces continue to mock those who venture to the bottom of the world. The team seeking the final resting place of Endurance has announced it has given up, defeated once again by Shackleton’s “evil ice”.

In a statement yesterday, the expedition said that after losing one submersible to the sea ice, and amid the risk of their own ship being caught in the same floes that doomed the Endurance, they had decided to abort.

Mensun Bound, the director of exploration on the expedition, said that over the course of the search he came to appreciate how he and Shackleton shared the same implacable enemy.

“It all comes down to ice, ice, ice and more ice,” he said from the research vessel SA Agulhas II. “A massive jigsaw of it is always shifting and mutating, as well as expandi­ng and contracting with the tide. Even for a ship like this it is a struggle: charging, reversing, charging again. And we have been caught in its embrace.”

He and his colleagues are part of an expedition to explore the Weddell Sea. For the past week they have taken a break from their scientific program, backed by the Royal Geographical Society­ and the Scott Polar Researc­h Institute, to use submersibles to try to find the final resting place of Endurance.

The sinking of Endurance was the start of an epic tale in which 28 men fled their ice-bound ship in lifeboats and crossed the most treacherous sea in the world. After landing on Elephant Island, their first solid ground for more than a year, Shackleton left behin­d most of the crew to survive on penguins and ship biscuits.

He and five others then sailed and rowed on for a brutal 14-day ocean crossing, aiming for a remote whaling station where they hoped to make contact with civil­isation and charter a rescue boat. A year after their ship became ice-bound, they returned to collect their crewmates — thinner, tired of penguin meat, but all alive.

Mr Bound revealed yesterday that the story has a special significance for him. He was born in the Falklands, and his family ran a hotel where Shackleton stayed while looking for a boat to return to Elephant Island. “The visitors’ book with Shackleton’s signature is still with my family,” he said.

Now the sea has claimed another victim. Although Agulhas II is free of the ice, it leaves behind a submersible: AUV7. There is a chance that even now it is lying above the wreck of Endurance itsel­f. Perhaps one day someone will brave the evil ice again to find them both. Until then, together they will slowly rust, monuments to the power of nature and to heroi­c polar failure.

The Times