Legendary Antarctic Explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance sank more than a century ago and its wreckage remained unknown at the bottom of the Weddell Sea until March 2022.
Now the team behind its discovery has teamed up with an Academy Award-winning film crew for a new National Geographic documentary showing how they located the legendary ship’s final resting place.
“Endurance” features thousands of 3D scans filmed by a 4K camera deployed at a depth of nearly 10,000 feet. It premiered at the London Film Festival last weekend before its theatrical release and then on Disney+.
The never-before-seen footage captures everything from a flare gun and a man’s boot to tableware used by the crew and identifiable parts of the ship.
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
“We were absolutely blown away,” Mensun Bound, exploration director of the 2022 discovery team, told AFP. “We didn’t expect to see the ship’s helm, the most iconic part of the ship , right there, standing.”
Historic broadcaster Dan Snow, executive producer of “Endurance,” called it an “astonishing achievement” to find him in such “astonishing condition.”
“No one has ever found a wooden wreck 3,000 meters deep in one of the most remote places on Earth, under the ice,” he said.
“It’s important because it ties into the story of Shackleton and the 1914-16 expedition, which is one of the greatest stories ever told – a story of leadership and survival like no other.”
The discovered flare gun was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, while the ship was lost in the ice, the BBC reported.
“Hurley gets this flare gun and he fires it into the air with a huge detonator as a tribute to the ship,” said expedition leader John Shears. “And then in the newspaper he talks about putting it on the bridge. And here we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there’s this incredible flare gun. »
Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was supposed to make the first land crossing of the frozen continent.
But his three-masted wooden sailing ship Endurance fell victim to the treacherous Weddell Sea and found itself trapped in the pack ice in January 1915. It was gradually crushed and sank 10 months later.
Shackleton, died in 1922described the shipwreck site as “the worst part of the worst sea in the world.”
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
He cemented his status as an exploration legend by leading an epic escape for himself and his 27 companions, by foot on the ice and then by boat to the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia, some 870 miles east of the Falklands.
“I think of all the great survival stories I’ve ever heard of, this one takes the cake because it involves so many people,” said Jimmy Chin, who directed and produced the new film jointly with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
The husband and wife team behind the Oscar-winning film ‘Free Solo’ saw the expedition organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust as an opportunity to “pass the story on to a new generation”.
“The ultimate polar challenge”
The documentary alternates between stories of the original missions and those of 2022, as modern-day explorers make dozens of unsuccessful deep-sea dives using a cutting-edge submersible as the deadline approaches to leave before the arrival of winter.
A trailer for the film shows footage from the original 1914 expedition combined with videos of modern research.
Bound recounted the various challenges that today’s team faced, including technology, research and climate, with one thing reminiscent of what Shackleton’s men faced.
“Ice, ice and ice,” he said, adding that the documentary clearly highlights “the brutality” of the conditions they faced.
“This is probably the hardest project I’ve ever been involved in… it’s not called the Unattainable Endurance for nothing, right?”
Shears also said there was a “real parallel” between the two efforts and that, like Shackleton, he was attracted to “the ultimate polar challenge”.
“More people have been in space orbit than have ever walked on the surface ice where the Endurance sank,” said Shears, who previously led a failed attempt to find the wreckage in 2019.
Chin and Vasarhelyi said combining the two stories was challenging but complementary.
“The two stories, even though 110 years separate them, speak to each other,” Vasarhelyi said.
“They both speak to this fundamental human condition: the audacity to dream big…they have ambition, coupled with the diligence, determination, courage and ingenuity required to achieve it. »
To tell the original story, they chose to use AI to capture the journal entries of Shackleton and six crew members in their own voices, based on other recordings.
The filmmakers also used restored and colorized photographs and expedition film footage taken by Frank Hurley.
But audiences must wait until the latter stages of the documentary to see the new Endurance imagery – a choice, Vaserhelyi admitted, that seemed “terrible” but necessary.
“It was a great story with great rewards, but you have to earn it, right?” she explained.
“The nice thing is that the film really plays the role of an introduction…and it builds to this incredible moment.”