Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.”

— Ernest Shackleton

They were there two years ago, during the waning daylight hours of the Antarctic summer, deep in the Weddell Sea, searching for what remains of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance — if anything remained, that is, after more than a century lost in the icy waters of the Southern Continent. They had studied charts, pored over records of the ill-fated maritime expedition and, most importantly, used satellite telemetry and 21st-century GPS coordinates to pinpoint the probable — but not definite — location of Shackleton’s ship. With the Antarctic winter closing in, they were forced to return to their home base of Cape Town, South Africa. They vowed to return one day and resume the search, but deep down they must have thought that was unlikely. The expedition had taken months to prepare and cost a pretty penny to finance, and it was difficult to believe they could mount another expedition on a similar scale during an economic slowdown and a global pandemic. No one would ever find Endurance, people said. It was consigned forevermore to the icy depths of maritime history.

And then, this past weekend, they did exactly that. Saturday, on the 100th anniversary of Shackleton’s funeral, the Endurance22 expedition found the wreck 3,008 metres below the surface of the Weddell sea. Overwhelmed with emotion, expedition leader Dr. John Shears, a veteran geographer and lifelong historian of polar exploration, told the world via Zoom, “We have made polar history with the discovery of the Endurance, and successfully completed the world’s most challenging shipwreck search.”

His hope, he added, was that humankind will be inspired by “what human beings can achieve and the obstacles (we) can overcome when (we) work together.”

Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust - Nick Birtwistle

And then the images emerged, showing the 144ft ship to be eerily intact on the floor of the Weddell Sea. The stern is revealed in surprising detail, preserved by the cold ocean currents and the absence of wood-eating sea organisms. “The wreck is in an astonishing state of preservation,” historian and broadcaster Dan Snow tweeted from the deck of the expedition icebreaker SA Agulhas II, hours after the find. “The water has the clarity of distilled water. We were able to film the wreck in super-high definition, and the results are magical.”

Scientists — and those who come after Endurance22 — will not touch the wreck. It will be photographed and studied from afar; unlike with the Titanic and other wrecks, nothing will be tampered with or removed. The site was declared a historic monument in perpetuity and is protected under the terms of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty.

Finding the Endurance marks the latest chapter in one of the most enduring accounts of human survival, but it does not close the book. Endurance had not been seen since it was crushed by ice and sank into the frozen sea in November 1915.

The Expedition22 team involved 64 scientists and a crew of 46, and cost $10 million to finance. Many of the scientists were on the original SA Agulhas II expedition, which ended in frustration in the winter of 2019.

Shackleton’s real-life odyssey of survival has no precedent in maritime history and has become the stuff of legend. He set sail from the island of South Georgia at the height of the southern summer in December 2014 with 27 men. His aim was to cross the Antarctic ice sheet to the South Pole and keep going, eventually reaching the Ross Sea on the other side of the continent.

Just two days after leaving South Georgia, though, Shackleton encountered polar pack ice. By early January, the ice had thickened to the point where Endurance was trapped in the Antarctic’s icy grip. After drifting with the ice for nine months the Endurance was finally crushed and sank.

Taking the lifeboats, Shackleton and his crew made their way to Elephant Island where most of the crew set up camp. They were stranded there, with no hope of rescue. Shackleton took four men in one of the lifeboats and set off for South Georgia Island, a mere 800 miles (1300 km) away, to get help. Their journey took two weeks through some of the most hostile seas in the world. Conditions were rugged but thanks to the navigation ability of Endurance’s captain Frank Worsley, they reached the whaling station on South Georgia.

©Frank Hurley - Endurance expedition, 1915

Their ordeal was captured in striking vintage images by expedition photographer Frank Hurley, who had saved a small pocket camera, not knowing when, or if, it would come in handy.

Once safely on South Georgia, Shackleton organized the rescue of the rest of the crew on Elephant Island. It would take four separate journeys to get all the survivors out.

In the end, not one of the original 27 crew aboard the Endurance died.

This past Wednesday, National Geographic announced plans to stream a multi-platform program event later this year, under the umbrella of National Geographic TV’s Explorer series. The series is possible because National Geographic contracted broadcaster and historian Dan Snow to accompany the expedition from the time it left Cape Town. Snow documented the entire expedition, including last weekend’s dramatic discovery, in real-time.

The program is being produced in cooperation with the Falklands Islands Maritime Heritage Trust, and will stream globally on National Geographic’s network of digital and social platforms this fall. The specific day and time will be announced at a later date.

“It is our hope that the story will inspire the next generation of explorers and adventurers,” Courteney Monroe, National Geographic’s president of content, said Wednesday. She needn’t have bothered. Just the idea of discovering an expedition ship 107 years after it was believed to be lost at sea for all time, in a part of the ocean Shackleton himself once described as “the worst portion of the worst sea in the world,” is enough to get anyone’s pulse racing.

“Life, to me, is the greatest of all games,” Shackleton said, shortly before his death in 1920. “The danger lies in treating it as a trivial game, a game to be taken lightly, and a game in which the rules don't matter much. The rules matter a great deal. The game has to be played fairly or it is no game at all. And even to win the game is not the chief end. The chief end is to win it honourably and splendidly.”

Splendour in the ice.

“I chose life over death for myself and my friends,” Shackleton famously said, on another occasion. “I believe it is our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be to not explore at all.”

‘Astonishing’ find of Shackleton’s ‘Endurance’ to be a multi-media event for National Geographic.

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