MB: Luck, good and bad, certainly played its part. NL: The discovery of the Endurance took place after your 2019 expedition had to be cut short due to the loss of a submersible.
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In the days of the old Cape Horners, those seas gulped down more fine men and ships than any other patch within the Five Oceans.
It took a day, but we got her to within helicopter reach of the Falklands where they winched her up and flew her to hospital. When we got to it in the middle of the night, two people had been washed away and drowned and another was very badly injured. Shortly before the pandemic I was down in those same waters again when, in the middle of a storm, we picked up a Mayday call from a yacht that had also been slammed over. It shouldn’t have happened but, just like Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, we all lived to tell the story. But the second wave never came and slowly we righted ourselves. To this day I remember the voice of the bosun who had been at the wheel praying in Spanish. We just lay there in a pile at one side of the bridge waiting for the follow-up wave to roll us under. You then felt the ship falling away into the hollow behind the wave. On one occasion we got hit by a freak wave (or, as the Mate described it, a ‘wall of water’) that whacked us over on our beam ends. We were looking for Admiral Von Spee’s flagship, the Scharnhorst, that had gone down fighting in the Battle of the Falklands in 1914. Back in 2014, I spent five months at sea southeast of the Falklands in an old Cold War submarine chaser that used to masquerade as a fishing boat. They really are the most consistently savage seas on earth. But I have experienced worse in the Drake Passage which sweeps under Cape Horn and the Falklands. The times we got caught it felt as if we were within the coils of a boa constrictor. The pack is out to get you and squash you like a bug. NL: Shackleton described the Endurance’s location as ‘the worst portion of the worst sea in the world.’ Does the Weddell Sea live up to its reputation, or are there other places you’ve experienced with more challenging conditions? The visitors book is still with my family, and their signatures are in it. We had a bar and bedding establishment on the waterfront of Port Stanley called the ‘First and Last,’ and Shackleton along with Worsley and Tom Crean, stayed there after Shackleton fell out with the Governor. But more than that, Shackleton stayed with my family on one of his three visits to the Falklands while he was trying to rescue his men on Elephant Island. My father had a large framed photo of Frank Worsley, the Captain of the Endurance. Coming from the Falkland Islands I was brought up on the Shackleton story. MB: I have been conducting wreck hunts, excavations and surveys all my life. NL: Is there extra meaning to you as someone who grew up in the Falkland Islands, a place that played a role in Ernest Shackleton’s story and is the closest thing South Georgia has to a neighbor? Not only was he the one who came up with the idea, but he was the single driving force behind both expeditions to find her, the first in 2019, and the second last year. I showed my friend the article and he said, ‘Well, what about the Endurance?’ and that was the moment of inception. But the very morning we were meeting in the coffee shop it was announced in the press that the Terra Nova had been found. It was the centenary of his death and the Natural History Museum were mounting a special exhibition to commemorate his life and deeds, and they asked me if I could find his ship. At that time I was interested in Captain Scott’s Terra Nova, the ship that took him on his fatal expedition to Antarctica in 1911. It all began in August 2012, when he and I were meeting in a coffee bar on the Old Brompton Road, in South Kensington. It wasn’t actually my idea, but that of a close friend. MB: The discovery of the Endurance was 10 years in the making. What prompted you to seek out the Endurance after so many years? NL: You’ve been exploring shipwrecks all over the world for decades. His book "The Ship Beneath the Ice" was published earlier this year. Renowned marine archaeologist Mensun Bound was Director of Exploration for Endurance 22, the team that discovered the wreck of the lost ship of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.īound will be visiting the Newberry on September 21 for a Meet the Author conversation at 6pm and joined us for a Q&A in advance of the event.
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