Mensun Bound’s lifelong quest has been to find Sir Ernest Shackleton’s legendary ship. He explains what it was like to see it for the first time, more than 100 years after it was lost.
A sixth-generation son of the Falklands, born in 1953, Mensun Bound’s mission to find Endurance was nurtured growing up on the islands in the Fifties and Sixties. “I’d throw open my curtains in Port Stanley and see one…two…three… eight or nine wrecks, old Cape Horners that hadn’t made it round against the westerlies, limped back to harbour, been condemned as unseaworthy, then scuttled or used as hulks to store wool.” As a boy, Bound would jump off the jetty and swim out to explore the wrecks. Slightly further offshore was the SS Great Britain, Brunel’s iconic iron steamer. “I used to go out there with my father,” Bound recalls, “until she was salvaged and went back to Bristol. We pretended we were looking for duck eggs but really we just wanted to clamber all over the ship.”
The youthful Bound was drawn to boats above the waterline, too. From an early age, he crewed schooners between the islands, steered them sometimes too, “which is not easy when you’re ten years old and everyone else is drunk in the scuppers”. At 17, having completed boarding school in Uruguay, and despite the offer of several university places, he had signed on as a stoker aboard the merchant ship Darwin instead, plying between Buenos Aires, the Strait of Magellan, the Falklands and South Georgia. “I loved it. I had this desperate desire for adventure. The economy of the islands in the Sixties was in crisis. We all wanted to get out. Sailing was the best kind of life.” Spending months aboard the icebreaker SA Agulhas II earlier this year searching for Endurance was no kind of hardship for Bound, even at the age of 69, even in the unforgiving conditions of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, once described as “the most treacherous and dismal region on Earth”. Harsh – but from what I’ve read, fair.
Bound, erudite and eminent academic that he now is, nonetheless agrees with that verdict. Grizzled old adventurer he may be (he was once called “the Indiana Jones of the sea”), yet because rather than in spite of that experience he does not entertain any illusions about the purity of snowy fastnesses, instead pithily calling the Weddell Sea “the armpit of the earth” and “an absolute hellhole”. The Ship Beneath the Ice, his account of the expedition which, in March this year (spoiler alert!) found Endurance, mapping and filming the amazingly well-preserved wreck in astonishing clarity, is gratifyingly long on logistical detail, correspondingly short on flights of fancy. Check out the footage on YouTube. The detail is truly amazing, thanks to cutting-edge robotic technology and a rare instance of the Weddell Sea coming good: wood-devouring worms cannot survive at those temperatures.
Bound, officially director of exploration in a large team which included many scientists, meteorologists, engineers and dive specialists organised by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, made an initial attempt to locate the wreck in 2019. His failure then illustrates the enormity of the task. The window for any remote chance of success, the so-called Antarctic summer, is narrow. Even within it, temperatures stay below freezing and any vessel must avoid icebergs and crash its way through the pack ice, often backing up and ramming the floes several times, like a battering ram battering away at a brick wall. The ever-present danger is that the search ship will meet the same fate as the one it is looking for: there may be considerably less of an ice sheet now than there was in 1915, but what is left can still easily trap, crush and spit out even a modern ship.
Frank Hurley, the young Australian along as official photographer, took stills and moving images of the stricken Endurance, its bulwarks popping, its mast splintered. They give you an idea of the power wielded by millions of tonnes of ice. Bound’s account of the logistical challenges is fascinating, giving due credit to the seamanship of his captain. “I get a bit messianic about kit,” he apologises, wary of the appeal of some of his technical explanations in print. He needn’t be: finding Endurance made news the world over partly because of the footage, partly because of Shackleton’s aura, and partly because it was so damned difficult to achieve.
Bound does not need to gild the lily. The history itself is poetic enough. For those not familiar with the heroic age of polar exploration, Endurance was the ship that brought Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition south in August 1914, just as war was breaking out in Europe. Shackleton had famously turned back when within 97 miles of the South Pole, then still unreached, in 1909, opting to save the lives of his companions rather than go on for glory. In 1911, Norwegian Roald Amundsen had made it to the pole. His British competitor Robert Falcon Scott, having arrived second, died on the return journey with his four companions.
Shackleton had come back to attempt an ambitious first crossing of the continent. He never got started. Stuck in the encroaching ice, Endurance finally sank on November 21, 1915. Its crew of 28 had time to remove provisions and smaller boats, in which after several months camped on the ice pack they sailed to the barren Elephant Island, living on seals and penguins. From there, in April 1916, Shackleton and five companions set out in the 22ft (6.7 metres) James Caird on an epic open-boat voyage to fetch help from South Georgia. They made it after 15 days and 1285km, eventually returning in a Chilean tug to retrieve their shipmates. All the crew survived. Endurance, meanwhile, lay 3048 metres down at the bottom of a sea covered in thick ice much of the year. And bristling with ship-killing icebergs all year round.
Endurance’s captain and expert navigator Frank Worsley had famously fixed the sinking point of his ship as 68° 38.5′S 52° 58′W. But, for various reasons, no one knew how accurate Worsley’s coordinates were. Or what condition the wreck might be in. Or, given the hostile conditions, whether meaningful exploration was even possible. Once the Titanic had been found in 1985, and then Bismarck and then HMS Hood, Endurance had become the most famous undiscovered shipwreck on the planet.
Back to Mensun Bound. We meet in the book-lined study of his manor house, much of it Elizabethan, some of it 14th-century, tucked away in a pretty village not far from Oxford. His wife, Jo, brings coffee. They met when she was an undergraduate and he was a postgrad at the nearby university. Romance blossomed at the Oxford University Underwater Exploration Group, the scuba club. Jo later worked with Bound on many of the marine excavations which made his name in the Eighties. They have three grown-up sons. Each year, around Christmas, the couple decamps to Stanley, where they have a home, for three months. “It’s the most beautiful place,” she says, which is not a universally held view, but then I’ve never been there, so I defer.
As an islander, his mother born and bred at Goose Green, his dad rising from boy messenger to senior civil servant in Stanley, Bound had a fascination with Shackleton. Sir Ernest visited the islands three times, and is buried on South Georgia, 1400km distant but which in a South Atlantic context counts as the archipelago’s neighbour. Although the schism between admirers of Scott (who never visited the Falklands) and admirers of Shackleton has narrowed in recent years, and was in any case overplayed, Bound admits that “kelpers [native islanders] are Shackleton people. The way Scott died is what impresses everybody. Shackleton’s story was the great escape of all time. Twenty-eight went in and twenty-eight came back.” The decision of the Boss, as he was known, to strike out from Elephant Island rather than hang around in the remote hope of rescue by a passing whaler, the probability being that he and his men would weaken and die when the game ran out, was “one of the great leadership decisions”. And indeed, it is still cited as such by military and motivational speakers today.
That said, Bound is not uncritical. “He was a very layered personality. Complicated. A bag of contradictions. He was kind, generous, amiable – but he could also be mean-spirited.” One of the subplots, for instance, of Bound’s book is that, while fully 24 of Endurance’s crew were subsequently awarded the prestigious Polar Medal, four were not. One, John Vincent, a bully and probably thief, may have merited the slight. Two others, lowly stokers, appear to have been the victims of sheer snobbery. Class distinctions were certainly rife. “Most people talk about the absence of class divisions, but the evidence is the Endurance was totally socially stratified.” The lower ranks were, for instance, not invited to the jolly concerts held to keep spirits up. “Who knows what those men must have thought?” asks Bound. “They were just on the fo’c’sle deck, they must have heard what was going on.”
The fourth man denied an award, shipwright Harry “Chippy” McNish, seems to have fallen foul of being too opinionated. McNish emerges from Bound’s book as an unsung hero of the saga. “He never stopped,” says Bound. “He caulked the small boats, built shelters, drilled the holes accessing supplies in Endurance’s hold before she sank.” That single act, accomplished through two feet of freezing water engulfing the stricken ship, making use of an ice chisel improvised as a pile driver, was undoubtedly the biggest factor in the crew’s survival. Three tonnes of food was subsequently hoicked out of the flooding hold onto the ice.
Bound is a fan of McNish’s diary, one of a number of journals kept by the crew, of which in Bound’s opinion Shackleton’s is comfortably the least illuminating. “Nobody living has been through the diaries like I have,” Bound confides, an assertion backed by the fact that transcripts of several of these documents litter the floor around us. “Shackleton was the worst diarist. He’s burnishing his own image, trying to impress, never lets you into his head. Of the others, some are scrappy, some very literate, but they’re guarded, if not obsequious. Those guys knew Shackleton would read what they wrote, and they knew that after he died [young, in 1922, of a heart condition] they were keepers of his flame. Chippy, though, he just writes from the heart, he sprawls it all out. He doesn’t cover up.”
The other diarist Bound chooses to highlight is Thomas Orde-Lees. He was particularly interesting because he was bullied, at one point being exiled from the upturned boats used as shelters to sleep alone in an improvised shed known as “the rabbit hutch”. “He was victimised, yeah,” says Bound. “It often happens on expeditions. People try to identify the weaker members. It’s Lord of the Flies.” I’m slightly taken aback by this. Has he seen it happening himself? “Oh yeah,” he replies, surprisingly casually. “Once everybody gets tired and stressed.” The fall guy, he says “is often the guy at the top, which is OK, because otherwise it might be someone else taking the flak.” For a long time, the guy at the top has been him. “Yeah, you see the big picture. You’re cracking the whip to keep things moving. You’re thinking about food, supplies, weather, deadlines, keeping everyone safe. You also want to bring the best out of everyone involved and for them to enjoy it.”
Bound’s CV and skill set meant he was uniquely placed to ensure success. Having alighted on marine archaeology as his ideal career in his mid-twenties, when he did so, he realised he was supremely well-equipped to make an impact, possessing the three key skills required: seafaring, diving and scholarly expertise. Which is to say, he had a seaman’s qualification, he’d done “thousands of dives, I stopped counting”, and he’d accumulated a plethora of degrees, in ancient history and art history, following six years’ study in New Jersey, living in Greenwich Village and unloading trucks for what he soon realised was organised crime to pay his way, and finally archaeology at Lincoln College, Oxford, on a scholarship organised by Sir Rex Hunt. Sir Rex, older readers will recall, was soon to find unwanted fame as the richly plumed Governor of the Falklands at the time of the Argentinian invasion in 1982.
Jumping up from his chair to a shelf in his library, Bound fetches his old seaman’s ticket for my inspection. I point out that the document gives his name as Michael, not Mensun. “It’s a nickname,” he explains. “I was very sick as a baby. I couldn’t pronounce ‘medicine’. It stuck.” As a teenager reading National Geographic in his boarding school in Uruguay, Bound had regularly written to the marine archaeologist George Bass, begging to be taken on one of his expeditions. “He always wrote back,” says Bound, “explaining that I was too young and wasn’t a diver.” But when he was old enough and experienced enough, Bass got in touch and asked him to get to Kos the following week to start work on a dive off Turkey. “It all came together. Everything I ever wanted to do in life.”
After learning his trade with Bass, Bound did some work on the Mary Rose in the Solent, meeting its discoverer, Alexander McKee. “I spotted one piece of pottery on a shelf in his study and saw it was Etruscan, from about 600BC, and had been on the seabed. Which would mean it came from the oldest shipwreck known to archaeology.” The chance sighting led him to a diver called Reg Vallintine, who 20 years earlier, in 1961, had discovered a wreck off Giglio island in Italy. Vallintine had known the wreck was unusual but didn’t understand its full significance.
“I realised I’d blundered into something with huge significance,” says Bound. He and Jo spent the next four years excavating off Giglio. That find made his reputation. Not long ago, pre-Covid, the Bounds went back to Giglio and dived the reef hit by the Costa Concordia in 2012. “That was the last time I dived,” he says. An old infection, plus slipped discs, plus not being able to swim during lockdown has sapped his strength. “Even carrying a twin pack of bottles is hard now. Old accidents come back and whack you as you get older.”
Meanwhile, back in 1982, back home in the Falklands, the military junta in Argentina launched their invasion. Bound’s brother Graham, who has written several books about the subsequent occupation, was the founding editor of the local paper, Penguin News. “His card was marked. My mother and father were told, ‘While the eyes of the world are on the Malvinas, your son is safe, but the moment the world forgets, we are coming for your son.’ This was a regime that routinely disappeared its own people. My mother and father were terrified.” As the Royal Navy armada steamed south, Bound and other expat kelpers with expert knowledge of the coastline received calls from the Ministry of Defence. “They mentioned a landing at Salvador Water [as opposed to the eventual site at San Carlos]. We all said, ‘No, don’t go there! The water spoils right out at low tide.’” He spent the weeks after the San Carlos landings fearing the consequences of hand-to-hand combat or an artillery barrage in Stanley. The Argentine surrender was a huge relief. “It was an incredible feat of arms. Blood, guts and training. I know ten or so of the vets well. They’ll never have to buy a drink in Stanley.”
Even as recently as this year’s triumphant voyage, his early maritime experience served him well. The mate on the Agulhas was a no-nonsense sailor, somewhat dismissive of “academics with pig shit for brains”. That attitude changed when he saw Bound using a sextant. “We had a good ‘blokes’ relationship,” Bound chuckles. “When we said goodbye, we didn’t swap addresses or anything like that, just a manly handshake and off.”
If Worsley’s navigation skills were crucial back in 1916, Bound’s faith in them proved vital in 2022. One of his tasks was to define the “search box” in which the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, or AUV, would operate. “How much should I trust Worsley’s coordinates?” Bound would ask himself in the small hours in his cabin, fretting that the great man, for all his reputation, had miscalculated his sextant readings because of an ill-defined horizon, or misjudged his estimation of the drift of the ice pack, or simply got the time (essential for an accurate longitudinal fix) wrong. But no, when the moment of discovery came, Endurance lay just four nautical miles from where Worsley said it went down. “Under the circumstances, that is really quite brilliant,” says Bound.
As to what happens to the Endurance now, Bound is unsure. “It is the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen,” he says. “The preservation is incredible. But it’s organic. If we leave it there, it’s going to decay some time beyond our lifetime.”
The logistical problems of raising the Endurance would be phenomenal, as would the issue of moving and exhibiting it. Plus, Shackleton’s granddaughter, who most likely owns the vessel, has said she would prefer it to stay put.
For the moment, Bound thinks efforts should be concentrated on getting a camera inside the wreck and conducting a biological survey around it. “She’s the ultimate sealed box mystery,” he says, “an Aladdin’s cave. We need to have a proper look.” The final chapter in this epic saga is yet to be written.
Book extract: ‘There were tears. We had done it’
FEBRUARY 20, 2022
Endurance found?
At about 00.25, there was a rap on my door. This was too late for a caller and I knew it couldn’t be the bridge, because they would have phoned. It could only be news from the shelter, the small metal hut welded to the back deck, where the pilot, surveyor and data analysts sit during a dive.
It had to be either something calamitous or brilliant that could not wait till morning. On the one hand, they might have lost the submersible. On the other…
I opened the door and there were Nico Vincent [in charge of subsea operations], Jean Christophe Caillens [in charge of the back deck], and two of the media team. I knew instantly that they had found something exceptional. “We’ve got something important to show you,” said Nico, who is always straight to the point.
With John Shears, the expedition leader, we all headed down to the back deck. The shelter was tiny, because it had to be small enough to sling under a helicopter if we ended up working from ice camps. We crammed in and they replayed the scan for me. Immediately, I had no doubt that we had found a wreck.
The sonar image was incredible to see but to an untrained eye it would have been unintelligible: just an abstract splat on the seabed, a bit like the blob of a trodden snail on the path to your front door.
There were only two possibilities. First, drop-stones from an iceberg; second, a wreck. I have found drop-stones before, and this was nothing like them. I had no doubt that this was man-made, and the only manmade object of this size beneath the Weddell Sea pack was the Endurance.
FEBRUARY 21, 2022
Disappointment
Yesterday, during all the euphoria, a giant floe of five by eight nautical miles came bearing down upon us. Normally we would simply have shifted operations to another location within the search area where the ice was more hospitable. But now we are pegged to a point on the seabed which we believe to be the Endurance. We need three full dives to record the wreck and only then can we all head back to Cape Town with feathers in our caps. In the meantime, we have to sit tight and take whatever the pack sends our way.
Over the course of the day, the giant floe moved in and smothered our target area. This meant that if the dive was to proceed, the ship would have to carve a lane into the floe in order to create a protected area off the stern in which to dive the submersibles. The bridge was not thrilled with this idea, especially as the sensor that hangs from one side of the bow to measure ice thickness was registering 2.5m minimum. But there was no choice. It had to be done.
Around lunch today, when it was time to reposition the ship, it simply would not respond. We were royally stuck. The plummeting temperature had consolidated the broken ice around the hull. The floe is threatening to become our worst nightmare – patchy, gnarled, cragged and crisscrossed with pressure ridges, clearly it has been around for a long time and seen a lot of violence.
The high-frequency scans were not good news either. As they moved in towards the site we were all on tenterhooks… and then, over the next few minutes, everything came crashing down. It was one of those bury-your-face-in-your-hands moments.
What we were looking at was not the hull of a ship, but rather disjointed elements of it. It was indeed the Endurance, but it was far from what we were hoping. There were long shapes in the mud, one of which appeared to be rounded, suggesting part of a mast, a yard or a boom. Everything was blanketed in a fairly thick covering of silt.
This was extremely frustrating; yes, it was the Endurance, but it was only a minor satellite deposit.
Hopefully the main body of the wreck was not too far away; but how far away, and in what direction?
For a while I just stood there, trying to think of what to say to the documentary crew who I knew were waiting outside the door.
It reminded me of how I used to feel at childhood birthday parties if the music stopped and I was standing there without a chair. I felt foolish. You could almost hear Shackleton laughing.
MARCH 5, 2022
‘It’s the Endurance!’
Shortly after lunch John Shears, the expedition leader, and I were on the bridge. Both of us had been looking at the berg through binoculars. For some time we had been talking about getting off the ship for a walk and that berg was the perfect excuse – my last chance before a humiliating return journey, with little to show for the immense expense the expedition had cost.
When we got back at 16.45, all I was thinking about was getting out of my polar gear and warming up. Then the Tannoy crackled to life. “Shears and Bound to the bridge immediately.”
We raced up to the bridge. We suddenly became worried that maybe we had lost a submersible. We had extremely painful memories of losing AUV 7 in 2019. A surge of excoriating retro-agony rose up inside me; I felt like a matador in that split second when he knows he is about to be gored.
And then, through the window of the ops room, I could make out laughter. Suddenly I felt a rush of optimism. Could it be? Dare I think it? Dare I? My blood was pumping and the distant hum of the engine room sounded more like somebody holding down the keys of a big chord on a cathedral organ.
Then came something we had joked about for years. There was Nico, thrusting the screen of his phone towards me. There was a picture on it. “Gents,” he said, “let me introduce you to the Endurance!”
Strangely, I can’t really remember what I said next. This was the moment I had dreamt of for ten years and yet, when it struck, I somehow wasn’t ready for it.
My memory of it splinters into a series of brief moments that don’t really hang together in proper order. I remember rejoicing with John, Captain Knowledge Bengu and Nico. We were a close-knit international team who had shared a dream, and now, by this single act of discovery, we were for ever joined. We shook hands, embraced and laughed and, yes, there were a few tears. We had done it.
I remember thinking, where was Freddie Ligthelm [the Ice Captain]? This was his moment too. But, of course, he was on watch. We were still at the heart of the Weddell Sea pack, that most atrociously ship-hungry spot on earth that would, if it could, snuff us out like a bug. And then, suddenly, there he was, in his whites and epaulettes, walking towards me. He extended his hand and I met it with mine.
He asked me how I felt now that the quest was over. I told him I could feel the breath of Shackleton himself on the back of my neck.
They showed me the video they had just taken. It was a little over four minutes long but I was blown away. In my life I have had some incredible moments underwater. I have seen things that nobody ever gets to see: great works of art lying on the seabed, chests spilling with treasure, skulls gaping up at me through the sediment. These are moments of undiluted astonishment that make your synapses crackle; 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, I tell you, nothing compares with finding the Endurance.
As an archaeologist I am supposed to exercise professional detachment, and yet what I had seen was intoxicating. The thought that consumed me was that 3,000m beneath our keel we had a sealed box containing an Aladdin’s cave of polar treasures, a King Tut’s tomb of wonderful things: our single greatest and most authentic trove of artefacts from the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration.
I could have carried on rerunning that video, but then somebody appeared at the door asking if there was anybody who had not eaten. I couldn’t see who it was through the pack of bodies, but he said they were about to stop serving and if we wanted dinner we had better get our arses there fast. We dashed off, knowing that if we didn’t eat now there would be nothing until breakfast.
Extracted from The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance by Mensun Bound, published by Pan Macmillan.
Written by: Robert Crampton
© The Times of London