The Ship Beneath the Ice
The Discovery of Shackleton's Endurance
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
On 21 November 1915, the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s ship, finally succumbed to the immense pressures of the surrounding ice. Its crew watched in silence as the stern rose twenty feet in the air and then, just like that, it was gone. Over a century later, an audacious plan to locate the ship was hatched. It would finally succeed in March 2022, to headlines all over the world.
In The Ship Beneath the Ice, marine archaeologist Mensun Bound gives a blow-by-blow account of two dramatic expeditions to find the ship in what Shackleton called ‘the most hostile sea on Earth’. As with Shackleton, Bound too experienced failure and despair, and at times his own ship was on the cusp of being frozen in ice, much like the Endurance.
As one of the world’s foremost experts on the Endurance, Bound includes previously untold stories of Shackleton’s epic survival and fascinating details about his iconic ship. Complete with numerous photos from the original expedition in 1914–17, as well as from the wreck on the seafloor, this book is the perfect gift for armchair explorers everywhere.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The final chapter of one of the age of Antarctic exploration's most famous sagas is told in marine archaeologist Bound's page-turning debut. Drawing on diary entries from Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1914 expedition to the South Pole aboard the Endurance, Bound explains how the ship became trapped in sea ice, splintered, mand sank. Though the entire crew survived—thanks to Shackleton's famous 800-mile lifeboat journey to South Georgia Island to seek help—the Endurance was never recovered. In 2019, Bound and his own crew traveled to Antarctica in an attempt to locate the wreckage, using coordinates pieced together from small bits of information in the journals of Shackleton and his men. After ramming through miles of ice pack as thick as six meters in some places, the expedition launched a remote submersible, only to have it go "rogue" (it has yet to be found). Three years later, Bound returned to the site with many of the same crew members; on Mar. 5, 2022, their deep-diving sonar submersible spotted the remarkably well-preserved Endurance on the floor of the Weddell Sea ("A moment of absolute perfection," Bound writes). The shifts between past and present are skillfully handled, and Bound vividly conveys the anxiety and anticipation of archaeological expeditions. Armchair adventurers will be swept up in the thrill of discovery.
