The Ship Beneath the Ice
The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
By the subject of the National Geographic documentary Endurance, streaming soon on Disney+
"As thrilling as any tale from the heroic age of exploration. . . Bound’s account is a triumph. The storytelling is piano-wire taut, the writing saturated with polar moodiness." ― Sunday Times
The inside story of how the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton's legendary lost ship, was found in the most hostile sea on Earth, told by the expedition's Director of Exploration.
On November 21, 1914, the Endurance succumbed to the surrounding ice. Ernest Shackleton and his crew had navigated the three-masted wooden vessel ten thousand miles to Antarctica in hopes of becoming the first to cross the barren continent, but early season pack ice trapped them in place offshore. Marooned on the ice for six months, Shackleton’s expedition to push the limits of human strength took a new form: one of survival against the odds.
A century after this legendary story entered the annals of polar exploration, renowned marine archeologist Mensun Bound and an elite team of explorers joined a new global race to find the wrecked Endurance. Bound experienced failure and despair in his attempts to locate the wreck, and very nearly found his own vessel frozen in ice. Finally, a century to the day after Shackleton’s burial, the discovery: nearly ten thousand feet below the ice lay a remarkably preserved Endurance, its name still emblazoned on the ship’s stern.
Told “with passion and flair” (Washington Post), The Ship Beneath the Ice is a modern-day adventure narrative of the intrepid spirit that joins two mariners across the centuries—both of whom accomplished the impossible.
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.
