Book review of The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance by Mensun Bound

In 1911, Roald Amundsen grabbed the distinction that had eluded Shackleton. Three years later, however, Shackleton was back in the polar south, going for a consolation prize: the first crossing of the Antarctic continent. He failed at that, too, and this time it was a complex and perilous rescue effort that brought him glory.

Rescue became necessary after the expedition’s ship, the Endurance, became trapped by ice in the Weddell Sea, which lies between the Antarctic Peninsula and the continent’s mainland. The Weddell’s ice pack is vast and notoriously restless, and the imprisoned Endurance drifted northward for 10 months. By October 1915, she was being squeezed so hard that everyone on board had to disembark and camp on stable ice. The abandoned vessel withstood the pressure until Nov. 21, when it sank. Thanks to brilliant improvisation and greatness of spirit, Shackleton saved not only himself and his immediate company, but also a support group awaiting them on the other side of the continent. Not a life was lost. (One of the best accounts of this episode can be found in Roland Huntford’s biography “Shackleton,” which I reviewed in the Book World issue of Dec. 29, 1985.)

Jump to 2019, when a shipload of archaeologists, ice experts, engineers and masters of several other disciplines set out to find the Endurance. In “The Ship Beneath the Ice,” the group’s commander in chief, Mensun Bound, tells their story, and that of a follow-up mission two years later, with passion and flair.

Bound grew up in the Falkland Islands, not far, relatively speaking, from Antarctica. “I was born of the sea,” he writes, “so it’s perhaps no surprise that I became a marine archaeologist specializing in shipwrecks and lost underwater worlds.” Bound sums up Shackleton’s management of the miraculous 1916 rescue as “arguably, the greatest story of human survival in recorded history” and the lost Endurance as “the Ultima Thule of shipwrecks.” By its end, “The Ship Beneath the Ice” has amply justified those superlatives.

The book’s first half chronicles yet another failure, incurred by Bound and company in their first attempt to locate the Endurance. They were relying on coordinates of the ship’s last position taken by its captain, Frank Worsley, and converted into a theoretical “survey box” on surface ice. Unable to see the wreck, they hoped to detect its presence from signals sent by unmanned submersibles. Unfortunately, the technology they’d been able to afford failed them, and the allotted time ran out. But Bound made a farewell prediction: “Other suitors [of the Endurance] will follow and one of them will succeed.”

Meanwhile, the experience had elicited some evocative prose from the note-taking author, such as this description of a splendid Antarctic sunset: “There was about it something so otherly and beyond that you wondered if you were really supposed to be here. It seemed almost as if we had trespassed into some hidey-hole where the gods go to drain their rainbows.” On another occasion, Bound wrote more succinctly of being “locked within the hard crust of the most deranged sea on earth.”

During the next two years, Bound raised enough money to return with better instruments and a mostly new cadre of experts, including deep-sea divers. Again, however, the clock was ticking, and Bound had to decide how much faith to put in coordinates recorded by Worsley at a time when a whiteout had been obscuring the horizon — a necessary reference point for an accurate sextant reading. With only hours to spare, Bound’s divers, with help from submersibles scanning the sea floor, not only located the Endurance 9,842 feet below the surface, they could see “the seams between the planks and even the nails that fastened them.” The ship sat largely intact on the sea floor, looking “as if someone had laid her out gently on the silt and said, ‘Wait here now, wait until somebody finds you.’” Declaring that “our mission was to find, record, educate and disseminate through publication,” Bound leaves the question of what will happen next to the Endurance for future adventurers and archaeologists to answer.

Shackleton’s overriding concern for saving lives has made him a business-school exemplar of enlightened leadership. Bound’s ability to learn from a near miss may turn out to be an object lesson, too. In any case, all hail to him and his comrades as the Endurance’s successful suitors.

Dennis Drabelle is a former contributing editor of Book World.

The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance