Mensun Bound had been searching for historic shipwrecks for decades. He had found ships from the Second World War, from the age of sail, from various periods of maritime history. He described what the cameras showed as, without qualification, the finest wooden shipwreck he had ever seen.
The Endurance was upright. Its stern was intact. The ship’s wheel was in place on the aft well deck, as if the helmsman had just stepped away. The taffrail — the carved railing at the stern — was intact. The starboard bow was visible. The Weddell Sea cold and pressure at 3,008 meters had kept the ship in a state of preservation that would have been remarkable even for a recently sunk vessel.
The ship’s name was legible on the stern.
This is the detail that the expedition leader John Shears described as jaw-dropping, and the reaction is understandable. The name Endurance, carved and painted on the stern of a wooden ship, had been at the bottom of the Weddell Sea since November 21, 1915. The men who last read it had been Shackleton and the other officers, watching from the ice as the stern lifted and then disappeared. For 106 years, no human being had seen it. And then, in March 2022, the cameras saw it again, still there, still legible, still named.
The ship’s family motto — “By Endurance We Conquer” — was adopted by Shackleton from his family arms. He had named the ship for it deliberately, and the name proved accurate in a way he had not intended when he chose it. The ship did not survive. The men did. The conquest the motto promised turned out to be of a different kind than crossing Antarctica.