Wild’s later years were less settled. He emigrated to South Africa, worked in various capacities, and died in 1939. His reputation, like McNish’s, has been reassessed in the decades since: the full weight of what he accomplished on Elephant Island — keeping 22 men alive and functional through four months of Antarctic winter — has been more fully recognized as the years have passed and the conditions of that waiting period have been more carefully studied.
Lionel Greenstreet, the first officer who had joined the expedition 24 hours before departure on the basis of almost no information about it, lived into his 90s and died in 1979. He is the last bridge between the generation that experienced the Endurance and the generation that inherited its story.
## The Living Record
The Endurance is not only a historical event. It is a story that has continued to evolve as new evidence has emerged, as the men who experienced it have been reassessed, and as the context in which it is read has changed.
The 2022 discovery of the wreck added a new chapter to a story that had been essentially closed for a century. The photographs of the ship at 3,008 meters — upright, intact, its name legible — were circulated globally and viewed by millions of people who had never heard of Frank Worsley or Frank Wild or the southern coast of South Georgia. The wreck discovery was news in a way that a century-old survival story normally is not, and it was news precisely because of what the cameras found: the ship, still there, still named, preserved by the same cold darkness that makes the Weddell Sea so dangerous.