#1553 Shackleton’s Ship the Endurance Found!

It's a thrilling story. Join us for all that and more on this week's Listening to America.

Hello everyone and welcome to Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I'm delighted today to pursue our enlightenment theme with our West Coast Enlightenment. Correspondent Mr. David McCandry, formerly the executive director of the Washington State Historical Society and the author of several important books. One on Lewis and Clark, actually, two on Lewis and Clark, a third coming, and a book on Captain James Cook's Third voyage. Welcome Correspondent McCandry.

He actually made it on land. Of course, this is the heroic era of Antarctic exploration, it's the heroic era of exploration generally. And we can unpack what we mean by that at the end of this, because I think it's a point worth emphasizing. But with the Nimrod expedition from 07 to 09, he reached 88 degrees south towards the South Pole, which was a record at the time.

Of course, famously, Scott rolled Amundsen race to the South Pole of 1911, won by Amundsen, tragically for Scott. But there were still other things to do in this heroic phase of Antarctic exploration. So Shackleton's third expedition, the one that we're going to concentrate on today, the so-called Transantarctic expedition of 1914 to 1917, resulted in his ship. The Endurance, our centerpiece, getting stuck in the ice, eventually sinking, forcing Shackleton to heroic ends. Literally and figuratively. And that will be the primary again, this will be our focal point. But just to finish out the brief biographical capsule. Actually, there's an interesting interlude that doesn't get talked about much in Shackleton's career, probably because it's not of the heroic stripe.

He was part of the Royal Navy's invasion of northern Russia after World War I. This was after the tsar's government was toppled, but before the Bolsheviks seized control, actually, it was because the Bolsheviks seized control. The allies, the old Allies, principally Great Britain and the United States, with some other remnants, tried to undo the Bolshevik revolution anyway. So, after a brief side trip to northern Russia in late 1918, early 1919, Shackleton actually engaged in a fourth expedition. Which we also don't hear and know much about again, because of its largely anti-heroic proportions. He would die in South Georgia, the place he made famous by his Great Rescue mission.

Curiously, this showing kind of the anti-climactic nature of Shackleton's career. His fourth expedition was originally intended for an almost equal another. Quixotic, not entirely quixotic, but it was a trip sponsored by because Shackleton had become famous. Now. By this time, he had a wealthy sponsor, a fellow by the name of Rowan. If I remember correctly, and originally, they were going to go to the Beaufort Sea to look for some still unknown lands in the Arctic Basin. Kind of fill out what we now know as the northern Canadian archipelago. But the Canadian government withdrew its support. So Shackleton went back to what he knew best, which was Antarctica. It was kind of envisioned as a circumnavigation of Antarctica.

Something cook, by the way, my man Cook was the first to do in the 1770s. It was kind of filling in the canvas kind of thing. Map unknown, previously unmapped aspects of the Antarctic coastline. They were going to be looking for minerals. It was a very prosaic affair. Again, I would call them almost anti-heroic.

It was kind of an applied expedition, yeah, there was kind of elements where they were looking for new lands, new coasts. This is what happens when the heroic age ends, but, long story short, Shackleton dies in South Georgia, the place he made famous. This, of course, is on the fourth, virtually unknown expedition.

But he entered into myth and legend, which is, of course, the whole point of Menson's bound book about the Search for the Endurance and his third voyage.

Whenever there's a story that comes straight out of the world of Joseph Banks, or Thomas Jefferson, or Captain Cook, or Lewis and Clark, I always turn to you. Of course. So you're listening to a special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkins Dave. The book we're going to talk about today is by Menson bound B-o-u-n-d. The Ship Beneath the Ice, the discovery of Shackleton's Endurance third Voyage, is the most famous. The endurance gets trapped in the ice.

They think that maybe if they wait, it'll ease up and they can slip out. It turns out they can't. The boat is crushed, they abandon it, they watch it sink.

Now they're marooned in Antarctica. It's amazing that they weren't all killed by the elements there. Unbelievably good leadership and great esprit de corps. And is it true that not a single person died?

And so I'm not, I don't consider myself necessarily a Shackleton expert. Bounds certainly does, and Shackleton's able to get to South Georgia. Find a whaling vessel that will go back to several 800 miles or so quite a distance. And rescue the men who have been stranded on an island off the Antarctic Peninsula.

What was the purpose of this? What is this whole mania about the polar expeditions really about? is it about resources, is it about geopolitics? is it about pure love of exploration?

What's going on here?

But what I mean, I think. What historians mean by referring to the heroic phase, or age of exploration, is that it was venturing off into unknown places and climates just for the sake of doing so. There was no other. Famously, it was said that the people who wanted to climb Mount Everest, which is also a part of the Heroic. You did it because it was there. There was no great mystery, there was no trade route, there was no specific cartographic or geographic insight that was to be gleaned.

It was purely the romance of travel and expeditiary endeavor. That's what I certainly mean by the heroic age of exploration. So because in this age, no one had ever climbed Mount Everest, no one had quite before Amundsen, no one had been to the South Pole, no one had been to the North Pole. No, in the particular instance here, no one had ever walked across the continent of Antarctica. There were people before Cabasa de Vaca, other people, Lewis and Clark, in a fashion, walked across North America, Ledger tried to walk around the world.

He kind of anticipated this heroic phase of doing things, just to say that you were the first to do so. So that's really, and I don't mean to minimize it, but that's really all what the trans-Arctic Antarctic expedition was about. Yes, they would find features and aspects, and mountain ranges and other features, but the point was just simply to say they were the first to have done so.

Cook's attempt to discover what was going on south of the equator, to solve a number of the last great geographical mysteries of the watery planet and so on. We'll take a short break, we'll be back in just a minute. You're listening to Listening to America with Clay Jenkins.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. My guest is Dave Nacandri, our West Coast Enlightenment correspondent. Dave. This story has great romantic interest. Everyone survived. Shackleton showed true leadership. That long voyage across dangerous seas in a really tiny boat.

And, of course, one of the things that people like to do is find the wrecks of famous ships. And this man, Minson bound not once but twice, went down to Antarctica in search of this ship and spent millions and millions, and millions of dollars. This was a gigantic rescue expedition with underwater probes and a huge crew and all sorts of communications equipment and cinematography, and the first attempt failed. We have the latitude and longitudinal data from the navigator of the expedition, but done under duress.

And the Antarctic is a very difficult place to do latitude and longitude. So the first attempt failed. And you might have thought, well, that's the end of that. That's millions and millions and millions of dollars, and from a certain point of view, what's the point?

So let me ask you that question, What's the point?

One of the criticisms I have, I mean, I've enjoyed the book entirely. For different reasons than Bound probably intended. I know, for different reasons than Bound intended. When he wrote it, I was more interested in what, in the ancillary aspects, I'm still interested in. Shackleton.

I mean, his quest to find the shipwreck was interesting, it carried me along, but he is looking for this particular ship because no one has found the ship here before. Again, it's being first. That's a credible endeavor, but there's no great insight in and of the discovery.

It's what Bound almost does, inadvertently with his book, that I found the most interesting aspect of it. And that is his explication of Shackleton's record as travel literature. To me, that was the more interesting thing of what he was up to with this book.

So he's done this on a number of other boats and ships, he's got a great track record. So this was sort of one more thing for him to be able to accomplish, and he did on the second voyage. So let's talk about the book, Dave.

I'll give you my impression first, I would have liked more shackleton and less bound. I'm interested in the story of how they found it, and it's a fascinating story and involves a lot of intelligence, speculation, guesswork. Close reading of documents, an ability to read ice, an ability to read the way the ice moves in the Antarctic, and so on.

He's an expert and he had a great crew. They lost the first probe on the first attempt. It's still under the Antarctic ice somewhere.

But on the second attempt, with a different type of probe, these are unmanned. They got down to it, it was right where it should be. They took photographs and video of it. And I'm guessing there's much more to come along those lines. But the book is, in my opinion, a great story, not particularly well told and with too much emphasis on not himself necessarily. But the rescue attempt, the search.

I would have liked a lot more sort of day to day analysis of what was going on in Shackleton's world. And so I think a better book, frankly, could have been written about this, and it's a pity because it is a truly great and heroic story.

I think that the search for John Franklin ships in the Arctic is actually a far more compelling story, just to give one example. And I'm not even going into Captain Cook's ships in Rhode Island.

1969 Venturing a quarter of a million miles, landing safely, it was nip and tuck, but landing safely on the moon surface. Taking a moonwalk, gathering up some rock, setting up a couple of scientific experiments, taking some photographs and returning to Earth. That feels like a supreme expression of the human aspiration to know, to seek, to go beyond. When you learn that it was also an expression of the Cold War, it diminishes its value to me somewhat. If it also were attempting to discover whether there were minerals on the moon that we could mine to use in computer chips or nuclear weapons, it would plummet in my mind.

So what I love about Captain Cook going to Tahiti in 1769, or Shackleton going to the Antarctic in 1914 to 17, is that they went. Essentially, not entirely, but essentially for the purity of the discovery moment. And I think we need more of that in our world, I think it ennobles humankind. I saw a documentary about Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 a couple of weeks ago and I thought, Why don't I live in that America anymore? Why don't I live in that America?

That still thought boldly in that way. So I think you agree that there's a romance to this. That. That's why we're attracted to Lewis and Clark. That's why we're attracted to Captain Cook, that's why we're attracted to Franklin or to Fremont. But to the extent that they're agents of empire or agents of the economy, they're less.

Now, people brought back rocks and geologic samples from the moon, but it had more to do with understanding how the solar system that was created. Then what can we? Kind of? Mine the moon surfaces for vital minerals. Although I did read a news report lately that there might be a lot of lithium on the moon surface and it could have a lot of value. Bond's principal problem, I would say clay. He falls into the same trap of most students of Lewis and Clark do, which is not having read. He goes deeply vertical into the Shackleton story, I mean, he knows it. Intimate, the latitude, the longitude, the name, the members of the crew, the larger chronological context.

So he knows the vertical story exquisitely, but his lack of exposure horizontally, that is to say, travel literature, more generally, other exploratory ventures through time in Antarctica, or more globally. Because he's kind of got those blinders on only looking at the Shackleton story, he misses a lot.

Reporters are going to be calling you from all over the world. This is an enormous career opportunity, especially for somebody whose career was.

Archaeological rescue work. So, fair enough, I guess what I'm lamenting is that there was a classic to be written here that wasn't written for reasons that I think we have given adequate expression to. So, all right.

So the book is what it is, and I loved it, I read it, I read it in a day, it's a fascinating book.

It's presented in a journal form. I learned that the ship had been found. I was delighted by that. I'm always drawn into this kind of a story period, so I immediately ordered the book on Amazon and it came.

And then I immediately read it. What I did not anticipate, since I hadn't been following the news clips over the last few years, is how big an operation it was. This was a gigantic ship with a huge crew. This is not the kind of a romantic loner going out in a small boat to try to find Shackleton's endurance. This is a major work costing millions of dollars.

So Shackleton's endurance is the size of a yacht, essentially, and it's crossing major oceans to get to this place, and it's made of wood. And although it was a well-built ship designed to accept the crush of ice, it couldn't stand up to the great torque of these moving ice fields in the Antarctic.

La Perouse and others.

At one point, he says, And by the way, there was this very interesting, purely coincidental, aspect. The captain of the ship that bounds is the chief archaeologist, for the captain's name is captain knowledge. I mean, at first I thought this was a send up, but this is the guy's real name. But here was the point.

We kept. There are only certain times you're going to be able to be out there in the Weddell Sea. And when the captain says we can go, we go. when the captain says we can stay, we can stay. But inadvertently, Bounds narrative reemphasizes just how much authority a captain at sea has over the fate of the venture. I mean, at some point, Bounds says, whatever the captain says goes. He's kind of like a God on the deck of the ship. And Bounds story, in that instance, I thought, was well told because he's not a free agent.

He can only go where captain Knowledge says he can take him.

And the second thing is, there's a season. You can't do this any old time. There's only a short window of opportunity. Sorry, there's only a short window of opportunity with which to do this.

And one of the things that I found really interesting about this is that. This ship, which is massive and much stronger, and almost infinitely stronger than what Shackleton was using in the early 20th century. They were worried about it getting icebound now. It wouldn't have been crushed, but it would have been stuck. And they would have had to wait a year or many months, and they probably would have had to be helicoptered off. But they, they themselves were in danger of being surrounded, and, um, and straight jacketed by this treacherous ice.

They're kind of serendipitous discovers, discoveries we had as readers. They work, his explicit point. But maybe it doesn't matter if you, if you get where you need to go. In the end, the voyage was success.

Um, and as we've said before, it's exact location could not necessarily be determined. Uh, because of the possible imprecision of the latitude and longitude that was made by the navigator for Shackleton. But also just the variability of what happens when a boat starts to sink, and so on. So there's that, um. But also, uh, I just want to get a couple of facts on the table and you're the expert on this, as I understand it. The Arctic is ice, but no land. The Antarctic is a continent.

That was an important part of my investigation of Captain Cook. Uh, so I see I. Science is very interesting, that's very technical oriented, people don't fully understand all of the dynamics. That part of the book, I thought, was well done.

There could have been more of it, but to get his story done told, I thought Bound did an adequate job.

Welcome back to the special edition of Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson. Across from me, virtually, is our Enlightenment correspondent, Dave McHenry Dave. You're an expert on Arctic exploration. Particularly that of Captain James Cook's Third voyage, and your your book, Captain Cook Rediscovered, really opens new insights into that third voyage. Which, um, which, I think you rightly argue, has been misunderstood even by his key, uh, biographers. But I urge everyone to take a look at that book. Let's turn to our favorite subject, Lewis and Clark, because, as you said earlier in our discussion today, now, when we read about Fremont or Kit Carson or Jedediah Smith, we automatically triangulate to Lewis and Clark. Both for what the Lewis and Clark expedition can tell us, and for what it can say about Lewis and Clark.

And that's what I found actually extremely interesting here. So let me start with one. Munson Bound needed to find this ship. The first expedition failed. Millions of dollars are lost.

They regroup. He didn't expect this to happen. But a second expedition is mounted at even greater cost, with new submergeables and so on. They do find the endurance. But as they're closing in on the window of opportunity. When the ship has to get back to, uh, South Africa, and when the season which would enable them to find the ship is closing, you feel the tension. You can, he says, that if I fail here, if we don't find this thing. I'm not only a laughingstock, but I'm responsible for millions and millions of millions of dollars. In search of a a chimera and in a quixotic search which will humiliate me and damage my reputation. And so you can feel the pressure building.

And I think he handles this very well. I think that the journal does accurately show what it is to be the commander of an expedition of this sort. Uh, and it makes me think of Meriwether Lewis.

I mean, I don't know that for sure, but yes, Clay, it's, it's the. That's that theme we've long talked about so many times, the dynamics of the construction of the record that is the is the most interesting aspect of this, in fact, very early on. Bound, to his credit, kind of acknowledges that. When he first became interested in Shackleton, he had a very naive understanding of the value of the of Shackleton's own published narrative. The book that Shackleton called South to Bound. It's somewhat of a revelation that these the journals of the other members on the expedition, not necessarily just the commanders. That's where the real story is now. You and I consider that to be an axiomatic understanding of the Lewis and Clark story. We always revert to Lewis and Clark, he always reverts to Shackleton. But the real nitty gritty, the real idiosyncratic nature of the story is to be found in the accounts of the other members of the party, not just the commanders.

In fact, they found that it was surprisingly well preserved. They thought it might have broken up in a bigger way and kind of scattered along the seafloor. It did not. And at one point, Bound speculates that one of the diaries of one of the men was left behind in his quarters. Because things happen so fast, and he went, he, he went to try to do it.

He came down, the ship is filling with seawater. He thinks he might go slip through into his room, but he's afraid to do it and finally leaves. And Bound says, You know, it's at least possible that that journal is still in that room down there, and it is at least possible.

I mean, not likely, but possible that it could be recovered and brought up, and it might still be intact. In some sense of that term, that would be absolutely thrilling.

But if there are things that could be first photographed, the best 3D cameras and so on, and then maybe a few things brought to the surface. That would be an enormously important moment in the history of discovery, in my opinion, as important as finding the ship itself. These lesser journal keepers self-censor because they're writing semi-public and maybe public documents, and the captains can, um, can commandeer them at any time. In fact, in Lewis and Clark, it seems clear to me that, uh. The journals are actually handed into the captains to preserve them against the elements. And are kept in some special, um oil skin bag, uh. And then they're handed out at at key times so that the men can catch up in their journal. So you can't say just we would love to have the secret, secret diaries of men of the Lewis and Clark expedition, we just don't.

Let me turn to a couple of passages. Here. I'm looking at my page 358. Um, and again, in the form of a journal. Uh, this is after it's over. They've succeeded. It's 8 March 2022, and the subtitle of the chapter is out of the pack.

He says this Tomorrow, we gift endurance to the world. Today, we have been working with our London office on an embargoed press statement that will be released by the Falkland Islands Maritime Heritage Trust. At zero 700 GMT from then and forever.

I know that incredible view of the Stern will be iconic. And then he says, this and this made me mark in the margin. LC and circle it. Despite our euphoria, there is just a dab of sadness in the team. I myself feel it for three days.

This precious wreck has been ours alone, but tomorrow it will belong to the world. I marked that thinking about Meriwether Lewis and his difficult reentry after his expedition in 18 Six. And then I remembered your essay on Richard. Dana, who traveled to California, traveled around the world, uh, a little bit later than Lewis and Clark, and when he came back to Boston, I believe it was, uh. He expresses similar melancholia.

He talks down at the bottom about. We have had to punch the air and clap each other on the back moment, which was followed by the long stare. But now, with diving opera operations over, it is time for the big thing. And what that brought to my mind personally? Clay was something we've also talked about in previous episodes on the old Jefferson Hour was, uh, my sons and my trip to the Arctic Ocean. When we, um, we had our clap our hands, slap our backs. When we crossed the Mackenzie River and when we got to the shore of the Arctic Ocean. And how, um, surprisingly emotional it was for both of us. So this is what travel and expeditionary literature engenders in people.

It's very exciting. I think it's what draws readers to these stories, because, uh, because of what it can elicit in terms of sentiment.

Uh, all the men are alive, they get back to Britain. When Shackleton got back to Britain after the Endurance expedition, he struggled conventional domesticity and the quiet life did not sit well with him. And in 1920, if not before, he began talking about another polar expedition.

His health was not good, He was smoking as much as ever, drinking heavily and putting on weight as usual. He was without money of his own, and, perhaps not surprisingly, there were still outstanding debts from the Endurance Expedition. Again, that that re-entry issue, that peak experience, is over.

There's a sadness you can't go back really. It's not clear where you're going forward. Meriwether Lewis certainly suffered from this, the the the letdown, the maybe postpartum feeling that he got. They get when they get back into the coziness and comforts of domestic life and civilization.

You see it with all sorts of explorers, and it reminds me a little about something our mutual friend Thomas Slaughter said in his book Exploring Lewis and Clark. He said Here's the problem. It's not until you get back that the real voyage begins. And the real voyage is a voyage into your own capacity as a writer. It's a voyage into your own soul's processing of what you just saw. It's a it's an exploration of how you now go on after that extraordinary peak experience that you had.

And as we've both discovered with Lewis and Clark and others, there are literary conventions. There are templates about how you describe a discovery. How you say something is beyond articulation. That you're so overcome by its sublimity that you simply can't find language for it, et cetera. There are a whole set of these conventions. The trope of walking off the map of the known world, the trope of of a discovery, of meeting a native person, of finding a guide, feeling the burden of exploration in your own heart. But there are very few great passages in this book, in fact, almost none. I wanted more Jack London, I wanted the terror of the of the frost.

I wanted the views from the ship, out into this infinite prospect of ice and blue and the sky, and so on. He just doesn't have that, that ability to put me in the scene. He put me in the ship, he put me in the control room, he put me in the probe.

He put me in their computer analyses, but he didn't put me in the Antarctic, and I was really sorry for that. I think that's a great weakness. And this was rushed into print. I think he should have, he should have done a little more to take us into the scene.

So I just want to read this one passage for you. This is the bottom of page 368. This is at Shackleton's grave on South Georgia, and, as you say, he died on a later expedition and was buried there. I believe all of us at that moment were thinking about Shackleton.

He means different things to different people, everybody talks about his leadership, determination and courage. And yes, I get all that. But for me, Shackleton has always been about how you live your life. Life for him was never just a journey to the grave.

No, you squeeze it to the last drop, you suck the living daylights from it. Life is there to be grabbed by the scruff, and then you run with it until beaten and bruised, you drop. And that was Shackleton. He showed us how to live.

In the words of his favorite poet, he said Let me taste the whole of it. That's good writing. And I think that, um, it reminds me of Henry David Thoreau's famous passage I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately.

Do you think that's a fair characterization of Shackleton?

But, uh, and Shackleton is surely an admirable figure, and that I'm just an armchair geographer by comparison. But I, I, I don't think of them quite in the heroic aspect. Uh, that, uh, that the bounds, uh, uh is suggesting there, I guess it's the the fault line here goes back to bounces. Characterization of this is the greatest, the ultimate tool of shipwrecks. And that. The cross oceanic voyage to South Georgia to get help to rescue the men left at. Elephant Island is the greatest feat of ocean open ocean voyaging in a small boat in history. I just don't believe that to be the case. In fact, I can cite and know independently from reading. Uh, Captain Bligh after after being set loose in in, uh, off, uh in. What we now know was, uh, what? Captain Cook named them the Friendly Islands.

We would know it as the uh, Tongan islands, I mean, uh, Bligh said. So from south, from Elephant Island to South Georgia, we we determined as what, five, six or 700 miles. So Bligh went like, Uh, what's my note here? Um, I mean, he just went a thousand miles alone across the Coral Sea. He went 3,600 miles from the Tongan Islands to the East Timor Island. And what we would now call, um, um, uh, Indonesia.

I actually consider what what Bligh had to work with in an earlier time to be a greater feat of exploit in open ocean voyaging. Now, true, he's in the tropics, but that presents its own problems. So it was it it. The limitation of the book was the avowed point of upbound as the author from the beginning. That Shackleton's the greatest leader of all time. This was the greatest shipwreck of all time.

This is the greatest, uh. It was a great, uh, greatest open Ocean voyage of all time. It's this, uh, narrative by superlative that I found a little too much in the book.

We can't talk further about this extraordinary discovery of the endurance by Menson Bound and a team of others. It's called The Ship Beneath the Ice The Discovery of Shackleton's Endurance. David McCandry, Thank you so much. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.