I work in the environmental space, and Shackleton’s leadership lessons give us some really good guidance. Tim Jarvis: The loss of the ship gave birth to the greatest survival story of all time, and there are so many stories of leadership that resonate with the types of people who might want to find it. Finding her is an impressive feat in its own right. There’s the difficulty of finding it beneath the ice and the potential of a search operation meeting a similar fate. There’s the needle-in-a-haystack puzzle of it-there’s a lot of ocean floor! And the Titanic and many other big ones have been found already. As a legend like this grows, I think, you want to see the thing, to go to the source, to know it’s true.
So many have become invested in this epic-especially in the UK, where Shackleton’s resolve and no-man-left-behind success is a point of great national pride. And the more you investigate her every inch, the more you want to see her.īrad Wieners: Well, it’s not a grave site and there’s no treasure to recover, so I really do think it’s about the survival story and the technical challenge of finding her. If you are a Shackleton fanatic, you know what the wardroom looked like, or the deck did, all of these intimate things. What is unique about Endurance is it comes upon the scene at the dawn of photographic recording, and you can learn a lot about her every nook and cranny by looking at these photographs. The Endurance was a ship we knew quite a bit about before she set out. The other is that, to my knowledge, there are a lot of interesting historic shipwrecks around. By the time people set out to re-create Shackleton’s voyage or search for his ship, they have some context for what he experienced, and that context places him at the very pinnacle of their regard. The more you see truly rough seas, and ice, or experience extreme cold, the more you appreciate the story and what Shackleton and his crew went through. I would say that the type of people who have continually set out to find Endurance or to re-create Shackleton’s footsteps are in that category of expert. What I found when I was fact-checking my book was that the sources with the highest level of expertise on the sea or the Arctic had the highest level of hero worship for Shackleton. Why did the undersea hunt to find Endurance continually capture the imagination of explorers?Ĭaroline Alexander: Two things come to mind. Why does the story endure? We sought perspective from Alexander, Wieners, and Jarvis on why the story resonates so strongly with both new generations of explorers and the general public, and what we can learn from this latest discovery. Now, with the discovery of the wreck, worldwide obsession with Shackleton and Endurance continues-the Royal Geographical Society in London is currently showing a collection of images from the 1914 expedition. Outside covered that Shackleton fervor, and in 2003 contributor Brad Wieners reported on two competing teams of UK explorers who sought, unsuccessfully, to find Endurance. And over the years, there have been multiple attempts to re-create Shackleton’s journey-in 2013 Australian adventurer Tim Jarvis sailed from Antarctica to South Georgia Island aboard a replica of the James Caird and then crossed South Georgia Island on foot.
#ERNEST SHACKLETON ENDURANCE SHIP SERIES#
Actor Kenneth Branagh played Shackleton in a 2002 film for British television American documentary series Nova sent a film crew to Antarctica and hired mountaineers Reinhold Messner, Conrad Anker, and Stephen Venables to trek across South Georgia Island. Alexander’s book, which drew on new source material, birthed two separate Shackleton documentary films, and more media projects followed in its wake. In 1998, British author Caroline Alexander published T he Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition.
Shackleton and his men have been the subject of much media fervor throughout the last century, and this latest flurry of Shackleton media comes more than two decades after the tale experienced a worldwide revival.
The story still resonates with readers more than a century later: the sinking of Endurance amid the pack ice the bone-rattling conditions on Elephant Island the improbable 800-mile journey across windblown seas in the 22-foot James Caird the mountainous trek across South Georgia Island to finally raise a rescue party. The recent discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurancehas thrust his epic tale of Antarctic survival into the limelight once again.
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