Adult/Family
Lecture – Endurance: Finding Shackleton’s Ship Beneath the Ice
Less than two weeks after the start of World War I, Ernest Shackleton set sail with his crew in the Endurance, a three-masted, wooden vessel. Their goal was to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent on foot. Five months into the expedition and 10,000 miles from help, the Endurance became hopelessly trapped in ice. Ten months later the crushing, shifting pressure of the ice pack caused the Endurance to slip below the seal, leaving 28 men and 68 dogs on the ice with three small boats and the provisions they had saved. The expedition had turned into a rescue mission without any of the crew ever setting foot on the continent.
A fifth-generation Falkland Islander and renowned marine archeologist, Mensun Bound, was always connected to Shackleton. The explorer visited the Falkland Islands several times, once staying in the Bound family’s lodgings, his signature still visible in the guest book. In 2022, Bound was named Director of Exploration for the Endurance22 Expedition, an unprecedented 35-day mission through the heavy sea ice, freezing temperatures in a quest to be the first to successfully find the Endurance and survey the wreck using state of the art technology.
March 5, 2022, 100 years to the day after the burial of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Endurance was discovered upright, largely intact, and remarkably preserved nearly 10,000 feet beneath the icy waters of the Weddell Sea.
Join us as Mensun Bound recounts his expedition to find the Endurance, the lost ship of Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.
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Meet the Speaker
Born in the Falkland Islands, Mensun Bound studied in New York, before moving to Oxford University where he continued his studies at Lincoln College and then St Catherine’s College before finally becoming the Triton Fellow in Maritime Archaeology at St Peter’s College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the Canadian Royal Geographic Society and the Explorer’s Club. Known as ‘Indiana Jones of the Deep,’ Bound has conducted wreck surveys and excavations all over the world in a career that spanned over 40 years. In 1981, he excavated one of the oldest known shipwrecks (an Etruscan ship from 600 BC) and, in 1997, he used saturation diving methods in the South China Sea off Vietnam to carry out the deepest hands-on shipwreck excavation there has ever been. Twelve museums around the globe hold permanent displays of artifacts raised by Bound.