Today we're heading into the eternal ice of Antarctica and keeping a special lady company. The beautiful Endurance is waiting for us in door no. 7
More about her here:
The three-masted schooner barque designed by Ole Aanderud Larsen (1884-1964) was built by the Framnæs shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway. When she was launched on 17 December 1912, she was named Polaris. She was 43.8 m long, 7.62 m wide and weighed 350 tonnes. In addition to square sails on the foremast and gaff sails on the main and mizzen masts, she had a 260 kW steam engine, which allowed a maximum speed of 10 knots (19 km/h). The ship was designed for polar conditions and constructed to minimise the pressure of the ice masses. With a thickness of 28 cm, the frames were made of greenheart wood, a particularly stable type of tropical wood, and were twice as thick as on conventional sailing ships of this size. The hull of the Endurance was designed to be relatively straight-sided, as it was only intended to sail in loose pack ice. She was therefore calmer in the sea than ships with a spherical hull, such as the Fram; however, this came at the cost of not being lifted significantly out of the pressure line in ice pressures and was therefore unsuitable for encasements in pack ice.
The ship was commissioned by the Belgian polar explorer Adrien de Gerlache and the Norwegian whaling magnate Lars Christensen, who actually wanted to use it for polar cruises of a more touristic nature. However, due to financial problems, Christensen was happy to sell his ship to Shackleton for 11,600 pounds sterling (approx. 934,000 euros, as of 2010) - an amount that was less than the original construction costs. Shackleton renamed her Endurance after his family's motto ‘Fortitudine vincimus’ (‘Through endurance we shall conquer’).
The Endurance left the port of Plymouth on 8 August 1914, around a week after Great Britain's entry into the First World War, and completed the journey to Antarctica with a stopover in Buenos Aires without any problems.
Before the crew of the Endurance could cross to the Antarctic mainland to cross the Antarctic as planned, the ship was trapped by the pack ice of the Weddell Sea in January 1915 like ‘an almond in a piece of chocolate’ - as the much-used comparison goes. After resisting the force of the pack ice for 281 days, the Endurance was crushed by the ice on 21 November 1915. The expedition team had previously saved themselves on a safe ice floe. Thanks to a masterly feat of seamanship and navigation, Shackleton and his crew managed to get out of this desolate situation without any losses with the help of three lifeboats that were salvaged from the Endurance.
Initially continuing with the pack ice and later on ice floes, the castaways drifted northwards in their camps along the Antarctic Peninsula until the floes broke into small pieces. They finally reached Elephant Island in their lifeboats. There, one of the boats was converted and set off for South Georgia with 6 men to fetch help, which was successful. Months later, the remaining men who were still stuck on Elephant Island were rescued by a Chilean navy guard boat.
In 2019, a private expedition attempted to locate the wreck of the Endurance, but was unsuccessful.
In January 2022, the Endurance 22 expedition began the search. The S. A. Agulhas II brought the expedition, in which marine physicist Stefanie Arndt from the Alfred Wegener Institute took part,[3] to the last coordinates of the Endurance mentioned. From the historical records, the expedition members knew that the ship must have sunk at ♁68° 39′ 30″ S, 52° 26′ 30″ W. According to the rules of the Antarctic Treaty, the wreck is a protected historical site that may not be touched.
On 5 March 2022, the expedition found the ship with a diving robot at a depth of 3008 m, 7.7 km from the recorded position. Photographs showed the wreck standing upright in excellent condition.
