Discovery of Endurance
Mar. 9th, 2022 08:07 pmDriving to and from work again now, I was tuned into the shorter afternoon newscast when I happened to hear one item squeezed in that wasn’t ominous and portentous. The shipwreck of Endurance had been found at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. I’d known an expedition had set out to try and find Ernest Shackleton’s ship, but had thought trying would be one thing and finding it another.
For that matter, I’d also had the impression the shipwreck would amount to “a jumble of broken timbers”; the pictures brought back of the ship being crushed in the ice it had been stuck in had formed that thought for me. (Although it wasn’t that many years ago that Shackleton’s expedition started being publicized again as “a successful failure,” still overshadowing Roald Amundsen’s apparently effortless successes, I still have an impression that years before that I’d once seen pictures of a last jumble of smashed masts just above the ice in a then-old “book of adventure.”) I did get to thinking back to the Arctic shipwrecks found much closer to home not that many years ago, Erebus and Terror, and how once Erebus had been found I’d supposed Inuit testimony of a ship being crushed by ice meant Terror must have sunk well offshore King William Island after being smashed to pieces. That both ships made it south of the island at last, even if not any further, does sort of play against all the theories of that expedition marching off to confused oblivion. As opposed to those ships, still enigmatic after a few potential years of seeing if any records could possibly have survived underwater, we of course know what happened with the men on board Endurance.
For that matter, I’d also had the impression the shipwreck would amount to “a jumble of broken timbers”; the pictures brought back of the ship being crushed in the ice it had been stuck in had formed that thought for me. (Although it wasn’t that many years ago that Shackleton’s expedition started being publicized again as “a successful failure,” still overshadowing Roald Amundsen’s apparently effortless successes, I still have an impression that years before that I’d once seen pictures of a last jumble of smashed masts just above the ice in a then-old “book of adventure.”) I did get to thinking back to the Arctic shipwrecks found much closer to home not that many years ago, Erebus and Terror, and how once Erebus had been found I’d supposed Inuit testimony of a ship being crushed by ice meant Terror must have sunk well offshore King William Island after being smashed to pieces. That both ships made it south of the island at last, even if not any further, does sort of play against all the theories of that expedition marching off to confused oblivion. As opposed to those ships, still enigmatic after a few potential years of seeing if any records could possibly have survived underwater, we of course know what happened with the men on board Endurance.