Now, “every day somebody asks me whether I am related to the explorer,” he said. Once in the United States, Shackleton said, “people reveled in the story.’' “Shackleton books were beside the Bible in the hall, but otherwise nobody talked about it until I came to this country.” “When I was younger, my older brother would sit us all down to tell us the story,” he recalled. Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and National GeographicĬharlie Shackleton said the incredible tale was retold only occasionally in his boyhood home outside Dublin. The well-preserved wreck of the Endurance will not be touched, and is protected by the Antarctic Treaty as a historical monument. When she saw Hurley’s original glass-plate negatives during research more than two decades ago at the Royal Geographical Society in London, Alexander knew she was looking not only at history, but at art, she said. His older brother, Jonathan, has been to the Antarctic more than 40 times.Ĭaroline Alexander, author of the book “The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition,” said that images from the sunken Endurance prompted “a surge of almost affectionate recognition.” The ship has been spared from damage caused by wood-eating creatures found in warmer waters.Īlexander, who lives in Northeast Harbor, Maine, played the pivotal role in bringing to a global audience many of the images taken by Frank Hurley, an Australian photographer who sailed to Antarctica aboard the Endurance. “It was amazing to be there, and an extraordinary thing to recreate history and relive it,” Shackleton, 63, said of Elephant Island. One of those trips stopped five years ago at Elephant Island, where his ancestor had left 22 crewmen while he and five others took their perilous voyage to South Georgia Island, where they sought aid at a whaling station and were able to help rescue the others. I didn’t think they were going to find it,” said Charlie Shackleton, who emigrated from Ireland about 40 years ago and has been to the Antarctic twice. The wreck will not be touched, protected by the Antarctic Treaty as a historical monument. The search expedition, financed by an anonymous donor, left South Africa on an icebreaker in February and used two submersibles to scan 150 square miles for two weeks before the discovery. The discovery was announced Wednesday by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, which organized the $10 million search for the Endurance, a 144-foot sailing vessel that was found in near-pristine condition on the bottom of the Weddell Sea, only 4 miles from where its captain had recorded its last position in 1915. The entire 28-man Endurance crew, largely through Shackleton’s courage and resiliency, returned home safely after more than a year of being stranded.
It’s a story that made Ernest Shackleton’s exploits, including an 800-mile journey across open ocean in a 20-foot lifeboat, one of the greatest survival epics in the history of exploration.
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