Ernest Shackleton’s “Stunning” Footage Comes to Life 110 Years Later With Nat Geo’s ‘Endurance’
“Not all shipwrecked treasure glitters. Some’s frozen where nobody dares to look.”
A twinkle in his eye, marine archaeologist Mensun Bound is looking back on an adventurous career exploring waters from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. Sun, scuba and shining treasure. The Indiana Jones of the deep.
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In 2022, Bound embarked on his most high-profile mission yet, a search — his second — for the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s fabled ship, Endurance. Aboard the icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II, Bound headed to Antarctica’s Weddell Sea in hopes of locating the three-masted vessel, crushed in the pack ice in 1915. With historian Dan Snow on board to follow the endeavor, failure would be expensive and embarrassing.
Now, National Geographic Documentary Films is presenting the story of Shackleton’s epic of survival, and the search expedition a century later, in a knife-edged deep-sea horror. Endurance is directed and produced by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo, The Rescue), and Natalie Hewit. The film premieres at the London Film Festival on Saturday, Oct. 12, and will open in cinemas in the U.K. on Oct. 14. U.S. audiences can stream it on Disney+ worldwide later this fall.
In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out to trek, coast to coast, across Antarctica. The Anglo-Irish polar explorer was 100 miles from the continent when the Endurance got trapped in the ice. The Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition was over before it had begun. “What the ice gets, the ice keeps,” Shackleton would later write.
“The ship and the best hope of escape sank, crushed like a concertina, leaving the crew alone in the most brutal place on Earth,” Bound tells The Hollywood Reporter.
“Shackleton is still considered a hero today because, although he lost Endurance to the pack ice, he never gave up, and through his incredible grit, courage and inspirational leadership saved all his men. Risking his own life is what makes him a true hero,” says John Shears, the search expedition’s director of operations. Ice-locked seas, killer waves, crippling diarrhea and clothes frozen to the men’s skin made survival a million-to-one shot.
“You’d think the explorers would have had more pressing things on their minds than making a film,” says Bound, “but all the insanity was captured in startling detail on [expedition member] Frank Hurley’s photographic plates and 35-millimeter film.”
“Shackleton was generations ahead of what young people now know to be true,” Snow says in the film. “If you haven’t filmed it, it hasn’t happened.” So, the Endurance set sail with the latest cutting-edge moving film technology. The crew play-fighting with the sled dogs, kicking a football around the ice, Endurance’s masts collapsing and the ship sinking were all captured in raw clarity. That the footage survived at all is a testament to Hurley’s courage. “If Hurley hadn’t peeled off his clothes to dive and salvage the photographic treasures under 6 feet of mushy ice when the Endurance started to sink, this film would never have been made,” says Snow.
Shackleton was “desperate to get the story out there. He lived and died by publicity,” says Snow. To stay relevant, “He had to go back to the worst place on Earth.”
National Geographic’s Endurance showcases Hurley’s stunning footage taken in 1914-15, preserved and restored by the British Film Institute and color-treated for the first time. The story of the great escape from the ice is taken straight from the writings and recordings of the crew, brought back to life in their own voices using AI technology.
Endurance alternates between Shackleton’s expedition and the hunt for his wrecked ship in 2022. Both missions had to contend with the same merciless icescapes. While Shackleton and his men fought for their lives, the 2022 expedition was itself pushed to the limit. When their ship, the Agulhas II, got iced in, the scientists thought it was game over for the search effort. A side-scan sonar reading that had appeared to reveal the Endurance turned out to be a mirage. High fives and cheers turned to tears. Bound imagined he could hear “Shackleton laughing his head off” at their slip-up.
By March 5, 2022, as a winter worthy of Game of Thrones approached, 80 percent of the search box — covering 120 square miles of seabed — had been explored with no success. All that was left to check was the southern back end of the search grid. “I was very worried and thinking we might never find the wreck,” Shears tells THR. “Time was fast running out. We had only a further three days before we would have to abandon the search because of the rapid approach of Antarctic winter. At any moment the weather could turn for the worse, the temperature would drop and the sea would freeze.”
By then, much of the shattered crew’s belief was vanishing. “Today’s the day,” drone pilot and technician Robbie McGunnigle says in the film as the Saab Sabertooth drone glides into the abyss. “If it’s not, it’ll be tomorrow,” he adds wryly. Bound and Shears, nerves shredded, have gone on a head-clearing walk to a towering iceberg a mile away from the ship, only to be called urgently back to the bridge. At last Bound sees the images he’s been dreaming about for so long: Shackleton’s Endurance, intact in all its glory, perfectly preserved in the frigid polar waters, as if frozen in time, 9,869 feet under the ice of the Weddell Sea.
After pursuing the Endurance for more than a decade, Bound is star-struck. On screen he pores over a laser scan of the wreck, captured by the Sabertooth drone. It’s the most detailed 3D image of a wooden wreck the world’s ever seen. Bound wasn’t expecting to find the ship’s wheel still ready to grasp, or — still lying on the deck as if everything had happened yesterday — the flare gun Shackleton fired to salute the beginning of the ship’s journey to the underworld.
Bound points to the crew’s dinner plates, an abandoned boot, the word “Endurance” studded in brass letters on the stern. “The preservation is ridiculous,” he says. “You could still lean against the standing rails at the bows and peer through the portholes into the inky black cabin where Shackleton slept.”
Shackleton was convinced that “Each step taken into the unknown unfolds a page of mystery … it is not only man’s right but his duty to try to unravel it.” As Bound reminds us, “This was the great age of exploration. We hadn’t then descended to the deepest depths of the ocean. We hadn’t climbed the highest mountain in the world. Getting to the moon was a distant dream. The idea of exploration, going for the prize and then taking one step beyond, is in all of us.”
The marine explorer who thought he’d seen it all falls silent. “I can’t help but wonder,” Bound whispers, “couldn’t we all do with a bit more of Shackleton’s endurance in us these days?”
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