[♪ solemn music playing]
[dogs barking]
♪♪
[Lionel Greenstreet] [revoice] It was a dream.
It was a treasure hunt.
But I don't think that Shackleton thought
anything about the material side.
What the treasure can buy isn't the answer.
It's the finding of it,
the looking for it.
[Dan Snow] Shackleton once wrote to his wife,
said that he cannot describe the excitement
of seeing places and things
that no human's ever seen before.
[Ernest Shackleton] [revoice] Beloved.
This will be my last letter
before I go south into the unknown.
I have not the slightest doubt that we will get through.
[machinery whirring]
Why we go, I cannot say.
What the impelling force is that makes explorers,
I cannot describe.
[indistinct]
[Frank Hurley] [revoice] January the 21st, 1915.
Our position is disquieting.
The fall in temperature caused the small pools
around the ship to congeal.
It looks as though there was a possibility of us freezing in
and becoming part of the floes that menace us.
[Shackleton] Each step taken into the unknown
unfolds a page of mystery.
And as long as there is any mystery on this globe,
it is not only man's right,
but his duty to try to unravel it.
[Mensun Bound] The idea of exploration,
going for the prize,
and then taking one step beyond,
is in all of us.
[ship creaking]
[Frank Worsley] [revoice] We could hear
her beam snapping,
broken as easily as matchsticks
by the irresistible strength of the ice.
[Vincent] I like doing what's never been done before.
As Shackleton said,
difficulties are just things to overcome.
[wood creaking]
[Alexander Macklin] [revoice] As long as we can come out
of this predicament with our lives,
we shall not grumble.
And please, God, we will succeed.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
-Morning, Nico. -[Nico Vincent] Morning, Mensun.
Lasse.
[Lasse Rabenstein] Well, it's amazing, I mean,
it was taken from space.
When we have sunny weather, we can get the optical imagery
which is super helpful for navigation.
[machinery whirring]
Probably, we will move on this area
because we are already here.
[John Shears] We've got to provide all the support we can
to the AUV guys.
They are gonna be working 24/7
flat out to survey that search box.
We've only got 12 days.
If the weather holds up,
we may be able to get a 10-day extension.
But we have to get out before the ice reforms and refreezes.
[♪ intense music playing]
[Snow] We are near the latitude and longitude,
given by Worsley, the captain of Endurance,
as the place where he estimates Endurance sank.
Success awaits. Dive one, boys. Let's go.
[machinery whirring]
[Bound] The Endurance is the most storied wreck
of all time,
perhaps even more so than the Titanic,
which went down only two years before the Endurance set sail.
I've been working on shipwrecks all over the world,
from South China Sea in the east
to Caribbean in the west.
Shipwrecks of all kinds, all periods.
The wreck of an ancient Greek ship
found inside a live volcano off the coast of Sicily
could prove one of the greatest finds of the century.
[Bound] A shipwreck is, is just this huge artifact.
It's all there.
I mean, the best time capsules
in the world are shipwrecks...
and shipwrecks are all about people.
This is, um, Frank Worsley.
He was the captain of the Endurance
and, uh, Harry McNish, the carpenter,
James Wordie, the geologist, Greenstreet.
So it's all to do with their diaries.
The story of Shackleton
is really to be told in the diaries.
I've read all the diaries and most of them are not published.
This is first book I ever read about Shackleton.
I... it's-it's... I carry it with me.
It was a prize book that was given to me for,
believe it or not, attendance at Sunday School.
Growing up in the Falkland Islands
felt like the continent of Antarctica
was my backyard,
just several hundred miles away.
The great man himself, the boss,
Shackleton.
And I carry this with me.
[AUV engineer] All good.
[whistles]
Yeah, all good.
[news anchor] Uh, good luck with this, Dan,
but is this a needle in a haystack?
How, how optimistic are you?
Well, I-I think it is a needle in a haystack.
It's at 3,000 meters
beneath the surface of the Weddell Sea.
The Weddell Sea is one of the hardest places
on earth to operate.
The hope is, we do find the shipwreck,
the Endurance shipwreck,
and it connects us to an incredible story.
It's probably the most isolated,
the most difficult shipwreck on earth to find.
So this expedition is really on the frontiers
of science and geography.
My job is to try and spread the story
of what's being done here on the Agulhas
all over the world.
It's to channel the spirit of Shackleton and Hurley,
his photographer, to tell the world what they were doing.
But use modern platforms and tools,
like the internet, like social media.
We're still talking about Shackleton
because this is the greatest tale of survival,
of leadership, of teamwork in history.
And it's a story about failure.
[♪ light piano music playing]
[Bound] This was the great age of exploration.
We hadn't descended to the deepest depths of the ocean.
We hadn't yet climbed the highest mountain of the world.
[Snow] Polar explorers in this period
were global celebrities.
They were the rock stars.
[Bound] Shackleton was on four expeditions
to the Antarctic.
He found himself in 1901
as the third officer on Scott's great expedition,
the Discovery expedition.
[Shears] Shackleton must've been
a very special character even then,
in his 20s, to persuade Scott,
as a Royal Navy officer, to take this man
from the merchant marine with him,
all the way to the Antarctic.
[Bound] They suffered terribly.
They got back by the skin of their teeth.
Shackleton in particular was in a very bad way.
Shackleton is sent back
as an invalid to the UK,
which he was terribly embarrassed by.
[Bound] He never forgot or forgave Scott
for invaliding him out of Antarctica.
[Shears] But Shackleton was able, in 1907,
to secure enough funding for his own expedition
to Antarctica, called the Nimrod Expedition.
[Bound] Again, he was trying to get to the South Pole,
and he got to within 97 miles.
He could've taken the prize, but he didn't
because he knew if he went that last bit of distance,
that men under him would've died.
[Shackleton] I cannot think of failure.
Yet I must look at the matter sensibly
and the lives of those who are with me.
[Bound] It must have been a very difficult decision
for him to have made.
[Shackleton] After the conquest of the South Pole
by Amundsen,
who, by a narrow margin of days only,
was in advance of the British expedition under Scott,
there remained but one great main object
of Antarctic journeys:
the crossing of the South Polar continent
from sea to sea.
[Snow] Shackleton managed to convince enough people
the greatest Antarctic journey was yet to be done.
People might have reached the South Pole.
But the greatest journey was crossing
the Antarctic continent
from one side to the other.
[Bound] Shackleton then found his ship.
The Endurance was built in Norway
between 1911 and 1913.
When Shackleton purchased the ship,
he changed her name to Endurance
because it reflected his family motto:
"By endurance we conquer."
[Snow] He then assembled a crew.
Shackleton just sent a letter to the newspaper.
And he would say, anyone's able to apply.
He got 5,000 applicants, including three women.
Some were scientists who wanted to take part
in the kind of scientific elements of the expedition.
Some were sailors.
[♪ jaunty piano music playing]
[Worsley] I had joined the expedition by accident.
One night, I dreamed that Burlington Street
was full of ice blocks
and that I was navigating a ship along it.
An absurd dream.
But sailors are superstitious.
And when I woke up next morning,
I hurried down Burlington Street.
A sign on the door post caught my eye.
It bore the words "Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition."
I turned into the building. Shackleton was there.
The moment I set eyes on him,
I knew that he was a man
with whom I should be proud to work.
[Snow] He took one scientist,
a meteorologist who had just returned
from an expedition to Sudan.
[Leonard Hussey] [revoice] There was one small matter
about which I was concerned:
it was whether I should take my banjo with me.
His reply was emphatic. "Certainly," he said.
So my banjo, the same one on which I had played
to the audience in the Sudan, formed part of my baggage.
[Snow] He didn't require any Antarctic experience.
He took one guy because he said he looked funny.
He was looking for character.
He was looking for toughness and versatility.
So Shackleton ended up with a crew
of 28 men, including himself,
lots and lots of dogs to pull sleds,
which no one ever had any experience of doing.
And a cat.
On the other side of Antarctica,
he was sending another ship.
And they were gonna try and lay food dumps
so that Shackleton and his men could pick them up
and avoid starvation
as they made the second half of their journey.
[Bound] It was the very eve of World War I.
He did offer his ship
and its crew to the service of the nation.
He sent a telegram to Churchill,
but Churchill replied,
"proceed," and he did.
[Greenstreet] The Endurance arrived
at Grytviken Whaling Station in South Georgia
on 5th of November, 1914.
[Shackleton] The whaling captains at South Georgia
confirmed the extreme severity of the ice conditions.
[Greenstreet] The whaling skippers advised us
to delay our start as late as possible.
[Snow] Shackleton ignored that advice.
He couldn't return home.
There was a war on,
he'd lose his crew, he'd lose his funding.
He didn't have the reputation
that would survive another failure.
And I think he dragged his men down there on a doomed quest
because he couldn't bear to go home.
[Bound] Shackleton left South Georgia
on the 5th of December.
Two to three days after leaving,
they were in the ice.
The ice conditions that year were very bad indeed.
They headed down towards the shore of the Weddell Sea.
Ice conditions got worse and worse.
They got to within a hundred miles,
or one day's sailing, from their destination,
of Vahsel Bay.
But then, on the 18th,
they became ice-bound.
[Snow] His expedition had failed.
He wanted to walk across Antarctica.
He hadn't even set foot on Antarctica.
There you can see just on the horizon there, can't you?
-[Capt. Freddie L.] Yeah. -So there's a lot of sea ice
over there then.
[Freddie L.] Yes.
[Bound] It's now minus eight degrees,
and you can see looking at the open patches
that it is hardening up.
The ice gets all hard,
and old and gnarled and mixed and hummocked,
and at that stage, we are struggling.
And for me, it's a make-or-break situation.
[Snow] Mensun Bound is a legend.
He is one of the world's greatest marine archeologists.
But at this point, he doesn't want
his career to end in failure.
[Bound] We tried once before.
In 2019,
we came to Antarctica to search for the Endurance.
[indistinct] ...we're within its range.
It felt like, you know, my whole life had been,
uh, converging upon that moment.
It was an incredible feeling.
The excitement, the... exhilaration.
And then of course, it all went wrong.
We actually got to the wreck site, much to my amazement,
because we had very, very tough, uh, ice conditions.
We managed to put down the AUV,
AUV working perfectly fine.
But after 30 hours,
it suddenly stopped transmitting.
We'd lost it, and we had no idea what had happened to it.
We searched for three days, didn't find it.
Uh, massive failure.
[Bound] The AUV we lost cost millions of dollars.
And, all that planning, years of work,
all down the tube, you know.
It was literally one of the worst moments of my life.
You know, I never expected that, uh...
I'd have a second chance
to go looking for the Endurance,
that is for sure.
[Shears] We learnt from our failures in 2019
that we needed a, a different underwater drone
to search the seafloor.
It was Nico's choice to attach this brand-new vehicle
to the surface using a fiberoptic tether.
Nico's, in my mind, one of the best subsea engineers
anywhere in the world
As the vehicle surveys the seabed,
we'll see the Endurance appear in real time
on the navigation screen.
[AUV crew] [on radio] Robbie, that's the AUV
off the hook.
Okay, AUV in thrust mode, all yours, Chad.
[Vincent] When you're in the Weddell Sea,
the traditional sub-sea methods don't work
because the ice rules.
[Shears] The massive challenge is of launching under the ice
and searching on the seafloor at 10,000 feet.
And no one had ever done this before.
It was complete-- completely new
in terms of sub-sea technology.
We've got 15 nautical miles to run to the site.
Should be there between 1700
to 1800 hours tonight.
And what about the ice conditions, Lasse?
There's areas of,
of open water opening up,
but it will be a little denser at the site.
So whatever we do with the AUV operations,
the drift will be super important.
Because you have to park the ship
at the right side of the search window
to drift over the wreck site and not in the other direction.
In the Weddell Sea, we have an ocean system,
which is called the Weddell Gyre.
The sea ice goes clockwise like a huge circle.
On average, it drifts 20 kilometers a day here.
And even the ship will drift with the ice.
[Hussey] The ice was heavily and firmly packed
around the Endurance, extending in every direction
as far as the eye could see from the masthead.
[Greenstreet] As the weeks passed,
our drift was slowly but surely
taking us northwards,
our track on the chart showing a formation
like that of a drunken man's wanderings,
crossing and recrossing our own track.
[Shackleton] My chief anxiety is the drift.
Where will the vagrant winds and currents carry the ship
during the long winter months that are ahead of us?
And will it be possible to break out
of the pack early enough
to attempt the overland journey next year?
[Snow] Shackleton's gamble of racing south in 1914
and trying to beat the winter had failed.
He now had to survive a brutal winter
in the most inhospitable place on planet Earth.
[Shackleton] On February 24th,
we ceased to observe the ship's routine
and the Endurance became a winter station.
[Greenstreet] Ice huts were built
on the floes around the ship,
and the dogs, each one, chained to a hut.
The working and training of the dogs was taken in hand.
[puppies whimpering]
[Worsley] Most of the public schools in England
helped the expedition to purchase the dog teams.
And we named a dog after every school that helped.
-[dogs barking] -[men shouting, whistling]
[Snow] Shackleton insisted on optimism
above all else, and I think he was right.
Without that sense that you are gonna survive,
without that sense of purpose, you would give up,
you'd turn your face to the wall.
And so they organized life in a way
that would keep their morale up and keep them alive.
[camera clicking]
[Worsley] Hurley is a marvel.
With cheerful Australian profanity,
he perambulates the most dangerous
and slippery places he can find.
He snaps his snaps or works his handle,
turning out pictures of life by the fathom.
[Snow] Shackleton was generations ahead
of what young people now know to be true.
If you haven't filmed it, it hasn't happened.
And so of course he took the latest,
cutting-edge technology, moving film.
He took a documentary maker with him.
[Hurley] I was in the wilds of North Australia at the time,
making a film of the primitive Aboriginal life.
A cable from Sir Ernest Shackleton
invited me to join the staff for his expedition.
I hadn't the remotest idea of what it might involve
nor had I applied for a post on the expedition.
However, Sir Ernest had long been my hero,
and I was going to follow him in anything
and to go anywhere with him.
[Snow] Shackleton was desperate to get the story out there.
He lived and died by publicity.
Shackleton could never be confident of his funding.
He was always cobbling this stuff together.
But, underneath it all, he was hopelessly disorganized,
terrible with money.
To a certain extent, it was a pyramid scheme.
He'd get given 20 pounds here,
and he'd immediately have to pay, uh,
someone he'd owed it to over here.
I think Shackleton is best described by a keen observer,
fellow crew mate on the second trip to Antarctica:
He said he was a outstanding, plausible rogue.
[Bound] Shackleton never really had
the standing that he wanted in British society.
He didn't come from the aristocracy,
he didn't go to university.
[Shears] Shackleton grew up in Ireland.
His father was a farmer first of all,
and then he decided to retrain and became a doctor
and he moved the family to London.
[Snow] Shackleton spoke differently.
He was terribly bullied at school,
when he went to school in London.
He was desperate to prove his worth.
He tried to make it as a politician,
no one voted for him.
He tried to make it as a businessman, it failed.
There were two Shackletons.
There was the public Shackleton
that could quote, he had a photographic memory
that could quote long lines of poetry:
Shakespeare, Tennyson, Browning at will.
He would provoke people to tears
and cheers in public meetings.
The private one was insecure.
He had terrible health problems.
He was wracked with nerves.
He wrote to his wife and he said,
"I find that this is too overwhelming."
[Shackleton] Beloved, there are times
when I almost wish that I had not gone south
but stayed at home and lived a quiet life.
I suppose I am a domestic failure
and not the ideal married man.
I am just good as an explorer and nothing else.
[Shears] But, uh, Emily stood by him all the way through.
Emily Shackleton said,
"You can't keep a wild eagle in a barn."
[Bound] He must have been quite
a disappointed guy in some respects.
None of his plans worked out as he hoped.
[Snow] But he had to keep going to Antarctica
because it was the only way he could stay relevant,
that he could stay famous.
So it was like a devil's bargain.
He had to keep going back
to the worst place on earth
to maintain his status at home.
♪♪
Okay, Joe, the AUV levelin' out at, uh, the seabed.
[Joe Leek] [on radio] Alright, Roger that. Roger that.
[Robbie McGunnigle] Okay, guys. We're good to start mission?
[Jeremie Morizet] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
This is the one. Today's the day.
[laughs]
[Lars Lundberg] Just tab the rolls?
You are not so affected now.
[Vincent] Oh! We're moving!
-[Vincent] Good, making data? -[Clement Schapman] Yeah.
-[Vincent] That's good. -[Schapman] The seabed.
The, the seabed is, uh, is really flat,
which is a very good point for us.
Through the depression like that.
It's the perfect condition for finding a wreck.
[McGunnigle] Exactly.
[Vincent] The only sonar data in the world of the site.
We are the first one. Yeah!
-Yeah! -Yeah!
Your stupid plan is coming together.
[all laugh]
[Vincent] So let's try to review quickly,
with this vehicle on the seabed, what we will see.
The primary sensor is a side-scan sonar.
This is a low-frequency side-scan sonar signature
of a wreck which is roughly
the same size as the Endurance.
It may not look like much,
but this is what the Endurance will look like on the screen.
It will be two meters
below the surface, 40 meter astern.
[man] Forty meters below the surface.
You will pull slowly when I say...
[indistinct chatter]
To go to Antarctica, you need an exceptional team.
I've been working with the people on my team
for almost 25 years.
So we've gotten to know each other and become very close.
We've got some pretty impressive projects under our belt.
We have several world records.
For me, Endurance22 is my first expedition to Antarctica and
this is the first time I've been back out at sea
since the death of my wife.
I lost Sévereine in 2017 to cancer.
This was one of the most difficult times of my life.
So going back out to sea is really good for me.
And for us, we're like a family.
I usually say I'm the big brother,
but they don't agree with that.
So yes, I'm the dad of this team.
[indistinct chatter]
[Vincent] [in English] If we find the wreck,
it will be the team success.
But if we fail, it will be my failure.
Because I was in charge.
[Shackleton] About the middle of February,
the temperature dropped as low as 20 degrees below zero.
All precautions were taken to prepare the ship for winter.
But the Endurance's company refused to abandon
their customary cheerfulness.
[Worsley] Certainly a good deal of our cheerfulness
is due to the order and routine which Sir E establishes.
[Hussey] We had our own special duties to perform.
In my own case, I was kept quite busy
attending to four-hourly records of temperature,
noting atmospheric pressures, wind force, and direction.
[Greenstreet] Our cabins on deck began to get too cold
as the temperatures dropped lower.
So the cargo was cleared out of the tween decks,
and we built ourselves cubicles there
and lived down there throughout the winter months.
This was christened the Ritz,
the wardroom above being known as the Stables.
The Ritz served as an area in which members could relax,
read, play cards, and while away the time.
♪ It's a long way to Tipperary ♪
[Hussey] Our appetites were tremendous
and the kind of food we had a craving for
might make a little appeal to civilized tastes.
Seal blubber, for instance, was our greatest delicacy,
and I often used to eat it raw.
[Hurley] It is our custom to drink to sweethearts
and wives every Saturday night,
which all hands do with much fervor.
At midnight, we had cocoa and wished Sir Ernest
many happy returnings of his 41st birthday.
[wind whistling]
[Shackleton] We said goodbye to the sun on May the 1st
and entered the period of twilight
that would be followed by the darkness of midwinter.
The disappearance of the sun is apt to be
a depressing event in the polar regions
where the long months of darkness
involve mental as well as physical strain.
[Hurley] A form of midwinter madness
has manifested itself,
all hands being seized with the desire
to have their hair removed.
[men laughing]
It caused much amusement.
We resemble a cargo of convicts.
[Worsley] Greenstreet, the first officer,
at that moment, knocked at the cabin door.
He said to Shackleton, "The play can begin, sir,
whenever you are ready."
Shackleton said, "In five minutes,
you can go back and say so."
Greenstreet could never have guessed
that a few minutes earlier,
the Great Explorer had broken to me that tragic news.
He said, "The ship can't live in this, Skipper.
"It is only a matter of time.
What the ice gets, the ice keeps."
We would be cast homeless upon the dreary waste of ice
from which so few returned.
To the men, Shackleton was the cheery, happy chief
who was leading them in a great
and successful adventure.
And a few minutes later,
sure enough, we were in the Ritz
laughing heartily at one of the burlesques
that our men had become adept at producing.
The ship had become to them,
as to me, the center of the universe.
How would they be without the ship?
[Leek] I mean, imagine being here
in a tiny little wooden boat.
No GPS, no... nothing.
And then the leader says, "Oh, by the way, boys, we're stuck.
And, uh, we're gonna spend the winter here."
You'd be like, "Ah, great,
well, my wife's gonna kill me."
[all laughing]
Everything is absolutely perfect.
The vehicle is ready.
Everything is ready. The tether is ready.
However, the vessel is stuck in ice.
This is really frustrating.
We are not able to reach
the next position for the next dive.
And we are losing time.
[Captain Knowledge Bengu] Exercise patience.
[deck officer] Patience, patience. Yeah.
[Bengu] Yes, so they say.
[Shears] That's, um, heli-helicopter fuel,
so it's got 20,000 liters of helicopter fuel in it.
They use a special technique where they're swinging
the container from side to side across the bow
to roll the ship and that then loosens it.
So they're bringing the container back on now.
And then they'll start moving forward.
[ice cracking]
[Rabenstein] I think we have over the next two days
a very stable drift in this direction,
but then something is happening, we have a shift,
and you see, like, every six hours
we get a new forecast.
So just to give you an idea of the uncertainties
we have to deal with.
[Shears] The environment of Antarctica
is a very special place.
You're completely distant.
It's as if you're stepping out of the real world.
I've sort of lost count, but I think this is
my 25th expedition to Antarctica.
Going to Antarctica is very addictive.
You can, you can ask my wife about that.
Uh, it-it's something that once you've seen it,
you know, you-you've got this drive to always go back.
And Shackleton, you know, he also had this drive
to go back to Antarctica.
[Snow] You'd be hard-pressed to find a guy
with more Antarctic experience than John Shears.
He was head of logistics for the British Antarctic Survey,
which is the British group responsible
for, um, Antarctic operations.
He's been awarded the Polar Medal
by Her Majesty the Queen,
which is the same medal that Shackleton was awarded.
[Shears] I started doing expeditions
then when I was about 17, 18,
and then continued at university.
I come from a farming family in Devon, in England.
I was very close to my grandmother,
and my grandmother, um,
never had the opportunity t-to travel.
And my grandmother, as a small girl,
had gone into Exeter, to the museum there,
and they had an Antarctic presentation.
And she always remembered that.
That was the first time I heard
about Ernest Shackleton.
Gram was always wanting me and my two brothers
to get experience of what the world might be like.
And here I am, and I've been, you know, to the Arctic,
to the Antarctic in the space of two generations.
[Hurley] August the 1st, 1915.
At 10:00 a.m., the floe began to move in our vicinity,
driving tongues of ice below the ship
and heeling us over to starboard.
[Hussey] We felt like pygmies,
as millions of tons of moving ice crushed
and smashed inexorably all around us.
I kept on thinking to myself, how long can this last?
How long?
[Hurley] Every timber was straining to rupture.
The decks gaped. Doors refused to open or shut.
The floor coverings buckled, and the iron floor plates
in the engine room bulged and sprung from their seating.
Everything was in a state of extreme compression.
[rumbling]
♪ Oh, I met with Napper Tandy ♪
♪ And he took me by the hand... ♪
[Snow] They were listening to the gramophone
when it happened.
They felt this wave of pressure building.
It was like an earthquake,
ship shuddering as the ice pressed in.
[Worsley] Pressure throughout the day,
increasing to terrific force at 4:00 p.m.,
smashing rudder,
rudder post, and stern post.
[ship creaking, rumbling]
[Shackleton] The ship was making water rapidly aft.
I had the pumps rigged, got up steam,
and started the bilge pumps at 8:00 p.m.
[Worsley] We pumped three days and nights
without sleep,
but we could not pump her dry.
[Hussey] It was at this time
that a strange occurrence took place.
For some months, we had seen no emperor penguins.
Now eight of them made a sudden appearance,
walking slowly towards the ship.
We had always considered these birds
to be practically mute,
but on this occasion,
they proceeded to utter cries
that sounded like a dirge for the ship.
The effect of this death call was ominous and startling.
[penguins squawking]
[Shackleton] On October 26th, the end came.
All hopes of accomplishing our objective vanished.
[Hurley] Shackleton met the crisis
with complete composure.
He gave orders as though we were setting out
on just a sledging expedition.
[Snow] But to Shackleton, not only was it
an incredibly dangerous development,
they were now in mortal peril.
But it was also a sign
of a complete failure of the expedition.
This is probably Shackleton at his lowest point.
I don't think it can get any worse.
It can physically.
But for Shackleton, I think this is the trough.
He knew this was the end of his dreams.
[wind whistling]
[Worsley] There was no protection to be had
from the angry world of snows and wind.
[Snow] They had a tough first night.
They bedded down on the ice.
They drew lots for the fur sleeping bags.
They didn't have enough.
[Worsley] Three times that night,
our floe cracked dangerously under our tents.
Three times, we had to move.
[Shackleton] For myself, I could not sleep.
I walked up and down in the darkness.
The task now was to secure the safety of the party.
[Snow] He pivoted.
There was no more walking across Antarctica.
In that 12-hour period,
he completely flips his outlook.
And from that moment on, he is laser focused
on getting those men home.
[wind howling]
[Worsley] At dawn the next morning,
Shackleton and Wild, like good Samaritans,
made hot tea for all hands.
This they took along to the inmates
of the various tents.
Shackleton made a characteristic speech,
the sort of speech that only he could make.
He told the men not to be alarmed
at the loss of the vessel
and assured them that by hard effort, clean work,
and loyal cooperation,
they could make their way to land.
This speech had an immediate effect.
Our spirits rose.
[Greenstreet] It was decided to try and march
across the floes to a small island
called Paulet Island.
It would be necessary to take the boats
as the last part of the journey would be by water.
So everyone started to prepare for the sledging journey.
[Worsley] Now a last change of clothing was issued.
The dress consists of Burberry overalls
over a suit of warm underwear, a pair of ordinary trousers,
and a thick sweater.
[Hussey] Shackleton decided to cut down
every ounce of superfluous weight.
Once more, he gave us the lead
when he threw away a gold watch,
a gold cigarette case, and several gold sovereigns.
[Shackleton] I tore the fly leaf out of the Bible
that Queen Alexandra had given to the ship
with her own writings in it.
The order was that personal gear
must not exceed two pounds per man.
And this meant that nothing but bare necessities
were to be taken on the march.
[Hussey] It was shortly after leaving the ship
that I heard Shackleton calling for me.
"What's that, sir?" I asked.
"Your banjo," replied Shackleton.
This is the banjo that Shackleton saved
just before the ship sank.
He called it Vital Mental Medicine.
[dogs huffing, barking]
[Worsley] Next day, we started a march
to the westward.
The dogs dragged the stores on the seven smaller sledges.
I took charge of 16 men,
dragging our three boats placed on the larger sledges.
[Greenstreet] The boats weighed about one ton each with gear.
The going was frightful, and the labor was appalling
and our progress all too slow for the energy expended.
[Bound] They didn't get very far.
Two days later, they gave up
and they established a camp.
[Hussey] Our new camp,
to which we gave the name Ocean Camp,
lay about a mile and a half distant
from the watery grave of the Endurance.
[Hurley] Well, the poor old dark room was crushed.
And we found it was beneath about six feet of mushy ice.
But what does one do when you have buried treasure
to the value of 20,000 pounds
beneath six feet of mushy ice?
I peeled off and in an instant,
I was in that mushy ice and roping for the cases.
The first case, I got out in quick time.
I took a breather and down underneath the ice again
and up with the second case.
[ship groaning]
[Hurley] The ship began to violently move
under the pressure of the ice.
So there was nothing else for us to do
but to make for the floe, just for our dear lives
as quickly as we could.
[Snow] Shackleton returned to the ship
for his final visit,
and he took the flare gun.
[Shackleton] Hurley, Wild,
and self went into ship,
said goodbye, fired a bomb in farewell.
[Bound] It was Shackleton himself
who first saw the ship begin its slide.
He just saw the funnel just twitch.
[Worsley] We dashed onto the lookout platform
that had been erected.
And from there, we watched the death of the ship
that had carried us so far and so well
and that had put up such a brave fight
as ever a ship had fought.
Shackleton said quietly to the men,
"She's gone, boys."
[Bound] Shackleton had drummed into them
by then that what he expected of every one of them
was optimism, optimism, optimism.
How could they not, at that moment,
think about what their chances of survival really were?
And, you know, it's got to be said,
chances of survival were pretty negligible.
[machinery whirring]
Okay, let's find the Endurance!
We need to catch it now.
I don't want the other, uh,
the other shift to have it.
[laughs]
[♪ energetic music playing]
Okay, we called all the data?
[Leek] Yeah, we're ready. Let's do this.
There's a kind of superstition in our profession.
that if you don't have faith in it it, nothing will happen.
So, despite everything.
we try to believe it and think,
"Okay, our luck's gonna change. We have to be able to find it."
[Jeremie hums]
-[McGunnigle] Sinking location. -[Onde] Yeah. Ooh.
-[laughter] -[Onde] Ah, come on!
[McGunnigle] That's a shipwreck.
Come on, boys!
Open the bar! Open the bar!
-[Bound] Yeah? -Morning, Mensun.
-[Bound] Some news? -Good news.
[knocking on door]
John!
[Onde laughs]
We're gonna be gutted when it's a pile of boulders.
I'm just messing, this can't be, it's not possible.
This is it. This is the great moment.
We found the wreck of Endurance.
Are we quite... are we quite, quite sure?
Oh, geez. Yes!
[Bound laughs]
I'm only gonna believe it when I see it.
-[Bound] Yeah... -So about that point, precisely,
because the vehicle, uh, is low in batteries,
we have not been able to follow normal protocol
and make a video of the wreck.
So now, we have to secure the data...
-Mm-hmm. -...on the next dive.
Um, hi, gentlemen.
-Hi! -Hello.
-Somebody please show me. -Yeah, yes.
-Oh, my gosh! -Just over there.
[Bound] Look at that!
[Onde] And she was just
400 meters north.
From the actual position that Worsley gave?
-Yeah. -I can see that,
I can't believe it. Worsley really was an ace!
-We can't believe it as well. -[Bound] I am stunned.
Guys, thank you all.
This is just the best moment ever,
and I'm so pr-proud
and pleased to be able to share it with you.
Yeah. Hurrah.
[JC Caillens] Yay! Hoorah!
[all applauding]
[Snow] Mensun, I don't know about you,
but I've been swinging from optimism
to pessimism over the last...
Yeah, it was like that. Yeah.
But we're right over the spot,
right where Frank Worsley said he sank.
But that in all my life,
I've never known a wreck to be where it said it was.
You know, here it is.
What do you think, Nico?
I say that I don't know.
[Vincent] I have evidence but no proof.
I do not like gray area. I like black and white.
[Shackleton] Sixty-five degrees,
sixteen and a half south.
Fifty-two degrees, four west.
No news.
Patience. Patience. Patience.
Our hope, of course,
was to drift northwards to the edge of the pack
and then, when the ice was loose enough,
to take to the boats and row to the nearest land.
[Greenstreet] February the 3rd,
the cocoa has been finished for some time,
and the tea is very nearly done.
Soon our only beverage will be milk.
The food now is pretty well all meat.
[Charles Green] We had to catch penguins and seals first
before we could do any cooking.
Now, to do cooking, we had to make a stove.
We made a stove out of the funnel.
We-we used biscuit tins and, uh, a paint drum.
Well, it took me eight hours to cook a meal.
Between those eight hours, underneath used to melt,
and the stove used to topple over.
Well, I didn't mind that topping over
'cause I lost nothing because I just gathered up again
and put it back in the pot.
And they had to have it or go without.
[Greenstreet] The monotony of life here
is getting on our nerves.
Nothing to do, nowhere to walk.
That's the time when morale breaks,
when there's nothing whatsoever to do
and nothing you can do about it.
[Bound] Then they experienced squabbling.
[Macklin] Tuesday, March the 28th.
This morning, there was quite a lot
of unpleasantness on rising.
[Snow] Greenstreet got
his precious ration of hot milk spilt,
and he broke down.
Quietly, everyone gathered around
and poured out a tiny bit of milk
into his cup.
That really shows how on edge they all were,
but also it shows they looked out for each other.
[machinery whirring]
[Chad Bonin] Perfect.
Okay. Robbie, everything is secured
and all the slack is off the deck.
You're clear to dive.
Okay. Copy that.
Diving to a 100 meters first.
[Snow] This dive could well be the difference
between a claim of finding a shipwreck
and seeing Endurance.
[inaudible]
[Bonin] Are we...
going in for a quick inspection
or what is... what's the plan?
[Vincent] Yes, please.
[Bonin] Okay, I'll start turning around.
[indistinct]
[Vincent] We feel we are on the target now?
[Morizet] Yeah, I think this is it.
[Bonin] This just looks like seabed to me, like...
[Morizet] Stop, stop.
[Bonin] Looks like a spoon
sticking out of something, don't it?
Look at the shape of that.
[McGunnigle] I think it's a rock.
[Bonin] You got marine growth here.
-Yeah. -Looks like a piece of wood.
[Bound] I was gonna say it could be a heavy timber.
Could be a bit of planking.
It's true that the videos aren't extremely clear either,
but there's no wreck or ship to be seen.
[Morizet] I think there is no point to stay down here.
-[Bonin] Okay. -[Morizet] Yeah, I think, uh...
[Bonin] Continue the search.
[Morizet] Resume the search.
[Bound] There's no doubt about it.
We have a big debris field.
It's manmade, it's from the wreck.
[Vincent] So it's part of the vessel. Not the vessel.
[Bound] Yeah.
I felt a big crack in my head and in my heart.
I could hear Shackleton himself laughing his head off there
somewhere in the, in the background,
'cause we made fools of ourselves.
And suddenly, the clock that had stopped
just started again.
"Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick."
And we are back to racing against the clock.
[AUV engineer] Pull up!
[Bound] You know, these, these side-scans
really can play you false.
We have made huge mistakes before in the past.
We, we found the submarine, but we didn't recognize it.
We thought it was wrong. That was...
-[Shears] Uh, yes, yeah. -...an expensive mistake.
Mm. Sometimes things don't go right
for you in life, you know.
I think we've all faced that,
and it's coming back from that adversity
and in 2019, it was a nightmare.
Absolute nightmare.
You put in your blog, Mensun,
you said that we came back with our tail between our legs.
-[Bound] Oh, yeah. -I wouldn't have quite put it
in those words, but that's what...
-We did. -...that's what you said.
And here we are.
And if sometimes you have to fail to succeed.
[Worsley] We had food only for four weeks.
We had nothing to keep out the biting cold
save linen tents.
We are rusting and wasting our lives away
while the whole world is at war,
and we know nothing of how it goes.
[Shackleton] Owing to the shortage of food
and the fact that we needed all
that we could get for ourselves,
I had to order the dogs to be shot.
[dogs whimpering]
[Macklin] I shot Sirius today.
It went horribly against the grain
to put an end to this fine young animal,
which all the time was making joyous overtures to me.
My hand was shaking so much
that I had to use two cartridges
to finish him off.
Poor beast.
[Worsley] The youngest pups that had been born on board
were shot,
and so was Mrs. Chippy,
the carpenter's cat.
[Shackleton] There was not much fun in eating
the tough old dogs,
but the little puppies were tender.
[Hurley] A casual observer might think
the explorer a frozen-hearted individual,
especially if he noticed the mouths watering
when tears ought to be expected.
Hunger brings us all to the level of other species.
[Snow] On the 9th of April, their ice floe splits again,
and it's untenable.
They cannot live on these little slivers of ice,
and they take to the boats.
Getting into these open boats
is one of the most terrible things you can do.
[Worsley] Shackleton took command of one boat,
Hudson the smallest,
and I was in charge of the third.
[Greenstreet] Right from the very start,
we ran into trouble.
We were passing down a long, very wide lead,
Shackleton in the leading boat,
when we heard him shouting and pointing to port.
[rumbling]
I couldn't believe my eyes.
The ice was rushing towards us just like a tidal wave.
We shouted to the boat astern and pulled for our lives.
And both of us cleared the point of impact.
[Snow] The journey got very much
more difficult after that.
Men get terrible diarrhea,
their drinking water's contaminated,
their clothes are freezing solid on them.
Their feet are completely submerged
in freezing seawater.
[Shackleton] Hopes were running high
as to the noon observation for position.
Worsley snapped the sun.
It was a grievous disappointment.
[Bound] Rather than making progress,
they found to their absolute dismay
that they were 30 miles to the east
of where they'd started from.
[Snow] Just given the way the wind is pushing,
Elephant Island quite quickly becomes
the most obvious destination.
[Hurley] Sea and wind increase and have to draw up
onto an old, isolated floe and pray to God
it will remain entire throughout the night.
No sleep for 48 hours, all wet, cold, and miserable.
[Greenstreet] When we woke next morning,
there was a huge sea running.
The ice had all closed round us,
and we were being battered by the huge floes.
There seemed no chance of saving our lives.
Then, to make matters worse,
a crack appeared right through the center.
-[ice cracking] -We thought this the very end.
And we were, all of us,
at the point of shaking hands and saying,
"Well, cheerio, lads. This is the end.
A great game while it lasted."
When a miracle happened.
The ice started to recede from our floe
by some trick of the current
and left us in a big patch of open water.
Just one of these million-to-one chances
that sometimes come along at the right moment.
[Hussey] Shackleton was now very concerned
about the condition of many of his men.
All of us had swollen mouths
and found that we could hardly touch food.
[Shackleton] We were dreadfully thirsty now.
We found that we could get momentary relief
by chewing pieces of raw seal meat
and swallowing the blood.
But thirst came back with redoubled force,
owing to the saltiness of the flesh.
[Snow] They spot Elephant Island
in the afternoon.
They cannot risk approaching at night.
So they choose to tie the boats together
and wait out at sea.
[Macklin] I was seasick during this night
and very miserable,
sodden, frozen, and sick.
McLeod growled continually all night.
Men cursed each other,
and the sea, the boat and everything curseable.
[Bound] That is when Perce Blackborow
first got very bad frostbite on his toes.
[Snow] They're in a state of extraordinary misery.
Frank Wild said of that night that half of the expedition
were insane, helpless, and hopeless.
[Vincent] We have extended the search to the north
and for now we have found nothing.
Here, there is a part of the Endurance.
Okay? This is the only thing that we can say.
So now we have to do
the maximum of coverage in the minimum of time
and try to cover the entire search box.
[♪ intense music playing]
[beeping]
So what do we have to do to find the wreck?
[Leek] Oh, I don't know.
Huh? What else?
[sighs]
[Bound] So I discussed with the Falklands
Maritime Heritage Trust
about giving us an extension.
And, uh, they said yup,
we can take another 10 days on the charter.
But all depending on your judgment as captain
whether, uh, it's safe enough for us to stay on site.
I'm not opposed to that.
The ice dictates what needs to happen.
So, so we are thinking that we review it
on an hourly basis with you.
[Bengu] The only thing is,
I just have to make sure that we don't stay here
and become a, another Shackleton.
[chuckles]
[machinery whirring]
[indistinct chatter]
[Hurley] The coast of Elephant Island presented
a barrier of sheer cliff and glacier faces,
wild and savage beyond description.
[Greenstreet] You would never have recognized
the crowd of men that landed on Elephant Island
from those that got into the boats
a week previous, haggard and drawn,
split with frostbite from exposure.
We had aged 20 years in a week.
[Hurley] Many suffered from temporary aberration,
walking aimlessly about,
others shivering as with palsy.
[coughing, groaning]
[Shackleton] They were laughing uproariously,
picking up stones and letting handfuls of pebbles
trickle between their fingers,
like misers gloating over hoarded gold.
[Hurley] Conceive our joy on setting foot on solid earth
after 170 days of life
on a drifting ice floe.
[Greenstreet] The first thing to do was have a drink.
If I live to be a hundred, I shall never forget
the feeling of that hot drink
going down my throat.
I wished that I had a neck like a giraffe
so as to prolong that exquisite feeling.
[Worsley] "Thank God I haven't killed one of my men,"
Shackleton said in our first confidential talk
on Elephant Island.
Shackleton had always insisted
that the ultimate responsibility
for anything that befell us
was his and his only.
His attitude was almost patriarchal.
This may have accounted for the men's
unquestioning devotion to him.
[Hussey] Today, our first job was to build a house.
We piled up some rocks, turned the two small boats
upside down on top of them,
and packed ice and snow into the cracks.
It was a dreadful little hut. We had no light at first.
Then we made a little lamp
by stewing down some seal blubber
with a piece of twisted bandage for a wick.
The lamp burned with a tiny smoky flame
that only made the darkness seem darker.
[Bound] But Shackleton very quickly realized
that they couldn't stay.
It wasn't a place where the whalers went.
Nobody was going to rescue them there.
[Hurley] To remain meant death
from slow starvation or from exposure.
The situation was desperate.
But again, our leader rose to the occasion.
[Snow] He decides their only realistic way of escape
is to take with him five fit strong sailors
and then use the prevailing winds
to undertake an 800-mile journey
across the most terrifying stretch of ocean
on the planet, towards South Georgia,
where they can seek help and hopefully come back
and rescue everyone they've left behind.
[Worsley] "I'm afraid it's a forlorn hope," he said.
"I don't ask anyone to come
who has not thoroughly weighed the chances."
The moment he ceased speaking, every man volunteered.
Five of us were chosen.
[Snow] To give himself slightly better odds,
he did make some changes to the biggest
and most seaworthy of their lifeboats,
the James Caird.
He put extra planking on the side.
They covered some of the open boat with canvas.
They filled up the bottom of the boat with ballasts,
and they put the mast of one of the other boats
down the keel to stop it flexing so much.
[Hurley] April 23rd.
The Caird is nearing completion
and God willing leaves tomorrow.
[Worsley] It is a dreadful thing
to face your shipmates.
Men who have been through thick and thin with you.
And to realize that in all probability
it is for the last time.
And to know that if you fail to come back,
they will starve to death.
♪♪
[Hurley] By 12:30, the Caird hoisted sail
to three ringing cheers from the shore.
[Hussey] We all pretended to have high spirits
as we cheered and waved to our comrades.
Even though in our hearts, we felt strangely forlorn.
[Bonin] Woo!
[Morizet] Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold.
[Kerry Taylor] The ice is stopping it.
Just freezing.
[Shears] It was bitterly cold.
And the guys are working out there,
and they're not complaining, they're just getting on with it.
But, you know, they're getting tired,
and it's, um, and it takes it out of you.
[♪ intense music playing]
Come on, come on, come on.
Just a bit of debris...
with an arrow would be good.
[Shears] We're not finding anything at all.
And the temperatures are gonna go basically,
off a cliff in the next few days.
And we'll have to call the search off.
It's getting a bit,
sorta like disheartening now, isn't it?
-Yeah. -[Taylor] It's just like, pff.
Okay, we'll call that end of line now. Yeah?
[Onde] Okay. End of line.
So it was not there.
Y-you know, your hopes go sky-high,
and then, you know, it's like a right hook to the chin,
and, pompf, down you go.
[Bound] We are running out of days, aren't we?
-[Onde] Yeah. -[Morizet] Yeah.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Snow] On the 24th of April, Shackleton sets off,
and he wasn't a day too soon.
The following day,
Elephant Island was surrounded by ice.
They'd have been trapped there for another winter.
[Shackleton] The ocean south of Cape Horn
in the middle of May is known to be
the most tempestuous storm-swept area
of water in the world.
[waves crashing]
[boat creaking]
[Shackleton] So small was our boat
and so great were the seas that often our sail
flapped idly in the calm
between the crests of two waves.
[Worsley] A great sea would break over us,
pouring water in streams over everything
and making us feel we were under a waterfall.
[man groans]
Gradually, the constant soaking caused our legs and feet
to swell, turn white,
and lose all surface sensibility.
[Shackleton] Over on Elephant Island,
22 men were waiting for the relief
that we alone could secure for them.
Their plight was worse than ours.
[Hussey] Well, the hut was cramped
and dark and dirty,
and we were dark and dirty too.
We had no bread or biscuits
and sometimes days and days would go by
without seal or penguin appearing on the island.
I think that few people in the world
have been as hungry as we were and have survived.
[men coughing]
[Hurley] Life here is almost beyond endurance.
We pray that the Caird may reach South Georgia safely
and bring relief without delay.
[Snow] Worsley tells them the course
to steer if they want to hit South Georgia.
If they sailed past South Georgia,
there was nothing till the coast of Africa
thousands of miles ahead.
They would perish somewhere in the South Atlantic.
[Shackleton] At midnight, I was at the tiller
and suddenly noticed a line of clear sky.
I called to the other men that the sky was clearing.
And then a moment later, I realized that what I had seen
was the white crest of an enormous wave.
I shouted, "For God's sake, hold on!"
I had never encountered a wave so gigantic.
[wave roaring]
[men yelling]
But somehow the boat lived through it,
half full of water.
We bailed with the energy of men fighting for life.
Not until 3:00 a.m., when we were all chilled,
almost to the limit of endurance,
did we manage to get the stove alight
and make ourselves hot drinks.
[Snow] They started seeing some positive signs.
They saw seabirds
they knew didn't venture that far from land.
[Worsley] At 1 o'clock in the afternoon,
we saw the peaks of South Georgia straight ahead.
[Bound] But when they got to South Georgia,
they were on the wrong side of the island.
Where they wanted to be was the other side,
which is where the whaling stations were.
[Snow] Shackleton thought that Vincent
and McNish were at death's door.
He could not risk sailing all the way around South Georgia.
They stopped in the dying light
'cause they couldn't go in shore
without being able to see properly.
[Worsley] Suddenly, the wind shifted on shore
and increased to a gale
of the most extraordinary violence.
[Shackleton] The mast bent with the force of it,
and at one moment, we thought
it was going to snap.
[Worsley] The bow planks on each side opened and closed
so that long lines of water squirted into her.
[Shackleton] The chance of surviving
the night seemed small.
I think most of us had a feeling
that the end was very near.
Then, just when things looked their worst, they changed.
The wind suddenly shifted.
I have marveled often at the thin line
that divides success from failure
and the sudden turn that leads from certain disaster
to comparative safety.
[Snow] Then finally, on the 10th of May,
they threaded through some rocks.
They landed and they dragged themselves up the beach.
One more night at sea and they would've certainly perished.
It is remaining...
- Elusive. - Yep.
The light blue line is the area covered,
and the remaining large area is the south channel
on the next dive it will be most probably on this block
-and we start to move to the east.
And then what?
Do you think we are going to stay further to the south?
For the moment my order is
cover the box.
Okay.
[Bonin] This is it. We-- on this dive, right here,
we're gonna find the Endurance.
[Rabenstein] We have only a few days left.
Winter is coming.
Among all the people on board,
we started to discuss a lot
about how does Worsley know
where the sinking position was.
He just estimated.
He hadn't been able to get a site for three days before,
and it wasn't until the day after the ship sank
that he was able to get his next fix,
so what was the direction of drift in between?
That was the challenge.
[Rabenstein] We just came up with this idea now
during the cruise to use a dataset called ERA-20.
It's a big European project to, um, calculate the climate
and weather of the past 100 years
based on weather station data and physical models.
Then we calculated the drift trajectory,
uh, the Endurance might have had
around the 21st of November.
So then the sinking location would have been here
in the southern edge of the box.
In addition, John and me, we had the idea
to look into the meteorological observations
of Hussey from that day.
[Christian Katlein] The Hussey's observations are great
because they are real observations,
but they don't cover the night.
So I just threw the data into a model product
from re-analysis, which is basically a,
a weather model run backwards.
And actually we have quite some confidence
that between the 18th and the 22nd,
uh, the Endurance somehow went south.
That Worsley had no means of, of observing it.
So we do have to cover that southern part
of the search area in any case,
which is where you're pointing us to.
Nico, you're very quiet though.
You're just ingesting it all.
Yeah.
You know, I am like a old computer.
When I'm thinking too much, the screen freezing.
[all laugh]
[Caillens] Good?
[Vincent] For me, for the sub-sea operation point of view,
the real question is why we are discovering this now,
and not a year ago?
Thirty percent of the box left
and now he makes this wonderful flipping prediction.
If it's not in, i-i-i-it's not
in a place that we surveyed already.
So what he's basically said is it's somewhere
that we haven't surveyed or somewhere else.
Right. That-- i-it's is not a prediction.
I can make that prediction.
I didn't go to flipping university
and learn about flipping which ice goes best
in me gin and tonic.
[Bonin] What's our percentage complete now? Roughly?
[François Mace] Uh... 73%.
[Bonin] Starting to run out of some area here.
[Vincent] Now that we have, um,
a drift forecast, we have to link this
with the reality of the debris field that we have.
So if we apply the drift model
on the large area of debris of the wreck,
then the wreck might be anywhere from here to here.
But all this area has already been covered except...
[Bound] Except for that little spot there.
[Vincent] Except this little spot.
So we have to search on this area.
The more the days go by, the more I think,
"How can you be part of Shackleton's story and give up?"
[squawking]
[Snow] Shackleton was now
on the remote, uninhabited side
of one of the most isolated islands on earth.
He had to get round to the whaling stations.
[Shackleton] I realized that the condition,
particularly of McNish and Vincent,
would prevent us putting to sea again.
The alternative was to attempt crossing the island.
The island of South Georgia
had never been crossed by anybody.
The whalers regarded the country as inaccessible.
[Snow] Shackleton knew that the mountain crossing
was the desperate gamble of dying men.
[Shackleton] Worsley and Crean were coming with me,
and after consultation, we decided to leave
the sleeping bags behind
and make the journey in very light marching order.
[Worsley] Our equipment was three days' food
slung around our necks in a sock,
the old Primus lamp,
an ax to cut steps in the ice, my little compass,
and a blueprint map of South Georgia.
[Shackleton] The carpenter assisted me
by putting several screws in the sole of each boot,
providing a grip on the ice.
[Snow] He decided to make a nonstop march
as soon as the weather was clear.
Life on Elephant Island was grim.
The men suffered terribly.
[Greenstreet] Very often, we were almost down
to our last meal when something would turn up.
A seal or some storm-driven penguins
and we were safe again for a few days.
[Macklin] Today, McIlroy operated
on Blackborow,
amputating all toes of the left foot.
We managed to sterilize instruments pretty well.
We had no sterilized overalls to get into.
We merely stripped to our vest.
[Greenstreet] I was one of the few who witnessed
the operation, and it was most interesting.
The poor beggar behaved splendidly,
and it went through without a hitch.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Worsley] At 2:00 a.m. on Friday, May the 19th,
the weather was fine and clear,
and the moon was shining brilliantly.
Shackleton said, "We will start now, Skipper."
[Snow] Shackleton insists on breaking trail,
being the first to go through the snow
so others behind would have an easier trek.
[Shackleton] After two hours steady climbing,
we were 2,500 feet above sea level.
The bright moonlight showed us
that the interior was broken tremendously.
Then, as daylight came, the fog thinned and lifted.
[Worsley] With the complete clearance of the mist,
we saw, to our sharp disappointment,
what we had taken for a frozen lake
was an arm of the sea.
[Shackleton] So we retraced our steps down the long slope
that had taken us three hours to climb.
[Worsley] Shackleton said, grimly,
"We shall have to go on to the next, boys."
This happened three times.
[Shackleton] We had now been
on the march for over 20 hours,
only halting for our occasional meals.
[Snow] At one point, Crean and Worsley
dropped off to sleep during one of their pauses.
Shackleton says he had this irresistible urge
to join them in sleep,
but he knew that sleep meant death.
[Shackleton] After five minutes, I shook them
into consciousness again,
told them that they had slept for half an hour,
and gave the word for a fresh start.
[Snow] And then, on the night
of the 19th of May,
they were high up in the mountains
and they realized they were gonna die.
It was far too cold and exposed up there.
[Worsley] The situation looked grim enough.
Fog cut off our retreat. Darkness covered our advance.
It was useless to continue in this fashion.
Shackleton said, "We've got to take a risk.
We'll slide."
Slide down what was practically a precipice
to meet... what?
Still, it was the only way.
Shackleton sat on the large step he had carved,
and I sat behind him.
Crean did the same with me
so that we were locked together as one.
Then Shackleton kicked off.
We seemed to shoot into space.
[Snow] They simply tobogganed off
into the unknown.
[snow scraping]
[♪ intense music playing]
[Worsley] We finished in a snow bank.
We had shot down a mile in two or three minutes.
We picked ourselves up and shook hands all round.
"It's not good to do that kind of thing too often,"
said Shackleton.
[Shackleton] At 6:30 a.m.,
I thought I heard the sound of a steam whistle.
I dared not be certain.
[Worsley] Seven o'clock came,
and we listened intently.
Then, clear across the mountains
in the still morning air
came the sound of steam whistles
of the whaling factories bidding the men.
It was the first signal of civilization
that we had heard for nearly two years.
[Worsley] Our old friend, Captain Sørlle,
who had entertained us two years previously
when the expedition had touched Stromness Bay,
failed to recognize us as we stood on his doorstep.
[Shackleton] I said, my name is Shackleton.
He was extremely pleased to see us
and at once took us into his house.
We had baths, our beards came off,
and we felt like human beings once again.
[Snow] The very following day,
Worsley went round in a small steam ship
to pick up the other three men
who were still on the west side of South Georgia.
[Shackleton] On the Tuesday, we started out
in the same whaler
to try and reach my comrades on Elephant Island.
[Worsley] We met the pack ice 60 miles north
of the island.
To attempt to force the unprotected steel whaler
through the masses of pack ice
would have been suicidal.
[Shackleton] To admit failure at this stage was hard,
but the facts had to be faced.
[machinery rumbling]
[whirring]
[Leek] [on radio] Thrusters enabled, all yours.
Copy.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[McGunnigle] Today's the day.
And if it's not, maybe tomorrow.
[indistinct]
[whirring]
It's sad that we don't found her yet,
but, uh, yeah, there is still five boxes remaining.
[Schapman] So our next mission will be D10
and D09.
[Lars Lundberg] If the ice had been more stationary,
it could work, but there's, as it--
[McGunnigle] Come on.
Oh, yeah. Oh, come on, Ellie.
Come on, give us more. Give us more.
-[Schapman laughs] -Give us more.
It's got some height.
[Schapman] Yeah, yeah.
[McGunnigle] It's got some height.
Nico?
-[Vincent] Go ahead. -Can you join us
in the survey room, please?
[Vincent] Yes.
That's the Endurance.
[Schapman] That's really interesting.
-[McGunnigle] Morning, Nico! -Morning. How are you? You okay?
I'm good. Another beautiful day.
[all chuckle]
[Bonin] There you go, my friend.
That's a beauty.
[Bonin] There you go, my friend.
[Vincent] I suggest that we have a dive with camera.
[Bonin] Verification.
John Shears, John Shears, John Shears, Nico.
[Shears] [on radio] Nico, Nico, go ahead.
Yes, please. John, could you join me on the bridge?
And if you find Mensun, could you come
with Mensun on the bridge please?
[Shears] Okay, I'll come straight up.
[Vincent] Yes, please bring your,
bring your Mensun with you, please.
[♪ pensive music playing]
[Snow] Shackleton made not one,
not two, not three but four attempts to get back
to Elephant Island to rescue his men.
He was turned back by storms and frozen seas.
[Worsley] The wear and tear of this period was dreadful.
In those four terrible months,
I saw deep lines appear in his face,
and his hair turned gray.
On the fourth attempt, the Chilean government
came nobly to the rescue.
They lent Shackleton the little steamer Yelcho.
[Shackleton] This time, providence favored us.
I found as we neared Elephant Island
that the ice was open.
[Hussey] We were sitting down to a magnificent meal
of old seal bones, seaweed, and limpets
when, from the man on duty outside,
we heard a sudden yell.
"Wild!" he shouted, "Wild! There's a, there's a ship.
Haven't we better light a flare?"
We forgot all about our wonderful meal.
We made one dive for the door.
Those who couldn't get through the door
went through the sides,
and the wonderful meal was kicked over in the rush.
[Snow] Suddenly, everyone ran down the beach
waving and shouting ecstatically.
Shackleton used his binoculars to count the number of men.
Only when he was certain he'd counted
all the right number of people
could he relax and know
not a man would be left behind.
[Worsley] He put his glasses back
in their case and turned to me.
It sounds trite, but years literally seemed
to drop from him as he stood before us.
I woke up this morning saying, today's the day.
-[Schapman] Yeah... -I can smell it.
-[Morizet] Yeah. -[laughter]
Come on, you say that every day.
[all laughing]
-Good time? -[Shears] Yeah, yeah.
-[Vincent] Hey, Mensun. -[Bound] Hey, Nico.
-[Vincent] So Mensun, John... -[Bound] Yeah.
...I would like to introduce the Endurance.
Ohh, yes! Oh!
-Oh! -Brilliant.
Absolutely brilliant.
-Well done! Yeah! -Oh, my gosh.
I was saying, I was saying to Mensun on the ice.
I said it was gonna be a good day.
The way you were looking, I thought,
"They've lost the AUV."
That's what I thought.
Big kiss.
[all cheering and applauding]
Good morning!
[Onde] It's so beautiful! Oh, my goodness, I can't believe it!
[Snow] The AUV has been broadcasting back
the first images from the seabed,
and Endurance looks unbelievable.
It's all in one piece.
Researchers made
a stunning discovery.
The ship Endurance finally found.
It's the most extraordinary find.
The Endurance was found at 3008 meters under the sea.
[news reporter] It's a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
[cheering continues]
One of the biggest deep-sea mysteries of our time
finally solved.
[Shears] My grandmother... oh, she'd be, uh,
she'd be so proud.
So, so proud.
And so, so...
So part of what I do is, um,
is that sort of inspiration from, from her.
From, uh, Gram.
[Shackleton] We were given a welcome
none of us is likely to forget.
[crowd cheering]
[Worsley] The Chileans cheered us,
and we cheered ourselves hoarse in reply.
When we landed, they welcomed us so heartily
that they nearly pushed us into the sea again.
[Hussey] Shackleton's last journey into the Antarctic
was a failure,
but it was a glorious failure.
[Shears] That's Shackleton's cabin there,
right there.
Oh, wow, we got the binnacle right there.
Oh, my God, the compass guard, you can see it.
-[Vincent] Yeah. -[Shears ] The tin mug.
-[Vincent] Yeah. -[Shears] Plates.
[Bound] Plates. Oh, and there's the flare gun.
-[Pierre Le Gall] Yes. -[Shears] Wow.
-[Le Gall] Yeah. There's a boot. -[Bound] The boot.
Yeah, you see, it's even got the buckle. Right there.
And if you look at the picture,
conceivably, that could be Wild's boot.
Look at that. Identical, isn't it?
[Shears] You must be very, very proud of your guys, Nico.
-Yeah, I am. -[Shears] This is incredible.
Shackleton said that when you go to the poles
you're touch by a kind of magic,
and you're changed forever.
[♪ poignant music playing]
[Shackleton] We lived long, dark days in the south.
We lived through slow dead days of toil,
of struggle, dark striving, and anxiety,
days that called not for the heroism
in the bright light of day,
but simply for dogged, persistent endeavor
to do what the soul said was right.
I return to the wild again and again
until I suppose, in the end, the wild will win.
There is the fascination of striving
after the almost impossible.
[Snow] When they got back,
the First World War was raging.
It just wasn't appropriate for Shackleton
to have his moment in the sun.
Nearly all of them signed up
for military service straight away.
Tragically, two of them are killed.
Several others are badly wounded.
Shackleton himself joined the military
in a logistics role.
[Bound] When the war ended,
he finally had his moment.
He began touring and lecturing.
The film South was released, and it was a great success.
[Snow] Shackleton had one more expedition left in him,
and in 1921, he went back to South Georgia,
but he died of a heart attack in early 1922.
[Bound] It is an old cliché
that Shackleton never achieved any of the things
that he set out to do.
And it's true, he didn't.
But that was not what Shackleton was about.
Shackleton was about man's urge
to be always pushing to expand his boundaries,
always striving for the next thing,
always reaching for the horizon.
That was Shackleton.
[Shears] Shackleton was buried here
on the 5th of March, 1922.
And exactly a hundred years later,
on the 5th of March, 2022,
we found his ship, the Endurance,
on the seafloor of the Weddell Sea.
I think Sir Ernest
would be amazed and probably also rather jealous
of what we have achieved and slap our backs and laugh
and applaud loudly our efforts as a team.
When you walk away from here,
reflect on what you've done and remember,
we're a symbol of how people can achieve
the greatest of challenges if they trust and work together.
[♪ solemn music playing]
[♪ dramatic music playing]
♪♪