The discovery of Ernest Shackleton’s ship the Endurance in pristine condition at the bottom of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea was one of the few good news stories this month.
It marked the coming together of modern stories of technological and logistical achievement with older tales of exploration and struggle. Located 3,000 metres down, 107 years after it was crushed by ice, finding the Endurance was a significant moment in polar history.
As a result of his egalitarian leadership style and the fact he “never lost a man”, Ernest Shackleton is one of the most admired explorers of Antarctica’s “heroic age”. This spanned a 20-year period of intense exploration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that became most famous for the race to the South Pole between Britain’s Captain Robert Scott and Norway’s [Roald Amundsen] in the summer of 1911.
