Endurance 1915
Marker: recorded wreck position (First World War).
Key facts
| Name | Endurance | Wikidata label |
|---|---|---|
| Year lost | 1915 | English Wikipedia lead text (year following a loss verb, parsed) |
| Era | First World War | derived from year |
| Ship type | barquentine | Wikidata P31 instance of |
| Nationality / flag | United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland | Wikidata P8047 country of registry |
| Sea / ocean | SOUTHERN OCEAN | Natural Earth marine areas (public domain), point-in-polygon |
| Position | -68.6980, -52.4440 | Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0) |
About the wreck
Endurance was the three-masted barquentine in which Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men sailed for the Antarctic on the 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The ship, originally named Polaris, was built at Framnæs shipyard and launched in 1912 from Sandefjord in Norway. When one of her commissioners, the Belgian Adrien de Gerlache, went bankrupt, the remaining one sold the ship for less than the shipyard had charged – but as Lars Christensen was the owner of Polaris, as well as of the yard, there was no hardship involved. The ship was bought by Shackleton in January 1914 for the expedition, which would be her first voyage. A year later, she became trapped in pack ice and finally sank in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica on 21 November 1915. All of the crew survived her sinking and were eventually rescued in 1916 after using the ship's boats to travel to Elephant Island and Shackleton, the ship's captain Frank Worsley, and four others made a voyage to seek help.
The wreck of Endurance was discovered on 5 March 2022, nearly 107 years after she sank, by the search team Endurance22.
Diving & visiting
In 1998, wreckage found at Stinker Point on the southwestern side of Elephant Island was incorrectly identified as flotsam from the ship. It instead was from the 1877 wreck of the Connecticut sealing ship Charles Shearer. In 2001, wreck hunter David Mearns unsuccessfully planned an expedition to find the wreck of Endurance. By 2003, two rival groups were making plans for an expedition to find the wreck, but no expedition was mounted at the time.
In 2010, Mearns announced a new plan to search for the wreck. The plan was sponsored by the National Geographic Society but was subject to finding sponsorship for the balance of the US$10 million estimated cost.
The wreck of Endurance was discovered on 5 March 2022.
Location
- Recorded position: -68.6980, -52.4440 (Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0); may be approximate)
- Sea / ocean: SOUTHERN OCEAN
Wreck positions on this site are for interest only and are not for navigation. Many wrecks are war graves or legally protected: never disturb human remains or remove artefacts, and check local law before diving.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Endurance (1912 ship) (revision 1377314009), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section and section(s) “Wreck”, “Discovery”; condensed by selecting paragraphs and trimming at sentence boundaries; citations and formatting removed. No text added. This excerpt is available under the same licence.
Wreck facts from Wikidata (CC0).
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