A century after Endurance sank, modern explorers found the ship intact, as if it were waiting 107 years for its sailors to return

Photos: Falklands MaritimeHeritage Trust / National Geographic, Esther Horvath

If you ever wanted to hide something huge and make sure no one would ever find it, you couldn’t pick a better place than the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

Off the coast of Antarctica, the Weddell Sea is a far-out frozenness where nobody finds anything except seals and penguins and subzero weather that covers your beard in icicles and makes you wish you’d stayed home.

That’s where polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance finally went down to the bottom, back in 1915, after being stranded and locked in ice floes for several months. In all the years since, although the entire crew survived, the world wondered whether the supposedly indestructible ship that sank in those forbidding waters would ever be found.

Perhaps some fragments, broken pieces of hull or mast might someday be discovered to tell a partial tale, at least provide a clue, to the fate of that vessel, built specifically to withstand the harsh Antarctic conditions.

The place where Endurance went down lies some 1,473 miles from Punta Arenas, the southernmost tip of South America. The nearest non-postal zones bear names like Elephant Island, South Georgia, Queen Maud Land, King Haakon VII Sea, and the least hospitable address of all — the South Pole.

And if you ever managed to get there — and there means an area of a million square miles — locating the wreck would seem like a hopeless endeavor. Because Endurance sank to a depth of 9,024 feet, at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

Yet if you’re an adventurer obsessed with the drama of shipwrecks and drawn to the sheer power and energy of the open seas, you’ll keep looking. And that’s what happened on March 5, 2022, with a remarkable expedition named Endurance22. The Endurance was finally found, almost all of it intact and preserved in its dark, frigid underwater grave.

But that’s the end of the story. The beginning starts in 1914, with polar explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which would be known to history by the name of his ship — “the Endurance Expedition.”