By: Sarah Smellie
ST. JOHN’S (CP) – The wreck of the last ship belonging to Sir Ernest Shackleton, the famed Irish explorer of Antarctica, has been found off the coast of Labrador by an international team led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
The Quest was found using sonar scans on Sunday evening, sitting on its keel under 390 metres of churning, frigid water. Its towering mast is lying broken beside it, likely cracked off as the vessel was sucked into the depths after it struck ice on May 5, 1962.
Shackleton’s death aboard the ship in 1922 marked the end of what historians consider the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration. The explorer led three British expeditions to the Antarctic, and he was in the early stages of a fourth when he died. He was 47.
The Quest’s discovery was “profoundly moving,” said John Geiger, leader of the Shackleton Quest Expedition. “It’s just such a great story. It links Canada to this most-famous-of-all polar explorers.”
Geiger said Shackleton had planned to take Quest on an expedition to Canada’s High Arctic, but the federal government at the time axed the trip. That’s when the explorer decided to head back to Antarctica for a fourth time.
Renowned shipwreck hunter David Mearns, the expedition’s search director, said it was his responsibility to interpret the sonar images and declare whether the long-sought vessel had truly been found.
“To be part of that, to be able to deliver that, is a huge privilege in my life,” he said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening, shortly after he and the crew docked in St. John’s, N.L.
The jubilant voices of about 12 of his fellow explorers could be heard in the background, sometimes overtaking his voice.
“They’re all very, very happy,” Mearns said. “I think that feeling is going to spread in certain parts around the world.”
Geiger, who is also chief executive officer of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, said the discovery in the Labrador Sea came as the expedition entered its fifth day, just as doubts were setting in about a mission already beset by technical difficulties.
The 23-person crew lost the first few days trying to fix the problems, and there was a small window in which conditions were expected to be good.
When they finally got the sonar vehicle in the water Sunday, the search moved slowly.
“Sixteen hours went by, there’s nothing, just a very smooth ocean floor,” Geiger said in an interview Tuesday. “Our technician was looking away from the screen, I just happened to be looking at it, and suddenly, unmistakably, a ship appears in the sonar data.”
“Suddenly, it goes from this sense of, ‘Oh God, I’m not sure this is going to work,’ to this sense of exhilaration.”
It was Mearns’s job to be more skeptical.
“They were all shaking hands and high-fiving, and I refused to shake anybody’s hand until we had the last pass over,” Mearns said. “And then I said, ‘Okay, yeah, that’s the Quest.'”
The Norwegian-built ship, used for Arctic research and sealing after Shackleton’s death, appears to be in “incredible condition,” though it was damaged when it slammed into the seabed, Geiger said.
Now that it has been found, the next step will be sending down remotely operated vehicles to capture images of its remains.
