Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, recently discovered beneath Antarctic ice by a Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust (FMHT) expedition, could now fall prey to plundering by “rogue organisations”, according to exploration director Mensun Bound.
The exciting discovery of the famous vessel was described on Divernet on 9 March. But now Bound has told Metro.co.uk of his concerns that treasure-hunters could attempt to access Endurance after his team’s activities revealed its approximate location – even though it lies in icy seas at a depth of 3km.
Crushed by sea ice in 1915, the wreck was discovered some 6km south of the position originally recorded by Captain Frank Worsley.
Bound expressed his fears that the perfectly preserved artefacts on board were vulnerable to ending up on display in “Las Vegas hotels”, in the sort of “help-yourself” situation that had occurred in the years after Robert Ballard’s 1985 discovery of the even deeper-lying Titanic.
The Endurance crew had evacuated their ship hurriedly as it flooded, leaving everything in their cabins, said Bound. He referred to “a huge amount of the personal effects of the people on board… just sitting there in the bunk-rooms where they left them – books, suitcases full of stuff, drawers full of things”.
Russian submarines
Bound conceded that nowadays little could be done to prevent wreck interference: “How do you protect something in the middle of the Weddell Sea under the ice? Anybody with a few Russian submarines or something could go down there.”
However, he preferred to hope that in the future a “right-thinking” archaeological organisation might access the wreck to help maintain or even restore it as an educational site.
The Endurance22 expedition team, which included historian and documentary-maker Dan Snow, had addressed a large international audience of school-children as the result of its outreach programme. “Our purposes were entirely scientific, archaeological, historical and educational… we took on Dan Snow and History Hit because we knew they could get the story out in a way we couldn’t,” said Bound.
Also speaking to Metro.co.uk, Snow said that it would be far more cost-effective to share the underwater reality of Endurance with the public through new technology than to attempt to raise and conserve the ship.
“The 3D laser-scanning is mind-blowing and will allow millimetre-accurate models to be produced, which people can explore with headsets,” he said, predicting “a photo-real quality that will make it like no other shipwreck you’ve ever seen”.
He said he believed that in future the Endurance discovery would have “a huge impact on how we engage with subsea heritage”.
Mensun Bound worked with treasure hunters before, so that one is a ship that had already sailed on.