Quest, the schooner-rigged boat that belonged to the celebrated Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton when he made his final voyage, has been discovered at a depth of 390m in the Labrador Sea off eastern Canada.
Forty years before Quest sank at this location after being crushed by sea-ice, Shackleton had suffered a fatal heart attack on the vessel while at the southern end of the Atlantic Ocean. He had been heading to Antarctica, and his death is regarded as having ended the “heroic age of polar exploration”. The wreck’s discovery comes in the 150th anniversary year of Shackleton’s birth.
The 33m boat had been built as Foca 1 in Norway in 1917. Shackleton bought it for £11,000 and fitted it out as an expedition vessel in Southampton, renaming it Quest.
He had originally planned to use it for an Arctic expedition, but when the Canadian government U-turned on this at the last moment he decided to head to Antarctica instead for what would be his fourth foray there: the Shackleton-Rowett expedition of 1921/2.
John Quiller Rowett funded the voyage, and his grandson Jan Chojecki was on the recent expedition to locate Quest, as was Norwegian Tore Topp, part of the Schjelderup family that ran the boat mainly as a seal-hunter between 1923 and 1962.
Quest would finally sink on 5 May, 1962 north-west of St John’s and east of Battle Harbour, Labrador.
“Finding Quest is one of the final chapters in the extraordinary story of Sir Ernest Shackleton,” said the CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) John Geiger, who led the expedition that located the vessel on 9 June.
“Shackleton was known for his courage and brilliance as a leader in times of crisis. The tragic irony is that his was the only death to take place on any of the ships under his direct command.”
Wreck-hunting team
The wreck-hunting team spent months analysing and cross-referencing ships’ logs, news reports and legal documents with historic weather and ice data before feeling confident that they could locate Quest.
Among them was UK-based David Mearns as search director, lead researcher Antoine Normandin and other experts from Canada as well as the USA, UK and Norway. For the expedition they used the research vessel LeeWay Odyssey, with scanning equipment operated by experts from the Marine Institute at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
They found the wreck upright and intact, the scan revealing Quest’s prominent bow, its intact aluminium wheelhouse and its foremast lying perpendicular to the hull.
“I can definitively confirm that we have found the wreck of Quest,” reported Mearns. “Data from high-resolution side-scan sonar imagery corresponds exactly with the known dimensions and structural features of this special ship, and is also consistent with events at the time of the sinking.”
Quest had left London in mid-September, 1921 on what Shackleton had presciently said would be his ‘swansong’ voyage, but he found the long Atlantic crossing marred by engine problems stressful.
The vessel was anchored at Grytviken on South Georgia Island on 5 January, 1922 when the 47-year-old Anglo-Irish explorer suffered a cardiac arrest in his cabin in the early hours.
He was buried on South Georgia and the expedition continued for the next six months. Quest then reverted to Norwegian ownership, working for the Schjelderup business.
Quest’s next 40 years
At the start of WW2 the Royal Canadian Navy requisitioned the boat to ferry coal between ports in Nova Scotia before refitting it as a minesweeper, but in the end Quest saw out the war supplying water in England.
In 1947 it was rebuilt, extended to 36m with new radio and navigation gear and an upgraded engine and returned to seal-hunting off Norway.
Geir Klover, director of Norway’s Fram Museum, has pointed out that Quest “continued to make history long after Shackleton, including exploratory work and dramatic rescue missions in the high Arctic. Its work as a sealer was also often high stakes”.
On 1 April, 1962 the vessel was operating in the Labrador Sea when it became stuck in ice that over time crushed it until, on 5 May, leaking water flooded the engines and the crew abandoned ship.
Quest sank at a reported 53’10 N, 54’27 W, though this position had not been trusted by the RCGS team because of the prevailing foggy conditions.
However, their research eventually established that rescue ships that picked up Captain Olav Johannessen and crew-members would have been using the LORAN long-range navigation system, a WW2-era precursor to GPS considered accurate to within one nautical mile.
Johannessen’s readings would have been made only once he was on the rescue vessel, so could be considered more accurate than had previously been supposed.
The team set out to sonar-scan a 24sq nautical mile grid but a series of mechanical problems on their five-day expedition left them with only a 24-hour window to find the wreck.
They took it to the wire – almost 18 hours had passed on 9 June before Quest showed up on the screens – about 1.35 nautical miles from the position its captain had logged.
The wreck lies in the traditional waters of the Mi’kmaq, Innu and Inuit people and Chief Mi’sel Joe of the Miawpukek First Nation was an expedition co-patron, as was Alexandra Shackleton, the explorer’s grand-daughter. The team now plan to return to the site to carry out a detailed ROV survey.
Also on Divernet: SHACKLETON’S ENDURANCE SHIPWRECK FOUND INTACT, ENDURANCE TO BE PROTECTED FROM TREASURE-HUNTERS, ENDURANCE EXPOSED TO DEEP-SEA TREASURE-HUNTERS
