Marine archaeologist Mensun Bound has witnessed great works of art lying on the seabed and chests overflowing with treasure but says, “nothing compares with finding the Endurance....”
In an interview with The Irish Examiner, Bound says he can still recall that “hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling” when he observed the video of Ernest Shackleton’s most famous ship, filmed at a depth of 3,008 metres in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea.
“My first view was of the stern of the ship, and then there was the rudder which had given them so many problems, lying in the mud innocently, but we could clearly see the damage it had sustained,” Bound told newspaper, recalling the first submersible images from three miles down on March 5th, 2022.
Ernest Shackleton’s most famous ship, Endurance filmed at a depth of 3,008 metres in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea
The Falklands-born archaeologist, who is due to speak at the Shackleton Autumn School in Athy, Co Kildare on Saturday (Oct 29), described seeing “the ship’s name arching over the stern, and the camera rose higher to capture the ship’s wheel, and higher again to film the portholes of Shackleton’s cabin....it was quite surreal”.
Just a fortnight before, he and an international team on board the South African icebreaking polar supply and research ship SA Agulhas II has fallen into a collective depression over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“We may have been thousands of miles away and off the charts, but we weren’t immune to world news. And then, all of a sudden there was this very positive thing, where the clouds seemed to peel back and the sun came out for a brief time, and Dan Snow, our historian on board, was speaking to millions of people around the world...”
A fifth generation Falkland islander who grew up, as he says, “bringing peat in for fires on a horse and cart”, Bound has discovered many of the world’s best known shipwrecks.
Many artefacts he recovered are on exhibition in over a dozen museums around the world. The Discovery Channel, which nicknamed him the “Indiana Jones of the Deep”, commissioned a four-part series on his work, entitled Lost Ships.
He began his career in underwater archaeology in Turkey with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. He founded the first academic unit for maritime archaeology in England, and from 1992 to 2013 was the Triton Fellow in Maritime Archaeology at St Peter’s College, Oxford University.
Among his expeditions have been location of the Campese Bay wreck off Giglio in Italy, which filled vital knowledge gaps on the Etruscan trade around 600 BC; and recovery of intact porcelain from the Hoi An ship, which was wrecked in the South China Sea in the mid 15th century.
He has surveyed Lord Nelson’s ship, Agamemnon, he located the first world war German wreck of the Scharnhorst off the Falkland islands; and he was involved in several expeditions to the battle cruiser Admiral Graf Spee, a symbol of German might, which was scuttled off Uruguay in 1939.
Coming from the Falklands, he had been a Shackleton enthusiast from a very young age. “The Boss” had been to the Falklands several times. On at least one visit, Shackleton, Tom Crean, and the captain of the Endurance, Frank Worsley, had stayed at a boarding house run by Bound’s great-great-uncle, Vincent Biggs and left their signatures in its guest book.
However, when the idea of an expedition to search for the Endurance was mentioned over a coffee in London’s South Kensington just over a decade ago, Bound wasn’t too keen.
Read more in The Irish Examiner HERE
The Ship Beneath the Ice: the Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance by Mensun Bound is published by Macmillan on October 27th
Bound is speaking at the Shackleton Autumn School in Athy, Co Kildare on Saturday, October 29th. Further details are on www.shackletonmuseum.com
