Ernest Shackleton’s endurance ship is not as solid as we thought, according to a researcher: NPR

And if one of the most famous and formidable antarctic exploration ships in history, the story of the crew and survival of the crew has been told for more than a century, was not as strong as legend claimed it?

A new research document on the Endurance ship is casting doubts about certain current beliefs concerning the ship of the Explorer Ernest Shackleton, in particular according to which it was one of the best built ships of his time and that he sank due to the loss of his rudder after being trapped in sea ice in 1915.

“None of that is true,” said Jukka Tuhkuri, author of the article and professor at Aalto University in Finland, where he studied sea ice and Arctic technology. “It was not a solid ship compared to the other ships of his time, and he did not flow because of the rudder.”

Tuhkuri has conducted scientific research on ice on board the 2022 expedition which has located the wreckage of endurance. The trip made him curious to know why the ship sank. He spent the years that followed a technical analysis and browsing historical documents, in particular the drawings of the ship, photographs and personal letters.

His article, published Monday in the journal Polar recordargues that endurance presented several structural defects which made him poorly adapted to the freezing conditions of polar exploration and that Shackleton was aware of his weaknesses.

Shackleton alluded to the ship’s faults in a letter to his wife, where he wrote that endurance was “not as solid as (his previous ship) Nimrod in terms of construction” and that he “would exchange it for old Nimrod any day now, except for comfort”. Shackleton and his crew went to less than 97 miles from the South Pole during the Nimrod expedition from 1907 to 1909.

Design defects have condemned endurance, affirms an article

According to Tuhkuri, Endurance was originally called Polaris and was created for Arctic Tourism before Shackleton bought it to use it for polar exploration. The ship was built to withstand the collisions with the ice cords on the edge of the ice cream, where you could find polar bears hunting.

“But Shackleton took him to the ice floe that exercises compression charges on the hull,” said Tuhkuri. “And this is a different type of load, and this requires different details in the hull, and these were not there.”

In 1914, Shackleton led an expedition of 27 men in two ships – Endurance and Aurora – in Antarctic in order to cross the continent by land. Shackleton and the endurance crew sailed on one side, while Aurora went to the other.

But before endurance could reach the shore, he found himself stuck in a dense sea ice in January 1915, leaving the ship and its crew blocked. The men lived on the frozen ship in the Weddell Sea for months, but were finally forced to abandon it in October, taking away rescue canoes and a small amount of supplies. The endurance sank on November 21, 1915. Shackleton and all the members of the endurance crew finally managed to get in safety and survived. (All the men of Aurora, except three, were saved.)

The ship was crushed by ice

Sea ice cream is not a flat coin of frozen water, according to Tuhkuri, but rather a “mosaic” of banquards of different sizes pushed by the wind and the currents in a “constant and disorderly movement”. The endurance derived in the frozen ice cream for a while, but ultimately the changes in the ice compressed the ship and finally sank it, he said.

Tuhkuri said that endurance had pine bridge beams and weaker oak and pine frames than other comparable ships of the time. But some design choices have also made the shell of the vulnerable ship, he explained. The long machine room weakened it and the shell lacked diagonal support beams found on other polar exploration ships.

Tuhkuri also noted that even if the damage to the rudder caused a leak in the ship, the members of the crew managed to keep it under control; The most important damage caused to endurance was the “tear of the keel (the structural backbone which runs along the bottom of the ship), which broke the ship in two halves,” he wrote.

Tuhkuri said he didn’t want to harm Shackleton’s trip but rather add a new detail to the historic file.

As he writes towards the end of his article: “Perhaps endurance was a strong and heroic ship in the poetic sense; In the technical sense, unfortunately, this was not the case. »»