102 years after the death of Sir Ernest Shackleton The ship on board which the famous British explorer of Irish origin made his last voyage to try to reach Antarctica has been found. The vessel, called “Quest”was located on the ocean floor off the coast of Newfoundland, in Canada. Shackleton suffered a fatal heart attack on board on January 5, 1922. His death marked the end of what some historians call the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, but the ship remained in service untilsinkingwhich occurred in 1962.
The discovery of the wreck of the ship on which Shackleton died
The remains of the Quest, a 38 meter long steamer, were found at the bottom of the Labrador Sea, a northern arm of the Atlantic Ocean. The discovery occurred at a depth of 390 meters thanks to sonar equipment used by a team of researchers from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS).
The wreck is found almost in a vertical position, lying on a seabed that in the past had been eroded by the passage of icebergs. The mainmast appears broken and leaning on the port side, but otherwise the ship appears to be substantially intact.
The finding was the result of months of careful research and analysis by expedition members aboard the research vessel LeeWay Odyssey, from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway. They consulted logbooks, newspaper clippings and legal documents, cross-referencing them with historical weather and ice data to determine with a high degree of accuracy where the Quest rests on the seabed. The investigation was sponsored by Alexandra Shackleton, the explorer’s niece.
“At the moment we have no intention of touching the wreck – Antoine Normandin, director of research, explained to the BBC – It is located in an area already protected for wildlife, so no one should touch it. We hope to return to photograph it with a remotely piloted vehicle, to really understand its status”.
“Quest”: a ship rich in history
The Shackleton-Rowett expedition left London on 17 September 1921. Shackleton told the Evening Standard that this voyage would be his “swansong”. That statement was prophetic: in the early hours of January 5, 1922, while the Quest was anchored in the port of Grytvikenon the island of South Georgia, in the South Atlantic, Shackleton died in his cabin of a massive heart attack, aged 47. After six months, the Quest returned to London, where she was sold to the Norwegian Schjelderup family and used as a fishing vessel.
That may have been the last time the world heard of the Quest, but fate had other plans. The vessel, in fact, appears several times in the annals of the history of polar exploration in the early twentieth century. At the start of the Second World War, she was requisitioned by the Royal Canadian Navy to ferry coal from Sydney to Halifax. Later in the same year she was refitted as a minesweeper, but plans changed and she was used for water supply in England.
On April 1, 1962, while stuck in the ice of the Labrador Sea, she was crushed with such force that she broke the deck bolts in the engine room and buckled the cabin doors. On the morning of May 5, water invaded the Quest’s engines, and her captain, Olav Johannessen, made the call to abandon ship. The crew, some of the cargo and valuables were evacuated to nearby ships and at 5.40pm the Quest sank. In a telegram to the ship’s owners in Norway, Johannessen noted the final position: 53’10 N, 54’27 W.
A similar fate had befallen another legendary Shackleton ship, the Endurance, in the ill-fated Transantarctic Expedition of 1914-1917. The remains of the sailing ship, crushed by the ice of Antarctica in the winter of 1915 and sank at around 3,000 meters deep, they were found in March 2022.
