Sir Ernest Shackleton is shown as he arrived in New York aboard the Aquitania on a hasty business trip to Canada in January 1921. The remains of the famous Antarctic explorer’s last ship were found by an international team offshore Canada led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
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ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland – The last shipwreck belongs Sir Ernest Shackleton, a famous Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer, has been found off the coast of Labrador in Canada, 62 years after it went missing. The wreck was found by an international team led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
The Quest was found using sonar on Sunday evening, lying on its keel at a depth of 390 meters in choppy, cold water, the association said. Its towering mast was broken off its side, possibly cracked as the ship was sucked into the abyss after hitting the ice on May 5, 1962.
John Geiger, head of the Shackleton Quest Expedition and the organization’s chief executive, said: “I heard that some Americans were interested in finding the Quest and I had an image of a couple of billionaires in my mind. on a yacht in the Labrador Sea. The Royal Canadian Geographical Society told an audience at Memorial University’s Maritime Institute in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Wednesday.
“We did it the right way,” Geiger said. It’s not about anyone’s ego, it’s about telling great stories and celebrating some of humanity’s best qualities.”
He called the Quest a very historically important ship.
Shackleton’s death on the ship in 1922 marked the end of what historians consider the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration. The explorer led three British expeditions to the South Pole, and was in the early stages of his fourth when he died of a heart attack. He is 47 years old.
The Norwegian-built Quest was a steamship equipped with sailboats, Geiger said, and Shackleton specifically bought it to travel to the Canadian Arctic. But the Canadian government at the time canceled those plans and Shackleton decided to set sail again for Antarctica.
This photo shows the Quest sinking off the coast of Labrador, Canada, in 1962. The remains of the last ship of Sir Ernest Shackleton, an Irish-British Antarctic explorer, have been found off the coast of Canada.
Tore Topp/Royal Canadian Geographical Society/AP
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Tore Topp/Royal Canadian Geographical Society/AP
He died when it was just off the coast of South Georgia, east of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.
After the explorer’s death, Quest was used for Arctic research and then returned to its original use as a sealing vessel. It sank in 1962 after being damaged by ice in the Labrador Sea during a whaling trip.
Geiger said the ship appeared to be in “incredible condition,” even though it was damaged when it hit the seabed.
He added that it won’t be brought to the surface – that would be too expensive – but it will be thoroughly documented and studied. A crew will likely depart some time before the end of the summer to begin filming footage of the ship using a remotely operated vehicle.
In 2022, researchers discovered another of Shackleton’s ships, the Endurance, at a depth of 10,000 feet – about 3,000 meters – in icy water, a century after it was swallowed by Antarctic ice.
A team of marine archaeologists, engineers and other scientists used icebreakers and underwater drones to locate the wreck on the bottom of the Weddell Sea, near the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Endurance22 expedition set out from Cape Town, South Africa in early February on a ship capable of penetrating three feet of ice.
The team of more than 100 researchers and crew members deployed underwater drones to scan the seabed for two weeks in the area where the ship was reported to have sunk in 1915.
Shackleton never achieved his ambition of becoming the first person to cross the South Pole via Antarctica. In fact, he never set foot on the continent during the failed Endurance expedition, although he had visited Antarctica on previous trips.
