A New Documentary Charts the Sinking of Shackleton's ‘Endurance’—and Its Rediscovery a Century Later

25.10.2024 - 16:01 / cntraveler.com / Ernest Shackleton

Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 aimed to be the first to cross the snowy mass of Antarctica, passing through the South Pole on the way. But he never even got started on that epic journey—and embarked on another instead—when his ship to the White Continent, the Endurance, sank in the Weddell Sea before reaching its base on Antarctica. Shackleton then had to figure out how to get his crew safely home from where they were stranded on the ice. He succeeded against all odds, and became a legend in the process, but the shipwreck itself was never found, the aura of mystery and intrigue only growing greater with time.

Until now.

In 2022, an international crew aboard the icebreaker Agulhas II sailed back to the Endurance’s last known coordinates with the aim of using the latest undersea exploration technology to search for the shipwreck, despite being in some of the most treacherous waters in the world. This mission was led by a team of four: British expedition leader John Shears; South African icebreaker captain Knowledge Bengu; French director of subsea operations Nico Vincent; and Falkland Islander explorer Mensun Bound. On board as well was a film crew of three, headed by director Natalie Hewit, with the task of documenting the search. That story, interspersed with those of Shackleton’s 28-man crew in their struggle for survival, is now told in Endurance, a forthcoming National Geographic documentary.

Below, Hewit, co-director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (who joined the project alongside husband and Free Solo collaborator Jimmy Chin after the expedition completed), and producer Ruth Johnson take us through what went into bringing this story to the screen.

Expedition participant and documentary executive producer Dan Snow holding Shackleton's book, South, atop an ice floe.

How did you get attached to the project initially?

Natalie Hewit: Back in 2016, I shot my first film in Antarctica. It was just the most intense, crazy experience of my life. But it also was a really personally significant time. It changed me as a person, and I spent years afterwards trying to get back there. [So] in the summer of 2021, someone phoned me up and said—”we've got this project, there's an expedition going to Antarctica to look for Shackleton’s ship. Would you be interested in going?”—and I was like, absolutely yes. I didn't even think for a second.

Chai Vasarhelyi: [In 2022] we were shooting Nyad, and we heard that the boat had been discovered and NatGeo had acquired the rights [to the film], and we asked if we could collaborate on it.

Most of our films have really examined this idea of the audacity of the human experience—where you have the chutzpah to dream these impossible dreams, and