REDISCOVERING HISTORY: THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY TO SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON'S LOST SHIP QUEST

As a world hungry for stories of discovery unearths the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Quest at the bottom of the Labrador Sea off the coast of Canada, the vessel’s current resting place off Cape Breton Island quenches a decades-long thirst for adventure. Another shipwreck, of course, but this is also the salvation of a story of exploration, danger and the profound power of human curiosity that could have slipped quietly away into history. Here is how a team of explorers brought the Quest back into the public eye.

THE PRELUDE TO THE DISCOVERY

The return of the Quest to our awareness started with painstaking work and steady determination on the part of a group guided by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. The first phase of the story involved digging into the historical record – ship logs, old newspaper articles, legal records that played out as the ship sank below the surface of the sea.

UTILIZING TECHNOLOGY IN THE QUEST FOR QUEST

It took a new use of side-scan sonar technology, and months of tireless searching, to find the side-scan blob that both looked like the location of the Quest and suggested that she was lying upright and intact on the sea bottom. This is the navigational star they needed in their modern-day cartography.

THE ECHOES OF DISCOVERY

Once the ship was conclusively located, Mears, a seasoned shipwreck hunter and a key member of the expedition, made the discovery public. The Quest, 1,280ft down in the breathtakingly clear Caribbean water, had been found, its profile matching what was known from the ship’s historical record and subsequent data collected during the days after her sinking. The successful search represented what could be achieved with a merge of history and technology.

QUEST VERSUS ENDURANCE: A TALE OF TWO SHIPS

But the Quest was found, quite aptly, just as Shackleton’s own lost ship, the Endurance, was located at the bottom of the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Shackleton had so valiantly made do with his lifeboats that the discovery voyage of the Quest takes on a different rhetorical cast and emotional emphasis than, say, that of the Bounty. The ship was — like Shackleton — doomed to be associated with a lamentable end.

A HISTORICAL LEGACY UNEARTHED

The decision to buy the Quest, formerly Foca I, and Shackleton’s epic voyage south towards South Georgia Island is one of the last great acts of heroism in the exploration era. The fact that the ship survived for 40 years after Shackleton’s death, and that it ended its individual existence by being sunk in the Labrador Sea to become a holding place for sinking Halifax bombers in the Second World War, adds a wonderful maritime legacy to its cultural significance. The discovery will not only allow closure to the ship’s actual journey, but also relive the ship’s place in history and memory.

THE FUTURE OF QUEST: PRESERVING THE PAST

Now that the wreck has actually been found, there are plans to send some ROVs down to take photographs of it, just like those taken of the Endurance. Perhaps they will yield some information about the final moments of the Quest and perhaps a little more insight about what the effects of such conditions were on the crew of that ship as well. This journey into the realm of the deep seems to mirror our continual quest to find out about our past and what lengths humans will go to in order to ensure it is not forgotten.

UNDERSTANDING THE JOURNEY

The quest – each of us, on a voyage of discovery of the Quest and itself – is in the mythic minds that ‘chose’ to search out a ship’s manifest and a hunk of driftond. It’s in our openness to following curiosities about what could have been; in our willingness to create a detailed written record of those curiosities and findings; in our metaphoric landing at a quay, and our desire to relink with the roots of that past. We see too that changemaking is as much about determination as technology. And that the human condition is one of evolving curiosity about the unknown. The voyage itself is testament to never giving up, to tapping every possible tool to find the stories that form us. As we bid farewell to this extraordinary expedition, we remember that every voyage – whether down a wide river estuary or into the deep ocean – carries with it the possibility of a new chapter in history, a new fire to ignite in us all.