Wreck of the last ship of the famous Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton found off the coast of Canada

St. John’s, Newfoundland – The wreck of the last ship of Sir Ernest Shackleton, a famous Irish-born British Antarctic explorer, has been found off the coast of Labrador, Canada, 62 years after his disappearance. The wreck was found by an international team led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

The Quest was discovered on Sunday evening using sonar scans. It was lying on its keel in 390 meters of ice-cold water, the company said. The towering mast lies broken next to it. It probably broke off when the ship was sucked into the depths on May 5, 1962, after hitting ice.

“I heard that some Americans were interested in finding Quest, and I just had this image in my head of a couple of billionaires on yachts up in the Labrador Sea,” John Geiger, leader of the Shackleton Quest expedition and executive director of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, told an audience at the Marine Institute of Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Wednesday.

“We did it right. It’s not about anyone’s ego, it’s about telling great stories and celebrating some of the most beautiful human qualities,” Geiger said.

He described the Quest as a historically very important ship.

Shackleton’s death aboard ship in 1922 marked the end of what historians call the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration. The explorer led three British expeditions to Antarctica and was in the early stages of a fourth when he died of a heart attack. He was 47.

The Norwegian-built Quest was a schooner-rigged steamship and Shackleton bought it specifically to travel to the Canadian high Arctic, Geiger said. But the Canadian government scrapped those plans at the time and Shackleton decided to sail again toward Antarctica.

He died when the ship was off South Georgia, east of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.

After the explorer’s death, the Quest was used for Arctic research and then returned to its original purpose as a sealing vessel. She sank in 1962 after being damaged by ice during a whaling trip in the Labrador Sea.

The ship appears to be in “incredible condition” despite being damaged when it hit the seabed, Geiger said.

It will not be brought to the surface, that would be far too expensive, he added, but it will be thoroughly documented and studied. A crew will probably set out before the end of the summer to take pictures of the ship using a remote-controlled vehicle.

In 2022, researchers discovered another of Shackleton’s ships, the Endurance, in 10,000 feet – about 3,000 meters – of freezing water, a century after it was swallowed by Antarctic ice.

A team of marine archaeologists, engineers and other scientists used an icebreaker and underwater drones to locate the wreck on the bottom of the Weddell Sea near the Antarctic Peninsula.

The Endurance22 expedition started in early February in Cape Town (South Africa) on board a ship capable of breaking through one meter thick ice.

The team, which included more than 100 researchers and crew members, used underwater drones to spend two weeks combing the seabed in the area where the ship is believed to have sunk in 1915.

Shackleton was never able to realize his dream of becoming the first person to cross Antarctica from the South Pole. In fact, he never set foot on the continent during the failed Endurance expedition, although he had visited Antarctica on previous voyages.