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FISHBURNE: It is, perhaps, the most famous expedition
of the twentieth century.
Ernest Shackleton's disastrous mission
to cross Antarctica.
When Shackleton's ship, The Endurance,
got snared in polar ice...
The mission became an all out fight for survival.
The ship disappeared beneath the surface.
Tonight's mystery: What happened to Shackleton's ship?
Can we find it?
And what secrets might it hold?
Now, for the first time an expedition
is heading into the frozen waters of the Antarctic.
Put it in the water!
This is pretty much the Holy Grail
because it's so inaccessible.
FISHBURNE: Armed with the latest technology...
Ready for armed state.
FISHBURNE: And a century old logbook...
They'll use sonar and drone submarines
to track down Shackleton's famous ship.
But with winter approaching...
There is no margin for error.
MAN: Oh, well... What the hell is going on?
This is the start of it here.
FISHBURNE: The hunt for The Endurance.
Tonight on History's Greatest Mysteries.
FISHBURNE: Antarctica,
the most extreme place on Earth.
Temperatures reach 100 below.
Wind whips across it at 200 mph.
This frozen continent surrounds the South Pole.
It's a vast land, entirely covered in ice.
Somewhere in these frozen seas
lies the Holy Grail of shipwrecks,
the Endurance,
the ship that carried legendary explorer,
Sir Ernest Shackleton, south in 1914.
(MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY ON RADIO)
Down here, the water is so cold,
the wooden ship is likely perfectly preserved.
But it's so hard to get to
that no one's ever been able to
hunt for the wreck. Until now.
Flying in from across the globe
is an international team of ship hunters,
explorers, and scientists.
Two years in the planning
and over $250 million of cutting-edge technology
make them think they can pull off a world first.
If the data that we have for the wreck site is correct,
then we'll find it.
Maritime archaeologist Mensun Bound
is heading up the search.
He's got 40 years' experience excavating shipwrecks,
but finding the Endurance is the ultimate challenge.
BOUND: The Endurance is, to my mind,
the most famous wreck of all time.
You know, she's up there with the Titanic.
If anybody can find the Endurance,
it's going to be this expedition.
This is the greatest wreck hunt that there's ever been.
FISHBURNE: The first mission for the team members
not arriving by chopper...
...is just getting onto the ship with their gear.
Three meters, closing.
FISHBURNE: Access from a 100-ft ice cliff
is not for the faint of heart.
-Okay, everyone happy? -Yep.
Good to go.
You'll be in the centre like this, holding here and here,
-basically -Okay.
And then the other guys will surround you.
It's quite interesting.
This expedition will face the same risks and dangers
that Shackleton did a century ago.
But today's team has come prepared.
The ROV has the tension.
-You can release it. -Got it.
It's just going to go under.
Steve Saint Amour,
leads one of the elite teams of sub-sea explorers.
SAINT AMOUR: Our job will be to document
the condition of the wreck on the sea floor.
FISHBURNE: Based in Maryland, his team has found
missing plane wrecks and most famously, surveyed the Titanic.
But hunting Shackleton's wreck
is their most challenging mission yet.
A ship has not been to the Shackleton location primarily
due to the ice pack and how difficult it is to get here.
This is the equivalent of going to Mars
and looking for, you know, the wreckage of a space craft.
It's just that remote.
To help him search, Steve's got a secret weapon.
A purpose-built, remotely operated vehicle,
or ROV.
This $2 million bot weighs in at over 6,000 pounds.
It's equipped with deep sea cameras
and two articulated titanium arms.
Its mission: to dive to the sea bed and explore the wreck.
It can descend to nearly four miles under the water
and withstand pressure
that would crush a human in an instant.
Before the ship sets off,
Steve's team needs to give their robot a health check.
And so one of the things we do to prepare for the mission
is go through and double-check all the connections,
and tighten up hardware.
FISHBURNE: Dave O'Hara, from Northern Ireland
-is Steve's pilot. -[Dave] Through there.
In there.
An ex-British navy engineer,
he's been working on robot subs for 12 years.
O'HARA: We've had the brains of the system out,
put it back in and we'll hook her back up
and give it a test again in a few minutes.
For me personally, it's a bucket list job.
The shipwreck side of things have got me inspired
to come do this for a living, watching guys find Titanic.
Just for the history behind it, the story,
the human aspect of it.
And I think that's the same with Endurance.
Okay, guys, just let her be. I'm gonna start the hydraulics.
FISHBURNE: Dave's confident he can get the sub 10,000 feet
down to the wreck.
But first they've got to find it.
Fortunately, the team has a big clue to where it could be.
To find the exact spot to search,
wreck archaeologist Mensun Bound
is investigating nautical charts
and the ship's original log
kept meticulously by Shackleton's captain,
Frank Worsley.
These record Endurance's position on the day she sank.
It gives us the coordinates, a latitude and a longitude.
If we look at the chart,
here we have it, right here.
This is where she sank.
This is "X marks the spot."
FISHBURNE: Using the data,
Mensun calculates a target 1,200 miles away
across the treacherous Weddell Sea.
It's a minefield
of giant waves and jagged ice.
LARSON: The Weddell Sea is a churning bed of sea ice.
This sea ice breaks into pieces and it floats around
and runs into each other, throwing up pressure ridges,
and you never know when it will turn totally solid again.
FISHBURNE: The expedition is also in a race against time.
The Weddell Sea is full of ice year round,
but as winter approaches,
the ocean around the continent freezes over.
Impassable sea ice covering an area
one-and-a-half times the size of the United States.
The team has a short window to get in and back out
or they'll get stuck in the ice.
Anyone going into that area with a ship
is putting their ship and their crew in jeopardy.
FISHBURNE: In 1914, two years after
the sinking of the Titanic,
British explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton, heads south.
ERNEST SHACKLETON: I believe it is in our nature
to explore, reach out into the unknown.
The only true failure would be not to explore at all.
FISHBURNE: It's the golden age of polar exploration.
Shackleton is full of ambition,
seeking glory for himself and his country.
He was really driven by the fact that
it was one of the last few places on Earth
that hadn't been touched by man
and he wanted to be one of the first persons there.
Antarctica was the last place to show this sense of adventure.
It was the last challenge left.
FISHBURNE: Shackleton's aim, to make history
by crossing the entire Antarctic continent
from coast to coast for the first time.
A hundred years ago, crossing Antarctica would be more
difficult than us going to the moon today.
I think it's the nature of man
to always see something we haven't seen before,
whether it's the moon or the South Pole.
ANKER: Shackleton and his 27 men,
they sailed off what we knew of the world.
FISHBURNE: But Shackleton will never even make landfall.
Here at the end of the Earth,
Shackleton's ship, the Endurance, will sink
in a disaster that will capture the world's attention.
Fully loaded, the Agulhas II finally sets off,
ready to take on the Weddell Sea.
So much has gone into this project,
so many years of work, so many dreams.
It feels like my whole life has come down to this moment.
FISHBURNE: Now it's time to put everything to the test.
The team will battle ice...
SAINT AMOUR: Roger, I got a berg right on the stern.
-Hurry, please. -...bitter cold...
-We are now stuck. -...and extreme depth.
Guys, we're gonna bring it back.
With so much at stake, how will they overcome the challenges?
Pod's gone. I don't know what to say, really.
FISHBURNE: After five days at sea,
the expedition to find the ship
of legendary explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton
is making good progress.
Now 1,500 miles from her starting point
at Penguin Bukta,
the crew is zeroing in on the wreck site.
On deck, Louisiana native and former Air Force engineer,
Devon James, is part of a second elite team
hunting the 100-year-old wreck.
It's his job to look after a critical set of equipment,
two autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs.
JAMES: It's basically a drone, just like an aerial drone,
but we use it in the ocean.
So this is used all over the world
to survey the sea floor without an operator
going below the surface.
Coming to you.
FISHBURNE: Also working on the subs is Chad Bonin.
Like Devon, he's ex-military.
-Forward. -Roger.
We haven't dealt with ice conditions like this before.
We were hand picked to come onto this job,
so there's a lot of pressure to complete the task.
FISHBURNE: Despite the challenges of sending
their AUV subs under the ice, Chad's got a good attitude.
As long as we're layered up we're okay.
We're from South Louisiana, it's usually hot weather.
FISHBURNE: The team knows where to head,
but getting there is tough.
The expedition's hopes rest on the Agulhas II.
Weighing in at 14,000 tons
and costing $170 million,
this ship is designed to smash through ice three feet thick.
A double hull of extra thick steel protects
the Agulhas II, and in the engine room,
second engineer, Mark O'Reilly
is pushing her four engines to the limit.
These deliver 12,000 horsepower.
O'REILLY: This is one of two prop shafts.
six thousand horsepower available on each
and that will give us enough power to break through
one meter of ice at seven miles per hour.
FISHBURNE: The Agulhas II is built
for the worst conditions on the planet,
but even for this beast,
hitting ice at speed is bad news.
Captain Freddie Ligthelm, is the ice pilot.
Part of the South African crew,
he has 15 years' experience in the Weddell Sea.
If we should hit any sea ice here at 15 knots,
it could possibly cause heavy damage to the vessel.
So we are continuously looking out.
FISHBURNE: The Titanic famously sank in 1912
because it hit an iceberg at speed.
One wrong move could bring this ship to the same fate.
But unlike the Titanic, the Agulhas II
has an arsenal of modern navigational tools.
LIGTHELM: This is us here and this is our speed vector
and you can see that this iceberg
is at a distance of 8.8 miles.
Sometimes you could get 100 targets on the radar
at a 12-mile range,
and you would try to then just skirt as much as you can.
FISHBURNE: To reach the wreck site, the Agulhas II
has been sailing around the northern edge of the ice pack.
She will only head into the thicker ice when she has to.
This sea ice is what explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton faced
more than 100 years ago.
LARSON: When Shackleton took his ship into the Weddell Sea,
he knew the tremendous risk he'd never make it out alive.
FISHBURNE: Caught on camera by photographer Frank Hurley,
the Endurance picks her way through hundreds of miles
of pack ice.
But how could the 144-foot wooden ship
avoid the fate of the Titanic just two years previously?
Wreck archaeologist, Mensun Bound,
is studying the ship's plans.
This is the original design for the Endurance.
She really was a beautiful, beautiful vessel.
If you look at her bow, you can see it's got
four huge oaken timbers here.
That's two times more than any other ship that I know of.
FISHBURNE: Her bow is over four foot thick.
The keel or spine of the ship is seven foot of solid oak.
And to stop her being ripped apart by ice,
her hull is cloaked in a wood called "greenheart",
so durable and strong that it's heavier than iron.
It is extraordinarily hard.
It's so hard, you can't even drive a nail into it.
But this is what Shackleton needed
because it is resistant to the kind of wear and tear
and abrasion that this hull was going to have to withstand
once it got into the Antarctic.
FISHBURNE: Shackleton named his ship Endurance
after his family motto,
"By endurance we conquer."
And the Endurance will need all her strength
as she sails further into the ice.
While the ice makes getting to the wreck site
a massive challenge...
these frigid waters are also the reason
Shackleton's wooden ship is likely preserved
at the bottom of the sea.
In warmer seas, marine creatures eat wooden ships,
the most destructive, a mollusk called "shipworm".
Shipworm can be incredibly destructive to wooden ships.
And they are voracious.
They just eat anything and everything in no time at all.
They can be up two feet long and they just eat, eat, eat.
FISHBURNE: Recent experiments have revealed that shipworms
can't survive in the freezing Antarctic waters.
Newly-discovered wrecks from Northern Canada
prove that icy seas can preserve wooden ships
even older than the Endurance.
But even if it's well preserved,
the Endurance rests 10,000 feet down.
And right now, the sea there is entirely frozen over.
Getting the subs under the ice
will push the team to the limit.
BONIN: It's armed and ready to go.
JAMES: AUV in the water.
Kill the lights and see what we've got.
Whoa.
We lost it.
FISHBURNE: For 11 days, the expedition
to find Shackleton's lost wreck
in the frozen waters of Antarctica
has risked raging storms and ice fields.
Now the crew is beyond the reach of helicopter rescue.
If something goes wrong, they're on their own.
They've reached the west side of the Weddell Sea,
as close as they can get to the wreck site in open water.
Beyond their position is pack ice up to 16 feet thick.
Before they break in, Louisiana boys Chad and Devon
want to test their AUV subs under a nearby ice floe.
We're going into sea trials where we're actually going
to launch the AUV and we'll go ahead and release it,
send it underwater.
FISHBURNE: At the wreck site, the AUVs will dive down
and use sonar to scan the sea bed for the wreck.
It may sound simple,
but even testing the AUVs like this is risky.
They've never been under Antarctic ice.
AUV team leader Channing Thomas knows the dangers.
THOMAS: There is a lot of pressure.
If this works, it's going to be extraordinary.
Two years of planning and tens of millions of dollars
rests, on the AUV sub doing its job right.
JAMES: We're being extra cautious
before we put it in the water.
Once we launch it, there's no turning back.
BONIN: Alright, let's go get us a successful launch.
FISHBURNE: Chad is taking no chances.
Ice is a constant threat.
The fast response craft, or FRC,
is the only way he can hope to protect
their multi-million dollar sub at the surface.
We're on standby in FRC in case anything goes awry.
Alright, crank up hydraulics.
Yeah, we definitely don't see this in the Gulf of Mexico.
(LAUGHS)
They'll do a quick test
to make sure all of our settings are correct,
and then send it under the ice.
This is the start of it here.
MAN: AUV is in armed state. Go ahead, Shane.
BONIN: They put it in armed state.
It's armed and ready to go.
MAN: AUV in the water. BONIN: Like a torpedo.
Alright. Looking good.
FISHBURNE: All systems are go.
Stay back here and monitor.
Roger that. Ready to dive.
Alright, 30 seconds till it dives.
Come on, cowboy.
MAN OVER RADIO: It's not going down. Start making some waves.
JAMES: It's very, very flat.
When it's flat calm like this, it has a tough time diving.
FISHBURNE: The only way to make the AUV dive
is to make their own waves.
Go create that wake in front of it as it's travelling.
It's trying to get the water on top of the bow,
at the forward end of the AUV to get it to start digging in.
Go, baby, go.
Keep coming, you're making headway.
It's going down, my man.
-(LAUGHING) -Good job, fellas.
BONIN: It took a little while, but it started diving.
So as of now, we have a successful dive.
It's a great relief to finally get it under.
We're on our first mission.
FISHBURNE: Now it's over to Devon's colleague,
Blake Howard, to communicate with the AUV.
We can pull forward a little more.
AUV's getting down to 300 meters right now.
Once the AUV gets going on its pre-programmed
four-hour test mission,
Blake will have no control.
All he can do is track it with this,
a high-precision acoustic positioning system or HiPAP.
(MACHINERY WHIRRING)
Dropped through the hull into the sea,
the HiPAP picks up acoustic signals
through the water from the sub.
It even pulls in some curious locals.
(SONAR BEEPING)
While the team tracks the AUV sub,
expedition archaeologist Mensun Bound
investigates how Shackleton's ship
ended up on this side of the Weddell Sea a century ago.
Here he is coming down the coast of the Weddell Sea,
all the while working his way south, south.
But as he's going, the ice is becoming more and more dense
and impenetrable,
until eventually he gets all the way down here.
And right here is where he becomes beset.
FISHBURNE: Just 60 miles from the south coast of the Weddell
Sea, the ice pack freezes solid around Shackleton's ship.
The Endurance is trapped.
HUSSEY: The temperature suddenly dropped
from 20 degrees above zero to 20 degrees below it.
The whole sea froze over and we froze in with it.
Of course, we had no explosives to blast our way out.
We just had picks and shovels.
FISHBURNE: For 40 hours, his men throw everything at it.
But they can't free her from the ice.
And at that moment, Shackleton's heart sank
because he knew, because it was so late in the season,
that he was frozen in place for winter.
FISHBURNE: And in the six-month long Antarctic winter,
just staying alive is nearly impossible.
LARSEN: Everything is pushing against you.
It's trying to kill you.
That cold is physically painful.
Any piece of exposed skin,
just a little gap in your clothing,
that's like somebody cutting your face with a knife.
ANKER: The wind's unrelenting.
And the snow is driven like needles into your face.
SCOTT: I was at the South Pole, it was so cold.
I removed my glove for just about a minute,
maybe a minute and 20 seconds,
and my thumb froze solid.
When you think about Shackleton and his men, out there
in wool and cotton
and things that weren't really designed for that environment,
it just reminds me how tough those men were.
FISHBURNE: The Endurance is completely stuck,
but she's 550 miles from where she will finally sink.
So how did she get there?
Turns out the Endurance is still on the move...
(ICE CRACKING)
...because the ice is on the move.
LARSEN: While it may look like a land mass,
it's floating on water.
That means whatever the water is doing,
whatever the wind is doing, that affects that surface.
FISHBURNE: Strong currents and winds in the Weddell Sea
spin the entire ice pack in a giant clockwise rotation.
For ten months, the Endurance moves with the ice.
This is the route that the Endurance was carried.
We can follow the route very precisely.
The crew was trapped,
but they had reason to believe they would escape.
Several years before, another ship,
a ship called the Deutschland,
had also become beset down here.
Because the Deutschland was eventually released
from the ice, people on the Endurance
thought the same thing would happen to them.
FISHBURNE: Out on deck in the early hours of the morning,
the team is waiting for their AUV sub
to return from its test run.
But there's a problem.
I don't know what the hell's going on.
They've lost all contact with their brand new
multi-million dollar sub.
FISHBURNE: Two weeks into the expedition
to find Shackleton's lost ship,
the team is within striking distance of the wreck site.
But their ship is going nowhere.
Four hours into a test dive,
AUV operator Blake Howard lost contact
with their multi-million dollar drone submarine.
Everything started to go well, we were gaining confidence
and then we lost it.
When we saw that it did not surface in front of us
or to either side of us,
we figured it had to be in the ice.
FISHBURNE: The fear is that the AUV came up
underneath the seven-mile wide ice floe it was diving under.
The team needs to move fast.
The AUV has 54 hours of battery.
If the battery dies, they'll never get it back.
That's a multi-million dollar loss they can't take.
We're going to search that area right there.
The expedition throws everyone
and everything they've got into the hunt.
Boats,
aerial drones,
and the operated vehicles.
The AUV has two flashers on it
and the general idea is to get the ROV down deep,
turn off all our lights, and hopefully see those beacons.
MAN OVER RADIO: Okay, Steve, go into the water.
Bring up all the hydraulics, please.
FISHBURNE: A cable tethers their 6,400 pound
robot to the ship.
It gives pilot Dave O'Hara full control.
MAN 1: Okay, Steve, our depth is 30 meters.
We are at 20 meters.
Can't see very much.
Shall we kill the lights and see what we've got?
MAN 2: Go for it.
O'HARA: Whoa, it's dark. You know something?
There is no way we're even gonna see a flasher.
FISHBURNE: A thick bloom of algae beneath the ice
has reduced visibility to almost zero.
O'HARA: We just couldn't see anything.
So we aborted the dive, come back.
Just keep the vehicle safe, ready to try again.
BOUND: Right now I'm very worried.
From day one we recognized that our nemesis
was going to be the ice pack.
You know, just as it was Shackleton's,
so was it going to be ours.
And, I'll tell you what, it's proven to be just that.
FISHBURNE: It's a setback,
but the team can't afford to give up.
Sixteen hours later,
Blake finally detects a signal from the missing AUV sub.
I started looking at everything
and I saw that 45 minutes ago
there was a HiPAP hit that made contact somewhere nearby.
FISHBURNE: The sub is within a mile of the of the ship,
somewhere under the ice.
The first ping, when it actually did come through,
was a great feeling for everybody.
It's extremely exciting for her
to actually talk back to us,
and it gave us a direction to head towards.
FISHBURNE: But with only one acoustic hit,
team leader Channing Thomas can't get an accurate fix.
He needs his team to generate more hits
to zero in on the AUV sub's location.
That means a radical makeover
to their underwater comms system.
What we need to do is create a 45-degree angle,
so the HiPAP is facing outwards instead of downwards.
FISHBURNE: Making the comms system face forward
is something they've never tried before.
Alright, coming down.
All stop.
BOUND: We've only got one HiPAP on this ship
and although it looks to be quite robust,
in fact, it's not.
If we take just one knock from an ice floe,
that's it. It's game over.
You know, the search for the Endurance
is finished before it even begins.
(SONAR BEEPS)
(SONAR BEEPING CONTINUES)
FISHBURNE: Then the team picks up a response.
It's almost definitely a hit,
so it's got to be within range.
You know, we know we're within its range.
Yeah, compared with
-where we were two hours ago. -Yes, yes.
Yes, sir. Exactly right. So we're getting there.
FISHBURNE: After another Antarctic night,
the team has picked up more new signals.
THOMAS: Plotted from three different locations
to triangulate about where she's located
and we're figuring she's about 800 meters ahead.
Now it's not an exact location,
but we've got a pretty good target zone.
FISHBURNE: Half a mile might seem close,
but the ship needs to get closer.
Their robot tasked with rescuing the sub,
can go four miles straight down,
but only 400 feet sideways from the ship.
They have to close the gap.
What are we looking at? Three to seven meters, Captain?
Yeah.
FISHBURNE: Twenty foot thick ice is well beyond
what their ship's built to break,
but it's a risk worth taking to salvage the mission.
(ICE CRACKING)
(RUMBLING)
The Agulhas II doesn't ram the ice,
it rides up onto the ice.
And under the weight of the 14,000 ton ship,
the ice floe starts to break apart.
The AUV is about here, about 200 meters away.
(CREAKING AND RUMBLING)
(ICE CRACKING)
FISHBURNE: Each strike releases colossal ice chunks
bigger than the size of a house.
By the time they're done,
the ship's smashed away 114 football fields worth of ice.
Finally, they can attempt a second rescue dive.
THOMAS: We're going to launch the ROV.
They're going to go in and locate it
and basically they're going to drag her out.
FISHBURNE: But what will their ROV robot find?
Across the ship, all eyes are glued to the live feed.
O'HARA: Right now we are at 6.5 meters.
-In under the ice. -MAN: Hey, is that an AUV?
O'HARA: That looks like one.
And we've got the AUV visual.
THOMAS OVER RADIO: Roger.
Tell the bridge we've got a vis.
FISHBURNE: Finding the AUV is a huge relief.
But now they need to bring it out.
BONIN: You can see the end of the AUV with the prop.
So it's definitely in a crack.
FISHBURNE: Dave has to grab the AUV with the robot arm.
O'HARA: So you're pretty much gonna have to fly me into it.
Come on, bubba.
Slow, slow, slow, slow.
O'HARA: As soon as we started the move
the fish dropped away below us.
We gotta go chase the fish down.
Getting back in there. We'll have to try again.
FISHBURNE: Every missed attempt
pushes the AUV farther out of reach.
And at the surface,
moving ice is threatening to snag the robot's tether.
The team needs a new solution and fast.
FISHBURNE: Four days ago, the expedition lost contact
with their multi-million dollar AUV sub.
It's a vital tool in their hunt
for Shackleton's lost Antarctic wreck,
but it's now 1,500 feet below the ship on the sea floor.
-(RADIO BEEPS) -Yeah, your heading's good.
FISHBURNE: Sub-sea explorer Steve Saint Amour,
is sending the robot back down to locate the AUV sub
and attempt a rescue.
At this depth, the weight of water
pressing down on the AUV
is equivalent to two jumbo jets,
one on top of the other.
The robot's got a hook and line,
but pilot Dave O'Hara is finding
that fishing at this depth...
(O'HARA GROANS)
...is far from easy.
(THUMPS)
The hook has to hold.
(MAN SPEAKING OVER RADIO)
O'HARA: Yeah, copy.
You can probably get the bridge to start moving
real slowly forward now, mate.
FISHBURNE: After four days, the AUV is finally in hand
and on the way up.
But as it approaches the surface,
Steve halts the ascent.
Bridge, go ahead.
(SAINT AMOUR SPEAKING OVER RADIO)
O'HARA: All the ice floes and bergs that we've broken off
overnight are all just sweeping in and around us.
The ROV will get caught in some of these bigger floes.
FISHBURNE: Ice chunks this big can weigh 2,000 tons,
more than 13 blue whales.
If one of them hits the cable,
the team could lose their robot and the AUV sub.
(MAN SPEAKING OVER RADIO)
(SAINT AMOUR SPEAKING)
(CAPTAIN BENGU SPEAKING OVER RADIO)
SAINT AMOUR: Roger.
FISHBURNE: Finally, the path is clear.
I just got to get it up to surface.
The ROV has the AUV in its grasp.
It's coming back up.
FRC, ROV approaching surface.
BONIN: Alright, here we go.
(MAN SPEAKING OVER RADIO)
-You got a hold of it? -Yep.
Alright, back down a little bit.
Whoo!
That's cold, buddy.
FISHBURNE: After a very close call, the AUV is safe.
Alright, coming up easy.
We're good.
Got it, Paul.
(LAUGHS) That's it.
I'm just glad to have it on board.
JAMES: It's been a rough four or five days,
so it will be nice to actually get a full night's sleep
instead of a few hours here and there.
FISHBURNE: With the critical gear now on board,
the hunt for the wreck is back on.
BOUND: Yeah, this is great.
Having her back on board like this, it's the best.
FISHBURNE: The team can now press ahead.
But there's still 230 miles
from where Shackleton's ship went down.
And in that area, the sea is still entirely covered in ice.
Shackleton and his ship drifted into this northwestern
part of the Weddell Sea, in October 1915.
For 10 long months, they've been locked in the ice
in a bitter struggle for survival.
It's so damn cold.
If you don't have an elaborate safety net of equipment,
you'll die.
FISHBURNE: Shackleton's only safety net is his ship,
but now the mounting pressure in the ice
is breaking it apart.
LARSON: They're in the ship, they can hear this ice
moving against the ship.
You hear the creaking of the ship.
You hear the pressure on the joints.
You never know if the ship's just gonna break apart.
(RUMBLING AND CRACKING)
HOWE: The timbers began to crack and groan.
It was like heavy fireworks and the blasting of guns.
(RUMBLING INTENSIFIES)
ANKER: To see the pack ice move in
and just squeeze the life out of that boat,
it must have been so trying and so depressing.
FISHBURNE: Mother Nature overwhelms
the mighty Endurance.
Finally, Shackleton gives the order to abandon ship.
ANKER: Their only hope was to take everything off
that ship that they needed,
and put it on their rescue boats and then
switch into survival mode.
FISHBURNE: The 28 men and 49 dogs
can only watch as the Endurance is overwhelmed.
(TIMBER CRACKING)
I can only image what it was like for him when he sat there
and stood on the ice and watched it just slowly implode.
Just a piece of his heart and soul
probably went down with that ship when it went.
FISHBURNE: The ship disappears beneath the surface.
Shackleton and his men are truly alone.
I think they were much more lonely than I was on Apollo 13,
because I had communication with home.
Shackleton, he didn't have a radio, he didn't have wi-fi,
didn't have, you know, a cellphone.
He was alone.
FISHBURNE: Shackleton's dream of becoming
the first man to cross Antarctica
is ultimately crushed along with his ship.
This is where his real battle for survival begins.
But if the ice crushed Shackleton's ship,
what can the team expect to find on the sea floor?
Mensun Bound is searching for clues in the records.
BOUND: You see in this picture here, the stern rose up
45 degrees, the bow went even further down
and then she just slid and was gone in minutes.
FISHBURNE: The Endurance then dives
10,000 feet to the sea floor.
But Mensun spots evidence
that the wooden ship likely survived the impact.
All this clutter that you see in this picture here,
all these masts and yards,
all that was still attached to the ship when it went down,
and that would have imposed an incredible
drag on the sinking ship.
That would've kept her upright and would to some extent
have slowed her down.
I do believe that the ship itself
is likely to be in an upright state,
but also three-dimensionally intact.
FISHBURNE: It's promising news for the rest of the team.
But suddenly, there's a new problem.
This time it's not the AUV sub,
but the robot that's supposed to explore the wreck.
The pod's gone.
FISHBURNE: It looks like it's suffered a death blow.
FISHBURNE: Halfway into their mission time,
the team in Antarctica is under mounting pressure
to reach the site of Ernest Shackleton's wreck.
Engineers Steve Saint Amour and Dave O'Hara
are depth testing their underwater robot
so it's ready to go.
But something's not right.
Guys, we're gonna bring it back.
The pod's gone.
FISHBURNE: A critical part has imploded under the extreme
pressure, ten thousand feet below the surface.
The robot's electronic brain is now mangled metal.
We've had a catastrophic failure.
We don't have all the electronics to rebuild the ROV.
I don't know what to say, really, I just don't.
Yeah, I'm speechless.
FISHBURNE: The aluminum pod was designed to withstand
pressure nearly three miles below the surface.
But Steve thinks the combination of extreme cold
and a material flaw
has caused it to be crushed
like it was nothing more than a soda can.
This is what we found.
One half of the bottle has pancaked
into the other half of the bottle.
There were quite substantial electronics
and they are entirely crushed.
This is the first time in my career
that I've ever seen this first hand.
This is an example of what hydraulic pressure can do.
FISHBURNE: It's a bitter blow for expedition archaeologist
Mensun Bound.
The worst possible news.
I mean, to lose our electronics like that.
There is no replacement.
We can't fly in spare parts.
There's nothing we can do.
This was what I was going to use to study the wreck, really,
eyeball to eyeball with the wreck.
FISHBURNE: To add to the problems on deck,
the bridge has discovered their closest route
to the wreck site is now totally shut off by the ice.
Analyzing daily satellite photographs,
ice pilot Freddie Ligthelm is hunting for another way in.
He's looking for channels of open water called leads
on the other side of the pack ice.
LIGTHELM: It does appear that there's some leads opening
up in that area, so we're quite excited about that.
We can actually approach the search site coming right
around all the ice and approaching from the south east.
With a bit of luck, we can be cautiously optimistic.
FISHBURNE: The new plan is to go the long way round,
skirt the pack ice, and then head towards the wreck site.
With a clear path ahead of them,
the ship should be able to reach the wreck site
in a matter of days.
Out on the deck, the AUV team
is making their final preparations.
All hopes now rest on them to find the wreck.
BONIN: I'm excited about it.
Can't beat the smile off my face right now, you know.
Finally getting there.
To be in the same area where he was at
and to finally locate that ship is just...
It's an excitement that I really can't explain.
FISHBURNE: Finding Shackleton's ship is the ultimate goal
of this expedition.
But 100 years ago, losing the Endurance
was just the start of a journey
that would make Ernest Shackleton a legend.
Stranded on the ice,
Shackleton's men face impossible odds,
but they have blind faith in the man they call The Boss.
There's this classic quote, and to paraphrase it,
"When the chips are down and all hope is gone,
"get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton."
FISHBURNE: Shackleton orders his men to march for land,
two hundred miles across the ice.
Shackleton has these massive sleds
with full wooden boats on them loaded with supplies.
And you could come up to a massive pressure ridge,
blocks of ice as big as semi-trucks
that are shoved up into the air
ten, 15, 20 feet,
and so, as you're approaching it,
it basically is a wall of ice.
I mean, I don't like to say things are impossible,
but I don't know how they would get over that stuff.
(DOGS BARKING)
FISHBURNE: The men cover only nine miles
of pack ice in a week.
Shackleton realizes reaching land is impossible.
To make matters worse, they're slowly starving to death.
As food supplies run out, they're forced to eat
the only things that brought them joy in the wilderness,
their dogs.
ANKER: The companionship that the dogs provided the team
was quite significant.
That moment must have been hard in an emotional point,
but it was also a mirror of how extended they were
and how precarious life was.
If you're shooting your dogs,
you're on the down and outs.
FISHBURNE: Then, as the ice they're on
drifts closer to the open ocean,
it starts to break apart beneath them.
(CRACKING AND RUMBLING)
And they have to rush onto their boats.
They have to throw their things on their boats.
They have to get into these boats
with everything they need to survive.
They have no choice, but to go from relative safety
to basically certain death.
FISHBURNE: Shackleton has finally left the ice
that's trapped him for 15 months.
But now he faces a new danger, the open Weddell Sea.
Even today this sea is nearly impossible to navigate,
as the crew of the Agulhas II is finding out.
We are now just stuck.
FISHBURNE: To reach the site of Ernest Shackleton's wreck,
the Agulhas II has powered around the ice pack
at the heart of the Weddell Sea.
And she's smashed through thick ice for the last 24 hours.
But just 19 miles from where the Endurance sank,
the Agulhas II runs into serious trouble.
(ICE CRACKING)
She's stuck in the ice just like Shackleton's ship.
BOUND: We're stuck. We're in a white out.
The ice is well over three meters thick,
possibly even as much as five,
and we're way, way below zero.
FISHBURNE: In the early hours of the morning,
the ship was brought to a standstill by impenetrable fog.
The ice moved in around her and froze her in.
If the temperature drops further,
the ice could trap the crew for days,
and the harsh Antarctic winter
is already barrelling down on them.
But Devon's got an idea.
JAMES: We could do like Shackleton did on the Endurance
when they got stuck in the ice and had the whole crew
run from one side of the vessel to the other,
together, to rock the ship free.
FISHBURNE: Devon's half kidding
but his plan isn't as crazy as it sounds.
Captain Bengu has 18 years' experience in Antarctic ice
and he's got a 21st-century trick up his sleeve.
Instead of moving his crew from one side to the other,
he's shifting a 40-ton container of fuel
using his crane.
(CAPTAIN BENGU SPEAKING)
FISHBURNE: And in the engine room,
engineer Mark O'Reilly is firing up
the two propellers to maximum power.
(WHIRRING)
After 14 hours using its crane,
and its 12,000 horsepower engines,
the Agulhas II finally breaks free.
(ICE CRACKING)
BONIN: Sounds like we're moving again.
See, you can hear the distinct difference
in the sound here, you know.
That's definitely ice scraping alongside the vessel
as we're moving forward.
(ICE SCRAPING)
FISHBURNE: And now that the fog has lifted,
the Captain has a clear view of the route ahead.
But the ship still has to get them inside the wreck zone.
And the closer they get, the thicker the ice becomes.
BOUND: This really is Shackleton territory.
The ice here is old,
it's gnarled, it's all hummocked
and it's all raftered up, steepled up into these ridges.
It's amazing that those guys survived
as long as they did on ice like this.
It's incredible.
FISHBURNE: This is the ice that trapped Shackleton
and his men for 15 months.
When they finally escape it on life boats,
they have to battle freezing winds and ice storms
on the open ocean.
Shackleton sets out for a tiny island 60 miles away.
It's his final hope.
On the seventh day at sea and barely alive,
they miraculously spot land.
HOWE: And when they saw Elephant Island,
everybody cheered.
And we pulled as hard as we could to make our landing.
LARSON: But it was a weird sort of euphoria
because they hadn't made it home,
they had made it onto an inhospitable rock.
The first night there, what was left of their tents
was just shredded in the wind.
Humans were not meant to be there.
The whalers didn't even come by there.
FISHBURNE: They are on a tiny storm battered
pinprick of a rock.
HUSSEY: Of course, food was very short.
We had very little except a little seal and penguin
whenever they came up.
LARSON: Shackleton knew the men could not survive.
Conditions would only get worse.
He had to get help,
and he knew he had to go as quick as possible.
FISHBURNE: But the only way out is across
the most dangerous ocean on the planet.
Taking only five men,
two barrels of water and four weeks of food rations,
Shackleton launches their largest life boat,
the James Caird.
There's a picture taken by Hurley
with a little Brownie camera, with the little camera he had.
LARSON: That picture scares the bejeezus out of me.
This tiny speck of a boat,
them all waving bravely at them
as if to give them encouragement.
Most of them must have felt,
"They're never going to make it
"and we're never going to be saved."
FISHBURNE: Shackleton's plan is to head
to the island of South Georgia,
eight hundred miles across the Southern Ocean.
The Southern Ocean is probably one of the most treacherous
bodies of water on this planet.
It's not uncommon to have winds in the 50s, 60s, 70 mph,
swells up to 100 foot.
The water temperature is just a little above freezing.
It can sink a vessel in seconds.
It's like going up a hill or a mountain
and you go up and up and then you reach the top
and then you go down and you skid down.
FISHBURNE: The odds are stacked against them,
but Shackleton knows if he doesn't make it to land,
all his men will perish.
FISHBURNE: A century on, after two years of planning...
BOUND: This is the point where she went down.
FISHBURNE: ...five and a half weeks at sea,
and four days battling the ice...
(CRACKING)
...the Agulhas II has finally broken through
to the exact coordinates of the Endurance wreck site.
It's a major achievement.
Only a handful of ships have ever been here.
BOUND: It feels great. I was up on the bridge till late.
I only got two hours' sleep, I'm shattered,
but, you know, at the same time I'm really happy.
But, you know, we've still got to find it.
To actually be here and able to
be part of the search is very exciting.
I'm ready for it.
FISHBURNE: But can they reach the Endurance?
JAMES: Hit the hydraulics.
FISHBURNE: The challenges of getting down to the wreck...
What have you got?
...will put the mission on the line.
The battery's running out.
FISHBURNE: Deep within the iciest part of the Weddell Sea,
against all odds,
the expedition to find Shackleton's wreck
has broken through to the actual site
where the ship sank over a 100 years ago.
Steve and Dave's robot sub is out of the game.
Damaged beyond repair, it can't hunt the wreck.
But there's still the AUV sub,
which will use sonar to scan the sea floor.
We're close to the actual last known location
of the Endurance.
We're gonna launch from where we're at,
all the way down to 3,000 meters, to the bottom.
Hopefully everything works well,
according to plan, and we'll see what happens.
FISHBURNE: Existing scans reveal that the Agulhas II
is floating above a vast underwater plain.
Here the sea floor plunges down
forty times the height of Niagara Falls,
to a depth of 10,000 feet.
This is the deepest zone of the Weddell Sea,
and the crew believes this plain
is the final resting ground of Shackleton's ship.
To program their sub's flight path,
the team needs to know what the water conditions
are like at the sea floor.
(WHIRRING)
They deploy a monitoring device called a CTD
to analyze the water.
Somewhere in these icy depths,
ten thousand feet down,
lie the remains of Shackleton's ship.
Mensun Bound wants to know
what the data might also tell him
about the condition of the wreck.
Hey, guys, what have you got?
This is the CTD over the wreck site
and it's just got to the bottom,
so we're at about just over 3,000 meters.
And as we get right to the bottom,
sort of in the last couple of hundred meters,
the temperature goes down considerably.
FISHBURNE: Remarkably, the water
at the sea floor is below 32 degrees.
It doesn't freeze solid because of the vast pressures at depth.
BOUND: Depth combined with the super cold water,
any bacterial activity will be slowed down.
This is all pretty good news
for the preservation of the Endurance.
FISHBURNE: All they've got to do now is launch the AUV sub
to hunt it down.
Hit that hydraulics when you walk around.
But all the ice here is a problem.
The AUV normally needs an open run of several hundred feet
to get below the water.
To make it sink faster,
Devon and Blake are trying out an unusual solution,
using a bag of salt to add weight.
But will their improvised fix work
when it comes to the actual launch?
JAMES: I've added five kilos of salt.
Salt should help it get down in this flat calm water
and get down to bottom, and start tracking.
Ready for armed state.
It's heavy.
Alright.
FISHBURNE: Adding the salt is a success.
The propellers bite and the AUV dives.
That was a successful launch for the first mission
to search for the Endurance.
If all goes well on the mission plan,
we should be recovering in about 42-43 hours.
JAMES: If it's down there, we should be able to find it.
Fingers crossed.
FISHBURNE: So far, so good.
The plan now is for the AUV
to spend the next 43 hours away from the ship
on a pre-programmed route beneath the ice.
At the moment we've just got to depth, almost 3,000 meters,
and we just got comms with the AUV.
Everything's good. She's where she's supposed to be.
FISHBURNE: Channing's team checks in with the AUV
at regular intervals using the underwater
acoustic comms system.
That's a very big relief that she's not
given us issues underneath the ice.
So everything's looking good at the moment.
We're gonna keep our fingers crossed
and keep thinking positive and keep pushing forward.
FISHBURNE: Now the ship must follow the AUV
no matter how thick the ice.
After over 100 years,
the hunt for Shackleton's wreck
comes down to what happens in the next 40 hours.
FISHBURNE: The team has succeeded in reaching
the exact place Sir Ernest Shackleton lost his ship.
Now can they find it?
Ten thousand feet down, the AUV sub
is halfway through its mission.
THOMAS: She's proceeding onto line three
and we're actually gonna jump up to that line,
find a nice comfortable spot in these floes
and wait for her there.
FISHBURNE: For now, AUV team leader Channing Thomas
and his team can only follow their sub's programmed route.
-(RADIO BEEPS) -Roger.
We monitor it still on that line
as long as we can to make sure she's flying true
and straight and at the right altitude.
FISHBURNE: Much like on an airplane,
all the scan data from the AUV sub
is recorded onto a black box stored on the sub itself.
Devon will only find out if it's found the wreck
once they pull it out of the water.
But that won't be for another 24 hours.
Five months after losing his ship,
Shackleton faced impossible odds in Antarctica.
He left 22 men behind on Elephant Island
and he's braving the worst ocean on the planet.
But after battling across 800 miles of it in two weeks
and painfully dehydrated,
he finally spots the island of South Georgia.
They'd made it. They had made
the toughest crossing in the world
in a vessel that never made that crossing before.
There was a sense of euphoria.
FISHBURNE: From his landing point at King Haakon Bay,
the closest settlement is a whaling station,
30 miles to the east.
But blocking his path now is a towering mountain range.
LARSON: The mountains were covered with snow and ice
and to get some sort of traction on the snow,
they took nails out of the boat
and pounded them through the bottom of the shoe.
FISHBURNE: Mountaineer Conrad Anker
has followed Shackleton's route.
ANKER: Shackleton's traverse of South Georgia,
in the context of when he did it,
was certainly one of the most technical climbs
done in the mountains.
If they didn't make it, their men were going to die.
And when you have that degree of immediacy on your goals,
you get things done.
FISHBURNE: After climbing for 36 hours,
Shackleton finally limps into civilization.
LARSON: When Shackleton told his story of what they'd
been through, no-one at the whaling station,
they couldn't believe it.
Every step of this story was beyond belief.
But, of course, it wasn't over for Shackleton then.
He had to go back and save the people on Elephant Island.
FISHBURNE: Shackleton strives tirelessly for four months,
to break back through the frozen sea.
At last, he approaches Elephant Island.
And as he's going ashore, the men on the island
are seeing the rescue boat is here
and they're starting to come out from under the shelter.
And Shackleton is counting, "One, two, three, four,"
all the way up until he's counted everyone.
And he looks to Worsley and says,
"They're all there, they're all alive."
And the emotion that he had at that time,
had to be just overwhelming.
LOVELL: To bring everybody on his expedition back home alive,
was probably one of the greatest adventure achievements
that we have in our history books.
FISHBURNE: On board the Agulhas II,
the crew hunting down Shackleton's wreck
has suffered a major blow.
Thirty hours into the dive,
the AUV that's scanning the seafloor has gone missing.
The multi-million-dollar machine
has likely located the wreck.
But AUV operators Devon and Blake
have lost contact with it.
If they can't reconnect,
they'll never find out what's below.
We've gotten over the site.
We've got the best equipment and opportunity to find it
and if we can't recover the data
after the AUV has already run its mission,
that's kind of heart-breaking.
FISHBURNE: Devon's last hope is that it's waiting
at its rendezvous point, ten miles away,
600 feet below the surface.
But they need to get there fast.
The AUV's battery is running down
and once the battery dies, the AUV's nothing more
than a 4,000-pound paperweight.
The problem is,
getting anywhere out here is far from easy.
Twelve hours into the chase,
the Agulhas II grinds to a halt.
(JUDDERING)
BOUND: We're stuck.
In normal conditions with open water,
we'd just shoot over to the loiter box,
pick her up and everything would be fine.
But, yeah, right now we can't move.
We're now almost eight nautical miles to get to the spot
and her battery is running out.
It's tough to search for an AUV in this kind of situation.
FISHBURNE: The team doesn't have time to wait.
Last time the ship got stuck, it took 14 hours to escape.
If it takes that long again,
the sub's battery will be dead before they reach it.
It's just a waiting game.
It depends on how long we got, we need to wait,
so, hopefully, not too much longer
because we are losing time.
(CRACKING)
FISHBURNE: At last, the ship breaks free.
By the time the Agulhas II
makes it to the planned end point,
the AUV's only got four hours of battery left.
The team prepares to lower its main communication system.
Yeah, we're just gonna get it together here,
spin it and then lift it.
FISHBURNE: But there's no signal.
The AUV is not where they hoped.
There's just one last possibility.
Has it come up and gotten stuck under the ice?
Devon and Blake want to use another device
to boost the comms system.
We're gonna drop this transponder down into the water
and bounce the signal possibly to the AUV.
At this point, any response is good.
FISHBURNE: They need to pick up a signal from the sub.
This is the last known possible location.
-I'm 50/50. -Yep.
It's a crap shoot.
FISHBURNE: It's the team's final roll of the dice.
But what will they find?
FISHBURNE: At the site where Ernest Shackleton
lost his ship a century ago
the team sent to find it
has a tough call to make.
Their final attempt to locate
their multi-million-dollar AUV sub has failed.
We got there and we could not establish communication
and we started realizing it's not here.
FISHBURNE: Without the AUV, the hunt for the wreck is over.
It hurt. You know?
FISHBURNE: The AUV could be anywhere.
It's likely out of battery.
And temperatures are dropping fast.
The ice floes that have trapped them twice in the last 48 hours
are closing in.
If they don't get out soon,
the ice could trap them for weeks,
just like the Endurance.
Captain Bengu makes the call.
I personally feel we've...
We've done exceptionally well
under the circumstances.
I think we just accept and let go.
We are at the end of the season now.
This is where the ice starts forming first
and, yeah, we should certainly get out of this area.
THOMAS: Antarctica's a tough cookie to crack.
Shackleton figured that out.
Obviously we're figuring it out.
FISHBURNE: The Antarctic has already cost the team
one of their AUV subs
and destroyed their underwater robot.
SAINT AMOUR: We came down with bigger, better technology,
but the same rules that Shackleton was playing by,
still apply today.
You know, Mother Nature, at some point
puts her foot down and lets you know who's boss.
ANKER: The ice still rules.
The ice is still the king and you have no choice.
You're merely there trying to do the best you can.
FISHBURNE: For now, the secret of Shackleton's lost ship
remains locked in the AUV, hidden beneath the ice.
JAMES: The AUV could be anywhere.
At this point it's likely that it's buoyant
and floating under the ice.
That information that's on that AUV,
could hold the secret of the Endurance.
We were always up against the ice.
That was always the enemy for us,
just as it was for Shackleton.
And, yeah, it's beaten us also.
FISHBURNE: The loss of the Endurance a century ago,
turned Shackleton into a legend.
Shackleton resonates today
because of keeping his men together,
keeping morale up, doing the impossible
and then saving them.
That's Endurance.
Whenever I'm out there in a tricky situation,
climbing or where things might not be going my way,
I take a bit of Shackleton and I plug it in and I'm, like,
"Yeah, Sir Ernest Shackleton,
"he would persevere."
And that is the power of Shackleton's story.
FISHBURNE: On the hunt for Shackleton's wreck,
the crew has battled the same conditions
faced by the Endurance,
broken through to one of the most
remote places on the planet,
and explored for the first time,
the ship's final resting ground on the sea floor.
For the expedition, getting this close to the wreck
is a major feat of exploration.
And while the onset of winter marks the end of this season,
the team plans to return.
If there's an opportunity to come back
and search for it again, I'm gonna be first on the list.
BONIN: Hopefully we'll find the AUV
and Shackleton's ship in the same spot.
I always said this was the greatest wreck hunt
that there's ever been and still is.
I mean, somewhere beneath my feet is the Endurance.
And do you know what?
It isn't over yet.
SCOTT SHACKLETON: They're talking about going back
to the moon, so why not go back to the Weddell Sea?
To be able to go down and find it and locate it
and document it,
would be a closure for this whole Endurance story.