Review of The Ship Beneath The Ice, by Mensun Bound, pub. Macmillan 2022
“Chad suddenly said, ‘Goddammit, I gotta get me some grandchildren. What’s the point of finding the Endurance if you don’t have grandchildren to tell the story to?’ So I told Chad about a little moment in Macklin’s unpublished diary in which he was thinking about what he would do in old age if he survived. He saw himself sitting beside an inglenook fireplace, telling his grandchildren the story of the sinking of the Endurance and how they survived on the ice.”
Mensun Bound is a marine archaeologist and this is the story of his two attempts, one unsuccessful, the second triumphant, to find the Endurance, sunk in the Weddell Sea in 1915 during Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. This theme lends itself to a two-strand retelling, comparing Shackleton’s original journey with that of the searchers for the ship, which is how Bound handles it.
aThis is quite handy, since he can keep his own diary of events but augment the long journey south, when nothing much is happening yet, with the diaries, largely unpublished, of members from the original expedition. By this process we gradually get to know Shackleton and his companions, and it becomes clear that for all their courage and fortitude, they were as fallible as anyone else and certainly no band of brothers. They were snobbishly exclusive towards the ship‘s crew, who resented it, and they understandably fell out a lot among themselves when stranded on Elephant Island. To quote Macklin’s diary; “Do what one will, one comes at times to hate the very sight of some particular unfortunate from whom one cannot escape. The way he looks, or eats, or walks, or sniffs, becomes abhorrent”.
Bound, a Falkland Islander, grew up with tales of Shackleton and clearly admires him immensely, but not to the extent of being unaware that he too had flaws; he could be autocratic, seems to have chosen his team specifically with an eye to eliminating any dissent and was petty enough to deny the Polar medal to Chippy McNish, the one member who did defy him.
The characters of those on the search expedition come over less strongly (possibly because there was less dissent, or because they’re all still alive). But the major character in this strand of the retelling is in any case the Antarctic itself. It is, of course, a landscape like no other:
“In all directions our view is dominated by bergs that range in shape and size from soaring, pointed multilaterals and long, vertiginous flat-tops to smaller thimbles, pinnacles and broken teeth; and finally there are the plumper and more bosomy bergs whose edges have been softened by snow.”
The wildlife, so long unmolested, is equally impressive; “Looking down, I could make out a number of seals suspended, motionless, in a vertical position, with only their nostrils protruding through the brash ice beside the ship. […] Most remarkably of all, they were actually coming right up to our submerged hull and nuzzling us with their noses.”
As they near the search area, there is a lot of tension, provided not least by the unpredictability of the technology they are using to search in conditions where it is largely untried and where one little thing going wrong can wreck everything, particularly given that any repairs have to be somewhat Heath Robinson: “It was not a sophisticated repair job, but one requiring successively larger hammers. They started off with a carpenter’s hammer and when that wasn’t big enough they sent for the blacksmith’s block hammer, and when that didn’t work they lowered down a sledgehammer. That worked.” There is a grimly amusing moment when one of the team members decides that state-of-the-art isn’t always best: “He spotted an old winch in storage and asked if he could also have that one for the project. Everybody was of the opinion that the two new ones would be entirely reliable, but Nico’s view was that they were not tried and tested, whereas the old one, despite its years, was. Both of the new winches have now failed and so Nico has switched to the 25-year-old winch, and it is working.”
What comes over most strongly is the complete and exciting unfamiliarity of the place – as Bound says, “We know more about the rings of Saturn than we know about our own Southern Ocean. To me it is painfully paradoxical that although we can peer 32 billion lightyears across the observable universe, we cannot see to the bottom of the Weddell Sea.” Bound’s motivation for the search was a fascination both with wrecks and Shackleton, but for me the most enthralling thought was the one he encapsulates here: “And this is where my chart of the Weddell Sea becomes interesting. The contour lines are there and follow the normal conventions, but when you come to the sector which is permanently covered by pack – that is to say, the part of the Weddell Sea where we are now – there is nothing. The contour lines stop dead in their tracks. There aren’t even any conjectural dots. It’s just blank and void. Right now, we are, literally, off the map. Nobody has been to the bottom of the Weddell Sea.”
Here be dragons, in fact. Who wouldn’t want to go on that trip and fill in that chart?
