For over a century, Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance has been mythologized as the Titanic of the Antarctic.
It’s considered to be a cautionary tale about a ship built to withstand anything, so much so that its hubris was built into its name. Of course, it eventually sank in the Arctic, supposedly due to a busted rudder.
A new study posits a fascinating idea: what if the Endurance was actually a piece of s**t that wasn’t built for any of the stuff that it did? Wouldn’t that make the fact that it sank entirely unsurprising?
That’s the claim in a new paper by Jukka Tuhkuri, a Finnish sea ice expert and professor at Aalto University. Tuhkuri ran some calculations after joining the 2022 expedition that rediscovered the Endurance wreck.
According to his data and historical research, the ship wasn’t actually a marvel of engineering. It was more like a cushy passenger cruise ship dressed up like an exploration ship.
It turns Out Legendarily Strong Ship ‘Endurance’ Wasn’t Actually Strong at All
The Endurance was never meant to plow through ice sheets. It wasn’t even originally called the Endurance. It was called the Polaris, and it was built for Arctic tourism.
The design is intended to gently bump into floating ice, hoping its momentum will push it aside. It was never meant to survive the real world, the rigors of polar exploration—and Shackleton knew the ship was a lemon, according to Tuhkuri.
Unlike the battle-ready ships of the day, the Endurance had pine deck beams (a soft wood), an engine room that was way too long (structurally unsound), and a hull missing key diagonal supports (a poor design choice for a ship supposedly built to smash into ice).
In a letter to his wife, Shackleton admitted it wasn’t as strong as his previous vessel, Nimrod, which was a more fitting name depending on which of its two definitions you go with.
Tuhkuri’s research also blows up the idea that the Endurance went down because of a broken rudder. The real culprit, Tuhkuri claims, was the ship’s keel, a.k.a. its spine. It snapped in half under pressure from shifting ice, quite literally tearing the boat apart from the bottom up.
Despite the wreck, Shackleton’s crew all somehow survived to tell the tale and spread the myth of the Endurance, the ship that was mythologized as unbreakable but, unlike the Titanic, was actually built to be indestructible. It was just good PR.
Or, as Thukuri puts it, “Maybe Endurance was a strong and heroic ship in a poetic sense; in an engineering sense, unfortunately, it was not.”
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