History & heritage  |  11 Mar 2022

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Akaroa Museum director Lynda Wallace is hoping the discovery of the wreckage of the Endurance will reignite public interest in the legendary ship’s captain Frank Worsley.

Worsley was born in Akaroa in 1872 and served as both captain and navigator on Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship, Endurance.

The wooden vessel was crushed by ice in the Weddell Sea and sank in 1915. Miraculously, the crew of the Endurance survived, but for more than a century the exact location of the wreckage has been a mystery.

This week a privately-financed expedition, Endurance 22, located the wreckage, just 6.4 kilometres from the location recorded by Worsley in his diaries as its resting place.

“It’s amazing that after more than 100 years of lying under 3000 metres of water in the Weddell Sea, Worsley’s ‘brave little ship’ has been revealed again,’’ says Ms Wallace.

“It’s an important footnote in the story of Frank Worsley’s life and the contribution he made to Antarctic exploration.’’

In his home town of Akaroa, Worsley’s skill as a navigator and sailor, as well as his unquenchable thirst for adventure, are well known and celebrated in an exhibition in the Akaroa Museum.

A bust of Worsley also stands near Akaroa’s main wharf.

But many may be surprised to learn that Worsley’s contribution to the survival of the 28 crew embarked upon the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was every bit as important as Shackleton’s legendary leadership qualities.

Without Worsley’s sailing and navigation skills, the arduous 800 mile crossing of the southern ocean in a 22 foot lifeboat could not have been made. Shackleton would not have found help in South Georgia and the whole party would have died and their story would have been lost with them.

Worsley, in his 1931 account of the expedition “Endurance – an Epic of Polar Adventure”, wrote of how, for a captain, losing his ship was “like having an arm or a leg amputated”.

"It was a heart-breaking sight to see the brave little ship that had been our home for so long, broken up by the remorseless, onward sweep of a thousand miles of pack-ice. To see her crushed, and know that we could do nothing whatever to help her, was as bad as watching a chum go out."

"The rigging tautened and sang like harp strings, then snapped under the strain as the ship was twisted and wrung by the giant hands of ice that grasped her. The men worked almost in silence. To talk was impossible. Each man knew it was the end of the ship. We had lost our home in that universe of ice. We had been cast out into a white wilderness that might well prove to be our tomb,’’ Worsley wrote.

Akaroa Museum is open to the public between 10.30am and 4.30pm seen days a week.