The last ship of Sir Ernest Shackleton was found at the bottom of the Labrador Sea this week, sitting upright and intact at a depth of 1,280 feet (390 meters). The ship called Quest sank in 1962, 40 years after the famous explorer’s death. The research team that found the vessel was led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
The team spent months reviewing ship logs, news articles, and legal documents to determine the approximate resting place of the vessel off the coast of Labrador. A side-scan sonar survey eventually detected the ship; an oblong blob in a sonar image indicated to the team not only the shipwreck’s location, but its relatively pristine condition. “I can definitively confirm that we have found the wreck of Quest,” said David Mearns, a shipwreck hunter and member of the recent search team, in a announcing the discovery.
“Data from high resolution side-scan sonar imagery corresponds exactly with the known dimensions and structural features of this special ship, and is also consistent with events at the time of the sinking.” A 2022 expedition to find Shackleton’s ship Endurance, which famously sank in 1915 after being stuck in ice, found the three-masted schooner at the bottom of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, some 9,900 feet deep. Shackleton bought Quest (then Foca I) for £11,000 ($US639,379 in today’s currency) and outfitted it as an expedition vessel.
Shackleton sailed Quest to South Georgia Island the following year, but promptly suffered a.