‘They're never going to find it': The hunt for wreck of the Endurance
One of Frank Hurley's pictures of the stricken Endurance and, right, Irish documentary producer Ruth Johnston.
It was the legendary feat of endurance and perseverance that saw a crew survive in brutal conditions for over a year.
The wreck of Endurance - the ship crewed by Ernest Shackleton and Irish seamen including Kerry's Tom Crean and Cork man Timothy McCarthy - was thought lost forever to the ice and sea when it became trapped in pack ice and later sank in November 1915.
More than a century later, the crew of Endurance22 achieved what was widely regarded as impossible - a successful attempt to locate the shipwreck.
A new documentary, Endurance, reveals the incredible work carried out to locate the wreck, as well as recalling the miraculous story of survival of its crew.
New to Disney+ and National Geographic Films, the find was an achievement against all the odds, according to the film’s Irish producer, Ruth Johnston.
Johnston first came on board the documentary three and a half years ago, when she was asked to support a documentary team on the Agulhas II, a research ship whose crew were setting out to find the Endurance at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, which forms part of the Southern Ocean.
“Having worked on shipwreck shows before and filming for these kind of shipwreck finds, I thought: ‘They're never going to find it’,” recalls Johnston.
“They're going to Antarctica. It's freezing. It's at 3000 meters under the sea, the ice will cover over it. Shipwrecks are not easy to find under the best conditions. But this really was an unbelievable find by these guys. Putting the documentary team onto the boat in collaboration with Little Dot Studios and History Hit, we really thought this was a fantastic opportunity for education off the boat.”
But the team of the Endurance22 expedition had both the brightest minds and the latest technology, says Johnston. “This technology is brand new. No one had gone to that depth before. Nico Vincent and his incredible team of subsea engineers had really designed something that was specifically created for this.
“All the backups and all of the challenges that they had on the Agulhas II, which is the research vessel that went out, there was 150 or more hours of footage of them on the ship, and they had one thing after another thing, detailed technical challenges to overcome in the freezing cold, outside, on the back of a moving vehicle where there's a drift, there's a serious ice drift.
“The research vessel is constantly moving. So you put a drone under the sea at 3000 meters, tethered to a ship on top, and it's freezing, and that line could break, or you could lose connection with it, which did happen, or the winch could break, which did happen.”
The film, from Academy Award-winning directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo) and Natalie Hewit (Antarctica: Ice Station Rescue), captures the sense of spirit, humour and camaraderie between the crew.
“They were coming close to the end of their time when they actually finally found it,” says Johnston. “And to keep going and keep going, 24 hours a day they were working, that’s something that stood out for me, is the humour and Nico's leadership.”
It was, she felt, reminiscent of the morale evident in the original Endeavour crew when faced with crisis. When Endurance became trapped in ice and eventually sank, the men managed to reach Elephant Island, before going on a perilous 800-mile voyage to seek help.
It was a quest for survival that was honed by their time together, says Johnston. “They put on plays and they read and they listened to music, and you have to keep the morale up like that. There's that theme of perseverance in both of the stories that we're telling in Endurance the film, that really resonated for me as a storyteller.”
The original story is revisited as part of the documentary, illustrated with Frank Hurley’s original expedition footage and photos, using some techniques such as colour treatment to give audiences a sense of the past.
“Colourisation, for me anyway, would be the colouring of every single piece of the whole frame. That's not what we did here,” explains Johnston. “It was really a creative treatment that the editors, producers and directors chose, and carefully, lovingly, put together.
“The British Film Institute were a partner for us, and they actually allowed us to do this colour treatment, because there's a sensitivity in colouring archive footage, would it change that historical record?
“We used it really just to bring the footage back to life again. You can see the colour of their eyes, and you can see their skin tone - I felt like that brought them to life again.”
Born in Letterkenny in Co Donegal and raised in Castlerock in Co Derry, Johnston originally considered a career in journalism before working in television.
“I started in television making BBC daytime shows well over 20 years ago, and I was actually working in London, and I moved to New York to look after a company there. I've made everything from reality television to game shows, to augmented reality, virtual reality. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of production work.
“I moved to Seattle, and I was head-hunted by the late Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft, and I had a call from their company, Vulcan Productions.”
That company specialised in storytelling that focused on environmental and social issues. “That's when I got into filmmaking for social impact specifically, in the films that I now make. My and Ted Richane's company is called Consequential, and that's the company who were co-producers on this film. We make films which try to move the needle on issues, or make people aware of global issues facing our world today. And there are plenty of issues, so there are plenty of stories to be told.”
It was through her work with Vulcan Productions that Johnston worked as executive producer on one of the most joyous and richly detailed music documentaries of all time. Directed by Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson, Summer of Soul brought viewers to the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a celebration of black history and culture, where artists included Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone.
“The music in that film is just unbelievable,” she says of the 2022 Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature. “The footage is just spectacular. And the archive, they had found so many hours of archive. To then bring it to Endurance - both these films have themes of perseverance and challenges. The archive films really fascinate me.”
- Endurance is now on Disney+
