Wreck hunters have found the ship on which the famous polar explorer Ernest Shackleton made his final voyage.
The vessel, called “Quest”, has been located on the seafloor off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
Shackleton suffered a fatal heart attack on board on 5 January 1922 while trying to reach the Antarctic.
And although Quest continued in service until it sank in 1962, the earlier link with the explorer gives it great historic significance.
The British-Irish adventurer is celebrated for his exploits in Antarctica at a time when very few people had visited the frozen wilderness.
“His final voyage kind of ended that Heroic Age of Exploration, of polar exploration, certainly in the south,” said renowned shipwreck hunter David Mearns, who directed the successful search operation.
“Afterwards, it was what you would call the scientific age. In the pantheon of polar ships, Quest is definitely an icon,” he told BBC News.
The remains of the ship, a 38m-long schooner-rigged steamship, were discovered at the bottom of the Labrador Sea on Sunday by a team led by The Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS).
Sonar equipment found it in 390m (1,280ft) of water. The wreck is sitting almost upright on a seafloor that has been scoured at some point in the past by the passing of icebergs.
The main mast is broken and hanging over the port side, but otherwise the ship appears to be broadly intact.
Quest was being used by Norwegian sealers in its last days. Its sinking was caused by thick sea-ice, which pierced the hull and sent it to the deep.
The irony, of course, is this was the exact same damage inflicted on Shackleton’s Endurance – the ship he used on his ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917.
Fortunately, the crews of both Endurance, in 1915, and Quest, in 1962, survived.
Indeed, many of the men who escaped the Endurance sinking signed up for Shackleton’s last polar mission in 1921-1922, using Quest.
