The wreck of the final ship belonging to legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton has been located 1,280 feet down in the Labrador Sea. Shackleton acquired Quest, a Norwegian-built schooner-rigged steamship, in 1921, intending to explore the Arctic. When these plans fell apart, he headed to Antarctica, on what would have been his fourth visit to the southernmost continent. But the explorer died of a heart attack aboard Quest on January 5, 1922, while anchored off the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic Ocean. He was just 47 years old.
Quest went on to a storied career of its own. The vessel helped rescue a crew that had wrecked off Greenland and searched for the polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who went missing on a rescue mission of his own. It explored Greenland as part of an expedition to chart an air route from London to Winnipeg, and during World War II served in the Royal Canadian Navy. “The ship had this wonderful post-Shackleton afterlife,” says John Geiger, CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
While on a seal hunt on April 1, 1962, Quest was trapped in ice off Labrador. On May 5, the crew evacuated as the ship took on water, sinking at 5:40 p.m. A team led by Geiger reviewed documentary evidence of the sinking, including a telegram noting the ship’s final position. They used sonar to scan the area and found the wreck, resting on its keel with its broken main mast lying alongside, 1.5 miles from its last reported location. “When it hit the seabed, there would have been a violent impact, and the main mast came down,” says Geiger. “It’s not broken up, and there’s not a lot of debris scattered about. For the most part, it’s astonishingly intact.”
