Non-fiction: Mensun Bound: The Ship Beneath the Ice (Pan Macmillan 2022)
The Endurance is, alongside the Fram, perhaps the most famous ship in Antarctic history. It was the ship Shackleton and his crew sailed on to Antarctica on an ill-fated expedition which was to see them shipwrecked and marooned on the ice. They managed to escape Antarctica on the ships lifeboats, sailing to Elephant Island across the tempestuous Southern Ocean.
The survivors record the sinking of the Endurance in their diaries. The Ship Beneath the Ice is an account by the Falkland Islands -born marine archaeologist Mensun Bound of an expedition to discover the wreck of the Endurance using unmanned submersibles. It’s written in the format of a diary, going through two separate expeditions day by day. The first one was a failure, but on the second the Endurance was finally found.
The book interleaves the story of the contemporary expeditions with that of of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, using all the published and unpublished diaries and accounts still in existence for context. This is a book that manages a rare feat: It’s both popular and engaging, but also interesting for someone who has read a lot of Antarctic literature.