‘I made one of the most important discoveries in history – I had the world up in arms’

Two decades into his acclaimed career, TV historian Dan Snow has explained why unearthing Ernest Shackleton’s 100-year-old shipwreck is the ‘best thing he’s ever done’.

National Geographic’s new documentary Endurance, from Oscar-winning filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, tracks the legendary British explorer’s extraordinary 1915 tale of survival.

‘Growing up my family loved history. My grandma would tell me wonderful stories and it’s why I love history today. 

‘Shackleton’s one of those names you hear about as a legendary explorer but I never thought that 40 years after hearing those stories I would be standing on the ice 10,000 feet above where his ship was on the seabed below.’

There was a lot of pressure riding on the 2022 expedition – helmed by polar geographer Dr John Shears, subsea engineer Nico Vincent, and maritime archaeologist Mensun Bound- after the first team ‘failed miserably’ in 2019.

They lost millions of dollars in damaged equipment.

No one was more disappointed than Mensun, however – whose family had once hosted Ernest in their Falkland Islands’ home – as he saw his lifelong ambition fade away. 

‘Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong,’ Mensun recalled. ‘I was just waiting for that little tap on the shoulder from history, and it didn’t come.’

The same fate looked set to repeat itself three years later until the Endurance was epically discovered ‘by the skin of their teeth’ just hours before the second attempt was meant to officially come to an end.

And the whole world rejoiced at the historic news. 

‘It really got a bit despondent with a few hours left,’ the 45-year-old presenter recounted. 

‘We thought: “We’re not gonna do this.” And then there it was, suddenly. Beautiful. [Then] we were talking to media in China and North America and were on the front page of the New York Times. It was just very special.’

The discovery came ‘just 10 days after Russia invaded Ukraine’ – a historic event of a very different nature – and the renowned British historian couldn’t help but feel a strange layer of ‘guilt’.

‘Everyone was very disappointed and sad and scared about the world and this was the first good news story that fought its way back into the news agenda and for a while, I felt awkward about it [because] a shipwreck is not going to save anyone’s life in Ukraine.

‘But then you realise this is what makes us human. These ventures, these stories, these images in the seabed, these people working together to push to the stars and push the depths of the ocean. That is inspiring people.’

Now he finds himself ‘bullish’ when people ask him what the point in it all is, and ‘pushes back quite hard’. 

‘Why does the Mona Lisa exist? It just gives people enormous happiness. We can’t explain it. It lifts people’s eyes up from the daily grind a bit and gives them something to be excited about. We shouldn’t be ashamed of that.’

Far from shame, the historian and History Hit podcaster who has won a Bafta for his series Battlefield Britain and received an MBE for his services to history, has officially peaked. 

‘I thought that young Dan would be quite happy and think “The old guy’s done all right.”. I got to go to this unbelievable part of the world. I got to tell the greatest story in history.

‘We got to find the most beautiful shipwreck in the world. Then come home and hand it over to the world’s best filmmakers. So I’m never going to beat that.’

Unlike Ernest and his men (who all astonishingly survived over 300 days in sub-zero conditions), Dan was kept ‘cosy’ on board the ship but even he got a taste of what they would have suffered all those years ago.

The broadcaster is no stranger to travelling the world to uncover history’s most impressive stories, but this was perhaps the most unique location he has ever visited. 

‘We did get to go out onto the ice a bit and experience for ourselves the extreme conditions,’ he admitted.

‘My lesson there is, I have no idea how they lived on the ice for months and months, because I went out on the ice for about 10 minutes and thought I was going to die. I had to go back and have a hot shower and those guys were out in the ice for months and months and months.’

Not to mention the ‘rough weather’ they experienced on the Southern Ocean. ‘There was a physical element to it, but certainly, I had it easier than most he concluded.

The documentary is also breaching frontiers in an entirely different way with its use of AI technology to recreate the voices of Ernest and his men who kept detailed diaries of their perilous voyage.