Advertisement

BIG Day For The Original Dogwalk Listeners: Archeologists Have Found Shackleton's Ship Over 100 Years After It Sank In Antarctica And The Ship Looks Perfect

If you clicked this blog, congratulations, you're a fucking nerd, but you're in a safe space here with me and the other nerds. 

We did the story of Ernest Shackleton and his expedition on Dogwalk in August of 2020. It is one of my favorite stories of all time. I read listened to it a couple summers ago and I'll never forget it. 

Ernest Shackleton set out on a voyage to Antarctica so he could walk across the entire continent with sled dogs. They went down there on a wooden ship, but before they could actually make landfall a storm took the ship and blew it up onto the ice and then as winter intensified more and more ice just built up around the ship and they were stuck. One of the crew members wrote in their journal said it would be like an almond trying to move itself off of a piece of chocolate. You just can't. This was 1915 so there was no radio, no real GPS, no distress signals, nothing. They were stuck in the worst place in the world far away from everything. After a fucking YEAR in the dark and the frigid cold the ship started to bust up a bit from the pressure of the ice so they took this little ricketing life boat that was only like 25 feet long or so and without any sophisticated navigation Shackleton and a few guys sailed 800 MILES across the worst possible stretch of ocean in the world and landed at Elephant Island in the middle of the south Atlantic Ocean because there was a whaling village there. Only problem was that the village was on the other side of the island. So these guys had to climb over these mountains that are so rugged and dangerous that nobody tried to do it again for over 100 years. It's an INCREDIBLE story of what humans are capable of surviving with the right leader. Not a single death of the crew. None of the rescue people died and neither did the people they left floating on a glacier. They survived on seal meat, flour, and a few of the sled dogs (RIP). It should be required reading in school, in my humble blogger opinion. And because the story has so much weight people have been searching for the sunken ship for a long time and now they've found it. Just an incredible way to start the day.