A History of Flag Nº 211: Since its first foray into the field on Simon Spooner’s 2014 expedition to explore the wreck of the French merchant ship Le Casimir, which sank in the Caribbean in 1829, Flag Nº 211 has been carried on a half-dozen maritime expeditions, including a multi-season project to map the 58 known wrecks of Greece’s Fournoi Archipelago, which span some 2,600 years of seafaring.
A fellow of The Explorers Club since 2004, John Geiger has been the CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and President and CEO of Canadian Geographic Enterprises since 2013. He is the internationally bestselling author of seven books, including Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition and The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible. Among his many honors is the Order of Canada, which was bestowed upon him in 2021.
It’s just after 7 PM on a foggy June night off the coast of Labrador, Canada, 18 hours into the search for the Quest, the last ship of legendary Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. An uneasy silence has settled over the search vessel, LeeWay Odyssey, with all eyes glued to monitors in the lab and the mess displaying the slow crawl of data from the side-scan sonar towfish flying above the seafloor. The past 72 hours have thrown a series of obstacles in our path, including malfunctioning equipment requiring an unplanned diversion to St. Anthony.
The delays have weighed on our expedition team. Our search window is tight. Now, we find ourselves in a race against the clock to finish scanning the search area before LeeWay Odyssey must return to port. Yet the seafloor is absolutely scoured clean. As the hours pass, the occasional erratic is all that interrupts the monotonous flow of sonar data. Some team members have not slept for 36 hours and begin to drift off to their bunks for a nap. Others gather in the mess, with one eye always on the screen.
I’m in the lab with several others but happen to be the only one looking at the monitor when, suddenly, a shape, unlike any others we have seen on the ocean floor 400 meters below, begins to emerge. A tiny, bright notch in the otherwise featureless orange expanse of the sonar feed, with a sharp, dark shadow. “What is that?” I ask. “Is that it?”
I text Antoine Normandin, the lead researcher for our Shackleton Quest Expedition, who had gone to the ship’s mess for a break: “Are you seeing this?” I can’t wait for his answer and head down, bursting into the mess: “Get David!” Antoine dives down below decks to find search director David Mearns. Soon, we’re all gathered in the lab.
We need to make another couple of passes at the target to be absolutely sure, but the image on the screen corresponds exactly with the known dimensions and structural features of Quest. This, together with its location, just outside the high-probability search box, means we are the first people to lay eyes on the ship since she slipped beneath the surface of the frigid Labrador Sea 62 years earlier.
“Engines unreliable; furnace cracked; water short; heavy gales; all that physically can go wrong; but hte spirit of all on board is sound and good.” – Sir Ernest Shackleton
How did the Norwegian-built Quest come to rest in Canadian waters east of the tiny fishing hamlet of Battle Harbour, Labrador, and northwest of St. John’s, Newfoundland?
Shackleton is best known for leading the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition from 1914 to 1917, during which his ship, Endurance, was trapped in and eventually crushed by pack ice. Despite the harrowing circumstances, Shackleton’s leadership ensured the survival of all his crew members and cemented his legacy as a paragon of resilience and heroism.
In 1920, Shackleton set his sights on the Arctic and drew up plans to explore a presumed landmass west of the Arctic Archipelago and north of Alaska. He also had his eye on the North Pole. He enlisted the financial support of Canadian department store magnate Sir John Eaton and his wife, Lady Eaton, and generated interest from the Canadian government. Shackleton then traveled to Norway, where he purchased a four-year-old schooner-rigged steamship named Foca I, and outfitted her for exploration, including the addition of her distinctively large wheelhouse, and, at the urging of his wife, renamed her Quest. At the time, newspapers reported that Shackleton “had given up the idea of exploring the South Polar regions, and in future will devote himself to the Arctic.”
Canada’s then-prime minister, Arthur Meighen, however, had other ideas. He withdrew his support for the expedition at the eleventh hour, leaving Shackleton scrambling to organize a backup plan. He reset his sights southward, and secured financial backing from an old school acquaintance, businessman John Quiller Rowett.
The Shackleton-Rowett Expedition was plagued with difficulties from the start: Quest was underpowered, top-heavy, rolled constantly, and required two unplanned stops for comprehensive repairs en route to Antarctica. The cumulative weight of these challenges took their toll on Shackleton. In the midst of these mishaps, Shackleton confided in his diary, “Anxiety has been probing deeply into me, for until the very end of the year, things have gone awry.” He added: “Engines unreliable; furnace cracked; water short; heavy gales; all that physically can go wrong; but the spirit of all on board is sound and good.”
Then, on January 5, 1922, tragedy struck. While Quest was anchored at Grytviken, South Georgia Island, Shackleton suffered a fatal heart attack in his cabin, ironically becoming the only man to die during an expedition under his immediate command. His death at age 47 marked the end of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Despite this devastating loss, the expedition continued on under the leadership of Frank Wild, fulfilling several of Shackleton’s scientific objectives.
Quest returned to the United Kingdom and was acquired by a young Norwegian entrepreneur, Ludolf Schjelderup. Under his ownership, the ship continued to be associated with polar exploration and was involved in several notable voyages, including the British Arctic Air Route Expedition of 1930, under the command of a brilliant young explorer named Gino Watkins, who himself tragically died a year later.
During World War II, Quest was pressed into service as a light cargo vessel and minesweeper by the Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission (Nortraship) while Norway was under occupation. Despite undergoing repairs in 1942 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, by late 1945 the ship was in such poor shape that it lay partly submerged in Aberdeen, Scotland.
In 1947–48 Quest was repaired in Bergen, Norway. By the time she sailed again, she was equipped with new radio, navigation and sonar equipment, along with a lengthened hull and new bow. Upon her return to service, Schjelderup began using Quest for annual seal hunts in the Labrador Sea.
It was on one of these sealing expeditions that Quest met her fate. The ship departed Bodø for the Labrador Sea in February 1962. From the start, and throughout the voyage, she encountered significant challenges—persistent leaks, malfunctioning bilge pumps, and rough seas.
In April, the ship was crushed by sea ice and the crew struggled to keep her dry. On May 4, she started leaking heavily, and bilge pumps running at full power could not prevent water from rising. The crew sent distress telegrams and prepared to evacuate.
By noon the following day, the main engine was submerged and had to be stopped. The crew began transferring to nearby vessels while attempting to salvage her cargo. At 5:40 PM, Quest heeled over to starboard and sank with 5,200 seal pelts still in the hold. The sinking was reported in Norwegian newspapers, and because of its Shackleton association, received a few lines in the Polar Record, but otherwise the world took little notice of the loss of this historically significant ship.
I always felt Quest deserved better, and in 2018 began preliminary research and planning for an expedition to find the wreck. The covid pandemic put plans on hold, but the discovery of the wreck of Endurance in the Weddell Sea in 2022 reignited my interest. Given her final resting place and her strong ties to Canada, it was only fitting that Quest should be found by members of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS). In late 2023, Normandin, a fellow and governor of the society, began working on a comprehensive analysis of primary documents and records related to the sinking to accurately determine her location.
My friend, the Hon. Alexandra Shackleton, a granddaughter of the explorer, introduced me to legendary shipwreck hunter David Mearns, who became an important advisor during the research phase and eventually agreed to serve as search director. At his urging, Normandin and I traveled to Norway, where we were joined by Fram Museum director Geir Kløver, who assisted the team with archival research and arranged a meeting with Tore Topp, the son-in-law of Ludolf Schjelderup. These efforts yielded original copies of telegrams, a statement on the events of May 5, 1962, signed by Quest’s captain, and crew photographs of the sinking. Additional resources came from archives in Oslo, Tromsø, and Ottawa, and included navigational charts from the early 1960s, weather data, and empirical ocean current information from oceanographic buoys.
From the beginning, I wanted the expedition to be grounded in an ethos of inclusion, embracing anyone with a stake or interest in the mission, reflecting Shackleton’s own approach to leadership. Alexandra Shackleton was appointed expedition patron, and, as the search was to be conducted in waters traditionally used by the Innu and Mi’kmaq peoples, Chief Mi’sel Joe of the Miawpukek First Nation was also made a patron. Kløver and Topp joined the team, as did Jan Chojecki, a grandson of John Quiller Rowett.
The team was rounded out by Canadian diver and cinematographer Jill Heinerth, a fellow of The Explorers Club since 2010; astronaut Mark Pathy; RCGS fellows Katherine Smalley and Derek Lee; Martin Brooks, CEO of Shackleton, the expedition-grade apparel company and an official partner to the expedition; and Canadian Geographic editor Alexandra Pope. We were joined by sonar technicians Craig Bulger and Sarah Walsh from the Marine Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland, who oversaw our round-the-clock search operations.
On June 4, 2024, we left St. John’s aboard the search vessel LeeWay Odyssey. Not unlike Shackleton on his final voyage, we soon faced several technical challenges, including a malfunctioning tow winch, an ultra-short baseline (USBL) beacon that wouldn’t calibrate, and a mounting pole for the USBL that limited our maximum travel speed.
By the time we reached the search area late on the evening of June 8, we had a remaining window of just 24 hours because of our numerous setbacks. As the hours passed by, and the sonar images revealed nothing but a smooth seafloor with the occasional boulder, I began to despair. We only had eight hours of search time remaining. But I remembered another Shackleton lesson from his narrative South:
Patience.
Patience.
Patience.
In the end, patience, planning, and perseverance won the day, and on June 12, we broke the news. “I can definitively confirm that we have found the wreck of the Quest,” said Mearns. “She is intact.”
Alexandra Shackleton was the first person ashore to be informed of the find. I had the honor of breaking the news of the discovery, during the 150th anniversary of Shackleton’s birth. She was ecstatic: “For me, this represents the last discovery in the Shackleton story. It completes the circle.”
