“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s a wreck,” says Chojecki. “We found a wreck.”

“Again,” quips Kløver.

Down the hall in the darkened hydro lab, Falcon pilots Andy Robinson and James Kuo sit in front of a bank of monitors, surrounded by a small crowd of onlookers, including Mearns and Antoine Normandin, whose research and probability analysis enabled Quest’s initial discovery.

They’re joined by Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser, a benthic ecologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who studies the biological communities that form on shipwrecks, and Danish marine archeologist Annamaiya Norling, who will assess how well these historical artifacts have held up in the harsh subsea environment.

Their voices never rise above a whisper as Falcon pulls back, adjusts course and approaches what can only be the bow of Quest. It is as though she is not a ship but an altar. She is adorned with what passes, in the ocean, for flowers: pink anemones and enormous bunches of peachy soft corals sprout from the timbers of her hull and what remains of her upper decking.

A collective gasp goes up from the group as Falcon’s lights land on an aluminum structure topped with a pile of debris. The twin portholes staring blindly back at us mark it as one of the few pieces of Quest unchanged since Shackleton’s day.

As Falcon continues its reconnaissance, the excitement dims as we realize that the ship’s bridge superstructure, which once proudly bore the name Quest, is gone. The stern and more than 70 per cent of the vessel’s starboard side are buried beneath nets, likely cut from fishing vessels snagged on the wreck. More abandoned gear, including weights, floats and trawl doors, is strewn around the surrounding seabed. It’s a stark reminder of humanity’s impact on the ocean, although Quest lies in an area that has been closed to bottom trawling for nearly 25 years.

“That is what the seabed looks like in an area that has been actively fished,” says Mearns with characteristic impatience. Then he softens. “We wanted it to look like Quest,” he admits. He means Quest as Shackleton knew her, as we’ve seen her in photos and film reels, sailing proudly down the Thames to the cheers of crowds, a little ship bound on her date with destiny, not this decaying hulk smothered by nets.

Meyer-Kaiser’s undimmed enthusiasm offers a new perspective. The wreck may not be the Quest of our daydreaming, but her story is far from over. She is no longer a ship; she’s an oasis of life in the desert of the open ocean. She’s a garden, waiting to be explored.

“Swimmers” Molly Smith and Wren Sakai — Atlantis’s chief mate and an Alvin pilot-in-training, respectively — wear thick, full-body wetsuits to protect against the frigid North Atlantic water.

Gripping rails attached to Alvin’s distinctive orange sail, they ride along as the A-frame lowers it into the swell. Their job is to unhook the ropes tethering the sub to the ship and, with the pilot’s go-ahead, seal the hatch and open the vent valves that will expel air and allow Alvin to sink.

(Over the course of the expedition, the rotating cast of swimmers become celebrities around Atlantis; after our first dives on Terra Nova, someone scrawls a message on the whiteboard in the galley: “Have you loved your swimmer today?”)

Strickrott, an Alvin veteran of almost 30 years, has given each prospective diver a thorough safety briefing. At 61, tanned and muscular, with barely a hint of grey in his short black hair, he exudes the serene confidence of an astronaut as he walks us through the list of rules for observers: No personal phones or cameras. No perfume. No polyester clothing — natural fibres only, in case of fire. And most importantly: pee before you go.

Getting a closer look at specific features of Quest’s wreck, as well as several targets identified on the sonar images from 2024, is the team’s first goal. Mearns is particularly interested in finding the “plunge point,” where Quest first slipped beneath the waves and where she likely shed loose items. The ultimate find would be her bell, which we have permission from the Newfoundland and Labrador government to recover.

Our job as observers is to control Alvin’s external cameras and log interesting sights for further review. But Strickrott also advises us, as first-time divers, to try to be present in the moment. “You are going to have an experience you will remember for the rest of your life,” he says. “Really enjoy the view out there.”

The bow comes into view, a biological riot. Alvin’s thrusters keep up a steady, inhuman whine as Sanger flies up over the port side, battling the current, and brings us to rest on the gunwale. My eyes are almost level with the rotting timbers, close enough to touch through the thick plexiglass I’m fogging up with my eager breath. I look toward the aluminum “house” with its empty portholes, and try to imagine Shackleton striding confidently about the deck, but the view is too alien, the experience itself too overwhelming, to allow for romantic daydreams. I have to periodically remind myself that I am actually on the ocean’s bottom.

On his dive with Sanger earlier in the day, Normandin observed it was like peering into an aquarium.

“No,” Sanger reminded him, “you’re in the aquarium.”

All too soon, it is time to drop weights and return to the sunlight world.

The following day dawns stormy, and the Alvin dives are cancelled, to everyone’s disappointment. I spend the afternoon reviewing the footage from my dive. Strangely, it is here, in a dim corner of the main lab that echoes with the booming of the waves on Atlantis’s hull, that I feel Shackleton’s presence.

Lulled by the pitching of the ship, my mind wanders the span of a century and reconstructs the Quest I’ve seen in countless photos. There is the deck where an impatient Shackleton bathed the expedition’s mascot, a German shepherd named Query. There is the “house” that once bore a brass plaque engraved with three verses from one of Shack’s favourite poems, Rudyard Kipling’s “If—.” The poem consists of a father’s advice to his son, or that of a leader to an acolyte. For Shackleton, perhaps, it was a daily reminder to look for the hero within.

I wave Normandin over from the table where he is busy poring over Terra Nova’s deck plans and point out an oxidized brass doorknob and latch plate lying near the splintered remains of what was presumably a door. “She’s a mess, but she’s our mess,” he says, with something like love.

Two days later, after five Alvin dives and three consecutive nights of operations with Falcon, it is time to move on from Quest. We haven’t turned up any evidence of the plunge point or the large debris we hoped to find, including a lifeboat visible in photos of the ship’s final moments. There is no sign of her masts or bell. Still, we’ve achieved our primary objective: to digitally preserve Quest as she appears today. The ocean will continue to do what it does, slowly but surely breaking her down, but she will live on, inspiring a new generation of scientists and would-be explorers.

As Atlantis steams north away from Quest, relief settles over the ship. The weather, too, has lightened up. Under a cool blue sky streaked with cirrus clouds, a few of us, including Geiger and Normandin, sprawl between the ribs of the bow, reading, journalling and chatting. But for the smartphones, our modern clothing and the absence of hand-rolled cigarettes or pipes, it could be a scene from any of the sea voyages of Quest or Terra Nova.

“We finished the job,” Geiger reflects. “Ever since the discovery, I’ve felt like it was half done.”

“Onward and downward,” Normandin replies.

There are no agitated cod guarding their prize, no nets waiting to ensnare the sub. The decks and wooden superstructures have completely rotted away, exposing metal innards, including her boiler, rudder and propeller. Her iconic double helm still sits proud amid the jumble of her crushed stern. Her reinforced bow is buried deep in the sandy sea floor, split open like a corn husk — wide enough for Alvin to fly right inside. “It’s like an open book,” says Normandin. “She’s going to tell us a lot.”

As at Quest, we lose half a day of Alvin dives to the conditions, though this time the culprit is not wind and waves but an iceberg the height of a 10-storey building that drifts directly over Terra Nova’s final resting place.

My thoughts turn to Scott as Atlantis churns the black water, waiting. Earlier in the voyage, Kløver placed small plaster busts of Scott and Shackleton on a bookshelf in Atlantis’s library, where they have watched over several spirited debates about the two explorers’ legacies. Scott’s bust wears a worried expression, as well it might; in the latter 20th century, just as Shackleton was coming to be regarded as an exemplar of leadership, several books systematically destroyed Scott’s reputation, painting him as a bungler who needlessly sacrificed himself and his men through his refusal to use dogs and skis to reach the South Pole.

The question of what makes a polar explorer a hero is complicated, wrapped up in contemporaneous ideals of masculinity, class and nationalism that seem outdated to us in 2026. An ability to self-mythologize was critical for any explorer who hoped to keep exploring, dependent as they were on public interest in their books and lectures and on patronage from wealthy backers. Expedition leaders often edited their own diaries to remove any hints of homesickness and self-doubt that could undermine the heroic narrative.

Their men could be — and were — much more candid, says Kløver, who has dedicated much of his career to transcribing and publishing expedition members’ diaries. “The crew diaries are much more interesting because they tell me [what is] not in the books about how it is to be out on an expedition — the hard work and the immense sacrifices these men made to achieve the goals of the expedition.”