Hours later, Shackleton suffered a massive heart attack and died in his cabin, aged 47. His death ended the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, in which daring adventurers competed to reach ever more southerly latitudes and either came home with epic tales of human triumph over the elements or succumbed to them. The ill-fated Shackleton-Rowett Expedition became little more than a footnote in the Shackleton myth. Quest was sold to a Norwegian family and spent much of the next 40 years working as a sealer in the Arctic. When she sank off the coast of Labrador on a foggy spring evening in 1962, the world took little notice. 

Quest deserved better. Her name can be found again and again in accounts of early 20th-century Arctic exploration, crossing paths with a veritable who’s who of the field. The discovery of the wreck of Endurance, Shackleton’s most famous ship, in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea in March 2022 (eerily, exactly 100 years to the day that the explorer was buried on South Georgia Island) was a call to action.

There was still one Shackleton ship out there — in Canadian waters, no less. To find her would not only bring the explorer’s story full circle, but also allow other stories to be told.

Which is why, on a brisk June night, under a bright sliver of new moon that seems to echo Shackleton’s last written words, an expedition team is preparing to drop a sonar towfish into the Labrador Sea.

When Quest went down on May 5, 1962, she was two months into a seal hunting trip in the sea ice off Labrador. She’d been taking on water since she left her home port of Bodø, Norway, in February. Then, the fatal blow: on April 1, her hull was wrenched by shifting ice, hard enough to break deck screws in the engine room and warp cabin doors. Her Norwegian crew did everything they could to keep her afloat and continue with the catch, but when it became clear that she would sink, the evacuation was calm and orderly. The crew offloaded as much cargo and valuables as they could to four nearby ships, then watched as Quest slowly heeled over to starboard and slipped beneath the waves.

In a telegram to her owners in Bodø, sent shortly after the sinking, Captain Olav Johannesen reported her final position: 53°10’ N, 54°27’ W. The job of interrogating the accuracy of those coordinates fell to Antoine Normandin, lead researcher for the expedition. A geographer with a background in aircraft navigation systems, Normandin had researched wreck locations in the past purely out of personal interest. When he mentioned his nerdy hobby to Geiger in late 2023, Geiger quickly recruited him to the search for Quest.

This afternoon in LeeWay Odyssey’s mess, Normandin — mid-30s, trim, with a mop of black curls and just a trace of a French accent — shows no sign of the exhaustion and worry that will soon overtake him. He’s animated, walking us through a positively Holmesian feat of detective work.

The biggest question was how Captain Johannesen had obtained Quest’s final position. Foggy conditions on the night of the sinking, corroborated both by photographs and historical weather data, would have made it extremely difficult to take an accurate position using celestial navigation. But Normandin hoped a clue might reside in the ship’s logs from one of Quest’s rescuers. It just so happened that the Norwegian national archives held two logs from Kvitfjell, which picked up some of Quest’s crew — including one from the year of the sinking. A hopeful Normandin requested the logbook for 1962 and flew to Tromsø. 

Craig Bulger and Sarah Walsh, the technicians from the Marine Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland, expect calibration of the ultra-short baseline beacon, intended to track the towfish’s position relative to the ship, to take 10 minutes at most, but after three hours, the beacon still won’t return a signal. Walsh suggests the towfish be deployed anyway, at which point it’s discovered that the hydraulics in the tow winch aren’t working properly. Instead of paying out cable smoothly, the winch judders and stops — a serious problem when you’re supposed to be towing $175,000 worth of equipment 30 metres above the seabed at the end of a kilometre of cable.

As LeeWay Odyssey turns slow figure eights above the William Carson, Mearns moves restlessly between the working deck, the bridge and the lab, asking questions, making mental calculations. On deck, Normandin and Geiger, dressed in down jackets and hard hats, give optimistic soundbites to cave diver and underwater explorer Jill Heinerth, who is documenting the expedition in photos and video. A sudden fluttering catches our eyes as a yellow warbler alights on the railing of the poop deck. Its appearance sparks a flurry of excited questions and debate. Is it a stowaway? A migrant blown off course by bad weather? The spirit of Shackleton? Geiger chooses to see it as a good omen. 

By late afternoon, with the winch still malfunctioning, the mood throughout the ship is considerably less buoyant. The decision is made to turn around and make for the nearest port: St. Anthony, N.L., about eight hours away in the opposite direction to the search area. Time is now of the utmost essence. Assuming the winch can be fixed quickly, we will have at most 36 hours to complete Mearns’ lines before LeeWay Odyssey must begin the long journey back to St. John’s.

I wake at midnight to the deafening roar of the bow thrusters manoeuvring the ship alongside the wharf in St. Anthony, but quickly fall back to sleep, happy to be stationary instead of rolling in my bunk with the swell. In the morning, I head out to the poop deck to see what’s going on. The air is fresh and mild, with scraps of blue sky showing through the lifting fog. A local mechanic, whose name, I learn later, is Harvey, is working on the winch. His phone jangles and he answers; the caller asks Harvey how he’s doing today. 

“Oh, I’m slicker’n whale shit on an ice floe,” he says. I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but he has the winch fixed within 15 minutes.

As Odyssey’s crew make ready to depart, Normandin and Jan Chojecki, grandson of the man who financed Shackleton’s last expedition, get on their knees and kiss the damp cement of the wharf in an appeal to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things.

Shortly before 6 p.m., as Odyssey finishes its long, wide turn into the seventh line, I ask Normandin how he’s feeling, partly out of journalistic obligation and partly out of genuine concern. He exhales, runs his hands through his hair, steeples his fingers against his forehead. “I just want this to be over.”

Eventually, he heads to the mess for a change of scenery, and Geiger comes to takes his place. We’re joking around in a state of delirium when Geiger suddenly leaps out of his chair toward the monitor.

“What’s that? That’s it!” he shouts.

A jarring anomaly has appeared on the featureless orange ticker tape of the sonar image, about the size and shape of a grain of rice, with a shadow like a spear.

Geiger texts Normandin: are you seeing this? Then, not content to wait for an answer, he goes to confer with the team in the mess.

Normandin rushes to wake Mearns; I scramble belowdecks to wake Sarah Walsh. We gather in the lab, and Bulger checks the measurements of the target against the schematic of Quest taped to the wall. He estimates it measures about 38 metres long; Quest was 37 metres.