A storied ship

The Shackleton-Rowett Expedition left London, England, on Sept. 17, 1921, with Shackleton telling the Evening Standard this trip was to be his “swan song.” That statement was prophetic: in the early hours of Jan. 5, 1922, while Quest was anchored at Grytviken Harbour on South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic, Shackleton died in his cabin of a massive heart attack, aged 47. He was buried on South Georgia at his wife’s request. The expedition continued, but the heart had gone out of it, and after six months, Quest returned to London, where she was subsequently sold to the Schjelderup family of Norway and put to work as a sealer.

That might have been the last the world heard of Quest, but fate had other plans. She appears again and again in the annals of early 20th century polar exploration history, either hosting or crossing paths with a who’s-who of the field (see sidebar below). At the outset of the Second World War, she was requisitioned by the Royal Canadian Navy to ferry coal from Sydney, N.S. to Halifax. Later that year, she was refitted as a minesweeper, but plans changed and she spent the rest of the war working as a water supply boat in England.

By the 1960s, Quest was showing her age. On April 1, 1962, while stuck in the ice of the Labrador Sea, she was crushed with enough force to break deck screws in the engine room and warp cabin doors. A persistent leak that had been present for months grew worse.

On the morning of May 5, water overwhelmed Quest’s engines and her captain, Olav Johannessen, made the call to abandon ship. The crew, some cargo and valuables were evacuated to nearby ships, and at 5:40 p.m., Quest slipped beneath the waves. In a telegram to the ship’s owners in Norway, Johannessen noted Quest’s final position: 53’10 N, 54’27 W.

Finding Quest

Those coordinates were key to finding the wreck, but it was not a matter of simply sailing out to Quest’s last reported position. Mearns and Normandin set out to investigate the full context for Captain Johannessen’s report, including where, when and how the final position was taken, the weather and ice conditions in the area at the time, and the speed and direction of the prevailing current — all factors that could have influenced where Quest came to rest on the seabed.

Foggy conditions on the night of the sinking, corroborated both by photographs and historical weather data from Environment Canada and the North American Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, would have made it extremely difficult to take an accurate position using celestial navigation. A clue might reside in the ship’s logs from one of Quest’s rescuers, and it just so happened that the Norwegian national archives had retained two logs from Kvitfjell, which picked up some of Quest’s crew — including one from the year of the sinking. A hopeful Normandin flew to Tromsø.

“The archives are only open one day a week. I was there at 9 a.m. and got the logs. I was very excited. I opened the log — it was mislabelled. It was actually from 1963. Completely useless for us.”

At that point, says Normandin, “a lot of swearing in French” ensued, but he decided to peruse the log anyway, to see how often Kvitfjell’s crew were taking celestial fixes. As he flipped through the log, he noticed that they were taking positions at all hours of the day and night. Beside each entry was written: “Loran.” That detail would prove to be the key to Quest’s finding.

LORAN, short for long range navigation, was developed in the United States during the Second World War to help convoys navigate the Atlantic Ocean and was made widely available for commercial shipping in the 1950s. Ships could roughly determine their position by calculating the time difference between radio pulses emitted simultaneously from a series of stations on shore. Although primitive compared to the Global Positioning System introduced in the mid-80s, LORAN was generally accurate to within one nautical mile.

Discovering that the Norwegian rescue ship had a LORAN set, Normandin now felt confident that other ships out that night had the same technology onboard, so it was likely Quest’s final position had been taken with some degree of accuracy. He hypothesized that once Captain Johannessen got off the sinking Quest, he would have waited until she went under before taking a LORAN reading from the ship he was on prior to sending the telegram. Based on this assumption, Mearns drew up a search box covering 24 square nautical miles, criss-crossed by lines to be scanned with the towfish sonar system. If Normandin was right, they stood a very good chance of finding Quest within the first 11 lines.

A race against time

In an eerie parallel to the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition, which was plagued by mechanical issues as it made its way south, things quickly started to go wrong onboard the search vessel LeeWay Odyssey. An initial calibration test of the sonar beacon failed, then problems were discovered with the hydraulics in the tow winch, requiring an unscheduled stop in St. Anthony, N.L., for repair. By the time the team reached the search area, they had just 24 hours to complete as much of the box as possible.

The search officially began in the wee hours of Sunday, June 9. Quest was spotted almost 18 hours later, at 7:41 p.m. Newfoundland time, on the sixth of 17 lines, about 2.5 kilometres from her last reported position. Geiger was in the dry lab watching the sonar images scroll in from the virtually featureless sea floor, when suddenly a jarring anomaly, about the size of a grain of rice with a shadow like a spear, appeared at the very nadir of the image. “What’s that?” he shouted. “That’s it!”

Normandin, who had been watching a monitor in the mess, sprinted to the lab to confer with Geiger and the sonar technician, then rushed to wake Mearns.

“I almost fell on the staircase twice, and I just burst into the room and said ‘David, David, you’ve got to come up right now. I think we’ve got it!’”