NavList:

Robin Stuart, of the documentary's modern fraction, you wrote:
"coverage of the Endurance22 search was tedious and probably deserves its 1.5 star rating".

Yes, I have chatted with a number of friends who have watched the documentary, and the bottom line is that the modern component, the Endurance22 discovery expedition, has no drama in it --this is an intrinsic problem with the story. By its nature, it's basically boring. We know how it ends. They head to the Weddell Sea in a huge, well-equipped, high-rent, safe vessel. They putter back and forth applying expensive, high-tech tools, observing from the warmth of some "mission control" deep within the vessel. There's one false alarm, which the documentary tries to play up. And then they find the actual wreck. We know they will find it because this is "old news". Further limiting the drama, there are no bodies. That's a problem for a film like this. Compare with the discovery of Titanic. That's a mass grave crushed on the ocean floor. It carries the mystery, the horror, and yes, the romance of human mortality. But Endurance? That's a pile of debris with some crabs and sea anemones living on it. The crabs do not appear to be unhappy!

You wrote:
"We know that Endurance22 got the paper as there were some indications that they adjusted their planned search box to the east"...

There's some "tension" in that sentence, right? You say you "know" something because "there were some indications...". Maybe it would be better to say that you "believe" it happened this way. Trouble is, you're in the position of outsiders looking through the windows trying to puzzle out what was going on in a meeting... of unknown participants... behind closed doors. The speculation is more difficult since wreck-hunters are an odd bunch engaged in an odd pursuit. They're not scientists or scholars, though often they throw in some scientific justification (typically about "climate research" these days) to please public interest and investor interest, too. They're also not mere businessman since they are not usually in it for the "piles of gold" though some are. What motivated the decisions of the Endurance22 team? How did they make their decisions?! You just don't know. And neither do I, despite being a peripheral member of the team. They didn't tell me. They don't have to tell me. And given the nature of the wreck-hunting "enterprise", I don't expect we'll ever know more than we do today.

You added:
"and Frank Reed was again contracted to review our work."

Just to clarify here, that was not what I was contracted to do. My job was to produce an independent analysis of the historical celestial navigation sights and occultation observations. I explained, naturally, that I would also review your work. They asked me to get in on this project because I had a prior relationship with one partner in the conglomerate of entities making up Endurance22... I had helped them hunt for a gold ship using records of lunar observations a few years prior. For my contribution to the discovery of Endurance, I was given a big thank you for my "spectacular analysis" and my contracted payment. I was happy to be paid, but of course this means I was operating in a different universe from you and Lars Bergman (and David Mearnes?).

To be clear, the work that you and Lars did was of the highest quality: an exquisitely detailed, scholarly analysis. You were honored and praised by the Royal Institute of Navigation for your achievement. And your work is recorded in academic style by your article. It will live for decades... Your analysis and mine differed in some important aspects of astronomy (well, I think they're important aspects), but we all put the big "X" on the ice floes in practially the spot, give or take a couple of miles. The big difference between your work and mine is something rather mundane... I was invited to the party and paid for my contribution. And the team acknowledged my role, eventually in a public fashion in their online notes about the discovery of Endurance. And my role got me a free ticket to a world premiere of a movie, which, as a film fan, was delightful. About the only small "honor" beyond this that I may get for my work could be a paragraph in an upcoming edition of an "entity" from the last century: an issue of National Geographic magazine (note: this is entirely distinct from the Nat.Geo. documentary --different authors, different principals). With any luck, I can use this "paragraph", if it materializes, to generate some business for my navigation classes, and also it may help bring some new blood to NavList discussions. This outcome depends on a theoretical premise. There are approximately 1.6 million subscribers to the print edition of National Geographic magazine at present. Of those, I assume, as a theory, that some small fraction of those subscribers actually read the articles. :)

You added:
"Watching the National Geographic documentary I got no insight into why they adopted the strange search pattern..."

Well, I don't know either. A documentary film is not a scholarly product, and it has to entertain as well as educate. Many topics could have been covered that would have made the story, already intrinsically undramatic, even more tedious. Where was the discussion of the celestial navigation and the occultations? Presumably, left on the cutting room floor, as they used to say. Having said that, I'm not sure there's any actual mystery here. After they had settled on a search box (which should have been an ellipse), they had to search it in some comprehensive fashion given ice conditions and the limits of a short season. It seems clear that they intended to search the whole box systematically, and without any further changes to the plan, they would have found Endurance eventually. But they ran out of time, and at the last minute they modified the plan and jumped to the southern limit of the box. I damn wish they had said what I was thinking --and what I said in my reports, too. Luck is critical. They rolled the dice here and got lucky.

You added:
"Indeed I came away with the impression that the search was based more on starry-eyed awe for Worsley's legendary but mysterious navigational skills than by any real understanding of the meaning of the numbers in the logbook or the caveats surrounding them."

I did not get that impression from the documentary (or from the small feedback I had from the team). Naturally, when they had the false alarm, the documentary team managed to get some over-the-top quotes from key players that looked almost comic in retrospect. I feel that this was intentional on the filmmakers' part. Certainly I emphasized in my reports, and in other communications, that the position originally given by Worsley was best thought of as the "Endurance Memorial Position". It was an epitaph, to be scratched into a grave marker for Endurance (which would never be seen again by any possible means from the perspective of 1915). The "Endurance Memorial Position" was not something to be treated like "GPS coordinates" --or maybe that's exactly how it should be seen. In fact, that's the modern analogy that I used repeatedly. When a modern app or device tells us a position, base on GPS/GNSS or other modern tech, and that position is precise to 15 digits, the numbers shouldn't be taken seriously (that 15th digit in a latitude is the size of an atom!). The Endurance position, listed by Worsley, precise to some seconds of arc, shouldn't have been taken seriously either. Worsley was not a "god" of navigation, and he did not pretend to be.

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA