p-chapman Ars Centurion
7y
220
Continuing trying to be an amateur historian in the time span of only a few minutes -- There's a lot more back and forth one can get into, regarding Shackelton's knowledge of ice and choice of ships.

Shackleton certainly knew something about building for ice, so he wasn't entirely ignorant:

[Edit: That's sort of the TL;DR of this long winded post. Shackleton certainly had some experience with ships for ice. Getting a custom built ship probably was far too much for his finances. As arjalon wrote, it was likely Endurance or nothing.]

For a 1902 British government expedition, with Robert F. Scott in charge, and Shackleton as 3rd officer or something, the custom built ship RRS Discovery was described this way:
Having observed previous expedition boats, particularly Nansen’s Fram, he [Scott] knew how to maximize the Discovery’s chances of not becoming enmeshed in the ice. The ship had therefore been designed with a well-rounded, bulbous hull made from thick wooden beams which meant it could rise up without being crushed by the extreme pressure caused by million-ton ice floes on the move.
[in Ranulph Fiennes' book on Shackleton]

Well, a quick look at pics makes the Discovery look fairly conventional, with some slab sides up top at least, and wikipedia says this:

Early discussions on building a dedicated polar exploration ship considered replicating Fridtjof Nansen's ship Fram, but that vessel was designed specifically for working through the pack ice of the Arctic. The British ship would have to cross thousands of miles of open ocean before reaching the Antarctic, so a more conventional design was chosen.

Still, it goes on to describe all the various heavy wooden construction used in the ship, so it was heavily reinforced, in some manner. But I don't know about whether diagonal reinforcing, as opposed to heavier hull, ribs, and cross beams. (The Fram had some diagonals.)

Whatever the details of its construction, the Discovery was stuck in Antarctic ice for two years. And came out OK.

So it might not have been a Fram-like gold standard, but would have been well regarded as very suitable.

Ok, if Shackleton would have known about what seemed to work in the Antarctic ice, why did Shackleton cheap out for the Endurance?

Wikipedia suggests that the fully equipped, custom-built Discovery cost 51,000 pounds.
Ignoring British inflation adjustments over the next decade or so, Endurance was bought for 11,600 pounds. (And he also spent 3,200 pounds on the Aurora, the smaller 2nd ship for the expedition group at the other side of the Antarctic continent -- this was all about an Antarctic land crossing, after all.) However, the Discovery was slightly over twice the GRT (gross registered tonnage) of the Endurance. (GRT isn't always the best metric, as for example the bulbous Fram, shorter than the Endurance, still has a larger GRT.)

So let's say that a smaller custom-built ship the size of the Endurance would have been, say 2/3rds the cost (as cost won't scale linearly). Thus something like 34k custom build cost vs. 12k for the actual Endurance. Plus some additional customization costs for the Endurance that must have been added on afterwards.

In any case, well over twice the cost to buy a custom ship for likely the biggest expense of the expedition!
(I suppose the cost ratio would have been guessed by anyone buying a depreciated used car vs. a new one...)

What about the diagonally reinforced Deutschland ship, mentioned in this article?

Shackleton was well aware of it, as he had wanted to buy it for his earlier 1907 expedition. But as wikipedia notes:
Unfortunately, Christiansen's price – £11,000, or approximately £1,150,000 in 2018 terms[3] – was beyond Shackleton's means; he eventually acquired the much older, smaller Nimrod for around half of Bjørn's price
Thus at one point even 11,000 pounds, less than Endurance's cost, was too much for his finances.

So I won't write Shackleton off as being a dumbass when it came to choosing a ship. But it still bears looking into, just what the Endurance's structure was, how it compares to the Fram and Discovery and Deutschlan -- and whether any useful reinforcements could have added at moderate cost within a reasonable time.

Again, this is all a quick & dirty look at the subject and I'm sure one can find more and better evidence for all sorts of opinions & counter opinions.