| Porthole 12 May 22

FORGET Harrison Ford – the true “Indiana Jones of the Deep” has been announced as a guest speaker aboard several Cunard Line voyages over the coming months.

Mensun Bound made global headlines earlier this year (CW 10 Mar) when he discovered Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance beneath the ice of Antarctica, where it had lain for more than 100 years.

Fresh from his frozen exploits, the now renowned maritime archaeologist will join Queen Mary 2 in Southampton for a 7-night transatlantic crossing on 24 Jun, while next year he will also present aboard Queen Elizabeth on a 13-night voyage from Alaska to San Francisco.

Bound, who is from Oxford University, is Trustee of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, and headed up a “team of crack deep-ocean robotic technologists” which discovered Endurance 3km under the ice.

Cunard noted that the shipboard lectures will be the first public presentations by Bound since he returned from his historic expedition, and will reveal how he and his colleagues “penetrated the pack to find the world’s most unreachable wreck”.

When the team found the ship, Bound noted that there are no wood-consuming parasites existing in the Weddell Sea, “so the wood is as fresh as the day the ship went down”.