In March 1909 Ernest Shackleton and the crew of the Nimrod reached New Zealand after 14 months away from civilisation.
It was during the heroic age of Antarctic exploration and Shackleton had gone further south than any human being had gone before. He and two others had come within 97 miles (150 kilometres) of the South Pole before having to turn back because of exhaustion, dysentery and hunger.
Shackleton had a keen sense of self-promotion. His first action on landing in New Zealand was to cable a 2,500 word account of his adventures to The Daily Mail which had an exclusive contract with him. The next on March 30th, 1909 was to make a wax cylinder recording of his adventures on an Edison Phonograph.
That recording 115 years old has formed the basis of an extraordinary documentary, Endurance, about Shackleton’s later and more famous expedition to cross Antarctica from north to south.
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21st century technology has been applied to this early 20th century tale of heroism and incredible resilience for a documentary which will be streamed worldwide through Disney+ from Saturday.
The story of how Shackleton came to rescue the 27 men of the Endurance is told in his own voice using AI.
The technology has been developed by a Ukrainian company Respeecher who worked on the project while bombs were falling around them following the Russian invasion in February 2022.
The company came on board in early 2023. Respeecher spent three months trying to work out a way of converting voices on wax cylinder recordings to AI. It was worth the wait. “We found that it was possible to squeeze out the best sound quality,” said Respeecher business development executive Volodymyr Ovsilenko.
The recording of Shackleton was only three and a half minutes long, but was essential to recreate his voice. “AI can clone and replicate a voice but you still need a human voice for that,” explained Respeecher delivery manager Natalia Statyvka
The voices of six crew members who kept diaries while on the Endurance and gave recorded interviews afterwards also feature in the documentary including the captain Frank Worsley and the filmmaker and photographer Frank Hurley. Unfortunately, there is no known voice recording of Irishman Tom Crean, who accompanied Shackleton on the Endurance expedition, so his voice could not be recreated.
The story of the Endurance expedition has been told many times through documentaries and dramas.
The ship became stuck and was eventually crushed by the ice in the Weddell Sea in March 1915. Shackleton and his crew rowed to Elephant Island, a remote island at the tip of Antarctica. Then Shackleton and six crew, including Tom Crean, embarked on an incredibly risky 1,200 kilometre journey in one of the lifeboats to South Georgia through some of the stormiest seas on the planet.
Even then they needed to traverse a high mountain range to reach a whaling station. Three months later they returned to Elephant Island to pick up the remaining men who, at that stage, were starving, yet none of them died.
The documentary, which was funded by National Geographic, also features the colourisation of Frank Hurley’s famous film from the Endurance expedition, but the critical factor in getting it over the line was the rediscovery of the ship.
Irish-born producer Ruth Johnston said there would be no documentary without the ship which was rediscovered on March 5th, 2022, 107 years after it sank. Underwater footage shows the incredibly well-preserved wreck 3,000 metres down, the wooden sign Endurance on its bow as clear as it was more than a century ago.
The search for Endurance was worthy of a documentary in itself. In early 2022, the Endurance22 expedition team, on-board the South African icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II, carrying cutting-edge undersea search technology, set out to find the Endurance at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust funded the mission.
All they had to go on was the co-ordinates given by Shackleton’s skipper Frank Worsley. These were extraordinarily accurate for the time, but still it took them weeks to find the wreck.
She was working on the film for four years most of it in connection with the expedition in 2022 to find the wreck of Endurance.
“As far as we are aware it the oldest AI voice conversion and the only one from an original wax cylinder recording,” she said.
“We wanted to tell their stories authentically not using actors, but telling their words in the same voice at the same time. We had enough of their writings to be able their story. All of this came up during the production of the film.”
There were important ethical consideration, she stressed. The words used had to come from the men themselves. Fortunately, all of them kept diaries or wrote accounts afterwards of Endurance.
“I didn’t think they would find it. When they found the ship, I said, ‘let’s go’. There has been so many stories told about Shackleton, but without the incredible subsea footage of the Endurance, we wouldn’t have it.“
Respeecher executive Dmytko Vasylets said the company took inspiration in trying circumstances from the Shakleton story. “It shows that even in the most trying circumstances you can keep your dignity. The project was so unique to us.”
Endurance is on Disney+ from November 2nd. A Q&A with the producer Ruth Johnson will take place as part of the Shackleton Autumn School in Athy at 7.30pm on Sunday, November 3rd.
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