In March 1909 Ernest Shackleton and the crew of the Nimrod reached New Zealand.
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 got 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 was to make an acetate recording on an Edison Phonograph on March 30th, 1909.
That recording 115 years old has formed the basis of an extraordinary documentary Endurance about Shackleton’s later and more famous voyage and the failed Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, better known as the Endurance expedition, from 1914 to 1916 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. The company spent three months trying to work out a way of converting voices on wax cylinder recordings to AI. “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 it cannot create a distinguished performance, you still need a human for that. It was really inspiring that Researcher was entrusted with data of this quality,” said Respeecher delivery manager Natalia Statyvka
The voices of seven other crew members who kept diaries while on the Endurance also feature in the documentary including the captain Frank Worsley and the film-makers and photographer Frank Hurley. Unfortunately, there is no known voice recording of Irishman Tom Crean so his voice could not be recreated.
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 in 2022.
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. Then Shackleton and six crew, including Tom Crean, embarked on an incredibly risky 1,200 kilometre sea journey in one of the lifeboats to South Georgia.
Even then they needed to traverse 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.
Irish-born producer Ruth Johnson said there would be no documentary without the ship which was rediscovered on March 7th, 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.
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.
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 Worsely.
“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 Shakelton story. “It shows that even in the most trying circumstances you can keep your dignity. The project was so unique to us.”
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