HMS Endurance (A171): The Red Icebreaker That Nearly Sank Cleaning a Strainer

Built in Norway

HMS Endurance was built in Norway in 1990 by the Ulstein Hatlo shipyard for Rieber Shipping, originally entering service as the commercial icebreaker MV Polar Circle.

She was a capable Class 1 icebreaker, powered by two Bergen BRG8 diesel engines producing over 8,000 shaft horsepower and driving computer-controlled variable-pitch propellers, backed by both bow and stern thrusters, a combination that let her push through ice up to a metre thick at a steady 3 knots.

She carried two ice-modified Westland Lynx helicopters, essential tools for reconnaissance and logistics support in the vast, largely uncharted expanses of the Southern Ocean and Antarctic coastline she would spend her career patrolling.

The Royal Navy first chartered MV Polar Circle on 21 November 1991, renaming her HMS Polar Circle, before purchasing her outright on 9 October 1992 and renaming her HMS Endurance, taking the name of the previous ice patrol ship, which struck an iceberg in 1989 and, though patched up and kept going, was found by a 1991 survey to have a hull no longer sound enough to risk another Antarctic season, a fittingly hardy replacement for a role that demanded genuine resilience against one of the planet's most unforgiving environments.

The ship whose name she took has a claim on history that the replacement never came close to, and it is not a happy one. The first HMS Endurance was a converted Danish cargo ship, and in the 1981 Defence Review John Nott proposed to pay her off without replacement, on the reasonable-looking grounds that an unarmed red ship pottering about the Antarctic was a luxury a shrinking navy could do without. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, wrote to him twice to say that this was a mistake: that any reduction in the British presence would be read by both the islanders and the Argentines as a reduction in British commitment, and later that the announcement was already doing disproportionate damage to the credibility of British policy in the region. He asked for her to be reinstated. She was not.

What the Argentine junta made of it is a matter of record. Britain had said, in public, that it was withdrawing its only permanent naval presence from the South Atlantic and not replacing it, at the same moment it was declining to guarantee the islanders' citizenship at home. Set beside everything else, it read in Buenos Aires as a country that had stopped caring. On 19 March 1982 Argentine scrap merchants landed on South Georgia and raised a flag, and the ship sent to deal with them was HMS Endurance, still in commission because the withdrawal had not yet taken effect. She spent the war in the South Atlantic, avoided being sunk, and took part in the recapture of South Georgia. The ship the Royal Navy had decided it could not afford turned out to be the one it had to send first.

Britain's Red Icebreaker

HMS Endurance, painted in the distinctive red hull that made her instantly recognisable among Antarctic research vessels, spent her career providing what the Royal Navy termed sovereign presence in polar waters, conducting hydrographic surveys and supporting the British Antarctic Survey's scientific work across some of the most remote and difficult territory on Earth.

The legal position she worked under is worth understanding, because it explains almost everything about the ship: the red hull, the scientists, the surveying, and the near-total absence of weapons. Under Article I of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, any measures of a military nature are prohibited south of sixty degrees south. What the treaty does permit is the use of military personnel and equipment for scientific research or any other peaceful purpose, which is why the only navy ship Britain keeps in those waters is one that spends its time charting the seabed, moving field parties around and putting fuel and stores into research stations. Sovereign presence, in that sentence, is doing a great deal of quiet work. Endurance was there so that Britain could point at something British in the Southern Ocean, and the way you are allowed to do that is by being useful to the scientists.

Her typical deployment pattern took her south into the Southern Ocean before returning north via tropical waters, and later shifted to an eighteen-month rotation designed to maximise the time she could actually spend supporting Antarctic research during the brief window each year when conditions allowed it.

HMS Endurance also carried out a series of notable diplomatic visits, including the first Royal Navy vessel to call at Argentina since the Falklands War, visiting Buenos Aires in 1997, with further return visits in 1998 and 2002, a properly significant thaw in relations given how central the two countries' naval history in the South Atlantic had been to the 1982 conflict.

She carried Queen Elizabeth II during the International Fleet Review of 2005, and in July 2007 the UK offered HMS Endurance to help resupply Argentina's own Antarctic research bases after the icebreaker ARA Almirante Irizar was disabled by a fire in her generator compartment that April, some 250 kilometres east of Puerto Madryn, a particularly warm gesture of practical cooperation between two navies with a famously complicated shared history. Buenos Aires, perhaps unsurprisingly given that history, turned the offer down, chartering the Russian polar vessel Vasily Golovnin instead while Irizar herself remained out of service for the next decade.

A Run of Bad Luck

HMS Endurance's later career was dogged by a persistent run of mechanical misfortune. In 2004, after a refit at Falmouth, the ship listed severely when her drydock experienced uncontrolled flooding, an incident that set off a string of machinery problems over the following years.

In January 2006, during Antarctic survey work, engineering staff discovered her rudder had come loose, forcing her to dock at Puerto Belgrano in Argentina for repairs in mid-March, work further delayed by around three weeks when a dockers' strike halted progress before the rudder could finally be replaced and welded back into position.

Nearly Lost Cleaning a Strainer

HMS Endurance's most serious incident began on 16 December 2008 in the Straits of Magellan, and it started, almost unbelievably, by chasing a problem that did not really exist. Fresh water production had been running low, and with 38 passengers aboard, including parties from the British Antarctic Survey, the British Schools Exploring Society and a BBC film crew, the ship's engineers set about cleaning a high-level sea water inlet strainer to improve the flow. The subsequent Service Inquiry concluded there had, in fact, been no critical shortage at all: even without rationing, the ship had roughly nine days of water in hand.

The strainer sat behind a hull valve with an odd quirk: its actuator spindle was 50mm shorter than every other valve of its type on the ship, for no reason anyone could establish, which meant its control air lines had to be disconnected and moved aside just to get the strainer basket out, something no other valve on board required. That particular valve dated to a refit in 2004, and the awkward workaround had apparently gone unreported ever since.

The air lines were removed and correctly reconnected once without incident. The second time, a different crew member reconnected them the wrong way round, so that the line meant to keep the valve shut was now wired to open it. About ninety seconds later, without warning, the valve swung open and roughly 1,000 cubic metres of seawater an hour began pouring into the engine room.

Command of the ship at that moment rested with the Executive Officer, standing in for a Commanding Officer who was ashore; he immediately turned the ship away from the nearby coast, a decision the inquiry judged to have bought precious extra time. HMS Endurance rolled up to 25 degrees either side of upright as she lost power and propulsion; crews attempted three times to dive into the flooded, pitch-dark engine room to refit the missing strainer lid, one attempt made by an officer whose only previous diving experience was on holiday, and two men cutting cables they had assumed were dead both received electric shocks, though both recovered. Fifteen civilian passengers were airlifted off overnight by a Chilean search and rescue helicopter.

She was saved, in the end, largely by good fortune. With the ship drifting helplessly towards land, nine shackles of anchor cable, some 250 metres, were paid out on the advice of salvage engineers ashore in the hope the anchor might act as a makeshift drogue and slow her down. It did rather more than that: she drifted directly over the one patch of shallow water nearby and the anchor held. The Service Inquiry later noted that had she drifted anywhere else in the vicinity, there was a very real chance the ship would have been lost entirely, either wrecked ashore or overwhelmed by the flood.

The Chilean Navy vessel Casma arrived to help overnight, and the following morning the tug Beagle took her under tow from the anchorage, a second tug joining around ninety minutes later to help with steering, before delivering her to Punta Arenas for emergency repairs.

A subsequent Service Inquiry found the flood had been entirely avoidable: the strainer need not have been cleaned that day at all, the valve's own control lines fell far below the accepted standard for pipe installation, and the ship had been left without a properly trained system maintainer after cost-driven crewing cuts were stretched thin by an unusually long 18-month deployment. It was, in the panel's own dry phrase, a case of "clarity of engineering command" having been lost, a sobering way for a ship that had spent years navigating genuine Antarctic ice without serious incident to nearly go down in a calm strait, undone by a 50-millimetre design quirk nobody had ever thought to report.

Laid Up and Scrapped

HMS Endurance never returned to active Antarctic service after the 2008 flooding, and she did not even sail home under her own power: repaired just enough at Punta Arenas to travel, she was carried back to Portsmouth, arriving on 8 April 2009, riding on the deck of the semi-submersible heavy-lift ship MV Target. HMS Protector took over her Antarctic role, while Endurance herself was laid up at Portsmouth from 2009 to 2016, with repair estimates reaching around £30 million, a cost the Ministry of Defence ultimately judged not worth paying for a ship of her age and history of mechanical trouble.

Her scrapping was officially announced on 7 October 2013, and after further delay she was offered for sale in July 2015, finally departing Portsmouth under tow on 1 June 2016 bound for a ship recycling facility in Turkey, bringing to an end the career of a ship that had spent seventeen years as Britain's eyes, ears and flag in one of the most remote and demanding regions on the planet, brought down in the end not by the Antarctic ice she had been built to face, but by a maintenance accident in far calmer waters.

The pattern repeated itself almost exactly. HMS Protector, which took over the job, is not a purpose-built warship either: she is the former Norwegian ice ship Polarbjorn, chartered and then bought, painted red and given a pennant number, which is precisely how Endurance herself had been acquired twenty years earlier. Britain has now solved the same problem the same way three times running, buying somebody else's working icebreaker rather than building one, and it works. What it does not survive is the thing that finished Endurance: an eighteen-month deployment, a crew trimmed to save money, and a single valve that nobody had ever written up.