Born in the Falkland Islands, Mensun Bound studied in New York, before moving to Oxford University where he continued his studies at Lincoln College and then St Catherine’s College before finally becoming the Triton Fellow in Maritime Archaeology at St Peter’s College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the Explorer’s Club in New York, and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Known as ‘Indiana Jones of the Deep,’ Bound has conducted wreck surveys and excavations all over the world in a career that spanned over 40 years. In 1981, he excavated one of the oldest known shipwrecks (an Etruscan ship from 600 BC) and, in 1997, he used saturation diving methods in the South China Sea off Vietnam to carry out the deepest hands-on shipwreck excavation there has ever been. Twelve museums around the globe hold permanent displays of artefacts raised by Bound. In 2019 Bound stunned the world with his discovery of Admiral von Spee’s flagship, Scharnhorst, which had been lost in battle during World War One. That same year Bound was Director of Exploration for the first search to find Shackleton’s Endurance in Antarctica which ended in failure when their Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) disappeared without a trace. In 2022 the search resumed with Bound in the same role, this time under the auspices of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, of which Bound is a Founding Trustee . On 5 March the Endurance was found at a depth of 3000 meters under the ice and, as predicted by Bound, it was upright, largely intact, proud of the seabed and in an excellent state of preservation.
His journey to find the Endurance, the lost ship of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, is chronicled in his Sunday Times best-selling book, The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance, published by Macmillan
Please also see Mensun Bound’s latest book on the history of shipwrecks worldwide, Wonders in the Deep, published by Simon & Shuster and co-authored with Mark Frary.