Elephant Island
We left the Antarctic Peninsula last night and headed for Elephant Island, famous for the refuge of Shackleton’s men until their eventual rescue. Just after lunch we arrived at Cape Valentine, where the exhausted crew in Endurance’s three lifeboats touched land for the first time in 18 months. Their precise landfall was on the small beach just to the left of the tip of the headland shown in this picture. Our next stop was Point Wild, a few miles to the west, where the men finally made camp under two boats while Shackleton went for help in the 22-foot James Caird. Between brief snowstorms, we could see the narrow rocky spit where they lived for four miserable months.
The sun was shining, so we could enjoy watching the blue-green swells breaking into brilliant white caps. We were followed by numerous cape or pintado petrels with black-and-white checkered plumage - a small flock is visible in the picture. In the strong winds, they soar with hardly a wing beat and the flocks give delightful displays of ‘synchronized flying.’ This effortless style of flight enables members of the petrel and albatross group of birds to travel huge distance across the ocean in search of food.
We left the Antarctic Peninsula last night and headed for Elephant Island, famous for the refuge of Shackleton’s men until their eventual rescue. Just after lunch we arrived at Cape Valentine, where the exhausted crew in Endurance’s three lifeboats touched land for the first time in 18 months. Their precise landfall was on the small beach just to the left of the tip of the headland shown in this picture. Our next stop was Point Wild, a few miles to the west, where the men finally made camp under two boats while Shackleton went for help in the 22-foot James Caird. Between brief snowstorms, we could see the narrow rocky spit where they lived for four miserable months.
The sun was shining, so we could enjoy watching the blue-green swells breaking into brilliant white caps. We were followed by numerous cape or pintado petrels with black-and-white checkered plumage - a small flock is visible in the picture. In the strong winds, they soar with hardly a wing beat and the flocks give delightful displays of ‘synchronized flying.’ This effortless style of flight enables members of the petrel and albatross group of birds to travel huge distance across the ocean in search of food.
