Elephant Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica
From the warm, comfy confines of National Geographic Explorer, it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to be huddled under two overturned boats on a remote Antarctic island, pounded by relentless storms spiraling across the Southern Ocean.
Directly ahead of the ship is Point Wild on Elephant Island, where 22 men from the Shackleton expedition survived for 135 days in 1916, frost-bitten and half starving with little hope of rescue, after their ship Endurance was crushed by ice in the Weddell Sea.
Today, swells crash on the rocks where the men were ultimately rescued by the Chilean Navy cutter Yelcho, after three failed attempts by other ships. We can barely see through the fog the monument to Luis Pardo, the Chilean captain who brought Sir Earnest Shackleton back to Point Wild to rescue his men, following his daring 800-mile ocean voyage to South Georgia in the James Caird. This open boat journey remains one of the most courageous voyages in the history of navigation.
Place names on the charts are testimony to this daring expedition and rescue ¬– Point Wild, named after Frank Wild, leader of the men left behind; Endurance Glacier, after the ship lost in the ice; and Pardo Ridge, for the heroic captain.
It’s with these sobering thoughts, and also gratitude for our modern-day expedition ship, that we leave Elephant Island in our wake on a course toward the Antarctic Peninsula, the third and final phase of our own historic expedition to the White Continent.
