Elephant Island
A calm deep blue sea, a clear opalescent sky, and along the skyline the legendary jagged shark teeth of Elephant Island. Closer is the glistening shell of an eroded iceberg, the morning sunlight gleaming on its polished walls. Now there is life: the frozen plumes of a dozen whales in the offing: the dumpy puff of a humpback and the tall smokestacks of fin whales. But we have eyes only for the Elephant. Will we be able to land?
This remote outpost of Antarctica was the setting for one of the greatest survival stories ever told. When Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance was finally crushed by ice after nine months drifting in the frozen Weddell Sea, his men took to the ice with three tiny whaleboats. Four months after floating north another 600 miles they were spat out into the ocean and took to their boats. After a harrowing week rowing towards elusive islands to gain landfall, they managed, despite wind and current, to land on this last and worst of options: stark Elephant Island. It is a forbidding place: jagged black mountains, plunging icy glaciers, and a sea that has flayed the land of all comfort. Here the 22 men of his loyal crew braced themselves for another Antarctic winter while Shackleton and five desperate comrades set off across the Southern Ocean in a tiny boat to seek help. In the next few days we shall be following in their footsteps.
We managed to replicate their achievement and landed by Zodiac at Cape Lookout to a scene out of the Garden of Eden: happy gentoos in glorious sunshine, fur seals cavorting in a shallow pool, and a bevy of blubbery elephant seals oblivious to the background clatter of a huge chinstrap penguin colony. Hard to tear ourselves away from such a diverse tableau of wonders.
But our departure to the east was capped by more excitement: we came upon a racing herd of fin whales, and matching their speed and direction, we accompanied them for almost an hour, marveling at their stamina and strength. The sea around us was rent by percussive blows as they punched their way northeast at a steady 10 knots, at times surfacing alongside or even just under the bow. Fins are the second largest whale in the sea, and certainly the swiftest: up to 90 feet long and as fleet as racehorses.
