Cape Wild, Elephant Island
61° 05’ 42”S , 57° 55’ 15”W
Fog! At first light everyone on the bridge is craning forward to scan for sea hazards: we are still in latitudes where giant icebergs loom suddenly with only a minute’s warning. Glimpsed through shifting veils of mist, barely a mile off on the port side we can see Elephant Island, one of the most forbidding shorelines on earth, yet a coast which in 1915 seemed like the promised land to the 28 men of Shackleton’s ship Endurance. Caught in the thick pack ice of the Weddell Sea in January 1915, their planned expedition was over before it had started: they never even reached mainland Antarctica. Safely billeted in their robust ship, the men survived 10 winter months happily while she drifted 1,000 miles north with the ice.
Expecting her to float free with the coming of spring, both optimism and ship were crushed in December as pressure ice broke the English oak timbers of her hull into matchwood. Camping on the ice floes with salvaged food and three small boats, the stunned crew drifted a further 600miles north with the moving ice. After a nerve-wracking 4 months on shrinking ice floes, they took to the boats when their last ice camp split beneath them. Now their fate hung on the genius of Frank Worsley, Kiwi skipper, who with sextant and tables navigated them unerringly to Elephant Island: 6 bone chilling days in open boats.
Falling ashore at last, the men kissed the black boulders with relief: they had not stood on solid land for 497 days. A quick survey of the coast revealed a safer campsite: the barren shingle and boulder spit before us this morning: Cape Wild. We took to the Zodiacs for a closer look at this legendary site: the soaring black pinnacle of Lookout Rock, the small Chinstrap penguin colony on the spit where they camped, and then the unscalable rock cliff of the island. From this spit, Shackleton, Worsley and four crewmembers made their impossible 800-mile boat trip to South Georgia across one of the worst seas on the planet. But Frank Wild had the harder job. As loyal lieutenant to Shackleton, he never doubted that “the Boss” would return. But keeping 22 men safe and sane on a diet of only penguins, seals and limpets for four long winter months tested him to the limit. When Shackleton returned it was not in a British ship but in a tug loaned by Chile: the monument we are gazing at is to Luis Pardo, its Chilean captain. But the greater monument is in the name Cape Wild, for it immortalizes both the wrath of the Southern Ocean and Frank Wild’s unflagging faith in his own Captain, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. We are all in awe tonight as we reflect on their ordeal, “between a rock and a hard place”, and Shackleton’s family motto: Fortitudine vincimus: “By Endurance we conquer”.
61° 05’ 42”S , 57° 55’ 15”W
Fog! At first light everyone on the bridge is craning forward to scan for sea hazards: we are still in latitudes where giant icebergs loom suddenly with only a minute’s warning. Glimpsed through shifting veils of mist, barely a mile off on the port side we can see Elephant Island, one of the most forbidding shorelines on earth, yet a coast which in 1915 seemed like the promised land to the 28 men of Shackleton’s ship Endurance. Caught in the thick pack ice of the Weddell Sea in January 1915, their planned expedition was over before it had started: they never even reached mainland Antarctica. Safely billeted in their robust ship, the men survived 10 winter months happily while she drifted 1,000 miles north with the ice.
Expecting her to float free with the coming of spring, both optimism and ship were crushed in December as pressure ice broke the English oak timbers of her hull into matchwood. Camping on the ice floes with salvaged food and three small boats, the stunned crew drifted a further 600miles north with the moving ice. After a nerve-wracking 4 months on shrinking ice floes, they took to the boats when their last ice camp split beneath them. Now their fate hung on the genius of Frank Worsley, Kiwi skipper, who with sextant and tables navigated them unerringly to Elephant Island: 6 bone chilling days in open boats.
Falling ashore at last, the men kissed the black boulders with relief: they had not stood on solid land for 497 days. A quick survey of the coast revealed a safer campsite: the barren shingle and boulder spit before us this morning: Cape Wild. We took to the Zodiacs for a closer look at this legendary site: the soaring black pinnacle of Lookout Rock, the small Chinstrap penguin colony on the spit where they camped, and then the unscalable rock cliff of the island. From this spit, Shackleton, Worsley and four crewmembers made their impossible 800-mile boat trip to South Georgia across one of the worst seas on the planet. But Frank Wild had the harder job. As loyal lieutenant to Shackleton, he never doubted that “the Boss” would return. But keeping 22 men safe and sane on a diet of only penguins, seals and limpets for four long winter months tested him to the limit. When Shackleton returned it was not in a British ship but in a tug loaned by Chile: the monument we are gazing at is to Luis Pardo, its Chilean captain. But the greater monument is in the name Cape Wild, for it immortalizes both the wrath of the Southern Ocean and Frank Wild’s unflagging faith in his own Captain, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. We are all in awe tonight as we reflect on their ordeal, “between a rock and a hard place”, and Shackleton’s family motto: Fortitudine vincimus: “By Endurance we conquer”.
