Elephant Island
Imagine yourself a member of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Transantarctic Expedition. You left home in August of 1914 in search of honor and glory. Now it is mid-winter day, June 21, 1916, and you wonder if you will return home at all.
You have landed on an isolated island in the Southern Ocean called Elephant Island, after the elephant seals that lived there until they were wiped out by sealers nearly a century earlier. Now, with the seals gone, there is no reason for anybody to call there, for anybody to find you. No, your future, if you have one, is carried by six men who left Elephant Island with the audacious idea of sailing a small boat to South Georgia Island, across 800 miles of the most turbulent ocean in the world, to bring rescue to you and your 21 companions.
Not much on which to pin your hopes, eh? But to give up hope is to give up, and to give up is to die. And so you rise from your wet sleeping bag, dressed in the same clothing that you have worn for over 17 months. You have a cup of warm powdered milk, and you proceed to your day’s chore of chipping limpets from the rocks to bolster your evening meal of pemmican hoosh and quiet the hunger that grows more severe with each passing day. And you hope that on this day The Boss will be back.
We are traveling in the wake of Shackleton’s failed expedition. We entered the Weddell Sea; beneath its deep water lies the wreck of Endurance. Far to the north of that spot, after months of drifting on the ice, the men finally felt the ocean swell and they took to their three boats. We visited Deception Island; they tried to reach it as well but the westerly wind and current defied them. Elephant Island became their only possibility. Early this morning we approached Cape Valentine, at the northeast tip of the island, where the three boats finally landed. It was hidden in fog as we approached, much as it was on April 16, 1916. Finding the spot unsuitable, Shackleton sent his second-in-command, Frank Wild, to find another. Wild returned to report that he had found a spot, and the best he could say for it was that it was better than the present. And so they moved to what we now call Point Wild, 11 miles from Cape Valentine, and there the 22 men waited for The Boss to come back.
And he did. Four months after departing in the James Caird, The Boss came back, this time in the Chilean tug Yelcho. This morning we took the National Geographic Endeavour to Point Wild to look out at the very spot and wonder how they could do it; how they could maintain hope; how they could survive. The answer: they did it because they had to. There was no other way.
And so we, too, left Point Wild and pointed our bow toward South Georgia Island, just as did the James Caird, but we did it in considerably greater comfort. They didn’t have afternoon tea with four kinds of cakes and cookies. Only hoosh with limpets.
Imagine yourself a member of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Transantarctic Expedition. You left home in August of 1914 in search of honor and glory. Now it is mid-winter day, June 21, 1916, and you wonder if you will return home at all.
You have landed on an isolated island in the Southern Ocean called Elephant Island, after the elephant seals that lived there until they were wiped out by sealers nearly a century earlier. Now, with the seals gone, there is no reason for anybody to call there, for anybody to find you. No, your future, if you have one, is carried by six men who left Elephant Island with the audacious idea of sailing a small boat to South Georgia Island, across 800 miles of the most turbulent ocean in the world, to bring rescue to you and your 21 companions.
Not much on which to pin your hopes, eh? But to give up hope is to give up, and to give up is to die. And so you rise from your wet sleeping bag, dressed in the same clothing that you have worn for over 17 months. You have a cup of warm powdered milk, and you proceed to your day’s chore of chipping limpets from the rocks to bolster your evening meal of pemmican hoosh and quiet the hunger that grows more severe with each passing day. And you hope that on this day The Boss will be back.
We are traveling in the wake of Shackleton’s failed expedition. We entered the Weddell Sea; beneath its deep water lies the wreck of Endurance. Far to the north of that spot, after months of drifting on the ice, the men finally felt the ocean swell and they took to their three boats. We visited Deception Island; they tried to reach it as well but the westerly wind and current defied them. Elephant Island became their only possibility. Early this morning we approached Cape Valentine, at the northeast tip of the island, where the three boats finally landed. It was hidden in fog as we approached, much as it was on April 16, 1916. Finding the spot unsuitable, Shackleton sent his second-in-command, Frank Wild, to find another. Wild returned to report that he had found a spot, and the best he could say for it was that it was better than the present. And so they moved to what we now call Point Wild, 11 miles from Cape Valentine, and there the 22 men waited for The Boss to come back.
And he did. Four months after departing in the James Caird, The Boss came back, this time in the Chilean tug Yelcho. This morning we took the National Geographic Endeavour to Point Wild to look out at the very spot and wonder how they could do it; how they could maintain hope; how they could survive. The answer: they did it because they had to. There was no other way.
And so we, too, left Point Wild and pointed our bow toward South Georgia Island, just as did the James Caird, but we did it in considerably greater comfort. They didn’t have afternoon tea with four kinds of cakes and cookies. Only hoosh with limpets.
