If you know much about the geography of this planet, then you know there are plenty of inhospitable places on it. Like, for example, Devon Island, the 27th largest island in the world…and the largest to be completely uninhabited. Devon’s severe climate and desert setting make it the perfect place for exactly one thing…simulating the conditions you might find on Mars. And, no, I’m not making that up, because scientists have already done so.
But, I digress. Some of those inhospitable places are fairly well known. Others, like the subject of this essay, are much less so. But. That doesn’t make them any less forbidding.
There’s never been an elephant on Elephant Island, which is an ice-covered, mountainous piece of rock in the Southern Ocean 152 miles off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. But, it has an elephant-like appearance and elephant seals were spotted on its shores by an English ship captain named George Powell in 1821, and, thus, the island got its name. But. That wasn’t its original name. The island was actually discovered earlier in 1821 by ships of the First Russian Antarctic Expedition and named “Mordvinov Island” after Admiral Nikolay Mordvinov, a well-liked Russian political figure of the day. Mordvinov’s name didn’t stick, however, and Elephant Island it became and remains to this day. Despite that lack of elephants.
And, Elephant Island lacked something else for nearly 100 years after its discovery. People. Not a single person had stepped foot on the island until 1916. And, when men finally did make landfall on the island’s desolate shores, let’s just say they didn’t come for a visit.
The first man to place a boot on Elephant Island was a Welsh sailor named Perce Blackborow. He’d been a stowaway on explorer Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition after not having been hired to the crew. The expedition planned to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent, but the ship Shackleton commanded, Endurance, became trapped in and eventually crushed by the Antarctic sea ice. The men, including Blackborow, having abandoned the ship and saved her three lifeboats, spent months living on drifting, cracking sea ice, first trying to make land on foot and, eventually, seeing the impossibility of doing so, simply drifting on the ice and hoping it would take them far enough north to make an escape to land.
Eventually, a voyage in the lifeboats was forced by the breakup of the ice. Several destinations were considered, but, eventually, Shackleton settled on the nearest. Elephant Island. The three lifeboats and 28 exhausted men arrived at the island on April 14th, but couldn’t find a place to make landfall. They found one the next day, April 15, at Cape Valentine. After a couple of days, the men moved again, to a location they named “Point Wild”, after the expedition’s second-in-command, Frank Wild. It was, perhaps, a bit more hospitable than Cape Valentine. But. Not, frankly, hospitable at all.
Because, again, Elephant Island is one of those places that simply aren’t fit for habitation, and, not just by humans. There’s no significant plant life on the island, nor are there any native animals. Migratory seals and penguins can sometimes be found, and chinstrap penguins nest there in season. But. Not a single species makes a permanent home there. Not one.
And, this was to be the “refuge” of Shackleton and his men. The explorer, though, didn’t plan to stay long. The island was rarely visited by any ships, even the whalers that were common in the area. There was no hope of passive rescue. So, Shackleton decided to fit one of the lifeboats out for an 800-mile journey across the frigid Southern Ocean to South Georgia Island, which hosted several populated whaling stations. (Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands was closer than South Georgia, but could not be reached, because travelling to it would have required sailing against the prevailing winds.) Shackleton and five crewmembers reached King Haakon Bay on South Georgia after 16 days. In an open boat.
Meanwhile, back on Elephant Island, the remaining crew had to wait. They built a shelter out of the remaining lifeboats and hunted for seals and penguins to stave off starvation. They found little. It was fall and then winter, times when both seals and penguins were scarce in the area. The men were exhausted, hungry, and frost-bitten. And, among the worst off was Blackborow, who’d developed gangrene. Two crewmembers were forced to amputate all the toes on his left foot.
As for Shackleton, well. King Haakon Bay happens to be on the south side of South Georgia Island. The whaling stations were on the island’s northern end. This meant that the party would either have to get back in the lifeboat and try to sail around the island, or cross its interior on foot. As a result of the condition of the boat and the failing health of some of the crewmembers, Shackleton decided on the land crossing. To that time, no one had ever crossed South Georgia Island on foot, and residents believed it was impossible because of the high, ice-covered mountain peaks and ridges that made up the, to that time, unexplored interior.
It was possible. Shackleton and two of his men crossed the island, doing things like sliding down a mountainside on a makeshift rope sledge. The end of the journey involved a descent down a freezing waterfall. But, eventually, Shackleton and his companions reached Stromness station, an inhabited whaling camp. A whaling ship was quickly sent around the island to pick up the remaining members of the crew who’d reached South Georgia. Then, came the larger task. Rescuing the men still freezing on Elephant Island.
Shackleton made three attempts, in three different ships. None of them could make it through the pack ice surrounding Elephant Island. He asked Britain for help, but, with the country in the middle of World War I, nothing would be available for months.
Back on Elephant Island, the crew was running out of food. Wild had refused to allow stockpiling of penguin and seal meat, seeing doing so as defeatist, since he believed they would have to wait only a month for rescue. By late August, this policy was having severe repercussions. The island was surrounded by ice, making rescue impossible, and there were no penguins or seals around to take for food. Stores were running so low that one crew member wrote in his diary that the men would be forced to eat the man who died first. Wild, meanwhile, was preparing for a boat trip to Deception Island in the hopes of meeting a whaling ship along the way. He planned to leave on October 5th.
By that time, Shackleton was ready for his fourth attempt. He’d convinced the Chilean government to lend him a tug called Yelcho, which had been involved in the third failed rescue attempt. The little ship and its captain, Luis Pardo, set out for Elephant Island on August 25th. On August 30th, the men on the ship spotted the camp at Point Wild and rescued the rest of Shackleton’s party, spiriting them away to Punta Arenas in Chile. Leaving Elephant Island uninhabited again, as it had been, to that point, for all but four and a half months of its history.
In 1970-71, a British Joint Services Expedition (a surveying and mountaineering expedition) visited the island. The expedition contained one civilian from the British Antarctic Survey and 14 members of the British Armed Forces under the command of Malcolm Burley, a commander in the Royal Navy. The mission completed a preliminary survey of the island and climbed several mountains that had never been climbed before. The expedition was transported to the island by the HMS Endurance, which, at the close of the mission, transported the expedition members away from the island, leaving it uninhabited again.
For most of the year, it remains that way to this day, in the main because it lacks a safe anchorage for ships. Or, possibly, because, again, it’s a horrible place to live. If you happen on Elephant Island in the summer months (fat chance), though, you might actually find a few people. Brazil maintains a shelter on the island that can support up to six researchers. They visit briefly. But, they don’t stay. Perhaps they’ve learned something the seals and the penguins learned long ago. Elephant Island is a lousy place to visit. And you definitely wouldn’t want to live there.
Things Amic Thinks About 