Cape Wild, Elephant Island

It's bleak, and it's cold, but these days it's hot! Today we visited the small point of rock in an otherwise forbiddingly icy coast where men from Ernest Shackleton's disastrous Trans-Antarctic expedition spent a very miserable 4 months. Shackleton, currently the hottest of the dead Antarctic explorers, landed here in April 1916 with 27 men from his sunken ship, Endurance. In one of the most stirring sagas of polar exploration, the men from this ship had already survived a winter on the pack ice before traveling in open boats to Elephant Island. The majority of the men stayed here under the command of Frank Wild while Shackleton and a few others went in search of help. In August, the island party were understandably pleased to see the Chilean ship Yelcho steaming in to rescue them. The captain of that rescue vessel, Piloto Pardo, is immortalised in a bronze bust erected on this tiny beach.