Early this morning, on our trip south through the Drake Passage, we crossed the Antarctic Convergence - the oceanographic boundary where Antarctic and Subantarctic waters meet. Water temperature dropped to zero degrees C / thirty-two degrees F. We have entered Antarctica.
Our first stop in Antarctica was at Elephant Island (named for the elephant seals that flourished here until they were removed by sealers in the nineteenth century). Imagine yourself one of the twenty-eight members of Sir Ernest Shackleton's British Imperial Transantarctic Expedition. You left England on August 1 and Grytviken, South Georgia Island on December 5, 1914. Your ship, the Endurance was caught in the ice of the Weddell Sea in January of 1915. In October of 1915 you abandoned the ship, and soon thereafter you watched her sink. You drifted on the ice until the end of March, 1916, and then you took to three small boats. Sixteen days later, 497 days after leaving South Georgia Island, you sight land. It is Elephant Island. Today's photo shows the sight that greeted your eyes: Cape Valentine, the westernmost point of this remote, rugged island in the vast Southern Ocean. Not particularly inviting, eh?! But had they missed it, nobody would have remained to tell the tale.
Our trip to Elephant Island also included Zodiac cruises at Point Wild, where twenty-two members of the failed expedition waited for four months while Shackleton and five others made the remarkable small boat journey to South Georgia Island and eventually managed their rescue. All survived. It is a remarkable story of perseverance and the human spirit. We had it easier. We retreated to the comfort of the Caledonian Star and pressed onward, southward, toward the Antarctic Peninsula.
