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January 30, 2000 |
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hell of an island |
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Position: Elephant Island Today's Bird Sightings: Mammal Sightings: Today's Reading: The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
Copyright © 2000, Janet I. Egan |
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Several people on the trip have been reading Endurance, the one by Alfred Lansing, which is based on the diaries of all the guys on the expedition (not just Shackelton's). I read it at the beginning of the trip and couldn't put it down. Everybody I talked to about it said the same thing. Even though you already know that not a single one of them died, you have to keep reading straight through until the end it's so riveting.  And so here we are in the footsteps of Shackleton ... The quote for the day on our little daily schedules conveys some of what arriving at Elephant Island meant to those men: "To rest unperturbed ... to hear the music of the surf, the swirl of ice-blocks, the croak of the penguins; to dream with hope of the future." -- Frank Hurley, Shackleton's Endurance Expedition, April 1916 after 497 days on the ice and sea |
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Elephant
Island looks so icy and forbidding that it's hard for me to
imagine Shackleton's men spending 135 days of an Antarctic
winter there waiting for the boss to return with a rescue
ship. We cruised past Cape Valentine, the first place
Shackleton and his men landed, and then arrived at Point
Wild, where they moved after discovering that Cape Valentine
was too exposed, around midmorning. We had a couple of hours
anchored off Pt. Wild, for viewing this historic site.
After
lunch we viewed a documentary video of the original silent
film footage from Shackleton's Endurance voyage. My
diary entry regarding this says simply: "annoying piano
music and text in weird unreadable font". I feel like I
should have gotten more out of it than that. After all, it
was historic primary source material! A lot of the film
concentrated on the beginning of the trip and on the dogs.
Lots and lots of cute footage of sled dogs. Knowing that
they were going to end up having to eat the dogs made that
kind of hard to watch. The way the men were carrying on with
the dogs was just so poignant. With the sea getting a bit
rough and the lights turned off in the lecture hall, I
started to drop off to sleep so got up and left the
unreadable text and annoying music to look for birds on
deck.
I
tried to imagine what it felt like to land on this
forbidding island after 497 days of living either at sea or
on the ice. Did land feel strange to them?