Shackleton’s views

If you are sailing towards South Georgia, Elephant Island by your starboard side, you don’t need to be a proper Shackleton’s aficionado to think and reflect about the James Caird trip. We were sailing the same passage these brave men did in the tiny and awfully wet lifeboat, but in an embarrassing full comfort, much faster, and in Summer. From time to time I looked through the pilothouse windows and tried to figure out how hard that trip must have been, although I guess our modern minds can’t fully figure that out.

Through the first days in South Georgia we took the penguinologists to their work sites in Cooper, Royal and Saint Andrews Bay. Then we entered the only inhabited place in the archipelago, King Edwards Cove. Frozen in time is the eminent whaling station with its Scandinavian church, the famous rusted oil tanks, scary wrecked whale-catchers, and cemetery. 

At dusk we docked alongside the Tijuca jetty, and it was already dark when we finished tidying up. We didn’t step down the boat. Dinner was ready. We agreed that the next morning everyone could roam free around the place. Josh, the Government Officer, would also open the museum and the post office for us. I went to bed with the unavoidable thought of being just a few hundred meters from the explorer’s grave. 

Next morning the weather was astonishing. I had never visited anybody’s grave before, but I marched up the gentle hill where the modest cemetery is. My presence made a fur seal leave. I respectfully passed by the rest of the twenty or thirty graves. All of them with their head oriented East. They were whalers who died in accidents; a magistrate who drowned when he was pushed into sea by an avalanche, and sealers who perished in a typhus epidemic. I was impressed by how young they were.

But the cemetery is dominated by Sir Ernest Shackleton’s granite headstone. He was buried oriented towards Antarctica.  Its enchanted carved star inevitably attracts your gaze and your steps. I paid my respects and silently observed everything. Where Shackleton rests there is peace, harmony, beauty. I can’t imagine a better place to rest for a sailor or an explorer. The most protected anchorage in a highly protected archipelago. With the minimum dose of civilization to keep you entertained. From time to time seeing boats pass by, hearing sailors’ conversations. Surrounded by petrels, by the call of a king penguin on the beach below, by the elegant flight of a nomadic albatross. Viewing the joyful teenaged seals playing the endless “king of the rock” game. Listening to the talk of a traveling pod of whales, to the soft and continuous wash of the swell. Profoundly submerged in nature.

Kenneth Perdigón

Skipper