On the morning of 27 August 1916, a small steam tug tied up at Picton Island and took on coal. Three hundred sacks came aboard, and the loading was finished in twelve hours. The next afternoon the ship left for Elephant Island. Sixty miles south of Cape Horn, the lookout saw the first icebergs.
The ship was the Yelcho, built in 1906 in Scotland for towing and cargo work in Chile. In 1908 the Chilean Navy bought her and sent her to Punta Arenas. She had no radio, no heating system, no electric lighting and no double hull. The Chilean government offered her anyway, although she was not suitable for Antarctic waters, and five hundred miles of open sea lay ahead of her. Her captain was Luis Alberto Pardo Villalón, who had joined the navy in 1906 and was now master of the Yelcho.
Twenty-two men were waiting at the other end. They were part of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition, whose ship Endurance had been trapped and crushed in the ice. The survivors reached Elephant Island on foot, by sledge and by lifeboat. On 24 April 1916 Shackleton and five companions left in an open boat on an 800-mile journey to South Georgia to find help, and Frank Wild stayed in command of the others. The island is covered with ice and mountains. The weather there is usually foggy with heavy snow, and the wind can reach 100 miles an hour.
Shackleton had already tried three times to go back for them. In May a whaler turned back when thick pack ice appeared about seventy miles from the island. Shackleton asked London for a better ship, but was told that nothing would be available before October, which he thought was far too late. A Uruguayan trawler started south in June, and the ice stopped that attempt too. A third ship, the schooner Emma, sailed in July and also failed.
Frank Worsley, who had been captain of the Endurance, watched the waiting change his leader. When they first set out to fetch the men, Shackleton had not had a single grey hair. By the third failed attempt, his thick dark hair was turning silver.
On the island, the men lived on a strip of land 250 yards long and forty yards wide. They built a shelter from two boats turned upside down on the rocks, which a snowstorm in May almost pulled into the sea. They ate one hot meal a day, and because the ice kept the seals away, they added penguins, fish and limpets to the small meat ration. One man had his toes cut off. Every time the sea opened, their hope of rescue returned.
The fourth attempt left Punta Arenas on 25 August. Near the island Shackleton found the ice open, and the Yelcho slipped through. The ship came up to the land in thick fog, and he did not dare to wait for it to clear. At twenty minutes to twelve on the morning of 30 August the fog lifted, the camp was seen, and the tug went straight into the bay. Shackleton saw black figures running down to the beach and waving. Within half an hour he was ashore. Worsley heard him shout: “Are you all well?”
Everybody was aboard within the hour. Two days earlier the ship could not have got in at all.
The Yelcho reached Punta Arenas on 3 September, where a crowd welcomed her. Shackleton sent a very short telegram to a London newspaper: everyone saved, everyone well.
Pardo was promoted and given medals. When the British government offered him a large sum of money, he refused it, saying that he had only carried out a mission given to him by the Chilean Navy. He died in 1935, aged fifty-two. Today the highest part of Elephant Island is called Pardo Ridge, and a bust of him stands where the men from the Endurance waited.