At a quarter past eleven on the morning of 27 August 1916, a small steam tug tied up at Picton Island and began loading coal. Three hundred sacks came aboard from the naval station at Puerto Banner, bringing the ship’s total to seventy-two tons, and the work was finished within twelve hours. At half past three the next afternoon she weighed anchor and left for Elephant Island. Sixty miles south of Cape Horn, the lookout sighted the first icebergs.
The ship was the Yelcho, built in 1906 by the Scottish firm Geo. Brown and Co. of Greenock, on the River Clyde, to tow and carry cargo for a Chilean company at Puerto Montt. In 1908 the Chilean Navy bought her and sent her to Punta Arenas as a tug and a supply ship for the lighthouses of the region. She had no radio, no proper heating, no electric lighting and no double hull. The Chilean government offered her anyway, although she was completely unsuited to Antarctic waters, and five hundred miles of open sea lay ahead of her. Her captain was Luis Alberto Pardo Villalón, who had entered the Chilean Naval Pilot’s School in 1900, joined the navy as a pilot third class in 1906, and been posted to the Magallanes naval base in southern Chile as master of the Yelcho.
Twenty-two men were waiting at the other end. They belonged to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, whose ship Endurance had been trapped in the ice of the Weddell Sea and crushed. The survivors reached Elephant Island on foot, by sledge and by lifeboat, and on 24 April 1916 Shackleton and five companions set out in an open boat on an 800-mile voyage to South Georgia to find help, leaving Frank Wild in command of those who stayed. The island is mountainous and covered in ice, 152 miles north-north-east of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The weather there is normally foggy with heavy snow, and the wind can reach 100 miles an hour.
Shackleton had already tried three times to go back for them. The whaler Southern Sky turned back in May when an impenetrable barrier of pack ice appeared some seventy miles short of the island. From Port Stanley he cabled London asking for a suitable vessel, and the Admiralty told him nothing would be available before October, which in his view was far too late. The Uruguayan government lent him a tough trawler, which started south on 10 June, and the pack stopped that attempt too. At Punta Arenas he met Allan MacDonald, the British owner of the schooner Emma, who fitted her out for a third try that sailed on 12 July and failed like the others.
Frank Worsley, who had captained the Endurance, watched the waiting mark his leader. Shackleton had not had a single grey hair when they first set out to fetch the men; by the third return from a failed attempt his thick, dark, wavy hair was turning silver.
What was happening on the island, he could only imagine. Wild later described a strip of land 250 yards long and forty wide, the rest buried under thick ice. The men built a shelter out of two upturned boats propped on the rocks, which a snowstorm in May nearly dragged into the sea. They ate one hot meal a day, stretching the shrinking meat ration with penguins, fish and limpets. One man had his toes amputated. The blizzard that began the day they landed lasted a fortnight, often blowing at seventy to ninety miles an hour. Everyone was frostbitten to some degree, and their clothes had been worn without a break for six months. Even so, they kept midwinter’s day with a pudding invented by Wild out of powdered biscuit boiled with mouldy nut-food, and a concert led by Hussey on his “indispensable banjo”, the last thing saved off the ship before she sank.
The fourth attempt left Punta Arenas on 25 August. The Yelcho steamed through the Beagle Channel and anchored the following night off Ushuaia, the most southerly town in the world. The weather gave them their first real luck in a long while: fine, clear, the sea almost smooth.
Near the island Shackleton found the ice open, pushed north for a time by a southerly gale, and the Yelcho slipped through. They came up to the land in thick fog, and he did not dare wait for it to lift. At twenty minutes to twelve on the morning of 30 August the fog did lift, the camp was sighted, and the tug went straight into the bay. Shackleton saw black figures hurrying down to the beach and waving. Within half an hour he was ashore with Crean and some of the Chilean sailors. Worsley, watching the boat go in, heard him shout: “Are you all well?”
Everybody was aboard within the hour, in two trips of a small boat, along with the expedition records and the essential equipment. The twenty-two men were just at the end of their resources. Two days earlier the ship could not have got in at all.
The Yelcho reached Punta Arenas on 3 September to a hero’s welcome, and the fire-alarm was rung in case anyone had missed the news. Pardo was promoted at once to pilot first class and given medals and naval honours. When the British government authorised a large sum of money for him, he refused it, saying he had simply carried out a mission assigned to him by the Chilean Navy. He retired in 1919, served as Chilean consul at Liverpool from 1930 to 1934, and died in 1935, aged fifty-two. The highest part of Elephant Island is now called Pardo Ridge, and a bust of him stands on the spot where the men from the Endurance waited.