At a quarter past eleven on the morning of 27 August 1916, a small steam tug made fast at Picton Island and began to load coal. Three hundred sacks were carried aboard from the naval station at Puerto Banner, which brought the ship’s total up to seventy-two tons, and the whole job was done in under twelve hours. At half past three the following afternoon she raised her anchor and set off for Elephant Island. Sixty miles south of Cape Horn, the lookout saw the first icebergs.
The ship was the Yelcho. She had been built in 1906 on the River Clyde, at Greenock, by the Scottish firm Geo. Brown and Co., and she was meant for towing and carrying cargo for a Chilean company at Puerto Montt. In 1908 the Chilean Navy bought her and sent her to Punta Arenas, where she worked as a tug and supplied the lighthouses of the region. She had no radio, no proper heating system, no electric lighting and no double hull. The Chilean government offered her all the same, even though 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. He had entered the Chilean Naval Pilot’s School in 1900, had joined the navy as a pilot third class in 1906, and had then been posted to the Magallanes naval base in southern Chile as master of the Yelcho.
Twenty-two men were waiting at the far end of that voyage. They belonged to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Their ship, the Endurance, had been caught 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 to cover the 800 miles to South Georgia and find help. Frank Wild was left in command of the men who stayed behind. The island is mountainous and covered in ice. It lies 152 miles north-north-east of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and 581 miles south of the Falkland Islands. The weather there is usually foggy, the snow is heavy, and the wind can reach 100 miles an hour.
Shackleton had already made three attempts to go back for them. The whaler Southern Sky turned back in May, when a barrier of pack ice that could not be forced appeared about seventy miles short of the island. She was not built to break ice, so she retreated to Port Stanley. From there Shackleton sent a telegram to London asking for a suitable vessel, and the Admiralty replied that nothing would be available before October. In his view that was far too late. The Uruguayan government lent him a strong trawler, the Instituto de Pesca No. 1, which started south on 10 June, and the pack ice stopped that attempt as well. At Punta Arenas he met Allan MacDonald, a British man who owned the schooner Emma. MacDonald fitted her out for a third try, which sailed on 12 July and failed like the two before it. Fifteen hundred pounds had been raised to hire the Emma, a vessel of seventy tons and about forty years old, built of oak, which had once been used to hunt seals illegally. The Yelcho had towed the Emma part of the way south until the tow-rope broke. She then called across to report that water had got into her own bilges and that her coal was running low, and Shackleton told her she could go back to harbour.
Frank Worsley, who had been captain of the Endurance and had stayed with Shackleton through everything, saw what the waiting was doing to him. When they first set out to fetch the men, Shackleton had not had a single grey hair. By the time he came back from the third failed attempt, his thick, dark, wavy hair was turning silver. At Punta Arenas his patience gave way over what he regarded as the annoying restrictions placed on him, and he sent the authorities a telegram in very bitter terms.
What was happening on the island he could only imagine. Wild later described a strip of land 250 yards long and forty yards wide; from 25 April onwards everything else was buried under a thick mass of ice. The men made a shelter out of two upturned boats propped on the rocks, and in May a snowstorm almost dragged it into the sea. Food had to be managed with great care. They ate one hot meal a day, and the meat ration, which kept getting smaller, was stretched out with penguins, fish and limpets, because the ice kept the seals away from the island. One man had his toes amputated. All through midwinter they lived under a permanent cover of mist and snow, and every time the sea opened up, their hope of rescue came back.
Shackleton’s own account fills in the rest. The blizzard that began on the day they landed went on for a fortnight, often blowing at seventy to ninety miles an hour. In one storm the wind threw about sheets of ice as big as window panes and a quarter of an inch thick, so that going outside was like walking through an avalanche of broken glass. Rickenson collapsed from heart failure, Blackborrow and Hudson could not move, every man was frostbitten to some degree, and they had worn the same clothes without a break for six months. Even so, they celebrated midwinter’s day, the great Polar festival, with what one of them called a “magnificent breakfast” of thick sledging-ration hoosh, with a pudding that Wild had invented out of powdered biscuit boiled up with twelve pieces of mouldy nut-food, and with a concert led by Hussey on his “indispensable banjo”, which had been the last thing rescued from the ship before she sank.
The fourth attempt left Punta Arenas on 25 August. The Yelcho steamed through the Beagle Channel and anchored the next night off Ushuaia, the most southerly town in the world. The weather gave them their first real piece of luck in a long time: it was fine and clear, and the sea was almost smooth.
Near the island Shackleton found that the ice had opened, pushed north for a while by a gale from the south. The Yelcho took her chance and slipped through. They came up to the land in thick fog, and he did not dare wait for it to clear. 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. He was about a mile and a half from the camp. He turned the ship in, and within half an hour he was ashore with Crean and some of the Chilean sailors. Worsley watched the boat go in and heard him shout: “Are you all well?”
Within the hour everybody was on board, carried out in two trips of a small boat, together with the expedition’s records and the equipment they could not leave behind. The twenty-two men had almost nothing left in them. Two days earlier the ship could not have got in at all.
The Yelcho reached Punta Arenas on 3 September and was welcomed like a hero. The police had been instructed to spread the news that she was coming in with the rescued men, and the fire-alarm was rung in case anyone had not heard. From there Shackleton sent the shortest telegram he could to the Daily Chronicle in London: everyone saved, everyone well. Dutch newspapers printed it within a day, and remarked that details of the rescue would certainly follow soon.
Pardo was promoted at once to pilot first class and was given medals, naval honours and credit for ten years of service. When the British government approved a large sum of money for him, he refused it, saying that he had simply carried out a mission given to him by the Chilean Navy. He retired in 1919, served as Chilean consul at Liverpool from 1930 to 1934, and died of bronchopneumonia in 1935, at the age of fifty-two. The highest point of Elephant Island is now called Pardo Ridge, and a bust of him stands on the spot where the men from the Endurance waited.