Saturday 5th March; 6th day at sea
Another early morning and this morning’s landing was to be on Snow Hill Island, where Nordenskjöld’s hut had been preserved. He was the second person to stay over an Antarctic winter, in 1902-03, and the original intention was for his ship, the Antarctic, to pick him up the following summer. However, when the ship returned from the Falklands and South Georgia, it couldn’t get through the Antarctic Straight due to ice, so the captain, Carl Anton Larsen, a famous Norwegian whaler, dropped three men off at Hope Bay at the top of the Antarctic Peninsula to try to get through on foot to alert Nordenskjöld of the problem. They failed in this due to the open water between them and Snow Hill Island, so they settled in for the winter at Hope Bay, collecting seals and penguins for food and fuel and fossils to keep them selves busy. Nordenskjöld of course was unaware of this, so he was stuck for a second winter on Snow Hill Island. Larsen, in the ship, tried to sail round into the Weddell Sea, but the ship was crushed in the ice off Paulet Island. The following summer, the men at Hope Bay tried to reach Nordenskjöld again, and almost unbelievably met him whilst he was on a trip round James Ross Island. Nordenskjöld wasn’t apparently too sure who was approaching him and his colleague, Jonassen, was on the point of drawing his revolver under the impression that the three figures, black from head to foot and wearing wooden boxes with slits over their eyes, were Antarctic aboriginals. Larsen meanwhile had set off in an open boat to try and pick up the three men at Hope Bay, found a note they’d left, set off after them and reached Snow Hill only a few hours ahead of an Argentinian rescue mission had arrived in the area. The story is rather reminiscent of Shackleton’s 1914-1916 expedition, with the difference that only one man died (of a heart condition), whilst there were deaths on Shackleton’s expedition in the separate Ross Sea group, and isolated groups of men, when marooned, simply settled down, built themselves a hut, and not only collected food and fuel, but even kept themselves busy.
Nordenskjöld’s hut is still preserved, mostly by an Argentinian base on Seymour Island to the north, but rather oddly they’d decided to put some modern soap and deodorant in the hut. There were still piles of fossils outside the hut – Nordenskjöld’s main interest whilst he was stranded. The island itself consisted of loose shale, mostly a rather dreary brown colour, plus snow at the tops of the hills, and the usual glaciers running down to the sea. Despite this, and the fact that no animals breed here, it still remained quite impressive.
After the landing the ship turned to the West and we headed off down the Admiralty Sound, past Lockyer Island and around Snow Hill Island into the Weddell Sea. We didn’t apparently have charts for the area we were in and the bridge crew didn’t entirely trust the GPS and computer system which displayed maps of where you where. The sea was littered with ice of all shapes, sizes and ages. Not only tabular bergs, which were the remains of the Larsen B ice-shelf that spectacularly collapsed in 2001. We also saw the first sea ice; large flat floes with penguins and seals on them. At this point we reached the furthest south point in the trip, 64 ° 36' 34.33'' south. Two of the expedition staff also saw an Emperor penguin – the subject of another competition – and the captain decided that it was time to use the ship as an icebreaker. Curiously the 5 metre rule doesn’t seem to apply when you’ve got 12,000 horsepower and 1500 tons of metal under you, and we crashed into the ice floes, disturbing the seals calmly lying about, in an attempt to get closer to the penguins. This was a bit of a futile effort as one of them disappeared into the water, whilst the other calmly wandered off into the distance. The ice-breaking was quite good fun however; they don’t simply batter the ice from the front, but use a sort of rocking motion to go on top of a section of ice floe and then rock downwards to split it.
One of the things we learnt at the recap in the early evening was that probably only about 5,000 tourists have been as far as Snow Hill Island and of those, perhaps only a quarter have circumnavigated it – most tour ships go down the west side of the Peninsula. The downside of the day was that my glasses fell onto the deck of the ship as someone lent me a pair of binoculars to see the Emperor Penguins more clearly and now have a scratch in the right hand lens. I might be able to claim on insurance though.
Nordenskjöld’s hut is still preserved, mostly by an Argentinian base on Seymour Island to the north, but rather oddly they’d decided to put some modern soap and deodorant in the hut. There were still piles of fossils outside the hut – Nordenskjöld’s main interest whilst he was stranded. The island itself consisted of loose shale, mostly a rather dreary brown colour, plus snow at the tops of the hills, and the usual glaciers running down to the sea. Despite this, and the fact that no animals breed here, it still remained quite impressive.
After the landing the ship turned to the West and we headed off down the Admiralty Sound, past Lockyer Island and around Snow Hill Island into the Weddell Sea. We didn’t apparently have charts for the area we were in and the bridge crew didn’t entirely trust the GPS and computer system which displayed maps of where you where. The sea was littered with ice of all shapes, sizes and ages. Not only tabular bergs, which were the remains of the Larsen B ice-shelf that spectacularly collapsed in 2001. We also saw the first sea ice; large flat floes with penguins and seals on them. At this point we reached the furthest south point in the trip, 64 ° 36' 34.33'' south. Two of the expedition staff also saw an Emperor penguin – the subject of another competition – and the captain decided that it was time to use the ship as an icebreaker. Curiously the 5 metre rule doesn’t seem to apply when you’ve got 12,000 horsepower and 1500 tons of metal under you, and we crashed into the ice floes, disturbing the seals calmly lying about, in an attempt to get closer to the penguins. This was a bit of a futile effort as one of them disappeared into the water, whilst the other calmly wandered off into the distance. The ice-breaking was quite good fun however; they don’t simply batter the ice from the front, but use a sort of rocking motion to go on top of a section of ice floe and then rock downwards to split it.
One of the things we learnt at the recap in the early evening was that probably only about 5,000 tourists have been as far as Snow Hill Island and of those, perhaps only a quarter have circumnavigated it – most tour ships go down the west side of the Peninsula. The downside of the day was that my glasses fell onto the deck of the ship as someone lent me a pair of binoculars to see the Emperor Penguins more clearly and now have a scratch in the right hand lens. I might be able to claim on insurance though.
posted by Iain Burke at 30.1.06
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