Travel
A three-week journey following Ernest Shackleton’s epic voyage to save his crew is a powerful experience of the most remote place on Earth. By Bruce Wolpe.
Following Shackleton’s epic Antarctic journey
When you stand for the first time on Constitution Dock in Hobart and look south, you know it’s there, out there, somewhere. The deepest south over the horizon. The frozen formidable fortress. Will you ever get there?
Everyone who has been to the Antarctic says it and, yes, it is a journey of a lifetime.
The first time you see the Antarctic Peninsula – mountains of contorted geology, snow and ice – the sense of the place it takes three days at sea to reach is immediate: raw, isolated, desolate, unconquerable, relentless. One of the oldest forms of transport – a boat – that makes you feel, as it cuts through the ice still lingering from winter in this hauntingly forbidden part of our planet, as if you are in a spaceship exploring an extraterrestrial world.
We are sailing on the Sylvia Earle. Its namesake is the nonagenarian marine biologist and oceanographer, a renowned ambassador and champion of the oceans. Our host, Aurora Expeditions, is an Australian company known for its deep experience in the Antarctic environs, and its commitment to biosecurity, the fullest ecological responsibility and sustainability, and ensuring no encroachment on wildlife from its voyages.
We travelled more than 6000 kilometres over 20 days in Ernest Shackleton’s wake. His heroic efforts in 1909 to be the first to reach the South Pole ended with the explorer forced to retreat, just 180 kilometres from his goal, for want of sufficient food. Roald Amundsen was the first to claim the title, two years later.
In 1914, Shackleton crafted an expedition of 28 men to sail the Endurance through the Weddell Sea to land in Antarctica and then be the first to traverse the entire continent to the Ross Sea. Endurance never reached the continent. It was trapped by sea ice that would never, after drifting north with its human cargo for a year, recede to open water. The ice ultimately crushed the ship and it sank.
It took all Shackleton’s knowledge and leadership to protect his men, through one of history’s most heroic and courageous journeys: to sail in the three small lifeboats from the sunken Endurance 550 kilometres to Elephant Island in the South Shetlands, and then, with just six men aboard the James Caird lifeboat, 1300 kilometres onwards to South Georgia, where a whaling station provided the resources to rescue the men left on Elephant Island. Shackleton was guided only by a sextant and his oceans of experience. All was accomplished under the most savage and horrific conditions, and it is a story of miraculous survival. No man was lost over the 24 months and 22 days of this staggering ordeal.
The Sylvia Earle tracks that journey from Ushuaia, Argentina, in Tierra del Fuego to the Antarctic Peninsula and the Weddell Sea, then to Elephant Island and onwards to South Georgia. There are whales that blow and birds that fly over. Icebergs – with their ultra white sheen and strata of blue ice near the ocean’s surface – are constantly visible, some shaped like alabaster models of buildings and sculptures that could grace a capital city. We were just carving lines across the surface of another world.
Antarctica is the most remote place on the planet. It is the only continent without permanent human residents. Though the land mass itself hosts few native animals beyond invertebrates, Antarctica’s indigenous marine life is rich and diverse. Its coastline and nutrient-dense seas are home to several species of penguin, including emperor and adélie, and a variety of seals such as the Weddell. However, this early in the season, the only whales we see are orca and fin whales.
Shackleton’s smaller craft could not easily find safe places to land on the islands of the Scotia Sea. It was only a little over a century ago, but the shorelines that those tiny boats faced were occupied by glaciers that have since receded hundreds of metres – some up to 1.5 metres a day. Overhanging ice is poised to crash down at any moment, exposing black sand and pebble beaches now crammed with penguins and seals. One Sunday, at a balmy 6 degrees Celsius, it looks like a summer opening weekend at the beach, with penguins and seals sunbathing. Visiting Yankee Harbour, Half Moon Bay and St Andrews Bay, we enjoy two-hour walks along beaches and paths of pebbles and snow, with isolated green patches of moss and tussock grass. In bright sunshine and blue skies, it is all so forbidding and rough, overseen by mountains of solitude and grace.
We access all these places from the mothership via Zodiac watercraft: inflatable rubberised boats that seat 10, one crew driving via an outboard motor. They are fantastic for zipping up to and around the icebergs and for skirting the coves that slice inland from the bays that pierce the islands. We skim the waters for hours. When the Zodiac engine cuts, we drift by the shore and watch the wildlife show unfold. All over the place are penguins mating and nesting and seals sleeping and mating. Terns, petrels and the occasional albatross soar overhead.
The first view of South Georgia is a real shock of green vegetation, after days at sea and the unbearable whiteness of the snow and glaciers of Antarctica. Moss and short grasses grace the base of mountains with summits as high as 3000 metres. There are no trees, however. No roads. No wires. No airports. No telecom towers. No cars. No cranes. No coffee bars. Just the waters – either grey or blue from the sun – the stony shorelines, the rocks and coves, the snow, the craggy mountain heights, the light, the clouds, the fog, the cresting waves from the winds that are exorcised into gales. We watch for hours, mesmerised.
En route, we pass that day’s mega iceberg, calved in 2021 from the Ekström ice shelf and designated A-77 by NASA. It is 10 kilometres long – half the length of Manhattan – three kilometres wide, 30 metres high. An in-your-face confrontation with global warming.
Damage is being done. The disappearing glaciers mean the penguins and seals are being driven ever further south, but the newly exposed shorelines mean more breeding. This is augmented through treaty and commercial agreements to limit human activity. On Salisbury Plain and St Andrews Bay, there are penguins and seals as far as the eye can see. But the warming oceans and expanded fishing of krill will ultimately impair their numbers. There is also the new threat from H5N1 bird flu that, at least so far, seems confined to the elephant seals and likely the migratory birds that brought the virus this far south.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, South Georgia was the capital of the sealing and whaling industries. Hunters killed an estimated 175,000 whales and seven million seals to fuel the industrial revolution and urban lighting before electricity. The rusted remnants of those plants can be seen in Leith, Stromness and Grytviken. The seals now occupy the town and humpback whales party nearby – they ultimately won that war. Fifty years later, there is more teeming life in these oceans than anywhere else on the planet – but can it prevail to the end of this century?
The South Georgia Heritage Trust has commissioned a series of “spirit tables” by Scottish sculptor Michael Visocchi entitled Commensalis to tell the grim history of the island’s whaling history. The trust hopes the installation will become “an international beacon” for “an ecosystem in recovery”. It is expected to open in 2026 for visitors to come and understand this spectacular place and the need to preserve the eternal beauty of these lands, glaciers and waters flush with life.
We are told the best thing to do on this expedition is to observe and absorb and take the memories with you. It is all just so astonishingly, ruggedly beautiful.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 20, 2025 as "Following Shackleton".
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