The Wreck of the San Telmo

If you are a fan of adventure and expedition stories, you probably know that credit for  the “discovery” of Antarctica (in February, 1819)  south of the 60° south latitude, part of the Antarctica Treaty Area.  Close enough.

The second caveat is that he didn’t actually initially land on the distant island, since 

the area is known for tricky fog banks and, frankly, when he reported the sighting of the land, no one believed him.  So, several months later Smith went back and landed on an island (Which he promptly named for his monarch, King George, the Batshit Crazy.)  Mapmakers (being known for their puritanical nature) just recorded it as King George Island, which is the northern-most island of the Southern Shetland Islands, now also known as the Smith Islands.

William Smith also reported that he found the washed-up wreckage of a sailing ship.  We will never know if Smith found anything else because his logbook has never been located.  Since there was only one recent missing ship from the area, everyone assumed that this was the wreckage of the San Telmo.

A year later, the Royal Navy financed a larger expedition by William Smith and his ship.  On this third expedition the rest of the Southern Shetland Islands was charted and the landmass of Antarctica was spotted for the first time.  

But, what of the San Telmo?

Napoleonic France took King Ferdinand VII of Spain captive in 1808, touching off the Peninsular War.  It was during this time that most of the Spanish colonies in the new world took advantage of the power vacuum and launched their revolutionary wars for independence.  By the time the king was returned to his throne by the British Army, most Central and South American nations either had achieved independence, or had started revolutions that had progressed too far along to be quelled.

By 1819, both Argentina and Chile had broken free and were united to help Peru achieve independence.  Since Spain depended on Peruvian Silver to maintain what was left of her empire, the fighting was fierce.  In 1818, Spain sent the San Telmo, a 74-gun ship of the line to Peru—in part to carry enough soldiers to reinforce the garrisons there, as well as to escort a load of silver back to Spain.  The San Telmo was the flagship of a Spanish naval squadron under Brigadier Rosendo Porlier y Asteguieta.

Although Spain had lost a significant portion of her navy in the 1805 battle of Trafalgar, she still maintained a powerful navy of excellent warships, including the San Telmo, which was listed as, “a second-rate ship of the line”.  At two-thirds the length of a football field and 52 feet width, she was a floating, heavily armed castle, with 24-pound guns on her upper deck and 18-pound guns on the lower deck.  Including officers, sailors, and marines, she carried a  crew of 644 men.

In order to reach Peru, the San Telmo had to sail around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, then through the tempestuous waters of the Drake Passage—one of the most dangerous sea passages in the world.  The San Telmo would also have to sail head-on into a strong eastward current, against fierce winds and avoid floating ice while encountering constantly choppy seas.  This frigid area is known for its bad weather and the constant threat of rogue waves as high as 65 feet.  A wave like that would have towered forty feet over the deck of the San Telmo.

On September 2, 1819, another ship in the convoy observed that a powerful wave had knocked out the tiller of the San Telmo, rendering the ship impossible to steer.   While the sails could have been set to compensate for the loss of the tiller in calmer seas, in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, the ship was doomed.  The ship was thus presumed to have sunk with her entire crew.

But the mystery remains:  where did the crew perish?

William Smith knew that he was being credited for discovering a new land mass and it was very much to his advantage to be recognized as the first man to set foot on a land whose existence had been theorized but that had never actually been seen.  But could the San Telmo have drifted far enough south to have reached the island first?

The British made several expeditions to the area, in part for exploration, and in part in search of good hunting areas for both whaling and seal hunting.  James Weddell, who was in those locations between 1822 and 1824, recounted that, on Livingston Island, a great number of seal bones were found dispersed on a beach on said island along with the scattered timbers of a wrecked vessel.  As he later wrote:

On a beach  in  the  principal  island,  which  I  named  Smith’s  Island,  in  honour  of  the discoverer, were found a quantity of seals’ bones, which appeared to have been killed some years  before,  probably  to  sustain  the  life  of  some  ship-wrecked  crew ;  suggesting  the melancholy reflection that some unfortunate human beings had ended their days on this coast.

The bones had to be relatively recent, since while there are no timber-eating worms in the far southern seas, but there are worms that eat both whale and seal bones.  For shipwrecked sailors, surviving any length of time on the island would be very tough, with the average daytime temperatures hovering around the 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and dropping below freezing at night, accompanied by strong winds, frequent rain and snow.  There are not enough trees or other vegetation to provide a significant source for fuel. 

Did the surviving crew of the San Telmo reach the Southern Shetland Islands and manage to survive for a short time before they died of exposure?  If so, they were the true first discoverers of Antarctica…and they were the first to die there.