Charlotte Bay
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[edit] Charlotte Bay hut
Located 64º 13' S, 61º 35' W on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula between Brabant Island and the Danco Coast.
This is an old Falkland Islands Dependency Survey (later British Antarctic Survey) hut at Portal Point in Charlotte Bay. The Bay was discovered by de Gerlache in the 1897-99 Belgica expedition and named after the fiancée of Gerlache's executive officer Georges Lecointe.
Wally Herbert, the leader of a later British expedition, had mapped the area from Hope Bay in the 1956-57 season, and arrived at the hut in Charlotte Bay as scheduled to the picked up by the RRS Shackleton. But Herbert had no radio, and had no way of knowing that the Shackleton had hit an iceberg and was forced to return to the Falkland Islands for repairs. As a result, the six men and their dogs were forced to stay in the hut for a period of about three months without knowing their fate, and with diminishing food supplies.
[edit] References
- Antarctica. Sydney: Reader's Digest, 1985, pp. 189, 216.
- Stewart, Andrew, Antarctica: An Encyclopedia. London: McFarland and Co., 1990 (2 volumes), p. 182.
- U.S. National Science Foundation, Geographic Names of the Antarctic, Fred G. Alberts, ed. Washington: NSF, 1980.
