Fortuna Glacier

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Fortuna Glacier is a tidewater glacier at the mouth of Cumberland Bay on the island of South Georgia. It flows in a northeast direction to its terminus just west of Cape Best, with an eastern distributary almost reaching the west side of Fortuna Bay, on the north coast of South Georgia. Named in about 1912, presumably for the whale catcher Fortuna. It is the largest glacier on the island, and is notable for two major events in the 20th Century.

[edit] 1916

In mid-April 1915, explorer Ernest Shackleton's ship (The Endurance) with 27 members of his Antarctic expedition became locked in the polar ice in the Weddell Sea just off the Antarctica. In the spring of 1916, as the ice warmed and drifted north, the ship was crushed. The party used the lifeboats to get to Elephant Island, a desolate, uninhabited atoll at the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula. There they were stranded. Shackleton and five others crammed into a lifeboat (named the James Caird), sailed across the frigid Scotia Sea for 800 miles, miraculously reaching South Georgia two weeks later. With great difficulty, they landed on the island's uninhabited west side at King Haakon Bay. Frostbitten and exhausted, with their clothing torn and crusted with sea salt, it was not feasible to set sail again in the wind, currents and huge seas to one of the whaling stations on the island's east side, which were the only human habitation on South Georgia. To get to there they had to cross unknown mountains and crevasse-riddled glaciers without equipment (at that time, the interior of the island was all but unknown). Unstoppable, Shackleton beached his boat and with two others made his daring traverse of the island, crossing the Fortuna Glacier in the process. Thirty-six hours later, without sleep or rest, they reached Stromness whaling station.

[edit] 1982

When Argentina militarily occupied the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, the British Armed Forces recaptured the island in 'Operation Paraquet', thereby removing the Argentinian military presence and restoring the island to British Sovereignty. It was decided to land a mountain troop of Special Air Service soldiers on the glacier, to approach Grytviken from the most unlikely direction. After the troops were landed on the glacier in conditions of extremely poor visibility and gale extreme force winds on 21 April, their conditions deteriorated rapidly still further. During several repeated rescue attempts the following day by a Wessex 3 (Antrim) and two Wessex V (Tidespring) helicopters, the Wessex V aircraft crashed in extreme weather conditions. The Wessex 3, crewed by Lt Cdr Ian Stanley, Lt Chris Parry, Sub Lt Stewart Cooper and PO ACMN David Fitzgerald, succeeded in rescuing all troops and aircrew in an amazing feat of flying and navigation just before dark. On returning to Antrim, the Wessex 3 (which can be seen at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton, Somerset) held 16 personnel instead of its normal 4 capacity.