Oddly, there was found to be a copper flotation device that had been unfurled and made flat for reasons unknown. There were no markings on the vessel, nothing to even indicate what nationality it was, and a search of the surrounding terrain showed no trace of anyone having been stranded or of any fire or camp. It was during this excursion that they would find something rather anomalous indeed.Īs they picked through the rocky landscape the team came across a shallow lagoon in the center of which sat a half-sunken abandoned boat described as a “whaler or ship’s lifeboat,” yet there was no sign of any crew other than some scattered equipment on shore, and no one had any idea of where it could have possibly come from or how it had ended up there. and the British Royal Navy’s Antarctic ice vessel HMS Protector arrived to fearsome weather, yet they managed to finally drop a survey team, led by Lieutenant Commander Allan Crawford, onto Nyrøysa by helicopter. Then, in 1958 it was found by the American vessel Westwind that volcanic activity had created a previously unseen expanse of rocky land free of ice measuring around 400 yards long by 200 yards wide, which was named Nyrøysa, the Norwegian word for “new mound.” The next expedition would not be until 1964, when the South African ship R.S.A. In 1930 the island was conceded by the British to Norway, and it would not be until 1955 that there was any further real effort to make another such journey, when the South African vessel Transvaal visited with the intention of scouting it as a possible location for a weather station. ![]() The expedition did not stay long, and after leaving behind a hut and some supplies they left this alien land behind. ![]() It was at this time that this fierce land was claimed for Norway and christened Bouvetøya, although it had also been claimed by the British in 1825 and called Liverpool Island. It was due to this aggressive nature that Bouvet Island was not even officially set foot upon by human beings until 1927, when the Norwegian survey vessel Norvegia managed to land here and its crew, led by Harald Horntvedt, was able to successfully penetrate inland. Indeed, so unforgiving were the conditions here and so unwelcoming was it to approach, with its cliffs, rocks, perpetual storms, and lack of any landing points, that is was largely seen as impossible to even land here at all, forcing those who found it to merely observe it from afar like some snarling, dangerous beast. miles in area, sitting among the grey churning sea from which it emerged like some ancient god to tower over the waves. What early explorers found when they came here was a storm-wracked expanse of rocks and imposing cliffs, around 19 sq. Discovered in 1739 by Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, there have been sporadic excursions to this otherworldly storm-beaten land of snow and wind over the centuries, and for a time it was an almost mythical land that many could not even locate at all, eluding many explorers and placed wrongly on maps all the way up until 1808, its location not really even fully known or properly set on nautical charts until 1898. ![]() An uninhabited, wind ravaged, frigid slash of volcanic rock shrouded in fog, it looks to be the surface of some alien world, forbidding and aggressive towards all who come here. Way down at the southernmost end of the world, right there in the midst of one of the most inhospitable and remote places on Earth is the remote sub-antarctic Bouvet Island, lying approximately 1,700 kilometers (1,100 mi) north of the Princess Astrid Coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica. Out among these remote places on the edge of our known world are often mysteries and enigmas that defy our attempts to understand them as surely as they defy human encroachment, and one of these is a mysterious boat, left forlorn and unexplained in one of the most rugged, least explored places on the planet. These are the locales that barely know the touch of human beings at all, uncharted wildernesses that have remained the same over the eons and which seem to almost not want us there at all. There are places in our world that lie well beyond the confines of civilization, existing out past our cities and over the horizon mostly away from human eyes.
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