In 1873, an Argentine sailor named Luis Piedra Buena loaded a crew onto a ship called the Espora and headed toward the Strait of Le Maire, a rough stretch of ocean near Patagonia known for tearing hulls to smithereens. He risked his crew’s lives for the noble quest of murdering a bunch of penguins to harvest their grease for oil.
Somewhere along the way, the ship wrecked near Isla de los Estados. Piedra Buena and his crew suddenly became castaways, struggling to survive on unfamiliar shores. The Penguins, having no idea they came this close to being scooped up and turned into lamp oil or whatever, still don’t care about humanity’s plight.
Eventually, the crew slapped together a makeshift sailboat and made it to Chile. The penguins kept on doing their thing.
Archaeologists May Have Found the Lost Shipwreck of 19th-Century Penguin Hunters
Now, according to a study published in the journal Antiquity and reported by IFLScience, archaeologists searching around Franklin Bay have uncovered the ruined wooden ribs of a 19th-century ship, along with a crude castaway camp on a nearby hillside.
The researchers dug up salvaged ship parts, including whole timbers and a deck prism, and found a smattering of distinctly human clutter—glass bottles, buttons, beads, and tools. While this belongs to Piedra Buena and his crew, the most logical explanation, the researchers aren’t claiming that just yet, just to be safe.
There’s more testing to be done, but it’s hard to deny that the location and all the artifacts combined heavily suggest that there may have been a bunch of stranded penguin hunters who may have ripped their ship to shreds to fashion it into an improvised boat that could possibly, maybe, get them to Chile.
Hypothetically.
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