You cannot visit South Georgia without feeling something about Ernest Shackleton. A true British - well, Anglo-Irish, in fact - hero in that he snatched a kind of victory from the jaws of desperation and defeat.
He set out to make the first crossing of Antarctica, a fact lost in the epic struggle of getting his entire team back to safety after losing his ship in the ice of the Weddell Sea.
Shackleton reached South Georgia 90 years ago after crossing 800 miles of the Southern Ocean with five others in a 22 foot boat. It was an astounding feat of endurance, navigation and good luck. They made landfall in King Haakon Bay in the west of the south coast, first at Cape Rosa and then further down the Bay at Peggoty Bluff.
From here, Shackleton and two companions set off on a 36-hour, non-stop traverse of South Georgia's mountains to get to the whaling station at Stromness on the north coast, to get help and a ship to rescue his stranded men.
Luckily our petrel work has taken us down King Haakon Bay. Shackleton's first landing at Cape Rosa was in Cave Cove, reached through a narrow channel of steep cliffs for 50 metres or so: protection from the pounding sea. A small pebble beach to haul the James Caird out - six exhausted men pulling her up, with one ton of ballast stones inside her?
A cave for shelter and protection, fresh water in small lakes above the tussac slope. Strange the power that history gives a place, I thought, as I photographed the stones washed by the sea's edge in an evocation of landfall.
Further down the Bay, Peggoty Bluff is a windswept place at the foot of two glaciers and a vast open sweep of moraine. The small bluff has a cave in which the three stay-behinds must have sheltered from weather coming in from the sea - but giving little comfort to icy winds from off the glaciers.
The Shackleton Gap leads across to the north of the island, the first glacier crossing of several before the safety of Stromness. And the rock of the mountains rising between the glaciers is horribly loose and dangerous, as I found out with a brief excursion up Mount Duse near Grytiken.
The names of Shackleton and his companions are etched and remembered forever on South Georgia's map. His grave at Grytviken still attracts tributes and mementoes. But it seems sad that carpenter McNeish, who modified the James Caird to make her seaworthy for the epic crossing, gets only a tiny islet on the wrong side of King Haakon Bay from one of the most memorable landfalls of human endurance, which his handiwork helped make possible.
And who could have imagined, when I first read the story some 40 years ago in a cosy English childhood that one day I too would stand in these bleak, wild and historic places on the other side of the Earth and feel the pull that has inspired so many with South Georgia's chill wind tugging at my face?