Archaeologists may have found an 1873 castaway camp on Isla de los Estados, Argentina

On a remote island at the southern tip of South America, archaeologists have recorded three wooden shipwreck hulls and what looks like a short-term camp. The camp sits beside a small stream, and it may connect to a famous castaway story from 1873, when an Argentine captain lost his brig and had to build a boat to escape.

An island on the edge of the sailing world

Isla de los Estados, also called Staten Island, lies off the southern tip of Argentina, across the Strait of Le Maire from Tierra del Fuego. Ships have used the surrounding waters on the Atlantic and Pacific route since the early seventeenth century. Today the island is a protected nature reserve, and its lighthouse ruins inspired Jules Verne’s 1905 novel Le Phare du bout du monde.

In the early 1870s, the Argentine sailor Luis Piedra Buena held the island by grant. According to the story that researchers have long studied, his crew lost the 157-ton brig Espora in 1873 while they hunted penguins for oil. The vessel, built in Maryland and formerly named Nancy, ran aground. The crew then built a small cutter called Luisito and sailed to Punta Arenas, Chile.

What the team found at Lacroix Inlet

A team led by Nicolás Ciarlo, with colleagues from CONICET and other Argentine institutions, worked at Lacroix Inlet in Franklin Bay in January 2026. They travelled on the sailboats Pampa Mía and Galileo as part of the expedition Aquí hay dragones, which the Argentine Navy supported. Their goals were to revisit wrecks that earlier researchers had reported, check the tidal zones for more remains, and search nearby land for signs of a short stay.

They recorded three hull remains. The first, labelled BF010, is a lower hull in the intertidal zone, with an iron chain beside it. The second, BF005, sits just above the high-tide line and still stands to deck height. The third, BF004, is a small section on the north side of the inlet. The team does not yet know whether the timbers come from one ship or several.

Then they turned inland. About 150 metres from both main wrecks, on the lower slope of a steep hill more than 12 metres above sea level, they found a camp site the team calls BF008. It lies beside a small stream. Surface finds include glass beads, Prosser-style ceramic buttons, corrugated galvanised sheets, a ship’s deck prism, and a small rudder hinge made of non-iron metal. The team used shoreline survey, photos, measurements, drawings, a few test pits, timber sampling, and a drone survey to map how the sites relate to each other.

Why the Espora story matters

The authors say the camp may link to the wrecks and possibly to the Espora, but they do not claim a match. One detail complicates the picture. Hull BF005 survives to deck height, and the authors say that does not fit the expectation that the Espora was fully scrapped after it was lost. If the hulls do belong to Piedra Buena’s brig, the site could show how castaways actually lived and worked during a short, desperate stay.

The wider value lies in how rare this kind of evidence is. Few studies have examined brief castaway episodes along the Patagonian coast, because such camps leave thin, scattered traces. Franklin Bay gives researchers a chance to test written accounts against material remains.

What the diary adds

Earth.com, which reported on the paper, drew on Piedra Buena’s diary to describe the ordeal. According to that account, the captain ran his vessel onto a beach on 10 March 1873, and the crew of eight laid the keel for a replacement boat six days later. They finished the Luisito on 30 April, floated it on 11 May, and reached Punta Arenas on 27 May. The diary also records that rations fell to one biscuit per man per meal in early April. These details come from the diary as retold by the news report, so readers should treat them as the historical backdrop, not as findings of the new fieldwork.

Caveats and open questions

The study is a short Project Gallery article that describes ongoing research, not a final verdict. The team has not named the ship or traced the crew, and they found no traces of the shipyard where the crew built the Luisito. The authors also note that researchers do not agree that the Espora sank in Franklin Bay at all. Timber analysis and further excavation could help date the hulls and show whether they belong to one vessel or several.

For now, the site offers a promising lead. A stream, a scatter of buttons and beads, and weathered hulls on a windswept shore may one day tell the story of eight men who built their way home.

Sources

• Ciarlo, N. C., Landa, C. G., Raies, A., Avila, S. L., Ulloa, R. and Zangrando, A. F. J. (2026). Castaways at the end of the world: ongoing archaeological research at Franklin Bay, Isla de los Estados. Antiquity. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10437
• Phys.org: Archaeologists uncover possible 19th-century castaway camp on island at the end of the world
• Earth.com: Stranded by a storm in 1873, an Argentine captain built a boat on the beach