Luis Pardo was a quiet Navy pilot from Santiago, posted to the naval station in Punta Arenas. In August 1916 he was given command of the Yelcho, a small Navy tug, to fetch Ernest Shackleton's 22 men stranded on Elephant Island. Three attempts by other ships had already been stopped by the ice.
The Yelcho had no heating, no radio and no double hull. Before sailing, Pardo wrote to his father: "When you read this letter, either your son will be dead, or he will have reached Punta Arenas with all the castaways. I will not come back alone." He left Punta Arenas on 25 August, found the men on 30 August and brought every one of them back alive. On 3 September the whole town crowded the piers to meet them.
He was promoted, and he is said to have turned down a cash reward from the British government, saying he had only carried out a Navy mission. He left the Navy in 1919, was Chile's consul in Liverpool from 1930 to 1934, and died in Santiago in 1935. He is buried there.
On the Costanera, a statue of him by the sculptor Luis Arturo Hevia, unveiled in December 2020, points towards Antarctica. His sabre is kept at the Naval Museum.
