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Historical Timeline for Heard & McDonald Islands - A chronology of key events

History of Heard & McDonald Islands[edit | edit source]

The first person likely to have sighted Heard Island was Peter Kemp, a British seal hunter who discovered it on November 27, 1833 while traveling on the Magnet from the Kerguelen Islands to Antarctica. He would have recorded this observation in his logbook.

Captain John Heard, an American seal hunter traveling the Oriental between Boston and Melbourne, sighted Heard Island again on November 25, 1853. He reported his discovery the following month and the island was named after him. Captain William McDonald aboard the Samarang discovered the McDonald Islands on January 4, 1854.

The first known landing on Heard Island dates back to March 1855 when Corinthian seal hunters led by Captain Erasmus Darwin Rogers landed there at a location called Oil Barrel Point. Between 1855 and 1880, a number of American seal hunters spent a year or more there in appalling conditions. At most, the community has 200 people. In 1880, the seals were largely wiped out and hunters deserted the island. In total, over 100,000 barrels of seal oil are produced.

The islands returned to Australia in 1947. Until the 1950s, Heard Island was visited by scientific teams at Atlas Cove. In 1971, it was the turn of McDonald Island to Williams Bay. The territory was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997.