area. Russian explorer von Bellingshausen commented on Smith's discovery: A few months later Smith revisited the South Shetlands, landed on King George Island on 16 October 1819 and claimed possession for Britain. In the meantime, a Spanish man-of-war had been damaged by severe weather in the Drake Passage and sank off the north coast of Livingston on 4 September 1819. The 74-gun ship San Telmo commanded by Captain Joaquín Toledo was the flagship of a Spanish naval squadron en route to Callao to fight the independence movement in Spanish America. The officers, soldiers and sailors on board the ship, including the squadron's Peruvian-born leader Brigadier Rosendo Porlier, are the first recorded people to die in Antarctica. While no one survived, some of her spars and her anchor-stock were found subsequently by sealers on Half Moon Beach at Cape Shirreff. During December 1819 William Smith was back with his ship to the South Shetlands. This time he was chartered by Captain William Shirreff, British commanding officer in the Pacific stationed in Chile, and accompanied by Lieutenant Edward Bransfield who was tasked to survey and map the new lands. On 30 January 1820 they sighted the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula, unaware that three days earlier the continent had already been discovered by the Russian Antarctic expedition of Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen and Mihail Lazarev. One year later, the Russians had circumnavigated Antarctica and arrived in the South Shetlands region. On 6 February 1821 they approached Livingston Island and observed eight British and American ships off Byers Peninsula. While sailing between Deception and Livingston, Bellingshausen met with American sealer Nathaniel Palmer, yet another pioneer of Antarctic exploration who is alleged to have sighted the mainland himself during the previous November. Palmer informed the Russians that seal hunting in the area was going at full steam, with Smith alone having taken 60,000 seal skins. The Antarctic sealing industry south of 60°S was initiated in the 1819/20 summer season by the early voyage of Joseph Herring (ship's mate during Smith's first visit) who stepped ashore in Hersilia Cove, Rugged Island on Christmas Day of 1819, followed by James Sheffield (with second mate, a 20-year-old Nathaniel Palmer), James Weddell, and possibly Carlos Timblón from Buenos Aires. American historian Edouard Stackpole wrote of the early 19th century sealers: As the seals were killed onshore the hunters used to spend protracted periods of time there, seeking