The McDonald Islands are a volcanic group of barren islands located in the Southern Ocean, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica. They have been territories of Australia since 1947 and contain the only two active volcanoes in Australian territory.
The islands did not have visitors until the mid-1850s. Peter Kemp, a British settler, is the first person thought to have seen the island. On November 27, 1833, he spotted it from the brig Magnet during a voyage from Kerguelen to the Antarctic and was believed to have entered the island on his 1833 chart. An American sealer, Captain John Heard on the ship Oriental, sighted the island on November 25, 1853, en route from Boston to Melbourne. He reported the discovery one month later and had an island named after him.
Captain William McDonald aboard the Samarang discovered the McDonald Islands close to Heard Island six weeks later, on January 4, 1854. No landing was made on the islands until March 1855, when sealers from the Corinthian, led by Captain Erasmus Darwin Rogers, went ashore, at a place called Oil Barrel Point. In the sealing period from 1855-1880, a number of American sealers spent a year or more on the island.
