Two more whalers

Tanks

I am fascinated by the ruins left by the whalers. There is a lot of controversy about whether they should be cleaned up and removed, or whether they should be allowed to remain as they are.

I hope they stay. I understand wanting to get rid of them and making the landscape as close as it can be to what it looked like before humans arrived. But apart from the difficulty of undertaking an ambitious cleanup in such a remote location, I like having these pieces of history there, and I especially like that the plants and animals are gradually taking them over. Taking South Georgia back.

It's been a hard day's night

Two baby seals just chilling outside one of the buildings.

Seals on the beach

 One advantage of the phone camera is that it's much, much easier to take video. I think that mama seal is saying, Get back here right now!

I was not expecting that

Not the wildlife— we'd been warned that seals and penguins wandered freely through Grytviken and we needed to maintain our usual 5 meter distance. (While walking the path from the cemetery to the post office, I had to pause a couple of times to allow seals to cross in front of me.)

No, what surprised me was how green it was. I know it's summer here, but although we've seen a lot of the tussac grass on the mountainsides, the large green spaces in the town were a surprise.

I should mention here that all of the pictures of Grytviken were taken with my phone. They'd asked us not to bring our backpacks unless we really needed them in order to speed up the inspections, and I decided to just make it simple and not bring a camera at all. The results aren't really bad, except for the pictures of wildlife. My iPhone just can't capture the detail my other cameras can.

Welcome to South Georgia

The buildings of Grytviken (with a glimpse of the giant rusting oil tanks.)

Shackleton and Wild

Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton—Sir Raymond Priestly

The rather grandly named Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-16 is more commonly referred to by the name of the ship, the Endurance. There isn't any part of it that I don't find astonishing, especially now that I am actually in this part of the world and have seen the mountains of South Georgia that Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean crossed on foot, half-starved, with screws in the soles of their shoes for traction. (And having just made the very unpleasant crossing from South Georgia to Elephant Island in a big ship instead of a 22-foot lifeboat.)

In 1922, Shackleton was back in South Georgia preparing for yet another expedition, when he died of a heart attack at 47. Plans were originally made to return his body to England, but his widow requested that he be buried in South Georgia. Grytviken was a busy whaling station then, but it's still as remote a location as you can imagine. The expedition's doctor, Alexander Macklin, wrote, “I think this is as the boss would have had it himself, standing lonely on an island far from civilization, surrounded by a stormy tempestuous sea, and in the vicinity of one of his greatest exploits.”

Frank Wild, who was left in charge of the remaining Endurance crew on Elephant Island for more than four months after Shackleton set off in the James Caird, surviving on seal, penguin, and seaweed, died in South Africa in 1939 at the age of 66. In 2011, his ashes were moved to Grytviken, and buried next to Shackleton.

The ship's crew supplied whiskey for the traditional toast at the grave and I even drank a little of it.

Grytviken

Grytviken was the first place we were able to go ashore, although until the last minute it looked like the winds were going to keep us from landing. The South Georgian government inspector had to clear the ship first, to make sure we didn't have any contaminants (or rodents), and she also checked each of us before we got in the zodiacs—our boots, our jackets, our gear. Did we have any velcro? No? Good.

It was established as a Norwegian whaling station in 1904, and is still described as the largest “settlement” on South Georgia. There's a post office and a museum for the cruise ships that stop there, but they are only open during the summer; the people who work there go back to England in April.

The main reason I really wanted to go there was to visit Shackleton's grave in the small cemetery there, but it was an odd, beautiful place well worth seeing apart from that history.