James’ and Sara’s Excellent Antarctica Adventure

Day 8: Grytviken, capital of South Georgia Island

Grytviken is probably most famous for being the place where one of the great British polar explorers, Sir Ernest Shackleton is buried. So we started our visit at the cemetery.

Shackleton was revered for his leadership.  After Amundsen and Scott had reached the South Pole, Shackleton planned to make the first crossing of Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea via the South Pole. The expedition was a failure but it produced one of the greatest stories in the history of polar expedition. The Endurance expedition set sail from Grytviken in December 1914. It made its way to the Weddell sea but ice came in so they were  stuck in ice for the winter (9 months)  As ice started to break up, the Endurance started to be crushed by ice. All supplies were taken off and the crew lived on the ice.  Eventually they watched the ship sink, and they were left with 3 lifeboats. Shackleton ‘s objective now was  to ensure his men got home. They used the lifeboats to get to Elephant Island which wasn’t on regular sailing routes so they had to effect their own rescue. Shackleton took 5 of the crew in the third lifeboat to get to South Georgia …took them 17 days in very bleak, harrowing conditions. They landed on the east coast side which had no whaling stations so had  to walk to civilisation. Took 4 and a half months to effect the rescue. He died of a heart attack at age 47 and they say that Shackleton’s  death marked end of heroic polar expeditions

Apart from the historic whaling station, the town has a church, a post office, a museum and a British Antarctic research station.

Carl Anton Larsen who captained the Swedish Antarctic expedition (1901-1904) founded the whaling industry choosing Grytviken as the site for the island’s first whaling station in 1904. Whales were very plentiful and production was limited only by the shortage of barrels. However Antarctic whaling would not have expanded if there had not been a growing demand for whale oil, which – with the new process of hardening the liquid oil into solid fat – could be used for products like margarine and soap.

Even in the early days there was concern that the new industry would destroy the whale populations, as had happened elsewhere. So in 1906, a new whaling regulation was introduced by Governor Allardyce which saw limits placed on operating licences, catch quantities etc. The regulation caused different vessels ( called whaling factory ships) to be invented which could get around the regulation. This created an oversupply and led to the end of whaling on the island.

There had been 6 whaling stations on South Georgia and some 175,000
whales were killed in the 60 year history of whaling on the island. By 1969, only the USSR and Japan were left. In 1985-86, a moratorium on whaling was introduced by the International Whaling Commission. Japan uses a loophole to continue whaling to this day.

And here’s some of the animals we saw at Grytviken and later, at Jason Harbour