When the wind drops, the only sounds are the squeaks of gentoo penguins,
and elephant seals wheezing obscenely. But such interludes don’t last long
in South Georgia. Most of the time, katabatic gusts off the mountains rattle
the loose corrugated iron into a furious symphony. Then you can stand with
your back to the sea and imagine that the rattling is the crash of heavy
machinery and railway trucks, that the misty air is fumes from a dozen vast
boilers reducing whale flesh to oil and that the water behind you is stained
with blood. And you can strain your ears listening for a note in the wind
which might be the steam whistle summoning men to work.
Stromness Whaling Station is a monument to human greed in the Antarctic.
Captain Cook, who was probably the first person to land on South Georgia
and who named it after King George III, saw it as a grim enough place: ‘Lands
doomed by Nature to perpetual frigidness: never to feel the warmth of the
Sun’s rays; whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe.’
Yet nature’s ‘horrible and savage aspect’ was to pale before the efforts
of human civilisation. South Georgia’s first holocaust was the work of sealers,
who quickly followed Cook’s voyage. Their targets were fur seals for their
skins, followed by giant elephant seals for oil-bearing blubber, traded
to China in voyages that were epics of human endurance. But within a century,
the island’s seal population was virtually extinct.
Today, the sealers’ behaviour appals. But we can excuse those desperadoes
for caring little of future generations. In pre-industrial days, the concept
of humans having a permanent destructive impact on nature was too new, and
the sealers’ fears for their own survival too real.
The whalers who followed had a similar code of ethics, but the technology
of an industrial world. Antarctic whaling was very much a 20th century business,
dating from 1905 when the Norwegians first came to South Georgia. During
the First World War, whale oil was vital for the manufacture of glycerol,
an ingredient of nitroglycerine, and the business boomed. Stromness, its
neighbour Leith and half a dozen other settlements became fully equipped
factories for turning harvested whales, mainly the great baleens, into industrial
products. The comparison to Auschwitz is facile but inescapable.
At their peak, South Georgia’s whaling stations employed more than 1000
people. From the mid-1920s onwards, however, the development of factory
ships, able to process whales in international waters outside restrictions
on quotas, reduced South Georgia’s importance and the stations fell into
disuse. The last station, Leith, lingered on until 1966, under Japanese
Today, the whale stations are deserted, but they continue to damage
South Georgia’s natural environment. Among other things, the whalers left
behind leaking tanks containing thousands of tonnes of fuel oil, loose asbestos
lagging, lead batteries and huge quantities of concentrated sulphuric acid.
A team of British experts, working for Christian Salvesen, the company that
holds the lease on the stations, made these discoveries early this year
when it began cleaning up the sites. The company is making the belated effort
as a condition of relinquishing its leases to the British government.
By the end of April, the team said, it will have removed or made safe
hazardous materials. While parts of the largest settlement, Grytviken, will
be preserved as a museum, the other whaling stations will be left to rust.
Even if they are safe for wildlife now, it is hard to imagine them remaining
so for long in this debilitating climate.
Ecologically, the best solution would be to remove the stations in their
entirety and leave the bays of South Georgia to seals and penguins and even
whales again. But there are reasons for preservation, too, so that future
generations can see what whaling meant. And I have a sentimental reason
for wishing that Stromness, at least, be kept in some kind of order. For
it was here that the greatest journey of the heroic age of Antarctic expedition
reached its end.
On 20 May 1916, after sailing an open boat through 1500 kilometres of
the world’s worst seas and crossing the island’s mountains in winter with
no proper equipment, three ragged and starving men, Ernest Shackleton, Frank
Worsley and Tom Crean, walked back into the inhabited world to bring word
of their 22 comrades marooned on Elephant Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula.
Stromness’s steam hooter was the first sound of the outside world that the
three men had heard for 18 months.
The British government, which claims sovereignty over South Georgia,
seems to have plenty of money to spend on defending its interests in the
South Atlantic. Is it too much to ask that it finds the cash to make a proper
job of cleaning up and properly preserving the whaling stations? As a monument
to human greed and human endurance they can have few equals, and probably
none in so grand a setting.
Michael Cross is accompanying Greenpeace’s Antarctic expedition aboard
the ship Gondwana.