South Georgia

The final stretch

Peggotty had scarcely prepared me for the eastern coast. In successive landings, at Gold Harbour and Salisbury Plain, we ran into 150,000 pairs of king penguins (plus 50,000 gentoos). Approaching Gold Harbour’s shore, I heard their collective cacophony and flinched at the ascorbic pong of fishy guano that left tears in my eyes – although for one traveller, Rochelle from Sydney, her tears were from joy. This is what South Georgia does to you: it overwhelms your senses.

Upon splashing ashore, I stood perplexed at where to point my camera. There were a million unbelievable photographs. Eventually, I walked down to the shoreline where, like the D-Day landings, penguins drifted onto the beach glistening clean, then tilted their heads skywards, honking like contralto geese to let their chicks know that they had a bellyful of krill. Dinner’s on its way, kiddo.

There were so many dramas that I could scarcely process them all. A skua stole a king penguin’s egg, but despite being three times its tormentor’s height, this placid penguin put up little defence. “Come on,” my inner pugilist yelled, “you’ve got a massive bill. Peck the skua on its head.” But no, that was left to the region’s pluckiest penguin, the pugnacious gentoos, one of whom waded into this scrap like hired muscle and spooked the skua away. Meanwhile, unbearably sweet little fur seals, recently weaned, comically charged us, teeth bared and advancing joltingly until we took one pace forwards and they scarpered, whimpering like pet dogs. There was no moving the hauled-out male elephant seals, though. These moulting beasts resembled fly-tipped sofas with flayed upholstery, except that they weighed about four tonnes. Burping, farting and excreting snotty salt from their elephantine snouts, they weren’t lookers.

Whether Shackleton encountered such abundance did not matter. In the last throes of his epic escape, he fixated on saving his men. Without any mountaineering experience, his team crossed South Georgia’s glaciated interior in 36 hours, and at Stromness they staggered into the house of the whaling master, who began arranging a ship to Elephant Island to collect the rest of the men. Two months later, the Chilean ship Yelcho picked them up. His entire crew was saved.

As a homage to Shackleton’s cross-island hike, we were dropped off at Maiviken beach to walk 3.5km to Grytviken. It’s tame by comparison: a squelchy yomp through a magnificent glacial U-shaped valley that reminded me of the Welsh Black Mountains. Except it wasn’t Abergavenny that waited, but a settlement dominated by rust-brown circular storage tanks that once brimmed with whale oil.

In the grip of a sunken sea-mist, and hauntingly atmospheric, it felt as if the weather-beaten Norwegian whalers who built this settlement in 1904 had just upped and left overnight. I was taken aback by the size of the industrialised whaling plant: pipes fed into cooking tanks for rendering the blubber after the whales had been hauled ashore by chain to be flensed. One interpretation panel read: ‘On a “good” day, 30 fin whales, each eighteen metres long, could be processed in 24 hours, yielding 200 tonnes of oil’. Beached on the shoreline were the decaying wrecks of whaling ships. One, Petrel, had a harpoon gun still mounted on its bow.

In all, 175,000 whales were killed before whaling ended here in 1963 and Grytviken became a ghost town.
Shackleton’s spirit remained similarly omnipresent. I entered a pretty, white wooden Lutheran church that had been created by the whalers in 1913. This was where his funeral later took place. His final 1922 expedition had planned to circumnavigate and map Antarctica’s coast, but in reality it was little more than an escapist jolly for a man who despised domestic drudgery: ‘I feel I am of no use to anyone unless I am outfacing the storm in wild lands,’ he wrote. Upon his death, recognising that his heart truly lay in South Georgia, his wife, Emily, insisted that he was buried there.

My last act was to visit Shackleton’s grave before our ship departed for the Falkland Islands. South Georgia was everything I’d imagined, and despite its remoteness, the island’s attachment to the past seemed almost otherworldly. Shackleton’s presence throughout this journey reinforced a lesson that I’d long since learned in life: to keep going at all costs. But as I walked to say goodbye to him and was assailed by a plucky little seal pup, I realised something even greater: that while the age of whalers and explorers had long since departed, nature, in all its glorious abundance, had reclaimed this wondrous South Atlantic outpost for itself.