Into the Frozen South

by J. W. S. Marr

Fine weather continuing, it was possible to settle down again to an orderly routine, and Jimmy Dell found me sufficient work to keep me from fretting. I learnt the art of splicing—working on the topsail sheet; and as lamp-trimmer, too, I was occupied in getting the steaming lights into shape. Maybe it was the strenuous nature of this work that caused me to commit the unmentionable sea-crime of giving a late relief next morning. I was aroused by the skipper yelling down the hatch that eight bells had gone, and I made a record turn-out, being on the bridge within one minute of the alarm. As a rule, I sleep very lightly; but this morning I erred, failed to respond to the usual call at one bell, and so slept on. But I think that quick turn-out made amends!

It was the Boss’s watch on deck, and during my trick at the wheel he talked to me with the utmost freedom and enthusiasm of his last memorable expedition, and pointed out the route by which he had crossed South Georgia, the land that was now in view ahead and towards which we were making for refit and overhaul. He called it “a land of storm”; and the term fits it well. It is a little, lonely island situated in the very south of the South Atlantic Ocean, amongst the stormiest seas of all the world. It is over a thousand miles from Cape Horn—the sailors’ graveyard—and nearly three thousand from the Cape of Good Hope. Captain Cook discovered it in 1775, and no doubt was sorry such a dreary wilderness existed. For a long time it was the happy hunting-ground of American sealers, who played such havoc with the valuable fur-seal with which the island then abounded that these animals are now practically extinct. To-day this far-flung outpost of the British Empire—for South Georgia is a British possession, and surely one of its most dismal—is the headquarters of five permanent whaling stations, one of them British, one Argentine, and the rest Norwegian.

At this time of year—official summer—the snow was present on the mountains in patches, but the valleys which open very invitingly to the sea were all white. In each valley was a glacier which ended abruptly at the water’s edge in a high, pale blue wall. But the whole aspect of the island was grim and forbidding: a wilderness of rock and ice.

Preparations were put in hand for entering harbour; the doctor, with me helping, put a genuine harbour-stow on the sails, and squared up all ropes and gear forward into an orderliness that would not have disgraced a man-of-war. As we plodded on towards our destination large numbers of penguins insisted on popping up unexpectedly out of the still water alongside, and Cape pigeons were numerous. Shortly after 3 p.m. we dropped anchor in the safe and sheltered harbour of Gritviken, near to the whaling station.

The old-timers amongst the crew were in their element now; you’d have thought they had suddenly come in sight of home. Particularly was the Boss exultant; he kept on pointing out familiar sights, and the weight of depression that had recently troubled him was quite shaken off. He was brimming over with vigour and energy, as happy as a sand-boy, and sniffed the air like a war-horse scenting a far-off battle. Sight of past victories must have quickened the fighting blood in his veins, and he could hardly restrain himself from rushing ashore at once. There was so much to do and so little time to do it in, that he felt as though every second were precious.

The water of the harbour was red with blood, and everywhere was the awful, nauseous stench of rotten whale carcasses. Whale oil may be a very necessary thing, but it is beastly in its securing! Several whalers were anchored near where we lay, and alongside the rough wooden quay lay an Argentine barque and a Norwegian cargo steamer.

We were promptly visited by the manager of the whaling station, who went ashore with the Boss, who was bursting with lively zeal; and as soon as possible such of us as were to be spared, pulled ashore in the surf boat, to watch the process of flensing a whale on the slip. For whalers nowadays do not cut-in and try-out their blubber in open water—they tow their catches into harbour where machinery exists for the purpose. The Norwegians who worked at the flensing struck me as being mighty heavy and ponderous, and distinctly bovine of feature.

The whole system of whaling is, of course, very interesting, even though unpleasant to those not accustomed to it; but it differs entirely from the methods in the old days of the Dundee whalers. It was then counted an exciting, dangerous calling, and to hunt a whale, harpoon it and bring the fish alongside was about the most thrilling sport in the world. The odds seemed to be somewhat in favour of the whale, and the risks the whalemen ran were unquestionably great. Nowadays there is so little danger as to be negligible, for instead of going out for months and years in lumbering barques, hunting the cetaceans in small whale-boats, and securing them by means of hand-harpoons, untiring persistence and cold pluck, tediously flensing them in the ship’s tackles and rendering down the blubber in the try-works established on the deck, fast steamers set forth in quest of the mighty game, and these steamers are armed with powerful little guns which project a heavy and deadly harpoon, which, fitted with a bomb that bursts when the weapon has penetrated into the whale’s interior, invariably inflicts a fatal wound. No doubt this is a more merciful way of dispatching the monsters; but it savours of cold-blooded slaughter. The whale stands no chance, the whalers run no risk; whaling to-day is merely systematized butchery. And to me, steeped in the old whaling traditions, primed with the picturesque accounts of real whaling, it was subject for sadness to think of these huge and nowadays helpless creatures being preyed upon so mercilessly. Once the whale-ship has secured as many whales as can conveniently be towed—each dead whale being buoyed and marked until the tale is complete—full steam is made for port, and the catch is hauled ashore on to a sloping plane, where the blubber is rapidly and scientifically stripped from the unwieldy corpse and conveyed to the try-pots to be converted into the oil of commerce.

We spectators found it treacherous work walking on the slip, which was several inches deep in a slimy horror of blood and blubber. For a considerable distance on each side of the whaling station there is a white fringe of bleached bones washed up by the tide, sole relics of what were once huge fish; but when man, and the sharks, and the birds had all taken toll, these poor remains were all that showed the magnitude of the sea’s finny spoil.

Having completed the round of the works, having breathed the oily atmosphere to our complete satisfaction, having seen the entire process of creating oil out of dead whale, we went for a short walk inland, up a slope to a small lake, turning to the left along a route where wet moss and sparse grass grew, returning by way of the shore, where the going was difficult on account of the dry bones littered there. So far as I could see, the land is mainly barren. This wet moss and short tussocky grass flourish to a height of about three hundred feet above sea level, but elsewhere I saw nothing but bare scree slopes, glacier-polished rocks and snow-covered shoulders, topped by the high-soaring, white-clad peaks that never alter though centuries come and go.