Grytviken 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, as do most of the scientists working around the island. No one lives on South Georgia permanently.

This 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 ship had to be cleared by the South Georgian government inspector first, to make sure we didn’t have any contaminants (or rodents) aboard, and she also checked each of us before we got in the zodiacs—our boots, our jackets, our gear.

South Georgia has no mammals other than seals. After a long campaign, rodents brought by sailors were finally eradicated in 2018 after more than 200 years (one of the reasons for the ship inspection before we could land there.) There also used to be herds of reindeer, which were introduced by Norwegian whalers, but they were so destructive to the native grasses and plants that they also had to be killed.

The grave of Sir Ernest Shackleton in the small cemetery in Grytviken. Sir Raymond Priestly famously said, “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.”

Most of us know the story of the rather grandly named Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-16, and have seen the eerie pictures of the Endurance trapped in the ice in the Weddell Sea. After the Endurance sank, the crew escaped by sledge and lifeboat to Elephant Island, the nearest accessible land; unfortunately this was a tiny inhospitable island far from the shipping lanes so there was no hope of rescue from there. So Shackleton and five of the men took one of the lifeboats and sailed to South Georgia. There isn’t any part of the story that I don’t find astonishing, especially now that I have actually been in that 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 made the very unpleasant crossing from South Georgia to Elephant Island across the Southern Ocean myself—the roughest seas I have ever experienced, and I was on a big cruise ship, not a 22-foot lifeboat. (Also, I did it in one day, not 17.)

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.”

The ship’s crew supplied whiskey for the traditional toast at the grave. I don’t drink much anymore but I had a couple of sips for the boss.

Frank Wild, who was left in charge of the remaining Endurance crew on Elephant Island for more than four months after Shackleton left, 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.

Shackleton is the main reason most people want to visit Grytviken, but it is an odd, beautiful place well worth seeing apart from that history. Seals and penguins wander freely on the paths and along the water, sometimes making keeping the required 5 meters distance from any wildlife challenging. (While walking from the cemetery to the museum, I had to pause a couple of times to allow seals to cross in front of me.)

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

A baby seal sacked out in front of one of the buildings.

We saw many of these rusty hulls in the waters around South Georgia. There’s a kind of poetic justice in the way the fur seals especially have come back from near-extinction, while the whalers and sealers are long gone, leaving only these relics behind. 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. Some of the whaling ships we saw looked like floating terrariums, with grass growing on the decks and birds nesting on every horizontal surface.

Two seals from the cruise around Ocean Harbour that morning. (I probably have enough seal pictures to do a couple more sets just of them, so picking a few to round out this group of ten was a challenge.)

There were lots of baby seals, but this one is the tiniest one I saw—probably a newborn.

This seal wasn’t interested in appearing cute. I’m not sure if it was our zodiac that was pissing him or her off, but I like this picture because it’s the only time I’ve seen a seal baring its teeth. We were supposed to stay away at least 5 meters away from all of the wildlife but were warned to be especially careful of seals because they bite. And if one of the passengers was bitten by a seal, the cruise would be over for everyone because we’d have to head back to Chile for medical care.

A seal actually jumped into one of the zodiacs when it was ferrying passengers to the shore, and all of the passengers had to huddle as far away from it as possible while the driver returned to the ship. The passengers disembarked and the expedition crew persuaded the seal to go back into the water.

This elephant seal pup was probably less than a week old (and already weighed more than I do.) But so cute!