WHALING IN SOUTH GEORGIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23081, 6 January 1937, Page 9

WHALING IN SOUTH GEORGIA

MOUNTAINOUS WIND-SWEPT ISLAND FEARS FOR FUTURE OF INDUSTRY The Bay of Grytviken, on the north coast of South Georgia, is about seven miles in width at its broadest, with a sweep inland of some five to six miles, and a narrow entrance about two miles across, said a South Georgia correspondent in The Times, London, recently. Its crescent coast line is fenced with the Allardyce range of mountains, 10,000 feet high, named after a former Governor of the Falkland Islands, to whose dependencies South Georgia belongs. Close to the sea front, sometimes set back a little, sometimes rising sheer out of the water, are steep cliffs where the snow cannot lie. Behind and beyond black rocks and grey-green strips of Antarctic grasses are ridges partly hidden' by mist reaching to the ice-bound heights unclimbed and perhaps unclimbable by man. Among the lower slopes the snow still holds, the ground shows a smoother surface and the tussock grass waves in the breeze. In the encircling barrier of mountain is a break through which can be seen the dark grey blur of trackless regions crossed once by Shackleton and his men, with great good fortune. SHACKLETON’S GRAVE The whaling station of Grytviken, the largest in South Georgia, covers about 12 acres of uneven ground on two sides of a deep-water harbour on the west side of the bay, and .is protected from the south by a mountain screen, with peaks 1800 ft high, rising abruptly from the very edge of the shore. •Across the bay, when the mist clears for a moment, two peaks of the Allardyce Range stand out against the blue sky, unexpectedly high and white, with on the near side a smooth white shining drop of 2000 ft to the intermediate ridge of black rock. When the sun is shining on these, isolated summits the whiteness is chilling, and the detail on the frozen face of the mountain is seen as distinctly as a cameo. Shackleton lies in his grave at the back of the tiny harbour under the shadow of cliffs, a depressing site the sun can hardly reach. On a small grassy hillock at the other side of the harbour are the small cairn and cross erected by his comrades of the Quest. Here such breezes as blow from the north are almost warm, and the heat of the sun agreeable; there is scarcely a ripple on the bay, where thousands of the round, fat, little Cape pigeons sit quietly on the water. Swift swal-low-like birds dart to and fro; and a large ugly bird, as big as a goose, the Skua gull, or “ Stinker,” which feeds on offal, tries apparently to stand on the water. WHALE INTO OIL

The entrance to the harbour of Nusvik, in Stromness Bay, at the western end of South Georgia, is partly blocked by a small, rocky island. All round the bay itself are steep cliffs, partly covered with si.ow. Nusvik, at the far end of a small cove within the bay, is a smoking fragment of a modern manufacturing town, with boiler houses, engine shop, and large guano factory. From this factory straight down to the shore runs the flensing board, a broad sloping platform where the whales are pulled up with wire cables worked by a steam winch. The whale is sliced up;

blubber, flesh and bones pour into the machinery through trapdoors in the flensing board; and the whole carcass is turned into white whale oil and chocolate-coloured dust, called guano, by a dozen men in two hours. The nose soon becomes indifferent to the evil smell. Behind Nusvik is the snowcovered col through which Shackleton and two companions descended after their 36 hours’ walk across the island, where they had. arrived on the southern shore, coming in a small boat all the way, some 12 days’ sailing from Elephant Island. With normal South’ Georgian weather they would not have got halfway. When the party arrived at the manager’s house they were unrecognisable and exhausted, except Worsley, who fed, shaved, and went off the same evening in a whale catcher to rescue the rest of his party. “The toughest man I ever knew,” said the Norwegian whaling master. No one had crossed the island before Shackleton’s party, and no one has crossed since.

Stromness is nearly a repetition of Nusvik, a mile or so along the bay. The mountain at the back back forms a gully down which the south wind can roar and almost blow the factory into the sea. A recent gale strewed havoc. The wireless mast was broken across. A motor boat 30 feet long was blown off the quay and never seen again. A man had been blown into the air and was lucky to have escaped with his life. The wind blew at over 100 miles an hour and at times in gusts of nearly 150. Many of the Norwegians believe the whales will soon be exterminated in the commercial sense. The average yearly bag is about 30,000, and a fifth of those killed are females with young. The whales' seldom come within 100 miles of South Georgia. They have acquired somehow a local sense of danger. It is suggested that they had found refuge in some open water within the ice barrier. The whales have gone south, and even the pelagic whalers who follow their prey down to the edge of the ice floe and cut them up on board are anxious for their business.