Triangular West Point Island slopes from thousand-foot sandstone cliffs down to the settlement on shore. Part of the coast has steep cliffs of layered sandstone, part is sandy beach littered with whale bones and rusty whaling machinery. Ths island was for 200 years a favourite rendezvous for whalers and sealers.
    Explorers and seamen of the Royal Navy made a practice of setting domestic livestock ashore to breed and multiply against possible future need. The animals ran wild, of course, and when sailors craved fresh meat instead of salted, it was there for the taking.
    Later, owners of the land might take a dim view of what they considered trespass. In fact, the young United States nearly went to war with Britain over the right of New England sealers ad whalers to help themselves on West Point Island. But then the Civil War intervened, and whaling soon swept farther south.

    ...Our first view of whale-shaped South Georgia was one of snow-capped mountains under low clouds. The humped spine rises to 9,825 feet in saddle-peaked Mount Paget. Width varies from 3 to 25 miles between the formidable south shore and the deep bays of the north coast.
    Ravines were filled with glaciers slipping down to the Scotia Sea. It was almost as void of human presence as when Captain James Cook both named it and claimed it for his sovereign George III in January 1775. Cook thought the island hardly worth discovering. Perhaps it was too great a contrast to the Tahitian Islands he had just left. He wrote in his journal:

The wild rocks raised their lofty summits till they were lost in the clouds, and valleys lay covered with everlasting snow. Not a tree was to be seen, nor ashrub big enough to make a toothpick.

    ...Since the B.A.S. dock was occupied by the research ship John Biscoe, our cruise ship the Lindblad Explorer steamed on around the bay about a mile to where the abandoned whaling station of Grytviken suddenly met our eyes.
    Brown, rusting, totally still, it waits silently for its end. A ghost town of empty homes and bunkhouses, offices and shops. Forgotten whale-catchers sit on the bottom of the harbor, leaning against the old dock.
    Inch by inch we moved to the decrepit dock. Whaling no longer requires shore stations, only factory ships where the huge sea mammals are drawn up on the deck for the knives of the flensers and lemmers, before they reach the digesters and pressure cookers that render the oil.
    The whaing station has not been used since the padlocks went on the doors at the close of the 1965 season. The machine shopn that coul drepair large boats is silent, the tall chimneys smokeless. No sign of blood or guts stains the plan where the great animals were cut up. But an air of melancholy hangs about the place, as the pungent reek of whale oil lingers. More decades of harsh South Georgia weather will be needed to clean the black, greasy soot from the roofs.
    We prowled around the town and peered through occasional windows. Even today a single switch will set a generator going, and a few lights will flicker on, powered by wtaer impounded up the mountainside.
    I walked across a deep, hard snowdrift to a grassy knoll where a few dandelions had rushed into bloom. Two old-time try pots and a couple of old-fashioned harpoons were mounted on permanent display in front of the deserted administration building. These pots, 3 feet in diameter, were relics of the oilers who rendered whale, seal or penguin oil on open beaches, souvenirs of the days of wooden ships.
    I peered through clean windows into workshops and into a storage shed where thousands of new harpoon heads were stacked, never to be used.
    Past the Kino, the cinema that doubled as a game room, past the steepled white church (now a recreation hall for the dozen men who winter at the British Antarctic research station across the bay), we skirted the fetid muck where dimwitted elephant seals pass their time in malodorous slumber.

    ...We had hoped to call in at Stromness Bay's whaling station, the terminus of Shackleton's amazing adventures on sea and land, but it is off-limits to all visitors because of vandalism. Who expected vandalism in Antarctica? Or ghost towns, for that matter?

Click on each photo below to greatly enlarge it.

An arch formed by whale ribs stands outside Christ Church Cathedral in Port Stanley. It was erected in 1933 to celebrate a century of British rule.

Little remains of this whaling shore station on New Island except lichen-spotted machinery and bones.

Grytviken, once the whaling capital of the South Atlantic, is a 15-minute walk around Cumberland Bay West from the British survey station on whale-shaped South Georgia. Several whaler-catchers are grounded at the derelict dock.

The Lindblad Explorer docks at Grytviken, rarely visted today. Beyond the old breakwater is the small white-fenced cemetery.

Transport costs are too high to bother with salvaging the scrap metal in these whale-catchers at Grytviken.

Receding snows at Grytviken reveal a 4-foot ladle that was used for testing when blubber was rendered in try pots on shore.

Once in a while, men from the British station at King Edward Point visit the Grytviken cinema or church for some special reason.

Young elephant seals loll in safety amid the rusting machinery at Grytviken. Once, whales, seals and even penguins went into the digesters to be rendered into oil.

Glacial meltwater courses through the whaling station at Grytviken and out this big pipe into the bay. A couple of elephant seals lounge on the grassy bank.

The hulk of a wooden sailing ship was beached to form a breakwater for Grytviken. Elephant seals sport in the water, no longer hunted for their oil.