South Georgia: The lost whaling station at the end of the world
"When we killed the sei whales," Roddy
Morrison, from Lewis in the Outer Hebrides ,
remembers, "they used to make a noise, like a crying noise. They seemed so
friendly, and they'd come round and they'd make a noise, and when you hit them,
they cried really.
It is difficult to recover the frame of mind in which the destruction of so many of the greatest animals on earth seemed like a good idea. About 1.6 million whales were killed in the Southern Ocean in about six decades. The whalers remain deeply ambivalent about it today. Many say they are proud to have done it but wouldn't do it now.
Once British sailors were a big part of the whaling
industry in the southern hemisphere. Now only rusting buildings and ship
skeletons remain, where once thriving whaling stations were, writes Adam
Nicholson. The abandoned whaling station at Leith Harbour on South
Georgia in the south Atlantic looks as if it has been bombed. Rusty steel
chimneys lie collapsed across the roadways. Power plants and dormitory blocks lie half-smashed, their
innards spilling out through the walls - cast-iron beds and baths, piping and
wiring, cushions and mattresses all now leaking into the freezing air. Some of
the huge steel cylinders of the whale oil tanks, 30ft high and 30ft across,
have had their sides folded in, as if by a giant hand. But these are just the
effects of time and the brutal winds of the Southern Ocean.
It is not somewhere you would ever like to be alone. The
winds that hurl off the mountains of this sub-Antarctic island, 800 miles east
of the Falklands, on the same latitude as Cape Horn ,
make the whole place creak and groan. Rusted corrugated sheets screech against
their fixings, doors slam open and shut, the ventilator cowls on the giant
processor plants still turn in the wind as they have done since the place was finally
abandoned and left to the elements in 1965.
No-one is there now because Leith
Harbour , like most of the other
whaling stations on South Georgia , is strictly
off-limits. The collapsing structures are too dangerous and the asbestos in
which the whale processing machinery is still wrapped makes the enclosed places
too toxic. The South Georgia government - this is one of Britain 's few
remaining overseas territories - had to give us permission to film in this
breathtaking time-capsule of a forgotten way of British life. And we had to be
accompanied by Tommy Moore, a Yorkshireman familiar with asbestos safety, and
dressed in full protective gear.
Pick your way through the buildings now and
you find yourself in a forgotten world - mounds of harpoon heads lying rusted
together, whale ribs and scapulae everywhere, abandoned tractors and rusted
lathes. In the manager's villa, graffiti tells of Argentine joy in 1982 at
recovering their own, every word of it covered with the unequivocal responses
of the crews of Royal Navy ships who arrived a few weeks later.
Snow clogs the
doorways of the cinema where the whalers used to watch over and over again the
few films they had, the dust-filled hall still filled with memories of
Elizabeth Taylor and Deborah Kerr. The hospital still has unopened bottles of
milk of magnesia and tins of Prickly Heat Powder on the shelves of its
half-trashed pharmacy. Stinking fur seals lurk in the radio shack and among the
overturned benches of the canteen. In the dormitories, the whalers' pin-ups
still smile winsomely from the walls. Hidden in attic spaces you can find the
bowls, ladles and tins of yeast with which the whalers made the fearsome hooch
to console themselves on long winter evenings 8,000 miles from home.
The whole place is a monument to a huge and massively
destructive episode in British history. By the beginning of the 20th Century,
whaling had virtually eliminated the stocks of whales in much of the northern
hemisphere. Europe had a growing appetite for the oils that whales could
provide - most of it for margarine and soap - and the vast stormy waters of the
Southern Ocean beckoned, teeming with krill and with the whales that fed on it. Almost entirely fuelled by British finance, the whalers came
south and embarked on a bonanza that lasted for two-thirds of the century.
Individual whalers made the kind of money they could only have dreamed of at
home. A young man returning to Shetland or the Hebrides
in the 1950s after 18 months "at the ice" could buy a house, start a
business or commission a fishing boat on his earnings… read more:
