So the few years that whaling survived in these climes changed forever the plant life of South Georgia, proving that Larsen, who founded South Georgia whaling, was not only responsible for destroying the whale populations, he was responsible for disrupting the local plant life as well. Revered in his home town of Sandefjord, Norway, this one man may have done more to upend southern ocean ecosystems both on land and in the seas than any other person in history.
Stromness stopped whaling in 1931 and became a shipyard for its final 30 years of existence -- closing in 1961, the same year Husvik closed. Grytviken was closed in 1964 and Leith in 1965 -- the last whaling station to operate on South Georgia.
We stopped at Grytviken and paid our respects to Shackleton. All on board stood at his grave and drank a toast to him. We also visited a recently established museum now run by Tim and Pauline Carr, sailors extraordinaire whose travels in their boat Curlew, (a 22 foot engineless sailboat built in 1899 and still one of the loveliest, ablest craft I have ever seen) are summarized in their book "Antarctic Oasis." The book is a description of the lives of two unique people who have lived often in splendid solitude, and who are now permanent residents of South Georgia, as well as the first curators of a new museum operating in the former station manager's house.
They came out to visit us aboard Caledonian Star and gave us a lecture. Both the deeds they recounted and their pictures of them were riveting.
So as I see it, the age of whaling from South Georgia accomplished four things: it destroyed utterly one of the main concentrations of the largest animals ever to live on earth; it introduced reindeer with inevitably devastating long-term consequences; it left behind acres of calomel, disintegrating wreckage, and pollutants seeping into the harbors of otherwise pristine South Georgia; and it created a snug house which Tim and Pauline may someday leave Curlew to occupy. The whalers claim that they kept thinking the stations would be of use again because they were sure their effect on the whale herds would only be temporary. But by 1965 it should have been crystal clear even to whalers that these stations would never find use before they had fallen into irretrievable disrepair as they have now done. So, did the whaling companies who built them move to clean up the colossal mess they had made? Of course not. Two of the oldest traditions of whalers is that they always destroy the whale herds they profit from, and they always walk away and leave their mess behind. I have visited derelict whaling stations in the Antarctic Peninsula, the Arctic, the Azores, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Falkland/Malvinas, Newfoundland, South Africa and now four of about 17 sites on South Georgia. Wherever I encounter them, abandoned whaling stations remind me of open pit mines -- blights on every landscape. As far as I can tell, whalers never clean up anything. It may be a key to making whaling profitable, since whalers, like the nuclear power industry, don't factor cleanup costs into the economics of their operations. As I see it, much of the profit in whaling results from taking the money that should have been spent on cleanup, relabeling it as profits and distributing it among the stockholders.
