Overall History
As Dee, our guide, told the Grytviken whaling story, it began with a Norwegian named Carl A. Larsen. In seeing Grytviken, he saw a perfect harbor. It was extremely well protected, included a flat area to build a camp, was close to fresh running water, and had beaches packed with animals. Legend has it, Larsen was praising the harbor when he glanced over the side of the ship to see hundreds of whales. Larsen, having heard the whale stocks were falling in the arctic, decided there was a huge profit to be made. He went to England and Spain looking for funding to start this project. It wasn't until he went to Argentina that he found a sponsor and the Compania Argentina de Pesca was born.
He returned with five ships: one whaler-catcher, two supply ships, and two passenger ships on November 16,1904. Six weeks after arrival, the station was built and, on December second, the first whale, a humpback, was caught. It is said that in the first two years of whaling the whale catchers never needed to leave Cumberland Bay, just outside Grytviken. The largest whale ever caught at Grytviken was a 120 foot blue whale.
Originally, the whalers would strip away the blubber and push the rest out to sea. A visit from William Allardyce, the Governor of the Falklands, changed that. He created a whale catching licensing system. It prohibited each station from owning more than two catcher boats, killing females with calves, and wasting any part of the whale. This proved to help the whalers as they soon discovered more oil in the meat and bones as well as other valuable products.
Hunting Whales
Finding and killing the whales was dangerous and took precision by the entire crew. One man would sit in a barrel at the top of the mast looking for whales. It was his job to spot, identify, and judge whales. He was supposed to be able to identify the species and size from a long distance in order to guide the captain toward the whale. Some species yielded higher quality oil than others and were therefore worth more effort to catch. Once in close proximity, the gunner, who was also the captain, would make a dash from the pilot house to the whale cannon on the bow and take a shot at the animal. They shot at the head, hoping to kill the whale quickly. A grenade set in the tip of harpoons helped. If the shot was a hit but not a kill, a long fight would begin. The harpoon had a line running from behind it. As the whale dove, the whalers let out line. As soon as it surfaced, they hauled the line back in, often attaching barrels and floats. They fought until the whale was easy to kill with a second shot to the brain. Then they set the carcass afloat, marked with a buoy and radar reflector, and continued hunting, returning at the end of the trip to collect all the whales.
Processing Whales
As soon as the processors were ready, they would wrap a chain around the whale's tale and haul it onto an open air wooden platform, the flensing plan, by huge steam powered engines. The flensing plan was so slippery with whale blood and grease that the workers put nails through their shoes to help prevent falling. Even before the whale was all the way ashore, men would begin removing the blubber. Long sticks with a sickle at the end cut off a bit. The rest was then pulled away like a banana peel by large winches. This was a fine-tuned process that took twenty minutes. The blubber was carried immediately to huge pressure cookers where it was cooked down to oil.
Originally, at this stage, the whale was pushed off the shore and abandoned. After Allardyce's law, they had to use more of the whale. Next they would slice away all the meat. The cook would take any meat he wanted in order to make food for the whaling station, such as pork and whale sausage. The rest was dumped into pressure cookers or freezers. Meat could be cooked into low-grade oil as well as made into meat meal. The frozen meat was sold as fish food or fertilizer. Bones were cooked down into bone meal, or used for scrimshaw-a common whaling station pastime.
The whale oil would be stocked in giant drums until an oil ship would come pick it up and sail it back to Europe. The oil was tested and sorted into separate containers by quality. The best quality was used in margarine, soap, ice cream, and as ingredients in many more products. The lowest quality was reused in the station. It was an extremely profitable business. Men who came to work at whaling stations were very well paid but worked seventeen hour days, seven days a week, with two or three days off each month. They also found time to do extra hours that paid nearly twice as well. After working hard for two or three years, depending on their job, former whalers could use their considerable savings to buy a farm or shop in their home countries.
Dealing with Remoteness
As South Georgia is in the middle of nowhere, a really cold nowhere, the stations had to be completely self-sufficient. It was said that a station could construct a whale catcher from scratch if necessary. The station had a rivet forge, tons of spare metal, thousands of random ship pieces, multiple workshops, and many ready hands to fix problems. On top of having the equipment to fix everything, the stations had to be nearly self-sufficient in terms of food as well. Water was abundant and nearby and so of no concern. Pigs, chicken, and reindeer were all brought for food. Reindeer were released into the wild for sport as well as food while pigs and chickens were kept locked-up. The whalers were often fed a pork-whale sausage. The people on the station liked it, but the crew of HMS Endurance thought it was rather disgusting. They also traded a good portion of their oil for tea, flour, and sugar. If the usual food grew tiresome, men could take their spare time and go get penguin eggs. Rubber boots, thick gloves, and a sack was all that was needed. Men pushed through the penguins to take eggs from nests. Men returned with sacks of fresh penguin eggs but also with bloodied arms from the furious penguin pecks.
The other problem with being in the middle of nowhere was that men could not just go into town for recreation. To solve this, the station manager had a cinema (movie theater), football (soccer) field, and ski jump built. The favorite of these was by far the cinema. Unfortunately, for an entire year there were not many movies, I think they had only twelve. These would be watched repeatedly and traded with other stations. Football teams were set up among the 540 men for the summer. Sometimes stations would take their best team and play each other. During the winter, when there were only 90 men left at the station, skiing was a common pastime. They were there primarily to do maintenance and to shovel since the snow could build up to a level that it sunk the whale catchers and collapsed the buildings, so they had plenty of spare time. Whenever the weather permitted, the men could go ski around or catch some fifty feet of air on the insane ski-jump. Contests were held among a station's crew as well as between stations.
The Decline of Whaling
As other whaling stations sprung up, the cetacean resource began to wane. Whale catchers had to go farther and farther afield to catch smaller and smaller whales in ever decreasing numbers. In the Southern Ocean, the whaling industry was slowly disappearing. Grytviken clung onto business by supplementing whale oil with elephant seal and penguin oil. The Norwegians abandoned the station in 1964. The Japanese took over, whaling only for meat, but in two years time they stopped as well.
The whaling stations couldn't keep up with independent factory ship's processing speed, and neither could the whale supply. The problem with the factory ships was they were completely pelagic and had the equivalent of a whaling station mobilized. They could set up base outside of the governed waters and catch whales without obeying any laws. They also saved the whale-catcher the trip into harbor. A factory ship was a massive craft containing tons of coal, a ramp to haul in whales, side ports to attach other crafts, and everything else in a land-based whaling station. They would literally swallow whales by the hundreds while whale catchers roamed the sea around them.
The Grytviken station was left with everything intact as people believed the whales would return in just a few years. When everyone left, snow slowly built up until it collapsed the buildings and sunk the ships. Today, all that remains of the South Georgia whaling industry is a few destroyed stations and thousands of whale bones covering the beach.
The moment I learned a few small things about the whaling here, I was eager to learn more. After reading that every bit of whale oil had been rung out of South Georgia before whaling stopped, it hit me how truly sad this story was. It was hard to imagine that hundreds of thousands of whales had been dragged up to where I had walked mindlessly along. On a happier note, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands now form the largest whale sanctuary on Earth. Every year, hundreds of whales come to safely feed on the krill swarms, now protected by U.K. law. Already the whales are coming back. As a tiny tid-bit of proof, we saw a humpback whale, a right whale, and multiple unidentified blows as we approached South Georgia.
There is a lot of information in this post and I learned it from Dee, our tour guide in Grytviken, from visiting The South Georgia Museum in Grytvken, and from reading two books: A Visitor's Guide to South Georgia by Sally Poncet and Kim Crosbie; and South Georgia by Robert Burton and published by the government of South Georgia. - Porter
Ed. Note: Grytviken can be found at 54 degrees 16.89 South and 36 degrees 30.46 West. In addition to the abandoned whaling station, one can find the terrific South Georgia Museum, Sir Ernest Shackleton's Grave and Memorial, the old Whaler's Church, and nearby the British Antarctic Survey's research station at King Edward's Point. We also enjoyed several great hikes in the area around Grytviken- including walking by many of the lakes to the North and Southwest.
What an amazing story, Porter. Well-researched and well-written!!
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