The Bottom of the Map

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

South Georgia

CHAPTER II.

The Falklands Discovered and Abandoned

CHAPTER III.

The Falklands Disputed and Defended.

CHAPTER IV.

The Falklands Taken Seriously

CHAPTER V.

The Falklands Battles at Sea

CHAPTER VI.

The Falklands British Again

CHAPTER VII.

Out of Humanity’s Reach: The Islands of Robinson Crusoe

CHAPTER VIII.

Islands Found by Accident on the Way to Somewhere Else: The Chatham Islands, the Kermadec Islands, and Lord Howe Island

CHAPTER IX.

Rocks and a Hard Place: the Bounty Islands, the Antipodes, the Auckland Islands, and Campbell Island

CHAPTER X.

Other Empires: Macquarie Island, Heard and Macdonald Islands, the Kerguélen Islands, Amsterdam and St. Paul Islands, the Crozet Islands, the Prince Edward Islands, and Bouvet Island

CHAPTER XI.

Tristan da Cunha

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Farewell, vain world, I’ve seen enough of thee,

And now I’m careless what thou say’st of me:

Thy smiles I court not, nor thy frowns I fear,

Since my head’s at rest and I’m quiet here:

What faults you’ve seen in me, take care to shun;

Look thou at home—enough there’s to be done."

(1810 epitaph of Captain Matley on Kerguélen Island)

Listen then, ye landsmen and brother sailors, and you shall hear of hairbreadth escapes and stirring adventures, the like of which perils, though many may encounter, yet few live to relate. (Hayward, p. 72.)

CHAPTER I.

South Georgia

Way down at the bottom of the map, just before you fall off the edge, is the island of South Georgia. It was discovered in 1775 by Captain James Cook. He named it after George III. To discover an island, you must be first to put it accurately on a chart. For years there were rumors that Amerigo Vespucci had discovered South Georgia in 1502. An expert who examined the evidence thoroughly concluded, There is thus no reason whatsoever for naming Amerigo Vespucci as the discoverer of South Georgia. (Christie, p. 563.) South Georgia may have been found in 1675 by Antoine de la Roché, a London merchant with a French father. However, his charts were so inaccurate that no one could find the place for nearly a century. Captain Gregorio Jerez of Spain on his ship Leon may have sighted South Georgia in 1756, but he too failed to produce an accurate chart. Captain James Cook became the official discoverer, because no one else could back up an earlier claim with an accurate chart. When Captain Cook discovered a place, it stayed discovered.

Captain Cook had mixed feelings about his discovery. He was proud to be the first, but felt the island he found was not good for anything. Captain Cook reported,

"The wild rocks raised their lofty summits till they were lost in the clouds and the vallies (sic) lay buried in everlasting snow. Not a tree or shrub was to be seen, no, not even big enough to make a toothpick.

I landed in three different places, displayed our colours and took possession in His Majesty’s name under a discharge of small arms." (Nan Brown, p. 2.)

George Forster, a naturalist on the Cook expedition,, thought . . . it would be impossible for any race of men to live upon it. . . . (Matthew, p. 71.) Later writing about subantarctic islands in general, Cook called them

Lands doomed by nature to perpetual frigidness; never to feel the warmth of the Sun’s rays; whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe. (Cross, p. 50.)

Nevertheless, subantarctic islands do have a strange appeal to hunters, explorers and scientists. If you do not want to spend a little time at the end of the earth, you are reading the wrong book.

First to come to South Georgia after Cook were the sealing ships, the Lord Hawkesbury in 1786, the Lucas in 1787, the Nancy and Polly (American) in 1792. In 1796 South Georgia had its first shipwreck, the Sally. There were some fur seals, but the main victims were elephant seals or, as Captain Cook called them, sea bears. The elephant seal or sea elephant is a huge animal not actually related to the elephant. Imagine instead a walrus with a big nose instead of tusks, an animal so clumsy on land that it is no match for a man in hand-to-flipper combat provided the man has an ax, a lance or a club. If your intentions are more peaceful, it is possible to pet a pup or even an adult female. Elephant seals have been described as ill-tempered and quarrelsome by nature. Elephant seals proved to be helpless and easy game, because they are basically very stupid.

At sea, elephant seals are extremely active. A scientific expedition once tagged an elephant seal and tracked it by radio for three and a half weeks. They found it dived 1600 times, averaging 18 minutes a dive, and once reaching a depth of 800 meters. A seal tagged at Macquarie Island reached 1500 meters. On shore to rest and breed they are so inactive you could mistake a live one for a dead one or overlook one that had buried itself comfortably in the mud. One writer described an elephant seal wallow as a mixture of thin mud, fur, manure and an occasional dead seal. Seal hunters were not happy when they happened to fall into a wallow. Other complaints focused on elephant seals’ gross belching. Apparently, if you were to give a troop of boy scouts a microphone and tell them to have a burping contest, you would not begin to come close to the sound of a herd of elephant seals. As for the smell, how would you smell if you weighed nearly a ton and ate nothing but fish?

During the 1800-1801 season a single sealing ship killed 57,000 fur seals. When Nan Brown lived on South Georgia for over a year in 1957 she saw only two fur seals. The hunters soon had nothing left to hunt but elephant seals. In 1892 Captain Budington reported they were nearly extinct too. From a modern viewpoint, sealing was a disgusting business. (Rankin, p. 33.)

Another disgusting business was hunting whales, which soon became a more lucrative business than seal hunting in South Georgia. Subantarctic waters are a prime breeding ground for most species of whales. In 1904 an Argentine company hired Norwegian laborers and set up a whale processing plant at Grytviken on South Georgia. By 1909 Grytviken had a population of 720 including three women and a child. About four out of five were Norwegian, but South Georgia remained British territory. Now the British, who had administered or ignored South Georgia from headquarters in the Falklands, finally had to send their first full-time official, a magistrate.

In 1912 hunters caught the largest whale they had ever seen. It was 112 feet long and weighed 100 tons. In 1913 the last sealing ship, the Daisy, left South Georgia. It was sunk in World War

I. Another landmark event in 1913 was the birth of Solveig Gunbjorg Jacobsen. People had died in South Georgia as far back as Frank Cabriel in 1820, but Jacobsen was the first recorded birth. Robert Cushman Murphy visited Grytviken on the Daisy and found docks, a marine railway, houses, dormitories, carpenter and cooper shops, metal-workers’ forges, machine shops, cattle and poultry shelters, telephones, an electric plant, a library, a chapel and an infirmary. There was only one woman: the manager’s maid. Murphy saw whale boats in the harbor and called them bloodthirsty little vessels. (Murphy, p. 169.)

Grytviken continued to grow, its economy based entirely on the slaughter and boiling of whales, with all the smells and garbage that generated. For example, a 122-ton 89-foot blue whale produced 3519 tons of blubber. Its heart weighed .62 tons, its liver .92 tons, its spine

10.04 tons and it had 5.6 tons of blood. (Rankin, p. 314.) From 1904 to 1965 South Georgia processed over 175,000 of the 1,700,000 whales taken from subantarctic waters. (Venables, p. 16.) Grytviken in Norwegian means Pot Harbor. Whalers were perfectly willing to throw seals or even penguins into the pot when they were short of whales. In the 1960-1961 season they filled 109,727 forty-gallon barrels from whales and another 12,383 from seals. No one could make a living just hunting seals: there were simply not enough left. In 1957 Nan Brown went on a whaling cruise. The ship she was on killed 14 whales in a week within 200 miles of South Georgia. Between 1963 and 1965 the Japanese caught 239 whales, compared with their 1925-1926 record of 7825 whales. As the Japanese well know, whale meat can be eaten. There is a recipe in Nan Brown’s book if you like. L. Harrison Matthews said whale was eaten plain, minced, smoked or as sausages. The whaling station at Grytviken kept a herd of pigs, both as meat supply and as four-legged garbage disposals. Half whale and half pork made a good sausage, half and half by weight that is, not one whale to one pig. The big game hunter, Erich Dautert, compared fresh whale meat to oily roast beef, while smoked whale meat tasted somewhat like a combination of smoked ham and smoked salmon. (Dautert, p. 91.) Given this diet and life style, it is no wonder that whalers were notorious drinkers even if they had to set up their own stills. Grytviken opened a jail in 1915. The first prisoner escaped, but gave himself up. A jail cell, even downwind from a whale factory, was better than playing Robinson Crusoe on remote parts of the island. The jail has been used more for temporary housing for visiting scientists than it has for prisoners. At its height, the Grytviken whaling industry employed nearly 1000 men. Eventually the factories were made obsolete by factory ships and the worldwide decline of the whaling business. The factory at Leith on South Georgia was abandoned in 1966. Sally Poncet, who visited in 1989, found it hard to imagine 700 men working in what was now a ghost town. Michael Cross in 1991 listed the ingredients of this early example of a toxic waste dump:

leaking tanks containing thousands of tonnes of fuel oil, . . . asbestos . . . , lead batteries and . . . concentrated sulphuric acid. (Cross, p. 50.)

Cross noted that Christian Salvesen, the company that held the lease, was cleaning up the property to return it to the British government. He said there were plans to preserve Grytviken and thought Stromness should be preserved too:

The British government, which claims sovereignty over South Georgia, seems to have plenty of money to spend on defending its interests in the South Atlantic. Is it too much to ask that it finds the cash to make a proper job of cleaning up and properly preserving the whaling stations? As a monument to human greed and human endurance they can have few equals, and probably none in so grand a setting. (Cross, p. 51.)

In 1991 the only ships at Grytviken were the hulk Louise, two scuttled sealing ships and the whale ship Petrel. Stephen Venables also favored preserving the abandoned whaling stations as an example of exploitation run riot. . . . (Venables, p. 157.)

South Georgia’s geography has long given it a special appeal to scientists.

In a region distinguished by its wild and spectacular seascapes, South Georgia is the most dramatic permanent example of nature’s forces. (Perkins, p. 1.)

Prince Philip said,

It is difficult to believe that South Georgia, with its snow-covered mountains, treeless landscapes and huge icebergs floating in its bays, is the same distance south of the equator as Manchester is north of it. The Gulf Stream does not always get the appreciation it deserves. (Perkins, p. 3.)

Icebergs come both from South Georgia’s 163 glaciers and from Antarctica. In 1980 an iceberg from Antarctica measured 40 miles long and 30 miles wide. South Georgia itself is 100 miles long and 30 miles wide, with a coastline so rugged and indented that the total area is only 1450 square miles. Mt. Paget has an elevation of 9625 feet. There are five other peaks over 7000 feet. A traditional description is the Alps in mid-ocean. (Headland, p. 1.) South Georgia is half covered by ice. Nan Brown said it looked like an enormous frosted cake. (Nan Brown, p. 17.) Snow can fall even in mid-summer, but it melts in a day or two at sea level. The maximum temperature is 70°F and the minimum is around 25°F. Storms come up without warning, and the wind can easily go from zero to 40 MPH in half an hour. Because of these vicious storms, all buildings on the island are moored to the ground by strong wire ropes. Niall Rankin quoted the Antarctic Pilot: The climate of South Georgia is uniformly dismal. (Rankin, p. 29.) Stephen Venables referred to APD syndrome—All Pervading Damp. (Venables,

p. 108.) On the other hand E. R. Gunther exclaimed, What pleasanter background than Grytviken? (Gunther, p. 27.) Robert Cushman Murphy said, . . . the bold shrubless landscape possesses a unique charm. (Murphy, p. 170.)

Another big attraction is the wildlife. In the tropics the greatest biodiversity is on the land; in the subantarctic it is in the sea. Cold sea water is richer in nitrogenous compounds than tropical water. ( Venables, p. 15.) Life is abundant from plankton to penguins, seals and whales. All the wildlife of Antarctica can be found in subantarctic islands which are much more comfortable places to live. Niall Rankin picked South Georgia as

. . . a spot in the far South where the maximum concentration of bird and animal life existed inside the smallest possible perimeter. . . . (Rankin, p. 18.)

Robert Cushman Murphy said, For a naturalist the situation could not have been improved upon. (Murphy, p. 172.) One bird to study was the albatross:

. . . French scientists published the results of tracking a wandering albatross by satellite. In thirty-three days it flew 10,000 miles, averaging 303 miles a day but sometimes covering as much as 600 miles, often managing on just one hour’s sleep a day. (Venables, p. 39.)

An even more popular bird is the penguin. James Weddell said only peacocks are prettier than king penguins, while Niall Rankin had a less favorable opinion: The King is not over-fastidious in its habits, and hygiene plays no part in its domestic life. (Rankin, p. 117.) Penguins have a natural curiosity and appear willing to accept humans in their midst as tall, absurdly colored penguins. Penguins often seem to be holding parades, parties and political conventions complete with orators and private conferences. Nan Brown said king penguin chicks look like teddy bears and walk like Charlie Chaplin. She also said the best eggs were from gentoo penguins in spite of their red yolks. Later she started the Penguin Rehabilitation Center to clean oil off penguins. She made a pet of one gentoo and learned they cannot be housebroken.

Less popular were the giant petrels, commonly called stinkers. They defended themselves by throwing up on anything that came within two feet of them. Governor Hudson from the Falklands was a perfect target when he visited South Georgia in 1928. Another bird with few friends was the skua, a kind of sea-going vulture with an attitude. Skuas do not wait for their prey to die: any sign of weakness is enough. No creature, whether it lives on land, in the air, or in the sea, is immune from skua attacks. If you shoot anything, the skuas will appear as if by magic before the sound of the shot has died away.

In South Georgia for botanists there are 193 kinds of moss, 103 kinds of algae and 20 other plants. For zoologists there are fur seals, Weddell’s seals and, most common of all, elephant seals. There are also leopard seals, a more streamlined and dangerous animal, a penguin’s worst nightmare. One leopard seal almost got Nan Brown’s pet gentoo penguin. Imagine an animal that looks like a seal and behaves like a shark. There were domestic animals such as dogs, pigs and cattle generally kept under control near the whaling stations. Rabbits and cats sometimes got loose, but did not do well in the wild. Rats were accidentally imported on infested ships in 1877 and mice in 1913. The mice barely survived, but the rats thrived. In summer they could find enough to eat outdoors, but in winter they became a real indoor nuisance in their desperate search for food. When one man shot at a rat with a .22, the bullet ricocheted off a rock, went through the magistrate’s window and stuck in his ceiling. A much more successful import were the reindeer introduced by the Norwegians in 1912. Erich Dautert said reindeer were the only sporting game on the island, . . . whaling being considered as a profession and sealing as mere butchering. . . . (Dautert, p. 168.) Nan Brown complained that reindeer meat was so tough and stringy that most of it ended up as fish bait. In 1984 Robert Headland reported a reindeer population of about 2000 in two separate herds with hunting strictly controlled. He also said some hunted with cameras instead of guns; the extreme beauty of the island made photography a popular hobby. Niall Rankin said,

. . . there are days in summer when it is a place of incredible beauty and anyone with a love of high hills and wild life could never find it anything but a paradise. (Rankin, p. 29.)

Expeditions have been coming to South Georgia for 175 years. In 1819 there was a Russian expedition led by Thaddeus Bellingshausen of Estonia. In 1823 came James Weddell in his ship the Jane and in 1877 Heinrich Klutschak of Austria. In 1883 there was a German expedition that had 11 men, 1 dog, 17 sheep, 9 goats, 2 geese and the Moltke, the first steamship in South Georgia. In 1901 came a Swedish expedition that ended in a shipwreck. They were rescued by Argentine Captain Irizar in his ship the Uruguay. In 1911 there was another German expedition. The ship Bayard was wrecked in the same year. In 1914 came the most famous expedition of all.

Sir Ernest Shackleton was a charismatic Irishman. Dr. Reginald William James said,

. . . I think he could persuade anyone to do almost anything if he could only talk to him. There was a mixture of personal magnetism, bluff and blarney that could be irresistible. (Huntford, p. 386.)

Shackleton was an excellent seaman with a background in the merchant marine. As an antarctic explorer he believed that endurance and determination could overcome any lack of expertise or proper equipment. This theory had already failed to get him to the South Pole on a previous expedition. Now he was ready to try again. He had talked to experts, read all he could and supplied his ship the Endurance as well as possible. He even included a newfangled item called vitamines. The Endurance sailed from London on August 1, 1914. Due to political tension in Europe, Shackleton offered to postpone his departure, but the offer was declined. World War I began on August 5. On August 8 the Endurance left Plymouth. On August 21 in Madeira, the German ship SS Hochberg collided with the Endurance. Captain Worsley promptly boarded the German ship and drafted three Germans to assist with minor repairs. At sea again Shackleton decided to change course from the Falklands to South Georgia, in order to avoid any German warships lurking in the area. It was also done to avoid British authorities. Unlike the Falklands, South Georgia had no cable or wireless station, so there was no way the British could cancel the expedition at the last minute. The Endurance arrived at Grytviken on November 5, 1914. A month later Shackleton sailed for Antarctica and tried for six weeks to reach the coast. He failed. By January 19, 1915, the Endurance was firmly stuck in the ice more than 60 miles from shore. With an adequate food supply and plenty of vitamines, Shackleton and his crew stayed aboard their frozen ship for nine long months, hoping the ice would shift in a way that would set them free. The ice finally did shift on October 27, 1915. Unfortunately, it shifted in a way that crushed the Endurance like an eggshell. They abandoned ship and camped out in tents on the ice, going back on board occasionally to salvage supplies and the life boats. On November 21, 1915, the Endurance sank, a victim of polar exploration that some called white warfare. England was deep in a bloody real war and seldom thought of its polar explorers. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill grumbled, Fancy that ridiculous Shackleton and his South Pole—in the crash of the world. (Huntford, p. 488.) Churchill said that only after every hospital and charity was fully funded, would he . . . concern himself with those penguins. (Huntford, p. 489.) Shackleton and his crew began to march north dragging their lifeboats behind them. On March 23, 1916, they sighted land, but could not reach it due to a patch of jagged broken ice between them and land. They continued to drag north on smooth ice.

On April 9, 1916, they at last reached open water and were able to launch their lifeboats. On April 15, 1916, they landed on Elephant Island, the first men to do so since 1830. On April 19 Shackleton announce his intention to take five sailors in the best lifeboat and sail for help. Due to wind and current the only goal worth trying was South Georgia 850 miles away. When Shackleton had raised money for his expedition, Neville Chamberlain contributed £5, but Sir James Key Caird contributed £24,000. The lifeboat was named the James Caird in his honor. It was 22 feet long with a beam of six and a half feet, scarcely more than a large rowboat. (Rankin, p. 47.) Shackleton, Worsley, Crean, McNeish, Vincent and McCarthy sailed on April 24, 1916. On May 8, 1916, thanks to Worsley’s superb navigation, they sighted land. It was the uninhabited east coast of South Georgia. . . . South Georgia wind seems to have a way of turning corners and coming at you from every direction. (Venables, p. 87.) It took two more days to land. They were near glaciers. Glacier ice does not sleep. (Sutton,

p. 43.) It is always groaning and popping.

It rumbles and creaks, now and again splitting with great noise, and on the snouts of the glaciers tremendous blocks break off to tumble into the sea and become dangerous icebergs. (Dautert, p. 54.)

On May 15 they sailed to a safer anchorage at King Haakon Bay. About this time the steamship Argos en route to South Georgia from Buenos Aires disappeared. Men reopening a whaling station found signs the station had been broken into. They found one body. They figured the Argos sank not far from South Georgia, some of her crew reached Prince Olav Harbour, then set out along the coast to seek an inhabited whaling station and perished on the way. Shackleton knew the Stromness whaling station was across the island and the James Caird was no longer seaworthy. He had no way of knowing in wartime if Stromness was open or abandoned. On May 20, 1916, leaving the other three men in camp, Shackleton, Worsley and Crean set out on foot for Stromness, 17 miles away as the crow flies, but closer to 30 on the rugged South Georgia terrain.

On May 22, 1916, they heard the 7 a. m. steam whistle at the whaling factory. It was the first sound of civilization they had heard in 18 months. Stromness was open. Their ordeal was not over, however. What they were doing was more like mountain climbing than walking a trail. They cut steps in the ice and at one point lowered themselves over a waterfall on a rope. At 4 p. m. they reached camp. Despite the theory that seamen are naturally bad walkers on land, they had covered 30 miles in 36 hours. Norwegian priest Kristen Løken said whalers are former criminals and runaway seamen who are at odds with life. (Huntford, p. 391.) They could not have looked better to Shackleton if they were angels. As for the survivors, Worsley described them this way:

Ragged, filthy and evil-smelling: hair and beards long and matted with soot and blubber; unwashed for three months, and no bath or change of clothing for seven months. (Headland, p. 75.)

Children ran away from them and a man ran to get the manager. Shackleton told the manager, I’m afraid we smell. Thoralf Sørlle replied, That doesn’t matter, we’re used to it on a whaling station." (Huntford, p. 599.)

There were still 25 survivors to rescue. First Thoralf Sørlle sent his boat the Samson to pick up the three still camped on the other side of South Georgia. Worsley went