Blogs

The new year welcomed in a different calendar, but our surroundings felt all the more familiar. As the season has gone on, friendships have developed, and we have all become a tight-knit community.

3 months in! The end of December marks the halfway point for our 6-month season in South Georgia. As the height of Austral summer, Christmas is a busy time in the ship schedule – we opened our doors for 21 ships and 3642 passengers this month.

In Deirdre’s last blog, we talk about how November often marks the busiest month of the season for us, and this year was no exception with a bumper 23 ships and 3416 passengers visiting us here at Grytviken over the last four weeks.

This month’s South Georgia Museum Blog is written by Operations Assistant Rachel.  Our journey south began on the 24th of September- or it should have at least.

March got off to an exciting start in Grytviken, with the arrival of a handful of unexpected (but very welcome!) visitors. The day after we’d been discussing how incredible it would be to spot a leopard seal, one turned up on the shoreline close to the whaling station!

It’s a question that leads to an extraordinary story. This small lifeboat, transformed by shipwright Harry McNish, became the vessel that carried Ernest Shackleton and some of his men to find help after Endurance was trapped in the ice.

It has been a busy season in Grytviken. January brought us to 79 ship visits and well past 10,000 visitors for the season. We often get asked what we do when there are no ships visiting. With ship visits starting to wind down in February, we have had time to do some non-ship work so we can give you some answers.

While South Georgia’s whaling era was overwhelmingly male-dominated, women weren’t entirely absent. Some of the whaling station managers and senior officials brought their wives to live on South Georgia. These women lived in the relatively better housing available at the stations, but their presence was rare.

No, not all the buildings at Grytviken were prefabricated. The prefabricated buildings were brought over from Norway at the behest of the station’s founder, Carl Anton Larsen. Everything, from the workers to the materials, had to be transported by ship.