The following is a column from BarrieToday community advisory board member Peter Bursztyn about his trip south of the equator. This is Part 4 in a series. To read Part 1, click here. To read Part 2, click here. To read Part 3, click here.
In 1894, a Norwegian, Capt. C.A. Larsen, was the first to (unsuccessfully) harpoon a whale in South Georgia waters. He returned in 1902, part of a Norwegian scientific expedition, and decided to start whaling in the area.
Obtaining financial backing, he began building the whaling station at Grytviken in November 1904. This operated continuously until 1962.
Grytviken was a factory to process whale carcasses into marketable products: whale oil, meat, and baleen. The “waste” (bones, skin, unusable meat, etc.) were ground up to use as fertilizer or as a component of animal feed.
Initially, whale oil, used for lubrication, lighting (odourless oil lamp fuel) and fine soap, was the most valuable component. However, lamp fuel was also extracted from coal and petroleum. Both were cheaper, eventually outcompeting whale oil in world markets.
Whale oil remained a superior lubricant for decades, until synthetic petroleum-based lubricants were able to match its performance. Baleen was used in women’s corsets and formal dress gowns, but changing fashion eventually made that market vanish. Whale meat consumption was limited to Scandinavia, Japan and aboriginal people living around the Arctic Ocean. (The latter supplied their own needs through hunting.)
Whaling resumed, briefly, at Grytviken under Japanese owners, but shut down permanently in 1965.
Today, Grytviken is home to the British Antarctic Survey, a small environmental research establishment of a dozen during winter, increasing to over 40 in summer. In addition, a small group of young people volunteer to spend six summer months operating the South Georgia Museum and small shop.
The latter has one of the most southerly post offices in the world. I mailed 30 letters there on behalf of the Barrie District Stamp Club. I will be back in Barrie before these letters arrive!
The museum depicts Grytviken’s life as a whaling station. One poignant exhibit is a cheeky version of the Ten Commandments, as imagined by a South Georgia resident.
The Stone Age ended because metals did the job better. Similarly, whaling stopped because petroleum-based lubricants and fuels cost far less. It is hard to us to understand an industry whose products have not been used or even seen by folk alive today.
Hitting a whale with a hand-hurled harpoon would be much like stabbing a human with a needle. In order to capture such a large beast effectively, harpoons had to be the size of a human leg. These couldn’t be thrown – they needed a special cannon.
For a swift kill, these harpoons had an exploding head. Those exhibited in the museum looked truly brutal. I couldn’t help reflecting on the fact that whales are harmless to humans...
Most “exhibits” were not inside a building. They are corroding remains of a once thriving industry: large diesel generators, small ships, chain with links the size of your foot, huge furnaces for the heat needed to melt whale oil out of its blubber, colossal oil storage tanks, anchors, etc.
There is also a modest but elegant church and some other buildings, carefully restored by the British Antarctic Survey. I couldn’t help noting that some buildings were securely guy-wired to the ground, a testament to the windy site.
The museum displayed a sample of emperor penguin skin, (illustration) showing its feathers. These are downy, but with a black tip. The feathers are very densely packed.
A living bird kept them waterproof by spreading material from an oil gland near the tail creating two centimetres of airy insulation above the skin. Below this was a thick layer of fat providing further insulation. The fat was also an energy store.
All penguins share similar insulation, but the emperor particularly needs it because this bird inhabits the harshest, coldest, environment of any living creature – the Antarctic ice shelf.
Emperor penguins come ashore (on the ice) to breed. They walk around 100 kilometres to where they themselves were born (part of the ice shelf which will not melt in the Antarctic summer).
The documentary movie March of the Penguins is worth watching. Emperor penguins stage a courtship, form pairs and produce an egg. As soon as it is laid, the male arranges the egg on his feet, wraps it into a fold of skin under his belly, where he will incubate it for two months while the female waddles back to the sea to feed.
While the female is away, the male penguin, and hundreds of others (also incubating eggs) huddle together closely in a milling mass enduring an Antarctic winter of gale force winds and temperatures of -50 C.
Eventually, the females return, full of krill. By that time, the chicks have hatched and are hungry. The females take over the task of keeping the chicks warm and begin to regurgitate their stomach contents directly into their chicks’ beaks to sustain their growth.
Meanwhile, the hungry males (having lost half their body weight) return to the sea to feed. Eventually, their find their mates again, and regurgitate food for the chick while the female returns to the sea (now closer as the sea ice melts in the Antarctic summer) to feed.
The emperor is the only species of penguin to breed in winter. Their ability to endure the harshest conditions on earth is made possible by their remarkable insulation, while their abundant fat reserves fuel their survival. Unfortunately, emperor penguins are rarely seen by tourists because of their remote habitat.
Other penguin possess similar equipment, but face less challenging climatic conditions. The king penguin is closely related to the emperor, and looks like a slightly smaller, more colourful version. They breed on the sub-Antarctic islands like South Georgia and the Falklands.
We went to a South Georgia beach two to three kilometres long, packed with king penguins. Some were frolicking in the sea honking loudly, clearly enjoying themselves. There were also fur seals and a few elephant seals. There were 60,000 breeding pairs of king penguins.
Adding an estimate for chicks, there were at least 160,000 king penguins – the world’s largest nest site for these birds.
On Tuesday evening, heading off to Stanley, Falkland Islands, we hit the roughest water yet with Force 8 winds and swells occasionally washing the fourth floor windows. By morning, the seas were quite calm and it had warmed to around 10 C – toasty compared to our past two weeks.
The forecast for Stanley is good.
Peter Bursztyn is a self-proclaimed “recovering scientist” who has a passion for all things based in science and the environment. The now-retired former university academic has taught and carried out research at universities in Africa, Britain and Canada. As a member of BarrieToday’s community advisory board, he also writes a semi-regular column. If you have a question Peter might be able to answer or something you’re curious about, email us at [email protected].
