16 April 24, 2022The Sunday TimesTravel South Atlantic
It’s more
opulence than
Endurance for
cruise passengers
in South Georgia,
but reminders of
Shackleton are
everywhere, says
Jamie Lafferty
Passengers on the Greg Mortimer take in the beauty of South Georgia in the
southern Atlantic Ocean before heading to King Edward Cove at Grytviken
and the grave of the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, belowT
here was already too much
going on. After almost three
days at sea, we arrived at the
mouth of King Haakon Bay in
South Georgia, where tussock
grass danced in a dawn gale and giant
petrels flew thrillingly close to the
observation deck of our ship. The sun
shone without warmth while the waters of
the bay shimmered turquoise, tainted by
meltwater from dying glaciers. The vast
fjord ahead was a mass of frozen cliffs,
vertiginous mountains, and islands
utterly unwelcoming to man. Eyes and
cameras grew overwhelmed — and then
the humpback whales started breaching.
South Georgia is a subantarctic
archipelago with all the subtlety of a
headbutt. First described by Captain
Cook in 1775, this British Overseas
Territory is little bigger than Wiltshire.
For all its forbidding air, this old whaling
outpost can also be a magnificently
beautiful place, appearing like a mountain
range floating in the southern sea.
It would have seemed particularly
gorgeous to Ernest Shackleton, who
miraculously reached its shores with five
other men after a hellish 17-day journey
from Elephant Island in Antarctica in- They came in a crudely converted
whaleboat, the 22.5ft James Caird, as the
rest of the Endurance crew — their ship
lost to the ice of the Weddell Sea — prayed
for their return. Shackleton’s desperate
journey was their last hope of survival.
More than a century later, we were
sailing aboard the infinitely more
comfortable Aurora Expeditions ship, the
Greg Mortimer. The expedition leader,
Ashley Perrin, tried to land passengers at
the same place where Shackleton had
landed, Cape Rosa. South
Georgia did not comply,
throwing up a rolling sea that
made attempts with
motorised Zodiac dinghies
impossible. Instead, we
retreated to the mother
ship and moved deeper
into the bay to Peggotty
Bluff, the spot where
Shackleton later left half of his
party before leading two men —
Frank Worsley and Tom Crean
— on a final, gruelling 30-mile hike
over the island to salvation and glory.
Before we got to wander those historic
shores, the crew decided to make the
most of good weather by having a
barbecue on deck, serving up the
sort of decadent spread the men of the
Endurance would have fantasised about
as they fended off starvation and madnessat the end of the world. Between
mouthfuls of fillet steak, passengers — a
mix of well-heeled and adventurous Brits,
Americans and Australians — looked out at
the bluff and tried to guess where the old
sailors may have landed.
When we finally stepped ashore, we
were greeted by rowdy fur seals, regal
king penguins and, most joyously of all,
the South Georgia pipit. The world’s
southernmost songbird has been
brought back from the brink
of extinction thanks to an
enormous rat eradication
programme across the
island and we spotted it at
every landing. Shackleton
and his men would
probably not have met
one during their days on this
forlorn beach, nor would they
have seen anywhere near as many
fur seals; they had been almost wiped
out by humans.
But this would still have been a
welcoming place after so many months
of deprivation. “It ranks among any of the
amazing tales of survival, and people will
tell it again and again and again,” said the
ship’s historian Stephen Martin later in
our voyage. “Frank Hurley’s photographs
and extraordinary films, plus Shackleton’sSouth Georgia is
an archipelago
with all the
subtlety of a
headbuttRETURN T
SOU
GEOR