Grytviken
Interesting facts
- Solveig Jacobsen, daughter of a station manager, was born here on 8 October 1913 and is recorded as the first child born south of the Antarctic Convergence.
- A team of about sixty Norwegians built the station in just over five weeks: they landed on 16 November 1904 and the factory began producing oil on 24 December.
- Carl Anton Larsen picked the site in 1902 while commanding the ship Antarctic on Otto Nordenskjöld's Swedish expedition, two years before he returned to build the station.
- Larsen, born in Sandefjord in Norway, gave up his Norwegian citizenship and became a naturalised British subject in 1910.
- One of the sealers' try pots that gave the cove its name survives in the South Georgia Museum, stamped by a London maker from Wapping Dock.
- Nothing was wasted at the station: blubber, meat, bones and innards were all rendered for oil, and the leftovers were turned into fertiliser and animal feed.
- Shackleton was buried here because his widow chose South Georgia as his resting place, and his grave lies among those of the island's whalers.
- Frank Wild's ashes reached Shackleton's side only after a writer researching his life found them in a cemetery vault in Johannesburg.
- In April 1982 a platoon of 22 Royal Marines held off Argentine forces for about two hours, damaging a corvette and downing a helicopter before surrendering.
- The first wedding at Grytviken was registered on 24 February 1932, and the church has hosted occasional services and marriages since.
Why it is worth it
At the head of a sheltered cove on the island of South Georgia, the rusting tanks and machinery of an abandoned whaling station spread along the shore, old whale catchers lie beached at the water's edge, and a small Norwegian church stands apart behind them. Grytviken was once the busiest whaling settlement in the Southern Ocean; today it is a silent industrial ruin at the edge of Antarctica, and the resting place of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.
The cove takes its name — "Pot Bay" in Swedish — from the old English try-pots for rendering seal oil that the surveyor Johan Gunnar Andersson of the Swedish Antarctic Expedition found here in 1902. Two years later, on 16 November 1904, the Norwegian captain Carl Anton Larsen founded a whaling station on the spot for the Compañía Argentina de Pesca. The first season brought in 195 whales, and in the decades that followed around 300 men worked here through each southern summer, processing whales and elephant seals for oil. The church, built in 1913, is the only building at Grytviken still used for its original purpose. Falling whale stocks made the station uneconomic, and it closed in December 1966.
Shackleton returned to Grytviken on his last voyage, the Shackleton–Rowett Expedition, and died there shortly after New Year's Day 1922, aged 47; he was buried in the station's cemetery, in 2011 the ashes of his long-time companion Frank Wild were interred beside him. The former manager's villa now houses the South Georgia Museum, devoted to whaling, exploration and the island's natural history. In April 1982, at the start of the Falklands War, Argentine forces seized the settlement; British troops retook it some three weeks later. The whale catchers Petrel, Dias and Albatross, beached after decades of service, still rust along the shore. Grytviken itself has no permanent population; the island's administration and a British Antarctic Survey station sit 900 metres away at King Edward Point, the only continuously inhabited settlement on South Georgia.
Getting there
Grytviken lies on King Edward Cove in Cumberland East Bay, on the north coast of South Georgia in the South Atlantic. The island has no airport and is reached only by sea, mainly by expedition cruise ships. The nearest airport with scheduled flights is Mount Pleasant (MPN) in the Falkland Islands, about 1,490 km to the west.
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From the encyclopaedia
Grytviken is a hamlet on South Georgia in the South Atlantic. Formerly a whaling station, it was the largest settlement on the island. Grytviken is located at the head of King Edward Cove within the larger Cumberland East Bay, considered the best harbour on the island. The location's name, meaning "pot bay", was coined in 1902 by the Swedish Antarctic Expedition and documented by the surveyor Johan Gunnar Andersson, after the expedition found old English try pots used to render seal oil at the site. Settlement was re-established on 16 November 1904 by Norwegian Antarctic explorer Carl Anton Larsen on the long-used site of former whaling settlements.
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