This morning the snowy peaks of South Georgia appeared on the horizon. By late morning we were at the mouth of King Haakon Bay, adjacent to Rosa Cove (where Shackleton and five of his men finally made landfall after their epic journey from Elephant Island.)
After a few days, their boat repaired, they moved to the head of the bay, landing at a place they called Peggotty Bluff - Peggotty being a character in Dickens' "David Copperfield" who, like them and their companions left behind at Elephant Island, lived in an upturned boat. We went ashore there this afternoon, to find greenery (the first we've seen for 10 days) – mosses and lichens, plus a few tiny shrubs. Nothing bigger, though – South Georgia is treeless. On the beach were a few groups of moulting King Penguins, some fur seals, and quite a number of elephant seals (including some pups.) At risk of invoking Mike Gatting again, elephant seals are lumbering beasts which can weigh several tons, spend most of the day doing nothing whatsoever, and are equipped with an unnecessarily elaborate nose. Think "Vogon Constructor Fleet" and you're about there. Fur seals, however, are the ones you need to avoid tripping over (and anyway, tripping over an elephant seal would require a step-ladder) – they are highly aggressive. They're probably a tad peeved about having been hunted almost to extinction.
It was quite eerie walking in the footsteps of the great Shackleton, Worsley and Crean; from this point they surveyed the surrounding mountains and set off on their extraordinary 20-mile crossing of the totally uncharted mountain range to get to the whaling station at Stromness – totally unequipped, exhausted and with no kind of guidance (other than Frank Worsley's uncanny sense of direction), they achieved in 36 hours what highly-equipped teams of mountaineers routinely fail to do today.
Along the beach, I found a small piece of driftwood: obviously part of a ship, and therefore obviously part of a ship that went down somewhere in these remote and frigid waters. I was immediately and vividly reminded of a day when I was on a beach with my father, 40-odd years ago: we found a button from a sailor's jacket, washed up on the tide. Dad had been a sailor, a long time ago. We sat there with our thoughts and eachother. We never spoke about it, but we shared what it meant. The sea kept its secret.
The weather today was good by South Georgia standards: i.e. it didn't rain OR snow. Diamond-clear streams run down from the fractured edges of glaciers, cutting through the mossy, peaty banks of tussock grass to the stony beach. Antarctic terns and giant petrels nest in the sparse vegetation; going too close to a tern's nest is a bad idea, as they are accomplished dive-bombers (a direct hit on a camera lens is not uncommon.)
Inland from the beach we found a pair of South Georgia Pintails, alias the Vampire Duck: it's the only carnivorous duck, feeding (when it feels so inclined) on seal blood (a by-product of giant petrels' total lack of table manners.) We also encountered one of the aforementioned giant petrels having its lunch, and I'd really rather not go into the details: suffice it to say that Count Duckula was lurking...
