There’s no doubt that there are moral complications that come with traveling to Antarctica and the subantarctic islands: How do you measure a carbon footprint against the transformative power of witnessing the world’s last remaining wildernesses? South Georgia, refreshingly, offers one example of how human intervention can turn our past mistakes around. Much of the natural splendor that exists today in South Georgia was nearly wiped out by the introduction of rats, which decimated the local fauna. It took a closely coordinated eradication program that lasted ten years to successfully bring back the wildlife, a process that continues today.
I met Deirdre Mitchell, who works for the South Georgia Heritage Trust (SGHT), the charity largely responsible for the rat eradication program, onboard the Sylvia Earle. She was wrapping up a seasonal stint as the museum director for the tiny museum in Grytviken, which, with its summertime population of four people, is the closest thing to a town on the island. (It’s not unusual for the few people on South Georgia to catch a ride on tourist ships, back to the nearest airport in the Falklands, at the end of the season.) She told me how the SGHT was able to successfully control invasive species, largely thanks to tourism. “For years, we would come on board the ships stopping in South Georgia and give presentations about the rodent problem,” Mitchell said. “And so many of those tourists would then donate towards the effort, because they were seeing firsthand what the problem was instead of thinking of it as some disembodied cause.”
There are no rats left on the island anymore; now, invasive weeds are proving to be a major threat to South Georgia’s ecosystems. And, despite all the biosecurity measures in place, travelers are told to avoid sitting while on land, to avoid transmitting bird flu via errant bird droppings on parkas or pants—from the Antarctic mainland or further afield. As robust as South Georgia’s ecosystem may seem today, we are still more than capable of destroying it.
There is another side of history—one of heroism rather than destruction—that draws travelers to South Georgia. The island is almost synonymous with Sir Ernest Shackleton, the explorer who, in 1915, led a crew of 27 men on what is widely considered to be among the greatest survival stories of all time. After watching their ship get crushed to smithereens by Antarctic ice in the Weddell Sea, the crew set out in a desperate search for safety. In the final chapter of the adventure, Shackleton, accompanied by shipmates Tom Crean and Frank Worsley, sailed 800 miles on a 22-foot wooden lifeboat from Elephant Island to South Georgia where they sought help at a Norwegian whaling station. Miraculously, not a single member of the expedition was lost.
Travel specialists are reporting record cruise bookings—but what does that mean for the White Continent’s fragile landscape?
I spent a lot of time onboard the Sylvia Earle thinking about Ernest Shackleton and his crew. It was hard not to, as I looked up from a book on the Endurance expedition to see massive swells in the Scotia Sea and imagined three men in a wooden lifeboat staring a wet, icy death right in the face—and continuing to row north. One would think that living through such an ordeal might discourage a return visit. But Shackleton traveled to South Georgia again in 1922 on another Antarctic expedition. There, he died of a heart attack. His burial site, in Grytviken, was supposed to be on our itinerary, as were other sites related to Shackleton’s remarkable journey.