Port Lockroy and Dallmann Bay
We had come to visit the old British scientific Base “A” at Port Lockroy, now a beautifully restored museum that captures all the quaint stoicism of the men who manned it in 1944. But there were more powerful, more poignant symbols here: huge rusting chains round the granite at our landing site. From these giant chains the early hunters moored their boats when they came in the early 1900s to kill whales. The seas then must have boiled and bubbled with thousands of whales. The piles of whalebones on Jougla Point just across from the base are what we did to them: boiled and bubbled them for their oil, to light the lamps of our cities before we had electricity. In the century after this first oil industry burgeoned, over 2 million whales were taken in the southern hemisphere, including 200,000 humpbacks. The first tourists who came here in the 1970s rarely saw humpbacks: they had still not recovered from the wholesale slaughter which peaked just after the last war. We saw our first humpback yesterday, gambolling with a score of killer whales, gate-crashing their fish banquet in the middle of the Gerlache Strait. This in itself is remarkable: killer whales are not whales, they are the biggest, fastest, fiercest of dolphins, so named because they are killers of whales. They too were shot in their hundreds by the early whalers because they would rip and tear the carcasses of harpooned whales being towed back to shore to be butchered.
By a strange quirk of history, we saw two killer whales shot today, not for reprisal, but for science. Bob Pitman and John Durban have been our guests on board to learn more about the genetics, ecology and behavior of the killer whales of Antarctica. They were as delighted as us to see the humpback feed with these small, Type B or “Gerlache” killers yesterday, and by coming up alongside the same group today in a Zodiac, they managed to fire satellite tags into the dorsal fins of two individuals with a harmless crossbow dart. What a privilege to be witness to this cutting-edge science as part of our insight into the complex wilderness of Antarctica. But our day was complete as we cruised into Dallmann Bay, where we encountered three happy humpback whales relaxing in the summer sunlight, between languid dives into the krill-packed waters of the bay. Our Captain carefully maneuvered us alongside until we could hear their explosive blows and musical trumpetings. One hundred years ago they would have been harpooned; today, thankfully, we fired off hundreds of pixels instead. The chains of yore rust; the bones of old crumble. How much nobler now to gaze in wonder at these gentle giants which have reclaimed their krill kingdom, and offer up a silent apology for what we did to them in our ignorance.
