14 hours Ago By [email protected] (Milo Boyd)
Deception Island is an eerie and confusing place. British sealers William Smith and Edward Bransfield named it 204 years ago, having mistaken the 12km rock for a typical island before finding relative shelter from the elements in the vast Port Foster bay that’s carved out its middle. Unlike every other landmass this far south, ice and snow don’t envelope Deception Island, thanks to bubbling magma within the active shield volcano that causes steam to rise off its beaches and heats pools of water into tourist-warming spas.
When I visited in the Antarctic summer month of December with cruise line HX , its resident historian Bernado Grosehopp promised that the odds of the volcano blowing its top were low. If it did, he assured, our sturdy vessel the Fridtjof Nansen (named after a suitably hard-as-nails Norwegian Arctic explorer) would be able to ride out the resulting tsunami and escape through the collapsed entry/exit passage. This was a comforting thought for us on deck as we drifted into the inner watery sanctum of Deception Island and to a natural harbour to the east, Whalers Bay.
Scanning along the u-shaped beach, my eyes landed on a huddled colony of chinstrap penguins, one yawning crab-eating seal, a cliff of nesting skulls, and a long, steaming stretch of desolation. Seven vast rusting oil drums are in the process of collapsing in on themselves beside the splintered remains of wooden huts. A sprawl of now-unidentifiable machines used in what was once the world’s only on-land and biggest whale abattoir face a similar fate.
Dead penguins and a lone departed seal are dotted across the beach, slowly rotting at the glacial pace the bitingly cold climate permits. They lie just above thousands of humpback and sperm whale carcasses, stripped of their valuable blubber and dumped there by early 20th century whalers unsure of how to dispose of such vast creatures on a continent that has a habit of persevering those who perish there. Had the 1969 volcanic blast which emptied the island of a small remaining crew of British researchers not covered those bodies in 2m of ash, they’d still be littering the seafront to this day.
Instead, only a few dozen whale bones poke through the surface. For the entirety of Deception Island’s two-century human history, it has been a place of death. As many as 100 sealing ships a year arrived in the wake of Smith and Bransfield, finding the shelter Whalers Bay offered was perfect for anchoring their ships and processing their catch.
Within the decade the area’s fur seal population had collapsed almost completely, ending the industry. Eighty years on and whalers would turn up, drawn by the then untouched population of humpbacks whose playful disposition and love of splashing about at the surface made them compliant catch. Quickly the Antarctic’s only permanent factory was built, with Brits claiming the island as a Falkland Islands’ Dependency and building a hand-cranked railway, graveyard and lodgings for several hundred whalers.
They went to work bleeding the whale population dry, slaughtering so many at such a pace that their bodies had to be held in the water off the beach; several hundred connecting the two sides of the bay and one point, creating a kind of macabre Total Wipeout obstacle course for any particularly brave sailors who chose to take it on. Deception’s most famous resident was Australian explorer Hubert Wilkins, who built a runway there in the late 20s for his historic Antarctic fly-overs. He also observed the raucous culture, including one particularly sodden night on the island that saw two salty-seadogs tossed into the drink.
"One of the whalers thrust his long knife into this veritable whale-balloon, which promptly exploded, hurling both men into the harbour, where they had to be rescued by some of the few sober observers," he wrote. The station’s boom years were brought to an end in the 1920s as ships set sail that allowed for the entire processing of a whale off-land. Researchers moved into the whalers’ vacated lodgings and happily conducted research there until 1969, when a second eruption in two years saw stranded British researchers airlifted to safety by their Chilean colleagues, ending the British presence on the island.
“First it was sealers, then whalers, then researchers, so it is the perfect encapsulation of the history of Antarctica,” Bernado told me during our visit to Deception, which has now found another lease of life as the Continent’s only true tourist destination. Today around 15,000 people visit each year, drawn to one of the few parts of the inhospitable continent with a human history, and one that echoes our uneasy but evolving relationship with Antarctica. Walking along the beach, I saw an island that is recovering.
Seal families loll about on the pebbles once more; fuel tanks and toxic batteries have been cleared following the 1991 Madrid Protocol; humpbacks venture here again, their global population having bounced back to 135,000 from a low of just 5,000. The remaining buildings will soon crumble completely and be taken by the waves. Deception Island is a place of desolation and hope.
It bears the scars of greed-fueled brutality that came close to ending a majestic species carried out by crews of frost-bitten men far, far from home. Today, those scars are only partially visible as the natural world continues to recover and cover-up. The hope now is that those entering the Antarctic’s growing tourism trade are as respectful and careful of its delicate wonders as HX, and allow the world’s last true wilderness to remain that way.
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