Grytviken in South Georgia is one of the most visited places on the island. As well as being the final resting place of the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, the old whaling station is home to the best museum in the Southern Ocean, which is run by the South Georgia Heritage Trust (SGHT) on behalf of the Government of South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands.
Every year, SGHT staff members spend the tourist season living and working in Grytviken, welcoming visitors to the site. But what is life like on the island when the cruise ships pull away? To find out, we spoke to Deirdre Mitchell, the SGHT’s operations manager in Grytviken.
South Georgia’s extraordinary wildlife is famous, but Grytviken is a rather different sort of destination. Can you introduce it for us?
South Georgia was the centre of the Antarctic whaling industry in the early 20th century, and Grytviken was the first whaling station that opened. The other whaling stations have too many hazards to land at, but Grytviken has been made safe for people to walk around.
If I open my front door, I might have three fur seals asleep on my front doorstep, and you’ve got to be like, ‘Right, how am I going to get to work today?’
Most people I think come to South Georgia with this initial interest in wildlife or Shackleton, so when they come to Grytviken it’s a chance to introduce them to this other side of South Georgia’s history.
It’s a really important history to learn about for so many reasons. It’s an amazing example of what humans can do when we overexploit our natural resources, but also the human story of the men who worked at the whaling station. And that’s the story that we try to tell – of how it was to live and work there. It’s a really untold part of South Georgia’s story.
How did you first come to visit South Georgia?
My very first season working at the museum was 2014/15 when I went there as a trainee curator fresh out of university. I had no idea what to expect whatsoever, but I completely fell in love with it and I just thought ‘I have to keep coming back to this place!’ It completely got under my skin.
From there, I started working on ships like the National Geographic Explorer as a guide for quite a few years and managed to pop back to Grytviken, which was phenomenal. I actually started working in my current role for SGHT in the 2022/23 season, so I’ve just finished my third season there.
How many people from the South Georgia Heritage Trust live on the island during the visitor season?
In the summer months our core museum team is four people including myself, so it’s quite a small team! But about a kilometre down the track from Grytviken is the British Antarctic Survey research research station at King Edward Point, and over the summer, the population there goes up to about 30. We don’t live at King Edward Point, but we rely on a lot of their infrastructure like the food store, the doctor’s surgery and things like that.
We are the only residents of Grytviken. We have a little house next to the museum where the four of us live. It feels like a normal house anywhere, except when you open the front door in the morning, there might be a fur seal or a penguin outside!
What do you eat on South Georgia?
We have a little cooking rota and get our food from a store at the research station that we can just go and help ourselves to. It’s almost like a mini supermarket, except there’s no choice and you don’t have to pay.
We get fresh food delivered roughly every six weeks or so, on the government supply vessel Pharos, that comes from the Falkland Islands. We do get quite large amounts of things, but obviously that’s got to be shared amongst 35 or potentially 40 people. There are some things that we’re not allowed to have for biosecurity reasons – they’re too high risk in case they could be hiding invasive bug species. Anything leafy, things like broccoli, lettuce or kale are banned, so whenever we get invited on a cruise ship for dinner you’ll always find us somewhere near the salad bar loading up on all the green things.
What is a typical day for you in Grytviken?
We can have up to two ships in a day, and we’ll have either a morning ship or an afternoon ship.
With a morning ship we normally start the day with a couple of us going on the ship and giving a presentation about the work of the charity, while the ship has its paperwork and biosecurity checked. Meanwhile, everybody on shore will get the museum lights on and the blinds open and get everything ready.
After the presentation, we go back onshore by which time our colleagues will have the museum all ready and opened up. Normally one or two of us are also running the shop, because everybody likes to get a little souvenir from the museum. Magnets are very popular! We also run tours where we take people through the whaling station, tell them about the history, what the different machinery was and what it was like to live there during the height of the whaling era. Normally we have guests ashore for three or four hours, then we wave them off and get the museum cleaned up and the shop restocked and basically reset for the next visit.
In terms of a ship visit, you get into a routine – but there are always curve balls. The weather might be particularly bad, or once we had so many elephant seals asleep in front of the entrance to the museum that we had to get all the guests to come around a side door! So you have to adapt and be a bit flexible, which makes it quite interesting.
We occasionally get days when we’re working but we don’t have a ship in and that’s when things are a little bit more varied, doing anything and everything. We might be cataloging objects in the museum, sanding and repainting the benches, or deep cleaning the church. All those behind-the-scenes maintenance things happen between ship visits.
What is it like having seals and penguins for neighbours?
It’s probably one of my favorite things about living there – it never gets old. There are so few places in the world where there’s that density of wildlife that just doesn’t care that people are there. We are completely irrelevant to it, which provides such lovely moments of comedy as well. If I open my front door, I might have three fur seals asleep on my front door, and you’ve got to be like, ‘Right, how am I going to get to work today?’
Once we were in the museum shop and a guest from a ship came in and said ‘Are fur seals allowed in the museum?’ The fur seal pups are so curious and inquisitive and not scared of people at all, that one just followed everybody up the steps and was just sitting in the porch completely unbothered. So we had to very gently usher it back out the door. It’s things like that that are the most incredible thing part of your daily life.
What do you do in Grytviken when you’re not working?
Normally we get about two days off a week and everybody spends it a little bit differently, I spend a lot of time hiking and trail running. We have two little huts on the Thatcher Peninsula, one called Maiviken and one called Harpon. They’re very basic—think a shed with a couple of bunk beds, and a primus stove ant tilly lamp— and we can go and do overnight stays in those.
They’re not very far away, but it feels like a proper holiday. You’re so remote and there’s no light pollution so the stars are absolutely incredible. It’s the best camping trip you can possibly imagine.
We also have organized social events as well – you have to make your own fun. We hold the South Georgia Half Marathon in February every year, where people can run or walk. It’s quite challenging but people always get really excited about it.
There’s also the South Georgia Olympics. Everybody comes up with a flag and an anthem, and we have different disciplines like wellie wanging [throwing] and sock wrestling. There are also art gallery nights where everybody creates an artwork of some kind and we have a gallery opening night. Everybody gets all dressed up and you have a nice glass of wine and go around and look at everybody’s artwork. The really nice thing is that people are really creative about the way they keep themselves entertained and it’s very community focused.
When I first went to South Georgia 2014, the internet was terrible. Now we have Starlink and can video call home. People were worried it might change the culture on the station, but South Georgia just attracts a certain type of person that recognises that it’s a small community and you need to do things for each other. People still organize these social things – we even have a craft club every Tuesday. Despite the fact that now we do have this amazing connection to home and the outside world, people still focus on that little community.
Finally, what sort of reactions do you get from visitors to Grytviken to the fact that you live there?
Two things that spring to mind. One of the most commonly asked questions we get is ‘Don’t you get lonely or bored?’ And I find that every single time I come here there’s no time to get bored. There’s this perspective of South Georgia as being incredibly isolated, but you’re in such a close-knit community and you’re all living on top of each other all the time. It’s almost the opposite – you have to make time to find your own space. That’s always fascinating to talk to people about.
But thinking specifically about Grytviken, often people don’t know much about the whaling history, but after they’ve spent some time with us and done one of our whaling station tours, they have this really nice reaction of ‘I’m so glad we’ve learned about this.’ People don’t know about these stories, but we’re here to tell them. It’s really nice for us to see that we’ve had that impact.
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