Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

On Good Friday, I woke at 6 o’clock to see Mount Paget a brilliant orange in
the morning sun, framed in my window. It was very beautiful and I watched the
orange turn to yellow and then to a dazzling incandescent white, while the deep
purples lightened to ice blues and cobalt. Glistening frost covered the nearby
vegetation and there were silvery patches of ice on the surface of the sea. As so
often happened, the rest of the day did not live up to this promise. We spent it
tackling various tasks in the laboratory and around the base – and one of the
drains had to be dug up to clear it, a lengthy job involving plenty of man power –
so life went on. One morning a friend, Asbjorn came round from Pesca and
stayed for smokoe (morning coffee). Some of the catchers from F/F Balaena came
in early that morning – very clean, well-designed, modern boats they looked
compared to the older dilapidated South Georgia catchers. (Little did I think then
that I would sail on them some years later in much more southerly waters;
chapter[11]).
One night, as we strolled along the shore, we saw the lights of a catcher
coming in to the Point; it was Kai formerly one of the Balaena's boats, now used for
towing because it could do only 12 knots. We caught the insidious habit of going
to the Kino with the lads to see light films like ‘Two girls and a sailor’! I started a
sketch of the view from my rooms to the south, which I thought would be good,
showing Hestesletten, Discovery Point, Moraine Fjord and the mountain backdrop
including Mount Paget. In the foreground I placed two king penguins. During
the day I heard the result of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race on the radio:
Cambridge won by 15 lengths! It was a world away. We explored the nearer
shore below Mount Duse, climbed up to sooty albatross nests to the east of the
base, and watched the movements of the ships – Albatros crossing the bay and
Petrel towing six sperm whales in. In the evenings we did some photographic
enlarging and I looked through the old sealing files.
One day I decided to visit Dartmouth Point, a Seal Reserve on the other side of
Moraine Fjord, opposite Discovery Point. Ian Biggs took Arthur and me over in
the government motor launch, Stella, towing the dinghy behind. We were off the
point before noon, but decided not to land on the outer beach as it was very rocky
and there was heavy surf. Instead we rowed through the line of rocks across the
mouth of the fjord that marked the former terminal moraine of the Hamburg and
De Geer Glaciers. We had a wetting from the surf, as the water was quite shallow
over the submerged moraine, and landed on a sheltered beach, crowded with
seals. Ian went, as we thought, back to base, while we walked down the beach on
the western side of the point, counting and classifying the seals by age groups.
There was much jetsam on the beach: driftwood, boxes of gunpowder, spars, an
oar from the transport Harpon, baskets, fenders and many whale skulls and
vertebrae. I found a very large leopard seal skull, measuring 425 mm in length
(the largest previously recorded in the scientific literature was 431 mm!).
As we were walking through the tussac we remarked once or twice on a
strange noise the seals were making, then realized that it was Ian, and saw him in
the motor boat just outside the rocks. He was holding onto the kelp to keep the
boat off the rocks as the engine had failed. At first he had intended to beach her to
the east of Dartmouth Point, but thought better of it when he saw the surf crashing
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