The terrible news that Henry Worsley had died just 30 miles short of crossing the Antarctic continent unsupported reached me just after I returned from the South Atlantic. We had been in the very stretch of ocean that a relative of his somehow navigated for 800 miles in a tiny boat with Sir Ernest Shackleton and four crew members after their ship was lost in the ice 100 years ago. Unlike them, we were warm and cosy in the Pharos SG, a government vessel that supplies the bases and patrols the well-managed fisheries of South Georgia. We passed the cove where the six men landed and ate baby albatrosses and an elephant seal before Shackleton, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean set out to tramp over the unmapped mountains to get help from Norwegian whalers on the north coast.
South Georgia is one of the jewels in the British crown: a range of precipitous Alps sticking out of the Antarctic ocean, overlooking bays filled with birds and seals, and named by Captain Cook for George III. The only way to get there is by sea from the Falklands. We had left Stanley in the tail end of a big storm, and Pharos was soon rolling up to 34 degrees in Force 8 winds. The imperturbable captain, Chris Butters, passed on a tip before breakfast on the first day: make sure your sausages are aligned athwartships, not fore-and-aft, on your plate, or you’ll lose them.
Three days of rolling later we woke to jagged peaks, icebergs and glaciers. Although midsummer, it was snowing. In Shackleton’s day the island was home to more than a thousand people, all in the whaling industry, whose deserted settlements still haunt some of the bays — heaps of crumbling buildings, rusting oil tanks and broken jetties.
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