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| The Whaler's Church at Grytviken |
The early part of the 19th century saw considerable exploitation of South Georgia's Fur Seal population, with Edward Fanning taking 57,000 seal skins on one voyage. There were at least 17 other sealing expeditions on the island, and the Fur Seal population soon declined. The next to be exploited were the elephant seals (for their oil), and when these had been decimated, the trade collapsed around 1830.
Thaddeus Thaddevitch Bellinghausen, an Estonian German, mounted an expedition to the Antarctic in 1819. He arrived off Willis Island on December 15th 1819 aboard the Vostok. Sailing south-eastward along the southern shore of the island he mapped the opposite side of the island to Cook, describing it as
... frozen and, so to say, dead ...
He met sealers and whalers on his way down the coast, but after three days, Bellinghausen broke off his survey due to poor weather, and sailed for the South Sandwich Islands.
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| Leith Harbour, an abandoned Whaling Station |
James Weddell was relieved to arrive at South Georgia in the Jane and Beaufoy after his difficult voyage to the Weddell Sea in 1833. He arrived on March 12th and anchored in Undine Harbour to effect repairs to his ships and resupply. The crew warded off scurvey by eating the island's wild burnet and also took many young albatrosses, a welcome change from the meat aboard the ships. Whilst attempting to take a precision sighting of the sun on land, Weddell was astonished to be disturbed by a mild earthquake, causing him to postulate a geological relationship between South Georgia and South America. They left for the Falkland Islands on April 17th.
Scientific visits to South Georgia began in 1877, when the Austrian Heinrich Klutschak arrived. A group of German scientists who, working on the International Polar Year project lived for a year at Royal Bay, mapping parts of the interior and recording the island's geological, biological, meteorological and topographical characteristics.
Thomas Kerr, Governor of the Falkland Islands, received an enquiry in 1887 from a retired naval officer, Captain C. D. Inglis, RN. Inglis offered to buy South Georgia, or rent it for a period of ninety-nine years in order to farm sheep. The request was passed to the Colonial Office in London, with Kerr raising no objection However, Inglis lost interest in the project before London had replied.
