Fortuna Bay, Hercules Bay, and Stromness, South Georgia

We have, at last, reached this most anticipated day, the day of our arrival at the Antarctic island of South Georgia. Whether for the first or the tenth time, South Georgia always excites.

Fresh snow carried by an exhilarating Antarctic breeze only added to the mystique, providing a sense of place for our first landing in Fortuna Bay, one of the glacially carved indentations on the north coast of South Georgia. Fur seal pups by the hundreds boiled in the surf at our landing, making mock charges at our boots and demanding to be photographed in their consummate cuteness. Once, fur seals were nearly extinguished by sealers taking the valuable pelts. They have returned in force, their numbers now in the millions.

We headed out over the snow-covered glacial outwash. Groups of king penguins marched along in stately solemnity. Red-coated expeditioners followed them to the breeding colony. By South Georgia standards, this is a small colony of ten to fifteen thousand breeding pairs, the adults standing pecking distance apart with smaller, brown young scattered between. King penguins have a very unusual breeding system. The whole process, egg to fledged young, takes more than a year, with two distinct periods of egg laying. Some adults were in charge of the larger, brown "oakum boy" chicks, while other adults carried eggs or very small, grey chicks on their feet, hidden from sight and nicely protected from the cold by a fold of blood-rich skin on the adult's lower abdomen. All of the chicks must survive the coming Antarctic winter if they are to become adults and enter the breeding population. A king penguin colony is a cacophony of the senses—the coming and going of adults bringing food to insistent young, the drone of trumpeting adults forming a background of sound for the whistles of young asking ...no, demanding to be fed, and the distinctive odor as well, all impressions to be recorded in our memory banks.

We moved on to Hercules Bay, which we explored by Zodiac. Here we had a four-penguin outing: king, gentoo, chinstrap, and macaroni. Overhead, elegant light-mantled sooty albatross soared along the steep cliffs that line this small bay. Our final outing of the day was at Stromness, where Ernest Shackleton, Frank Worsely, and Tom Crean completed their march across the island as Shackleton struggled to rescue the twenty-two men waiting on Elephant Island, their hopes resting on the Boss. There, at the edge of the abandoned whaling station, stands the manager's villa where the exhausted men were taken. Many of us walked up the broad valley, retracing the steps of the three explorers, to reach the waterfall down which they lowered themselves, one by one. Now the former whaling station stands falling into ruin, testimony to another era in the history of South Georgia.