Port Lockroy

Port Lockroy in Antarctica is a place of historical importance that also happens be in a spectacular location, although the early part of that history is a story of blood and gore and a testimony to human cruelty.

Port Lockroy is the name of a bay (and also of the British base here) that forms a naturally sheltered harbor on the western shore of Wiencke island at the mouth of the Neumayer channel. The British base is located on an island called Gaudier island in this bay. See the map in the first photo.

Most of the Antarctic territory which our ship visited was explored and mapped mainly by two expeditions - 1. A Belgian expedition to Antarctica lead by Adrien Gerlache in 1897 and 2. A French expedition in 1904 by Jean-Baptiste Charcot. It was the Charcot expedition that gave the bay the name Port Lockroy - after a French politician who had funded the expedition. And it was the Gerlache expedition which came up with the other names - Wiencke after a member of the expedition who was washed overboard and drowned, Neumayer after a German explorer Georg von Neumayer.

The Neumayer channel itself is an interesting place - its a narrow passage between the Wiencke island and the much larger Anvers Island and connects the Gerlache strait and the open sea. Because of it's winding shape, icebergs often get caught in the channel and can't easily float out to the open sea.

Passing through the channel therefore provides out-of-this-world views of majestic mountains, ice-covered cliffs, steep glaciers, fantastically shaped icebergs (see the video and first couple of photos).

Anyway, coming back to Port Lockroy, before the British base was built, in the late 19th and early 20th century this was a bloody place. This had become one of the hubs of the whaling industry. The large Whaling "factory" ships used to dock here while the smaller, killer fleet went out to the seas to hunt and kill countless whales and bring the carcasses to the factory ships - where they were dismembered, the "valuable" parts like blubber, bones and meat separated and stored to be shipped back to Europe. There is no estimate of the scale of this massacre which continued for many decades until whaling was banned here and the whaling industry collapsed.

Then in 1944 in what might be called one of the biggest (and I might add, illegal) land grab operations, a British expedition code named Tabarin, came and staked ownership claims in the name of the king, on large tracts of land at many locations in Antarctica including Port Lockroy. Fortunately by the Antarctic treaty of 1959, territorial claims of ALL nations on any part of Antarctica have been held in abeyance - neither recognized nor rejected. Thus the land remains free for everyone - for scientific research, or just a visit like ours, or any other non-political, non-military, non-commercial activity.

Till 1962, Port Lockroy was a British station devoted mainly to weather research. Some of the earliest measurements of our ionosphere were made here, so also the first recording of a phenomenon called Auroral Chorus - electromagnetic waves generated by geomagnetic storms. After 1962 for nearly 3 decades it was abandoned. It was rebuilt as a historical monument and also as a tourist attraction in 1996. It now contains a museum of Antarctic explorations .

There is a post office here (The building to the right called Bransfield House) and also a gift shop. It is the Southern-most functioning post office! For a dollar you can post a letter to your home (which will most likely arrive months after you return home!)

We weren't allowed to land here though when our ship passed by. I am not sure why, perhaps it had not opened yet (its open only for a few months each summer) or perhaps our ship's permitted landing sites did not include Port Lockroy (All Antarctic tourist cruise ships are allotted specific routes and landing sites. They cannot go anywhere else). See the next few of photos showing the spectacular spot at which the station is located.

There is one curious object in one of the photos, if you notice - A three masted ship of a kind which may have sailed in the south seas during the 18th century! At first knowing that Port Lockroy is now a museum, I thought this may be the ship Discovery that brought Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton to Antarctica on the first British expedition to that land. But later I found that Discovery is now a museum ship moored in Dundee in Scotland. So what could this be??

My best guess is that it is perhaps a Dutch ship called Barque Europa - The only sailing ship that is currently authorized to do Antarctic tours. At least the photos look quite similar!

But certainly that ancient look of that ship took me back for a moment to the Heroic Age of Antarctic Expeditions - that began with Andrien Gerlach (mentioned above) and ended with Shackleton's ill-fated 1922 expedition in which he himself died on South Georgia islands even before his ship had reached the Atlantic waters! It's hard to imagine now (especially after having actually seen the easiest-to-reach locations on a thoroughly modern ship), how, with the kind of equipment and technology they had, these people managed to explore one of the most difficult areas on earth and mostly managed to return alive!