Cinnamon and I visited Elsehul Bay last year, but it was a bit of a haze, first stop after the crossing from Stanley; the blur of biosecurity briefings, gearing up, and the crazy logistics of getting 95 guests into zodiacs and ashore, off of a 300-foot ship. I remember albatrosses, penguins, the endless clicking of camera shutters, the mountains, not believing I was really there. How did I get in this Attenborough documentary show?
Now Elsehul feels like home. It is lunch on our 3rd full day, gobbling a delicious carrot-sweet potato soup with good cheeses, dates, home-made bread, on the ship. This morning we did surveying, flew drones, took wood samples, and much more, amid the cacophony of seals, king penguins, and the occasional bellow of the elephant seals. We have walked every inch of the site, searching for any artifact on the surface, scouring with the metal detector, digging, surveying. It is a familiar landscape now, neighborhoods like “Upper Trypot”, “Lower Trypot”, “Seal Ridge”, “The Great Hall”, “The UFO”. Familiar landmarks, like the chill giant petrel on her nest, the pile of our lifejackets and other crap on the beach in the swarm of excited baby seals, and numerous piles of bones and carcasses. The place is a boneyard, when you get down to it, bones, feathers, decomposing seal and penguin skins, and poop everywhere of course.
The seals run the gamut from adorable inquisitive pups, to slightly larger ones who look like they’d give you a nip if they could, to the vaguely homicidal-looking, red-eyed ones, who look at you like you owe them a lot of money. Some of them, as well as the king penguins, seem quite interested in the archaeology work.
It is a fascinating mental process, experiencing one’s mind slowly transforming an undifferentiated landscape into an intentional landscape, ordered by humans – albeit more than 200 years ago – and then radically reordered by the animals, wind and water.
I was on metal detector duty yesterday around the foundation of a structure I spent hours excavating yesterday – I dubbed it “the Great Hall of Elsehul” as it seems to be the largest structure at the site, by far. After finding a few rusted blobs, a sort of spearpoint, and a huge nail, the detector went nuts. Some digging uncovered a perfectly circular rusted metal object, like a manhole cover, perhaps a yard in diameter. “Ah, that is where Jimmy Hoffa is buried!” opined one of our number. I suggested it was a UFO. Truth to tell, no one knows what it may have been. Something for a successor expedition to look into. For our part, it was carefully uncovered, measured and photographed for all the world to see.
The National Geographic Explorer pulled into the harbor yesterday, disgorging perhaps a dozen zodiacs of orange-clad ships’ guests. With our team’s permission, they got to land on “our” beach and have a look around our discoveries, in particular our star, the three trypots (for boiling down elephant seal blubber into oil), which were by yesterday well exposed, along with the brick furnace below. Some came wandering over to the Great Hall (where I was working alone to excavate the UFO), and I got to play tour guide. I told them that the most interesting thing we’d found were Norse Viking runes, and that our hypothesis was that the Vikings summered in South Georgia to avoid the harsh northern winter (not really).
Watching the orange people come and go reminded me how fortunate we were to be on this expedition. When we took the voyage last year (the “standard” Ushuaia-Falklands-South Georgia-Peninsula-Ushuaia three weeks), I thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and experience, and for most mortals, it would be. We never thought in a million years we’d be back on this amazing island, under such unique circumstances. Yesterday, I almost felt sorry for the orange zodiac people (well, not really – they are having the time of their lives and enjoying the same fantastic place that we are). It was just that I feel so fortunate to be part of this unique expedition with this amazing group of people. Onward!
– Chip
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