page_title: South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
section_title: 20th and 21st centuries
hierarchical_section_title: South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands / History / South Georgia / 20th and 21st centuries
caption_attribution_description: Panorama de la Géorgie du sud
context_page_description: South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands is a British Overseas Territory in the southern Atlantic Ocean. It is a remote and inhospitable collection of islands, consisting of South Georgia and a chain of smaller islands known as the South Sandwich Islands. South Georgia is 165 kilometres long and 35 kilometres wide and is by far the largest island in the territory. The South Sandwich Islands lie about 700 kilometres southeast of South Georgia. The territory's total land area is 3,903 km². The Falkland Islands are about 1,300 kilometres west-northwest from its nearest point.
  No permanent native population lives in the South Sandwich Islands, and a very small non-permanent population resides on South Georgia. There are no scheduled passenger flights or ferries to or from the territory, although visits by cruise liners to South Georgia are increasingly popular, with several thousand visitors each summer.
  The United Kingdom claimed sovereignty over South Georgia in 1775 and the South Sandwich Islands in 1908. The territory of "South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands" was formed in 1985; previously, it had been governed as part of the Falkland Islands Dependencies.
context_section_description: South Georgia became a base for whaling beginning in the 20th century, until whaling ended in the 1960s. A Norwegian, Carl Anton Larsen, established the first land-based whaling station and first permanent habitation at Grytviken in 1904. It operated through his Argentine Fishing Company, which settled in Grytviken. The station operated until 1965. Whaling stations operated under leases granted by the Governor of the Falkland Islands. The seven stations, all on the north coast with its sheltered harbours, were, from the west to east:
  Prince Olav Harbour
  Leith Harbour
  Stromness
  Husvik
  Grytviken
  Godthul
  Ocean Harbour
  The whaling stations' tryworks were unpleasant and dangerous places to work. One was called "a charnel house boiling wholesale in Vaseline" by an early 20th-century visitor. Tim Flannery wrote that its "putrid vapors [resembled] the pong of bad fish, manure, and a tanning works mixed together", and noted one bizarre peril: "A rotting whale could fill with gas to bursting, ejecting a fetus the size of a motor vehicle with sufficient force to kill a man."
  With the end of the whaling industry, the stations were abandoned. Apart from a few preserved buildings such as the South Georgia Museum and Norwegian Lutheran Church at Grytviken, only their decaying remains survive. From 1905, the Argentine Meteorological Office cooperated in maintaining a meteorological observatory at Grytviken under the British lease requirements of the whaling station until these changed in 1949.
  In 1908, the United Kingdom issued further letters patent that established constitutional arrangements for its possessions in the South Atlantic. The letters covered South Georgia, the South Orkneys, the South Shetlands, the South Sandwich Islands, and Graham Land. The claim was extended in 1917 to include a sector of Antarctica reaching to the South Pole. In 1909, an administrative centre and residence were established at King Edward Point on South Georgia, near the whaling station of Grytviken. A permanent local British administration and resident magistrate exercised effective possession, enforcement of British law, and regulation of all economic, scientific, and other activities in the territory, which was then governed as the Falkland Islands Dependencies. In about 1912, what is according to some accounts the largest whale ever caught, a blue whale of 110 feet (34 m), was landed at Grytviken.
  In April 1916, Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition became stranded on Elephant Island, some 800 miles (1,300 km) southwest of South Georgia. Shackleton and five companions set out in a small boat to summon help, and on 10 May, after an epic voyage, they landed at King Haakon Bay on South Georgia's south coast. While three stayed at the coast, Shackleton and the two others, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley, went on to cover 22 miles (35 km) over the spine of the mountainous island to reach help at Stromness whaling station. The remaining 22 members of the expedition, who had stayed on Elephant Island, were subsequently rescued. In January 1922, during a later expedition, Shackleton died on board ship while moored in King Edward Cove, South Georgia. He is buried at Grytviken. The ashes of another noted Antarctic explorer, Frank Wild, who had been Shackleton's second-in-command on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, were interred next to Shackleton in 2011.
  Argentina claimed South Georgia in 1927. The basis of this claim, and of a later claim in 1938 to the South Sandwich Islands has been questioned. During the Second World War, the Royal Navy deployed an armed merchant vessel to patrol South Georgian and Antarctic waters against German raiders, along with two four-inch shore guns (still present) protecting Cumberland Bay and Stromness Bay, which were manned by volunteers from among the Norwegian whalers. The base at King Edward Point was expanded as a research facility in 1949/1950 by the British Antarctic Survey, which until 1962 was called the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey.
  The Falklands War was precipitated on 19 March 1982 wh
caption: South Georgia, photographed by Frank Hurley during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
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