Talking Location With… author Sharon Bolton – South Georgia

22nd June 2020

#TalkingLocationWith... Sharon Bolton, author of The Split, set in South Georgia

In 2015 I published Little Black Lies, a story about guilt and grief, and whether love and friendship can withstand the trials of both. As far as I’m aware it was the first, and still the only, novel set in the Falkland Islands, a very small British protectorate in the South Atlantic. It involved a lot of research, because I don’t know that part of the world at all, and I spent many months reading books, poring over maps, watching videos and following social media channels. In doing so, I came across South Georgia, another British island, some four hundred miles closer to the Antarctic than the Falkland Islands and was immediately intrigued.

South Georgia island is a speck (especially compared to the vast continents of Antarctica and South America) just over a thousand square miles of gorges, mountains and glaciers and surrounded by the most forbidding and treacherous ocean on the planet.

Captain James Cook was one of the first to set (human) eyes on the place. Describing it, he said: “Lands doomed by nature to perpetual frigidness: never to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays; whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe.”

Captain Cook, it would appear, was not impressed. And yet South Georgia is a land of incomparable beauty: snow-capped peaks, silver ice, glacier lakes like liquid sapphires. In fairness, it’s also one of the most hostile and dangerous places on earth. Storms sweep in from nowhere, bergs the size of cities collapse without warning into the ocean, and a hike into the hills could see you tumbling into the deepest of fissures.

For most of its human history, South Georgia lay at the heart of the whaling industry in the southern hemisphere, at one time boasting four active whaling stations. Hundreds of thousands of whales of every species were hunted and slaughtered here, to provide the whale oil demanded by the industrialised countries of the north. It is safe to say that South Georgia is largely responsible for the near extinction of whales in the South Atlantic and, to this day, the populations are proving slow to recover.

Much of the action in The Split is centred around Grytviken, the former whaling station, now a tangled and treacherous heap of rotting iron. At its commercial height, hundreds of men worked in Grytviken and I like to think each left something of himself behind: a rusting tin of tobacco, a forgotten pair of blood-stained gloves, the broken picture of a loved one. Unearthly sounds pierce the air after nightfall in Grytviken. Was that the wind singing around the old oil tanks, or the echo of a flensing tool being sharpened?

Grim history aside, whales aside, in recent years the island has become again what it was always destined to be – a wildlife paradise. Over two million fur seals, some ninety-five per cent of the world’s population, live here in the summer, as well as over half the world’s population of elephant seals, and four types of albatross. This is good news, of course, but the derelict whaling stations remain, a stark reminder of how mankind can devastate even the most perfect of places.

The more I learned about South Georgia, the more I read, the more pictures I saw, it struck me as being at the same time, both incredibly beautiful and completely polluted by mankind at its worst. It’s four days sail from the closest human settlement, there are no airports, or any sort of road infrastructure. In the winter, there are only around a dozen people living there and the weather can be merciless.

Could there be a better location for a thriller?

Here are some of my favourite facts about South Georgia:

• Captain James Cook claimed South Georgia for Britain in 1775. Since claimed by Argentina, it remains a British territory.

• Sir Ernest Shackleton crossed 800 miles of South Georgia’s interior in 1916 after a failed and nearly fatal attempt to cross the Antarctic. He later (1922) died on the island and is buried at Grytviken.

• The island was the site of military occupation during the 1982 Falklands War and of the southernmost battle ever fought: Operation Paraquat. The British garrison, established after the war, was decommissioned in 2001.

• It is possible to get married in the tiny chapel at Grytviken and one or two weddings a year take place here.

• After a long rat extermination effort South Georgia was declared rat free in 2018.

• South Georgia boasts the highest British mountain: in Mt Paget at 2934m (Ben Nevis is 1345 m)

• No landing strip exists on the island, so all visitors come by boat. It is one of the least visited places on earth.

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Thank you so much to Sharon for this exceptionally fascinating insight into a little known part of the world.

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