The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 76

died. Everyone died, because those that did not perish from boils or fever or dehydration, turning blue-black and sinking flat from hopelessness, were then killed by outsiders afraid of contamination. We argued the matter and concluded miserably. It might be the plague. It might not be. And I note here that we were never to be sure. What was crucial then was that if it was out there, it was at the seaports where they—the beasties, the outcasts, the exiles, the self-named damned—crowded and scratched for food in competition with the chief predator of human detritus, the rat, the rat that carried the flea that carried the bacterium that was the plague. Bubonic to pneumonic or septicemic, I know the difference now and it does not signify, as it did not then; plague was plague, horrible and sure, the end result of a breakdown in civilization, what Grandfather called the darkness. If it was out there, it was Otter Ransom’s bitter opinion, it would be only time and accident until it reached South Georgia.

The leadership could not keep Germanicus’s discovery secret. Precaution and panic at the rumor of plague damaged the life of the island over the following year. The South Georgians had endured defeat, massacre, starvation, increasingly brutal winters as the ice pack seemed to creep north each year, even the cholera that drove the Volunteers from Port Stanley. The plague was profoundly different for them. It was an antediluvian foe, merciless, sudden. It was also a biblical curse. The South Georgians were a seafaring people, enjoying the bounty of and the crash of the weather and sea, a volatile mixture of God-fearing stoics and blasphemous doubters. They did know their Bible. They were at elemental extremes. The plague, the rumor of plague, was for them less to be explained by Lazarus’s talk of the results of political tyranny in overcrowded lands torn apart by racial and religious and economic fears than it was to be explained simply and dreadfully as a judgment of Longfaeroe’s Jehovah. Even the doubters like the sealers, like Christmas Muir, who said they had no time to be Christian, were touched by the shadow of plague. There was a terror and completeness to it that they could not block out with their hard-mindedness. The Patties they could fight with blood. The cholera they could fight with sanitation. The cold they could fight with expertise. The starvation they could fight with rationing and summer dashes to Africa for grain, vegetables, fruit. But the plague, the rumor of plague, it rocked them. They knew it could be fought, but it was in their minds long before it could have been in their bodies, and there it wrecked more havoc to reason than it might ever have done to their health, there it made the defiant feel doomed in their stand, there it made them abandon decency for cruel decisions. I am not saying they were the toughest people who ever gripped the earth or sailed the seas, but they were heirs of that lot, and it was not enough.

South Georgia is a one-hundred-and-forty-mile-long aquamarine rock, mountainous, heath-mantled, treeless, wind-scourged, battered by the stone-gray seas of what the sealers called the “filthy fifties.” This might sound desolate. It is, but also astonishing, haunting—misty blue peaks capped year-long with snow, naked heath laced with green fingers of fresh water. It is never more than ten miles wide except at its fat southern end, Cape Disappointment. It lies in a sailing arc between Cape Horn, a thousand miles upwind, and the Cape of Good Hope, twenty-five hundred miles downwind. In summer, it is gale-tossed, drenched, humid, at once sun-touched and cloud-tipped. In winter, it is deadly cold, dark gray, usually several hundred miles beyond the limit of the pack ice. In spring and fall, it enjoys violent changes of weather, is scraped by the passing of bergy bits and, in the spring, an occasional passing of an enormous ice island calved from the Antarctic ice shelf. At least that was the case for my first five years there. South Georgia’s weather is usually determined by the fact that it sits atop the Scotia Ridge that surrounds the Scotia Sea, a bottomless, ice-clogged cauldron suited for whales and storms and little else. As Christmas Muir said, it is the sort of sea one could understand God granting the Scots.

The spine of South Georgia is a sharp-peaked hornstone mountain range cut intermittently by craggy ravines pitted with caves through which the wind rushes year-long. That island could sing; it could also scream. The main settlement, Grytviken, was on the lee shore, on the vast Cumberland Bay, and consisted of stone and sod and imported wood-built houses tumbled atop each other, a smooth plateau that was the marketplace, several wharfs and many warehouses surrounding the sprawling whaling factory that was the primary industry of the island, and a half-built submarine pen down the bay left over from the Second World War.

Grytviken grew quickly and out of proportion after the defeat in the Falklands brought several thousand exiles to the island. The new town was renamed Gaunttown for the dead Luff Gaunt Senior, who had been the patriarch of the island. It was surrounded with gunposts and a series of watchtowers on the cliffsides. The Frazer camp was south of Gaunttown, and up. My shepherd’s hut was a few miles farther along a trail, in a natural amphitheater opening to the buffeted mountains of the western shoreline. The other settlements were on the southern shore at Cape Disappointment, mostly sour fisherman and old whalers and sealers, and on the northeastern shore, Shagrock, where Orlando the Black commanded a small group of sealers and evacuees from the Falklands.

After the rumor of plague, the leadership divided the island into precincts, arranging them according to priority for defense and for carrying on fishing and shepherding. All able-bodied men and boys were conscripted Volunteers. After my baptism, I was presumed recovered from my malady, and I