In 2016, Sandy Winterbottom stood in front of a teenager’s grave on the freezing island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic, 1400km east of the Falkland Islands. According to the slate label on his small white cross, Antony Ford was only 19 when he died there in 1952.
Beyond the cemetery sprawled a derelict factory, the Leith Harbour Whaling Station, empty for half a century when Winterbottom found it, sold off in the 1960s by a giant Scottish whaling company.
The vast eyesore was an unsettling reminder that South Georgia had once been the world’s largest whaling centre, and one of the reasons why, to Winterbottom, the seas of the South Atlantic seemed so empty. The station was named after a port district in Edinburgh, home of Christian Salvesen, the tycoon who built it in 1909. According to his grave inscription, Edinburgh had also produced young Antony Ford.
An environmental activist, Winterbottom had also been living in Scotland, and had been looking forward to a holiday in the pristine wilderness of the South Atlantic: six weeks crewing on board the three-masted, rigged barque Europa on a voyage from Uruguay to Antarctica, returning via the treacherous Drake Passage.
The ugly sprawl of the vast, rusting whaling station amid the stark beauty of South Georgia had come as a shock. The killing of whales had always sickened her, but she wondered about the boy, the same age as her son, buried in such a remote location, a whaler’s cemetery fenced to keep out the seals. What had happened to him?
Winterbottom did some digging, and learned the grave inscriber’s mistakes: the dead boy was Anthony, not Antony, and he died at 18, not 19. His brief life propels her book, an account of her own voyage spliced with an imagined description of Ford’s bloody years aboard a whaling factory ship, beginning when he was 15.
“I felt so pierced by Anthony’s grave; the image of it had lodged under my skin. I’d imagined the whalers as hardy men with little compassion, killing and slaughtering their way through dwindling communities of every kind of whale. But then, there he was. A teenager. How on Earth had he ended up in the thin soil of this place?”
Not everyone will enjoy Winterbottom’s mingling of such different eras of fact and fact-based fiction but it is skilfully done.
At the heart of the book is her discovery that the industrial-scale savagery of Christian Salvesen Ltd didn’t end at whales, but also engulfed the men who worked so hard to keep it in profit. The company refused, for example, to evacuate injured men, despite the pleadings of a doctor who arrived to find that a clinic at Leith Harbour had only eight beds for a station of 600 men. No surprise that the settlement required two cemeteries.
The two-headed whale of the title, a genuine whale mutant, echoes the author’s changing way of thinking about the environment, and the industries that damage it. Within her travelogue is the revealing answer to a human mystery, and also an elegy for the wrecked seas of the Antarctic, Salvesen’s cetacean victims, and the men and boys who slaughtered them.
