The history of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands is relatively recent. When European explorers found the islands, they were uninhabited, and their hostile climate, mountainous terrain, and remoteness made subsequent settlement difficult. Due to these setbacks, human activity in the islands has largely consisted of sealing, whaling, and scientific surveys and research, interrupted by World War II and the Falklands War.
Read more about History Of South Georgia And The South Sandwich Islands: 16th To 19th Century, 20th Century, Recent History, South Sandwich Islands, Old Maps
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“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The result of civilization, at the Sandwich Islands and elsewhere, is found productive to the civilizers, destructive to the civilizees. It is said to be compensation—a very philosophical word; but it appears to be very much on the principle of the old game, “You lose, I win”: good philosophy for the winner.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“we are so many
and many within themselves
travel to far islands but no one
asks for their story....”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)