To prevent scurvy, he urged de Gerlache to set an example by eating fresh seal and penguin meat, which the men detested. Shackleton especially was suffering badly from scurvy – but accounts of the trip that say he had to be carried on the sledge are incorrect. It was no good in snow, but proved useful for transporting loads across the sea ice. A separate Northern Party, led by Victor Campbell, discovered Oates Land (memorializing Lawrence Oates) and spent a winter of terrible privation in a snow cave at Terra Nova Bay on the Ross Sea’s western shore. On their third pass through the pack ice, Cook and his men landed on South Georgia, which he called the Isle of Georgia, and discovered the South Sandwich Islands. ‘Millions are being killed. Now a dangerous new threat had arisen. Despite attempts at ­plugging the hole and round-the-clock pumping, the ship continued to flood. He wrongly concluded that it must be an archipelago. Although Nordenskjöld’s expedition is remembered primarily for its survival against nearly overwhelming odds, it also performed the most important research in Antarctica (including studies in botany, geology, glaciology and hydrography) undertaken up to its time. Upon leaving the frozen southern seas for the last time, Cook wrote: Thick fogs, Snow storms, Intense Cold and every other thing that can render Navigation dangerous, one has to encounter and these difficulties are greatly heightned by the enexpressable horrid aspect of the Country, a Country doomed by Nature never once to feel the warmth of the Suns rays, but to lie for ever buried under everlasting snow and ice. He ordered his men to lay a trail of coal ash, supplemented by rotting food and other garbage, across the 600m of ice separating Gauss from open water. Arriving at Ross Island in January 1911, Scott found ice blocking the way to his old Discovery hut on Hut Point, so he established winter quarters at Cape Evans, named after his second-in-command, ERGR ‘Teddy’ Evans. On the last of these, Drygalski and his companions nearly were lost in the trackless white wasteland of snow-covered sea ice. By sailing through the straits that now bear his name, Magellan proved the southern land was not connected to South America, either, although it remained possible that it was attached to Tierra del Fuego. The seals in all these localities have been destroyed entirely by this indiscriminate killing of old and young, male and female. Scott’s last entry was dated March 29. If there were any remaining doubt how Cook felt about the prospects of a still-undiscovered Antarctica, he later underscored this opinion: ...whoever has resolution and perseverance to clear up this point by proceeding farther than I have done, I shall not envy him the honour of discovery, but I will be bold to say that the world will not be benefited by it. What’s remarkable about these discoveries is that their makers were disproving rather than proving the existence of a great southern land. These voyages were neither repeated nor widely known, however, and it was not until late in the 15th century that further progress was made on answering the question of Antarctica. Amundsen – and Scott, too – had by this time already reached the Pole, although Shirase, of course, could not know it. In AD 650, according to Rarotongan legend, a Polynesian navigator named Ui-te-Rangiora sailed so far south that he reached a place where the sea was frozen. Among the fossil evidence found in Antarctica that clearly supports the ­supercontinent theory is a deciduous conifer (Glossopteris), a fern (Dicroidium) and a terrestrial reptile (Lystrosaurus). In 1901 he declined the offer of a position on Scott’s expedition because he was in the midst of planning his own Scottish National Antarctic Expedition. The expedition had to abandon a score of dogs, eerily prefiguring the dogs marooned at Syowa station 46 years later. Six men had remained behind at the hut, hoping against hope that the missing party might return. Mertz died on January 7, when they were still more than 160km out. Ross may have been thinking of the Arctic islands and channels he knew well; perhaps sailing south and east would reveal a passage back toward the expected pole. Soon Endurance was squeezing through ever-narrower leads. Others have correctly pointed out that the Antarctic pack was known to be at its most navigable late in summer. Petty jealousy of some officers, coupled with his harsh shipboard discipline, entangled Wilkes in a messy trial in a Naval Court of Inquiry held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. By now his body was literally coming apart: hair falling out, toenails loosened, even the thick soles of his feet sloughing off. Following his return from the Discovery expedition, Shackleton married and fathered the first of his three children, at the same time holding a succession of jobs: magazine journalist, secretary of the Scottish Royal Geographical Society, (unsuccessful) candidate for Parliament and, finally, PR man for a big Glasgow steelworks. Drake discovered the passage now named for him, definitively proving that no southern continent was connected to either South America or Tierra del Fuego. By January 19, 1915, Endurance was caught. Although they hoped to fly from the Peninsula to the Ross Sea, bad weather made this impractical. Wilkes was hardly the last Antarctic explorer to be misled by the occurrence, and aerial photo-mapping has confirmed the integrity of his Antarctic cartography. Nearly 1000 years later, Europeans reached Antarctic waters. On November 16, either from a high lookout at Deception or from Hero’s masthead, he saw Trinity Island to the southeast and probably the Antarctic Peninsula beyond. Antarctica had been a part of " Gondwanaland " (an ancient super continent that was breaking up and doesn't exist any more) for about 200 million years. But on December 20, taking off again from Deception, they flew for 11 hours across the Peninsula and along its eastern side, covering 2100km and reaching as far as 71°20´S. As it is, however, seals in the Antarctic regions are practically extinct, and I have given up the business as unprofitable. Shooting seals in the water is the most destructive method of taking them as compared with the number of skins we have to show for our work. Greed was the watchword as the sealing gangs slaughtered without thought for the future. ), which he had once christened his toy boats as a child. Despite initial optimism and a large food depot laid by an advance party, the trio soon struck harsh reality, Antarctica-style. Actually, Scott and Wilson reached that point, Shackleton having been ordered to remain at camp that morning to look after the dogs. Amundsen claimed the polar plateau for Norway, calling it King Haakon VII Land, and wrote a note to Scott in the dark green tent he left behind. English merchant Captain William Smith (1790–1847), sailing in the British ship Williams in early 1819, set a course well south of Cape Horn while bound for Valparaiso, Chile, probably to avoid difficult winds. The expedition was also riven by a deep divide caused by the ship’s captain, Richard Vahsel, who was suffering from syphilis. Heavy ice, meanwhile, slowed Wyatt Earp, which arrived four days later. WWII interrupted the plans of many explorers, although a secret Nazi expedition in 1938–39, led by Alfred Ritscher, was dispatched to Antarctica by Field Marshal Hermann Göring. Filchner led a three-man party on a dangerous midwinter dog-sledging trip over 65km of sea ice to the charted location of ‘New South Greenland, ’ which American sealer Benjamin Morrell claimed to have sighted in 1823. Ross reacted quickly, changing his plans to a more easterly longitude for the push south. After three failed rescue attempts over the next four months, Shackleton enlisted the help of Yelcho, a steamer lent by the Chilean government, and was finally able to pick up all 22 men stranded at Elephant Island on August 30. On October 18, he sighted the island now named for him (Smith Island). Cook, who had been on the North Greenland Expedition with Robert E Peary in 1891 and returned to Greenland twice more in the next three years, is probably responsible for saving the ship. The history of Antarctica goes back 175 million years when the Pangea supercontinent broke up and the landmass which became Antarctica separated from its neighbors, Africa, India, and Australia. Australia, meanwhile, urged on by Douglas Mawson and John King Davis, dispatched a ‘rescue’ attempt, although Wilkins and Wyatt Earp had already made detailed plans to pick up Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon at the Bay of Whales after their flight. (Charcot had secured a pre­nuptial agreement from her that she would not oppose his explorations.). (Today the Pole is offshore in the Dumont d’Urville Sea, and Antarctic tour ships routinely sail over it.) Seven Antarctic territorial claims still … Although Bruce later became a world authority on Spitsbergen in the Arctic, he must have retained a special love for the Antarctic. By January 9, 1909, the foursome had trudged to within 180km of the Pole before being forced by dangerously dwindling supplies of food to turn and run for home. He also made the first flight in Antarctica, on February 4, 1902, in a tethered balloon called Eva. After surviving a horrifying storm among ice fragments as ‘hard as floating rocks of granite’ that nearly destroyed the rudders of both ships, they met an even greater hazard. The first expedition to Antarctica with travelers was in 1966, led by Swedish explorer Lars Eric Lindblad. Amundsen quickly – secretly – turned his ambitions 180°. On November 28, a field party working in the Queen Maud Mountains far to the south radioed Little America that the weather was clear. we use cookies to improve your experience on our website. De Gerlache’s son, Gaston de Gerlache, joined the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1957–59. The next morning, deeply disappointed to find himself among the living, Oates walked out of the tent in a raging blizzard, telling his companions, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ Another blizzard kept the three remaining men in their tent from March 21 onwards. Bellingshausen sighted a landlike mass of ice, possibly the shelf edge of continental ice, on January 27; Bransfield caught sight of land on January 30 that the British later considered to be a mainland part of the Antarctic Peninsula; and on November 18 Palmer unequivocally saw the mainland-peninsula side of Orleans Strait. Tens of thousands of aerial photographs were taken along nearly three-quarters of the continent’s coast, although their usefulness for mapmaking was limited by a lack of ground surveys. The British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Vivian Fuchs, was the first to cross the continent overland. Since nothing had been heard of the Swedish expedition, three search parties had been dispatched. Another Connecticut sealer, George Comer of East Haddam, testified to the Congress in the same year about the enormous waste of life involved in sealing: In the first part of a season we never disturbed the rookeries we visited, always letting the seals come on shore; then we would kill them on land with clubs or rifles. Continuing south, Bransfield sighted the Antarctic Peninsula on January 30, 1820, calling it Trinity Land. If mortal fear was not enough to dissuade would-be discoverers, perhaps eternal damnation did the trick, for the Catholic Church found the idea of a southern continent – with its own population, and thus its own separate relationship with God – unacceptable. Sailing west, Filchner reached new territory, calling it ‘Prinz Regent Luitpold Land’ (now Luitpold Coast). The winter passed fairly quietly otherwise, the group’s accommodations made cheerier by another Antarctic first – electric lights (powered by a windmill). By early February, the expedition had discovered and mapped the strait which now bears de Gerlache’s name on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, as well as the islands on the west side of that strait: Brabant, Liège, Anvers and Wiencke. Although the kayak never became an important mode of Antarctic transportation, the Primus was carried by nearly every expedition that followed Borchgrevink’s. update your settings The bowsprit – the last mast-top – She is gone! Borchgrevink brought 90 sledge dogs, the first ever used in Antarctica. Yorkshireman James Cook (1728–79), once apprenticed to a shopkeeper, was the widest-ranging explorer who ever lived. Around 200 million years ago, Antarctica was joined with Australia, Africa, South America, India and New Zealand in the supercontinent Gondwana. In later years, Palmer claimed that he had found the Antarctic continent, calling his discovery Palmer Land. The events that followed have grown to legend, becoming nearly as famous as the story of Scott’s last expedition. He went on to lead four more Antarctic expeditions including the second USAE of 1933-35 (during which he nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning while living alone at a tiny weather station called Advance Base) and the massive US Government exercise known as Operation Highjump. The world is mad.’ That night a whaler was dispatched to pick up the three men left behind at King Haakon Bay. During the early Jurassic (around 200 myr ago) oceanic crust began to subduct beneath the Pacific margin of Gondwana. Further exploration of Antarctica was carried out by an American named Charles Wilkes i… Most useful for this survey work was a small, iron-prowed motorboat carried in Pourquoi Pas?. Perhaps they knew something Wilkes didn’t, for this inauspicious beginning foretold great hardship for the expedition. He died in Norway four years later. They crossed the Antarctic Circle on January 17, 1773, becoming the first people to do so, and crossed it twice again without ever sighting land, despite pushing to a record 71°10´S. Their return home was a haunting, desperate run of barely sighted depots, slow starvation and incredible cold. Today, only geological formations, coal beds, and fossils remain as clues to Antarctica’s warm past. Explorers first skimmed the boundaries of Antarctica on sea voyages. Because early explorers confronted extreme obstacles and debilitating conditions, this period of time became known as the Heroic Age. Drygalski and 31 other men sailed from Kiel on August 11, 1901, in Gauss, a three-masted schooner with auxiliary engines. Four men – Byrd as navigator; Bernt Balchen, chief pilot; Harold June, second pilot and radio operator; and Ashley McKinley, photo surveyor – climbed into the big Ford trimotor. Larsen also found petrified wood on Seymour Island. The peace was marred only by the death of the ship’s pet pig, Toby, who once ate a basketful of fish – and the hooks that caught them. On August 15, 1908, he again sailed from Le Havre, this time in the newly built and amusingly named Pourquoi Pas? It took nearly 120 years and the start of the Cold War before his accomplishments were fully appreciated – by a Soviet Union newly anxious to assert its right to authority in the Antarctic. In 1831, as second-in-command of a voyage led by his uncle, John Ross, he located the North Magnetic Pole. 350 B.C. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wired his thanks, but the expedition was told to proceed. Norwegian Carl Anton Larsen (1860–1924) went to sea at age 14, and at 25 became master of his first whaling ship. Aged 40, he undertook the first of his three great voyages. Scientists have discovered new microorganism in the ice core of Antarctica, which may throw new … There, Shirase claimed all the area of the Ross Ice Shelf within sight as the ‘Yamato Yukihara, ’ or ‘Yamato Snow Plain’ (‘Yamato’ being a poetical name for Japan). For the final push to the Pole, Scott had chosen his companion on his previous journey furthest south, Edward Wilson, along with Lawrence Oates and Edgar Evans. Although legend had told of a vast southern land referred to as Terra Australis since the 1st century AD, the first sighting of Antarctica is invariably attributed to Imperial Russian Navy captain Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen in 1820, with Captain James Cook having missing the continent by only 75 miles in 1773. Poor weather confined the Snow Hill party to its small hut for most of the winter, but in December Nordenskjöld was able to sledge to Seymour Island, directly north of Snow Hill, where he found some striking fossils – including the bones of a giant penguin – bolstering earlier fossil finds made on the island by Larsen in 1893. During this, the first time anyone had wintered south of the Antarctic Circle, the expedition underwent great hardships: midwinter darkness toyed with the men’s sanity, and the lack of vitamin C made them ripe for scurvy. Following this unnerving crash, the ships again reached the Barrier. The term Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the Arctic Circle, was coined by Marinus of Tyre in the 2nd century AD. After a month’s recuperation, the four ships sailed south again on December 26, with Wilkes commanding Vincennes. Two months were spent charting the South Shetlands. Less than two years later, Dumont d’Urville, his wife, and their son Jules were killed in a train derailment as they returned from Versailles to Paris on May 8, 1842. It was a landmark agreement in the history of the Antarctic Treaty. Byrd and the others eventually rescued the stranded party. Not until 1930 did the Royal Geographical Society award Borchgrevink its Patron’s Medal. Antarctica is the Earth's southernmost continent, roughly centered around the South Pole. Over time, this supercontinent broke apart, and the … After joining the Royal Navy at the tender age of 11, Ross went on to a career of Arctic discovery. It met Amundsen’s expedition at the Bay of Whales on the Ross Ice Shelf. The primary achievement of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition – surviving the first Antarctic night – proved that bases could be set up on the continent itself, enabling a full-time program of exploration. Finding no seals, they steered east, and on December 6, 1821, sighted a large island of a new group. The latter part of the heroic age centred on the race for the South Pole and other Antarctic firsts. Elephant seals grow to massive sizes, particularly males, but the sealers found ‘sea elephants’ easy prey. Aside from Hansen’s death, there were other accidents – including a nearly disastrous fire and a narrow escape from coal-fume asphyxiation – but the expedition escaped the dietary and psychological dangers experienced by Belgica’s crew. The ancient Greeks, beginning with Pythagoras in about 530 BC, believed the earth to be round. Europe is mad. Although no one had previously penetrated further than a kilometer or so from the coast, Shackleton had no choice but to try to cross the island. Midwinter’s Day (June 22) 1903 was celebrated with a barrel of Guinness porter, a brew made more potent by the freezing of its water, unintentionally yielding concentrated alcohol. He was buried on the ridge above Cape Adare. Frenchman Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville (1790–1842) was a veteran of two circumnavigations (and fluent in English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish), when he sailed from Toulon in 1837 with Astrolabe and Zélée, clad in copper for protection from the ice. Shackleton and his men lived on the pack ice for five months before they sailed three small boats to Elephant Island. Despite the Japanese public’s outright scorn of his fundraising efforts, Shirase organized an Antarctic expedition in 1910. Shackleton himself lived to mount a final assault on the Antarctic, the ill-defined Quest expedition. When they separated, each ship still faced great danger: Erebus, now just 8m from the giant berg, somehow managed to slip past. A map he drew c AD 150 showed a large continent linking Africa and Asia. At Antarctic’s helm was Larsen, the Norwegian who had already discovered Oscar II Land during a previous expedition in 1892–94. The 10 men left behind were some of the most solitary in history, having the entire Antarctic continent to themselves. In 1819 Czar Alexander I dispatched Bellingshausen on a voyage to the Southern Ocean, a dream assignment for Bellingshausen, who had long admired Cook’s voyages. He and two of the six men who had sailed James Caird with him, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley, hiked for 36 straight hours over the 1800m-high mountains and crevassed glaciers to reach Stromness whaling station. A month later, Oates was in such bad shape that he prayed not to wake upon retiring. In Hobart, Ross heard troubling news: both Wilkes and Dumont d’Urville were exploring the area in which he intended to search for the magnetic pole. The massive ice shelf, which today extends nearly 290km out to sea, convinced him that it was time to head home, which he did on February 21. To really explore the continent's history, we have to go back far before Cook first crossed the Antarctic Circle. One of his midshipmen, quoted in the Literary Gazette and Journal of Belle Lettres, called it ‘a prospect the most gloomy that can be imagined…the only cheer the sight afforded was in the idea that this might be the long-sought Southern Continent.’ They surveyed the islands along it for another 20 days before being stopped by pack ice and turning north. American Lincoln Ellsworth (1880–1951), scion of a wealthy Pennsylvania coal-mining family, had whetted his appetite for polar exploration in 1925, when he made the first flight toward the North Pole with Roald Amundsen. To avoid instant collision with one of the bergs, each ship put the helm over hard, but they crashed into one another. The Ancient Greeks supposed that such a continent could exist - it was a lucky guess, based mostly on the assumption that there had to be some land mass to balance out the northern continents. He later supported Lincoln Ellsworth with his flights over Antarctica. 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