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  James Weddell with his ships reached a ‘furthest south’ in 1823 while seal-hunting and exploring in what became known as the Weddell Sea. Aquatint after WJ Huggins, October 1826.

  The main Antarctic Barrier ice and bergs are of fresh water, being formed originally from compacted snow. The seasonal pack ice, which is far more dynamic in its movement and covers the greatest area, forms by a complex process from seawater into sheets of up to about 15cm thick (6 inches), rising to about 1.8 metres (6 feet) or more if it survives for more than two years. By the time it has lasted three years it is ‘old ice’ and has lost its surface salinity, providing good drinking water. The mainland lies almost entirely within the Antarctic Circle (66° 33’ south, the outer limit of 24-hour polar daylight in summer and darkness in winter) but the winter pack – at maximum extent in August and September – reaches north to latitude 54° in the Atlantic, 56–59° in the Indian Ocean sector and 60–63° in the Pacific, the Antarctic Convergence in both the last two being further south. At 60 nautical miles (112km) to each degree and expanding in all directions northwards, these are vast areas and can be greater in a severe season. Seen from space, the winter area of the Antarctic ice can practically double. However, there are astonishing variations, famously exemplified by the Scottish sealer James Weddell’s penetration of the sea that bears his name in 1823, when he reached just over 74° south without encountering significant ice at all.

  A 1754 chart of the southern Pacific, including an inset speculating about the size and shape of Antarctica, by Philippe Buache.

  Linear distances are also daunting. The tip of the Peninsula is 965km (600 miles) south of Cape Horn across the stormy Drake Passage but, isolated islands apart, New Zealand is the next closest land at 3,380km (2,100 miles) away. South Africa is some 4,020km (2,500 miles) away and the south coast of Australia around 3,700km (2,300 miles). Lesser and Greater Antarctica together, measured west to east through the Transantarctic range, are about 4,500km (2,800 miles) across at their widest. The narrow land neck connecting them between the Ross and Weddell seas is under 965km (600 miles), excluding the ice shelves, which make the sea-to-sea distance far wider.

  Looking south

  Terra Australis recenter inventa sed nondum plene cognita. This optimistic Latin description, meaning ‘Southern Land recently discovered but not yet fully known’, first appeared on an imagined map of Antarctica in 1531. Its basis was twofold: a belief inherited from Classical times that an icy southern zone must exist to ‘balance’ the cold northern regions, and Magellan’s passage in 1520 through the southern straits that now bear his name, during the first voyage round the world. This left the false impression that Tierra del Fuego was the tip of something much bigger. Somewhere in the preceding centuries the Classical notion of ‘Terra Australis’ being icy transformed into the idea that it was a more temperate ‘counterweight’ to northern lands and a potentially rich prize for its discoverers.

  During the Golden Hind’s circumnavigation of 1577–1580, Francis Drake was driven well south of Cape Horn in 1578 into what is now the Drake Passage and clearly reported wide open seas and ‘no maine or iland to be seen to the southwards’. However, neither this nor later southern island discoveries dislodged the myth of a temperate polar continent until the 1770s.

  Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific, 1772–1774, searched for a ‘Southern Continent’, reaching a furthest south of lat. 71° 10’. Painting by Nathaniel Dance, 1776.

  In that era of European commercial, colonial and finally ideological warfare, scientific navigation came into its own as a tool by which new lands could be found, fixed, claimed and drawn into an imperial embrace. Britain and France were the new contenders, with Spain defending a long-standing oceanic empire. In 1768–1770 Lieutenant James Cook’s scientific Endeavour voyage to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti also charted New Zealand. The expedition proved that its two islands were no part of a polar continent, as Tasman had done for Australia in the early 1640s. With a recent history of both Spanish and French activity in southern latitudes, the government then decided to send Cook to resolve the ‘Southern Continent’ issue for good and, if it existed, claim it for Britain. Armed this time with a copy of John Harrison’s newly perfected chronometer, to fix accurate longitude at sea, Cook’s ships Resolution and Adventure spent the two antipodean summers of 1772–1774 pushing as far south as ice, fog, and endurance would allow.

  It was the first modern Antarctic expedition. Cook approached from the Atlantic and Pacific, circumnavigating the continent without seeing it, though coming almost within sight at his most southerly point, latitude 71° 10’, in 1773–1774. This latitude was not reached again in that area until 1959–1960. He returned with the first detailed account of pack ice and ‘ice islands’ (icebergs) and a belief that a cold land mass entirely within the 60th parallel south was their likely source. Based on his discovery of desolate South Georgia in 1775, he also said, with native Yorkshire pragmatism, that it might not be worth finding.

  Cook died on Hawaii in 1779, with France already at war with Britain, and remaining so until 1783 as an ally of the American rebels. The French Revolutionary War began in 1793 and it was not until after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 that the Royal Navy began to think again of polar exploration. It had by then established a Hydrographic Office (in 1795) to make official charts and had a large number of underemployed younger officers seeking peacetime opportunities for glory. The period 1823–1854, with Francis Beaufort as Hydrographer (of the Beaufort Scale of wind speeds fame), proved to be one of great Royal Naval surveying. It was also one of Arctic exploration, as naval expeditions – the first in 1818 – revived the 16th-century quest for a North-West Passage around Canada, between the Atlantic and Pacific. From 1847 this effectively became a series of search parties (not all British or official) to discover the fate of Captain Sir John Franklin’s 129-man expedition, which had left on the same quest in 1845 in Her Majesty’s ships Erebus and Terror, and vanished without trace. The total loss of Franklin’s party was only confirmed in 1859 and though in the process an icebound North-West Passage was found in 1850 by Robert McClure, it proved impassable to large sailing ships. Amundsen would be the first to sail through in the small Gjøa in 1903–1906. The last major Royal Naval Arctic expedition was one that tried to reach the North Pole by sea in 1875–1876 under Captain Sir George Nares, who had already seen Antarctic waters. Sledges attained 83° 20’ north, but the Navy then rightly concluded there was no sea passage to the Pole and Arctic discovery was largely left to other nations and private interests.

  Gathering fresh water from ‘ice islands’ (icebergs) in the South Atlantic on Cook’s second voyage, 9 January 1773. Engraving after William Hodges, 1777.

  Cook’s chart of the southern hemisphere, published in 1777 after his second voyage. In contrast to Buache’s 1754 chart (here), it shows his thoroughness in trying to locate a southern continent.

  There is some doubt on who first sighted the ‘Antarctic continent’, a phrase first speculatively used by Lieutenant Samuel Wilkes, who was commodore of a five-ship American naval expedition in 1838. The question, as Ross pointed out a few years later, was still ‘is there a continent at all?’ The two contenders are Lieutenant Thaddeus Bellingshausen of the Imperial Russian Navy, who went south in 1819–1821 with two ships and orders to make discoveries as close as possible to the Pole, and the British Royal Naval master Edward Bransfield. The disputed honour, by two days on 28 January 1820, may have been Bellingshausen’s but he never made such a claim and his thorough work – which clarified what Cook had seen of the Antarctic islands, especially South Georgia and the South Sandwich group – was little noticed after his return.

  At the same time commercial sealers, tipped off by Cook’s reports, were already beginning to decimate the fur seal population from South Georgia to the South Shetlands. The latter were discovered in 1819 by William Smith, a British sealer, and Bransfield returned with him in January
1820, claiming them for Britain. On 30 January he sighted the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and he was certainly the first to chart part of the mainland. In 1822–1824 the sealer James Weddell found unusually open water far into what he called the ‘Sea of George IV’ – now the Weddell Sea – but sealing became uneconomic in the 1830s and it was the whalers who made the next scientific contributions.

  Captain James Clark Ross was a successful Arctic explorer before commanding a four-year Antarctic expedition, 1839–1843. Painting by John R Wildman, 1834.

  The most notable of many was the firm of Samuel Enderby and Son, based at Greenwich from 1834, who had opened up the British South Pacific whale fishery as far back as 1775. The Enderbys’ was a successful concern, promoting discovery well beyond commercial justification because of their personal scientific interests. One of their captains, John Biscoe, circumnavigated Antarctica in 1831–1832 with the ships Tula and Lively, sighting and naming Enderby Land and further defining the west coast of the Peninsula, whose northern end he called Graham Land. Other Enderby discoveries followed but by the time of Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 a combination of scientific interest and the whaling potential had revived official involvement.

  Over the next two years there were three naval expeditions in Antarctica: French, British and American. The first was under Captain Dumont d’Urville, and the second Captain Sir James Clark Ross, who had reached the North Magnetic Pole in 1831. Both aimed at finding the North Magnetic Pole’s southern equivalent but were unsuccessful. (This was only first done in 1909, though not permanently, since the magnetic poles migrate.) Dumont D’Urville found the mainland coast in longitudes 120–160˚ east, naming it Terre Adélie after his wife and, more indirectly, its inhabitants – the Adélie penguins. Extraordinarily, he met but did not speak with the Porpoise of Samuel Wilkes’s ill-equipped American Pacific expedition, which spent two difficult seasons investigating the southern whale fishery and also charted the coast now named after him.

  Ross’s hand-picked Royal Naval party of 1839–1841 and 1842–1843 was by contrast very well-found, sailing in two specially strengthened ships – Erebus and Terror – which were later to vanish with Franklin. Their first two seasons were the most productive, especially from January 1841 when Ross discovered and claimed the coast of what is now the Ross Dependency, with the Ross Sea and ice shelf (or ‘Great Ice Barrier’). Here he named many of the features that were to become familiar in the saga of Scott and Amundsen. These included Possession Island, Cape Adare on the eastern side of the Ross Sea, the volcanoes Mounts Erebus and Terror on Ross Island (the former being active), and the sheltered McMurdo Sound, which lies between there and the mainland. Ross’s discoveries made his Antarctic expedition the most important of the century and there is a strange irony in his ships’ disappearance so soon afterwards in its greatest Arctic disaster.

  Ross’s success notwithstanding, the fragments of coast, ice and offshore islands so far discovered did not add up to proof of a single southern land mass. This remained the case until after the round-the-world oceanographic research voyage of HMS Challenger, under George Nares, in 1872–1876. Challenger’s brief foray into the Antarctic in 1874 was a minor part of her programme but she was the first steam vessel to cross the Antarctic Circle (66° 33’ south) and while Nares did not see the mainland, the deep-sea geological samples he brought home proved to be of inland continental origin, dropped out to sea by ancient glacial movement.

  HMS Erebus and Terror passing Beaufort Island and Mount Erebus, 28 January 1841. Later, Mt Erebus became the backdrop for the huts built by Scott and Shackleton. Watercolour by JE Davis, 1841.

  HMS Challenger with icebergs in the background. Her Antarctic circumglobal expedition (1872–1876) laid the scientific foundations for future expeditions. Lithograph, 1 December 1880.

  One of the first photographs of Antarctic ‘tabular’ icebergs taken from HMS Challenger during her global scientific circumnavigation. Unknown photographer, February 1874.

  During the next 20 years a few whalers went south into that region. The northern fishery was becoming exhausted, but with steam and the Norwegian Svend Foyn’s invention of the harpoon gun revolutionising the industry, it looked southwards once again. On the east of the Antarctic Peninsula the Larsen Ice Shelf commemorates the Norwegian whaling captain who discovered much of the area and whose reports persuaded Foyn in 1894 to back a further voyage by Henrik Bull in the whaler Antarctic. On 24 January 1895, Bull and his men were the first to make a confirmed landing on the continent proper, near Cape Adare. One of them was a young Norwegian seaman and childhood friend of Amundsen called Carsten Borchgrevink. In 1898 his so-called ‘British Antarctic Expedition’ was landed at Cape Adare from the whaler Southern Cross, to become the first to pass a winter on the mainland. Despite its name – required by its British sponsor, the publisher Sir George Newnes – Borchgrevink’s party was largely Norwegian, and one of them died while ashore. When their ship collected them in January 1900, they briefly went further south. Here Borchgrevink, the English Lieutenant Colbeck and the Finnish dog handler Per Savio sledged 16km (10 miles) over the Ross Ice Shelf to 78° 50’ south, the nearest to the Pole yet reached by man. The first ship to winter in the Antarctic – the Belgica under the Belgian Lieutenant Adrien de Gerlache – had then already done so too, but by accident. In 1898–1899 it was trapped for a year in the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea, west of the Antarctic Peninsula. This was a terrible experience for all concerned, including the Norwegian second mate, Roald Amundsen.

  William Colbeck went to the Antarctic three times between 1898 and 1904. He flew his Pirate Yacht Club burgee when he, Borchgrevink and Savio reached a furthest south on 17 February 1900.

  The Belgian exploration ship Belgica trapped in the ice in the Bellingshausen Sea, where the crew were forced to overwinter in 1898. Photograph by FA Cook, 20 May 1898.

  At the same time, money was being raised in London to launch what would be Scott’s first expedition of 1901 in the Discovery. The moving spirit was Sir Clements Markham, President of the Royal Geographical Society since 1893, but as a former naval officer also a veteran of both the Franklin search (under Horatio Austin in HMS Assistance, 1850–1851) and Nares’s Arctic voyage of 1875, on which his cousin Albert Hastings Markham was second-in-command and led the northward sledge party. He had come a long way since then, having left the Navy and, despite some difficulties, forged a successful career in what became the India Office. Here he was instrumental in starting quinine production in India, having organised transplantation of chinchona from Peru, and was loaned as geographer to a British punitive expedition in Ethiopia. A domineering and determined personality as well as a brilliant communicator, to whom the deeds of great explorers were meat and drink, Markham made a British Antarctic expedition the aim of his Presidency. His purpose was to widen geographical and scientific knowledge of the continent but, based on his own experience, he took it as axiomatic that the Royal Navy was the best organisation to undertake the task and that a naval officer should be the leader. He did not plan a race for the Pole but was also clear that Britain must get there first if contention arose.

  He did not plan a race for the Pole but was also clear that Britain must get there first if contention arose.

  Borchgrevink took 75 dogs with him to assist with pulling sledges as they explored the area. They were the first dogs used in Antarctica. Photograph by William Colbeck, 1900.

  The huts at Camp Ridley, the first to be set up on the Antarctic continent, acted as a base for the sledging parties exploring the area. Photograph by William Colbeck, 1900.

  Events spurred Markham on, including the 1895 Sixth International Geographical Conference in London, which placed priority on Antarctic discovery as ‘the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken’. It also rankled when Borchgrevink turned up fresh from Bull’s expedition, addressing the Conference rather less than modestly about their first landing at Cape Adare in January a
nd his own plans for what became the Southern Cross voyage. Markham tried to impede this but was frustrated by Newnes’s sponsorship, which was all the more galling when his initial approaches for government support of his own plans were rebuffed.

  From his Presidential chair, Markham nonetheless persuaded the Royal Geographical Society to put up £5,000 as seed corn for a public appeal and in early 1898 obtained the prestigious support of the Royal Society. The following year he found a wealthy business sponsor to add £25,000 to the £14,000 by then collected and finance was assured when the Treasury promised £40,000 in ‘match-funding’ to a similar private sum, which was already practically there.

  What Markham now needed was a leader in his required mould. Walking home down the Buckingham Palace Road in June 1899, a chance encounter with someone he had first met more than ten years earlier resolved his problem.

  Seals basking on newly-formed pancake ice off Cape Evans. The photograph was taken by H. G. Ponting, the Scott expedition’s official photoghapher, c.1910.