The Horrible and Heroic History of Antarctic Exploration

By Craig Cormick

Thought Antarctica was only for the tough and the strong-willed? Turns out it was also for the dumb and luckless as well. Discover the great Heroic Era of Antarctica Exploration and the extreme measures some explorers went to be first at something. Anything! Who was the first to spend an unplanned winter in Antarctica? Who was the first to play bagpipes there? Did Ernest Shackleton's brother really get arrested for stealing the Irish Crown jewels? What did Amundsen leave in the tent at the South Pole for Robert Falcon Scott? This book details the greats and the not-so greats, looking at the truly Horrible and Heroic History of Antarctic Exploration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merino Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215471227

Craig Cormick

Dr Craig Cormick OAM is an award-winning author and science communicator. He has published many more books than he has children and grandchildren (and he has four and three of those respectively). He was born on Dharawal Country – Wollongong – and has lived in the Blue Mountains and Queensland. He currently lives on Ngunnawal land in Canberra. He has been Chair of the ACT Writers Centre, co-host of the literary podcast Secrets from the Green Room, and has edited several magazines and books. He is drawn to stories of people whose voices have been hidden from history. Find him at wwwcraigcormick.com

Book preview

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has yet been devised.

— Apsley Cherry-Garrard, from The Worst Journey in the World

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Chapter 1: Who’s on first?

The question that drives much of the history of Antarctic exploration is... Who was first?

Who was the first to sight the continent?

Or who was the first to drive a vehicle there?

Or who was the first to hop across it barefooted?

These things are clearly important, as there have been very heated arguments over who was the first to step onto the mainland for instance, discounting anyone who stepped onto an offshore island that seemed to be a part of the mainland because of snow and ice.

So to save you the inevitable dinner party arguments, here are some of the notable Antarctic firsts:

Who was first across the Antarctic Circle?

Credit for this has to go to Captain James Cook. On his second of three great voyages of discovery around the Pacific, he sailed down amongst the icebergs, crossing the Antarctic Circle (66 degrees, 33 minutes and 39 seconds) three times. His farthest south was at 71° 10′, which he reached on 30 January 1774.

He wrote at the time: I can be bold enough to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored...

Well you can’t be right about everything (like presuming the natives of Hawaii would not get upset with him when he kidnapped their Chief five years later – and was then slain with the very knives he had traded with the people there!).

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And there is a technical point I should clarify here as to who was the first to go the farthest south. While Cook stood on the poop deck (no, that is not where it gets its name from!!) two of the crew tried to outmanoeuvre the other to be technically the farthest south. Midshipman George Vancouver, climbed the bowsprit at the front of the ship and waved his hat as the ship turned back northwards, to show he had gone the farthest south.

But Anders Sparrman, the ship’s botanist, went to the rear of the ship and hung out the window, for when the ship turned that actually made him the farthest South!

It was not recorded which part of his body he hung out the window, but we can presume it was his head not the other end.

Who was first to sight Antarctica?

Again Captain Cook gets the credit for this – although just between you and me, he actually never ‘sighted’ the continent, but just saw icebergs and things very close to it!

When they first sighted icebergs, in fact, looming about 200 foot tall, the crew thought they were islands. Cook took the ship along the edge of the pack ice, and came as close as 70 kilometres to the Antarctic continent.

It got so cold that their livestock died and the crew started showing signs of scurvy from lack of fresh food. Cook himself was said to be suffering constipation from the poor diet and William Wales, the ship’s astronomer, wrote: Salt Beef & pork, without vegetables for 14 weeks running, would probably cure a Glutton, even in England.

A close-up of a robot Description automatically generated with medium confidence They spent Christmas of 1773 in the deep southern waters with icicles forming all over the ship, that broke and fell to the decks like daggers. Needless to say, everyone was pretty pleased when Cook finally decided there was nothing else to be discovered in the frozen southern oceans and turned back to the north.

Are you exploring… or reading a map?

What was the first map to show Antarctica?

The idea of an Antarctic continent was postulated by people such as Aristotle in the Third Century BCE. And the term Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the Arctic, was coined by the Greek Geographer, Marinus of Tyre, in the Second Century. 

One of the earliest known maps to show the Antarctic content was the Piri Reis map of 1517. It was drawn on gazelle skin parchment, and shows south America and Antarctica. Interestingly, this was three years before Ferdinand Magellan rounded South America and crossed into the Pacific Ocean.

Later maps of 1565 and 1590 showed more detail of Antarctica at the bottom of the world – which was still largely guesswork, based on the crazy idea that the globe needed a similar sized landmass on the southern hemisphere as was on the north, to maintain balance.

Strangely enough by 1689 maps show the west coast of Australia BUT Antarctica has disappeared!

In the 18th and 19th Centuries several explorers, including Captain Cook, the Russian Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and the Belgian Adrien de Gerlache, all mapped some bits of Antarctica – naming places as they went, contributing to the final maps of the continent.

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1689 map with West Coast Australia but no Antarctica

So the verdict on this one is that no one person gets the credit for the first map of Antarctica, as it was slowly compiled like a jigsaw by several different people.

So who really sighted the Antarctic continent first?

There are three strong contenders for first sighting the Antarctic continent:

Englishman, Edward Bransfield

Russian, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen

American, Nathaniel Palmer

If you’re a betting person, take your pick now and lay your peanuts down while I run you through each in turn and assess their claims.

First up on the podium blocks is Edward Bransfield. He was an Irish sailor who was pressed into service in the Royal Navy at the age of 18, and rose to become an officer, serving on several ships.

The Royal Navy decided to send him to check out the South Shetland Islands, that had been found quite inadvertently in 1819. He landed on King George Island and took formal possession on behalf of dear old (but slightly mad) King George III (who had actually died the day before on 29 January 1820). Bransfield then proceeded in a south-westerly direction, completely missing Deception Island, crossing what is now known as the Bransfield Strait. On 30 January 1820 he sighted Trinity Peninsula, the northernmost point of the Antarctic mainland!!

Sounds pretty convincing, yeah.

Our second contender is Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, a Baltic German naval officer in the Imperial Russian Navy. He was a skilled cartographer and explorer, who ultimately rose to the rank of Admiral. But back in 1819-20 he was leading a Russian circumnavigation of the globe. He was charged with exploring the Southern Ocean and finding land in the proximity of the South Pole. No pressure, right?

He circumnavigated the continent twice, sighting land on several occasions, and disproved Captain Cook's claim that it would be impossible to find land in the southern icefields. In fact where Cook sailed north he sailed south, and where Cook sailed south he sailed north – so when you put their maps together you get a good rough outline of where the continent was.

Our final contender is Nathaniel Palmer, American seal hunter by profession, and an explorer by happenstance. In 1820 he sailed down to the Antarctic Peninsula and Palmer Land there is named after him. As is the US Palmer Station, located on the islands where he hunted for seals (and it is worth pointing out that the sealers actually wiped out entire populations of seals there in just a few short years).

Of course different historians have been keen to favour one of the three over the others as the first to sight the mainland, but upon examining their journals, the Gold Medal for First really has to go to von Bellingshausen on 27 January 1820, followed just three days later by Englishman Edward Bransfield, and then the bronze medal goes to Nathaniel Palmer – ten months later.

You might hear some people advocating for the Englishman William Smith, who sighted Livingston Island on 19 February 1819 – a year earlier than von Bellingshausen or Bransfield. But as I said, people can get very thingy