1912 (2 page)

Early Ventures South

No man will be a sailor who had contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned…A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

S
AMUEL
J
OHNSON
(1709–1784)

In 1520 the explorer Ferdinand Magellan was one year into his quest to find a westward route from the Atlantic to the Spice Islands of the western Pacific. The expedition to the Indonesian islands known today as the Moluccas was funded by the Spanish, in an attempt to break Venice's stranglehold on the lucrative European spice trade. Leading a Spanish-financed and-crewed expedition was a major undertaking for the Portuguese captain. Not only had he lost a ship, dashed against the rocks while surveying, but he was constantly staving off the threat of mutiny. Reaching 53°S off the southeast coast of South America, Magellan found a passage that he hoped would allow his four wooden vessels to sail to the other side of the Americas.

Magellan's crew were not thrilled to find themselves beating a path down the 570-kilometre-long strait. Their journey was arduous: wild seas and ‘williwaw' winds roared off the land, a ship was lost through desertion, and fire-loving locals came
perilously close to attacking. Thirty-eight days later, though, the three surviving ships reached the other side of the Americas having negotiated a passage through the ‘Land of Fire', Tierra del Fuego. The strain was almost too much for Magellan, who reputedly broke down and cried: against tremendous odds he had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and into the relatively peaceful Pacific.

From a survivor's account of the voyage, the world learned that the Strait of Magellan is ‘surrounded by very great and high mountains covered with snow'. Magellan's travels appeared to confirm the existence of the mythical continent on the southern side of the strait,
Antarktikos
—or, as it later became known,
Terra Australis Incognita
, the ‘Unknown South Land'. However, the great navigator did not live to enjoy the fame his discoveries brought, dying—as did most members of the expedition—on the way back to Spain.

Tales of what lay to the south had fascinated ancient and medieval Europe. Stories were told of Prester John, a Christian king who ruled over a fantastical country surrounded by pagan states in the Far East, and within which four rivers of Paradise flowed from an inaccessible mountain of great height at the centre. For centuries speculation about the south continued, untroubled by evidence.

The sixteenth century saw expeditions geared for trade and territorial expansion ploughing new routes into the Southern Ocean. Magellan provided the first point on the map, and cartographers around the world enthusiastically incorporated his discoveries.
Terra Australis Incognita
was an ideal home for the undiscovered Christian country and, using stories of Prester John and others, mapmakers prepared frighteningly detailed charts of the supercontinent's alleged coastline and vast interior. This fantasy persisted over the next hundred years or so, connecting the southern part of Tierra
del Fuego, northern Australia and sometimes even Indonesia.

Half a century after Magellan discovered the strait that bears his name, an English adventurer stumbled on the fact that something was amiss. Sir Francis Drake is best known today for playing bowls when the Spanish Armada sought to invade England during the heady summer of 1588, but a decade earlier he was halfway to emulating Magellan's achievement of circumnavigating the globe, and this time surviving. Drake had steered through the strait in a swift seventeen days, and with a happier crew than his unfortunate predecessor, before a huge northwesterly gale blew up. He was pushed back around the tip of South America, considerably further south than anticipated. Where
Terra Australis Incognita
should have been, there was just sea: the great continent in the south was, it seemed, a lot smaller than most had imagined.

Competition in the Netherlands soon led to a spate of discoveries. With the Dutch East India Company holding a strictly enforced monopoly on the only known trade routes of the time, the Strait of Magellan and the south African Cape of Good Hope, other explorers set out to search for an alternative trade route: a Southwest Passage. In 1599 ships in a small Dutch fleet searching off the South American coast for this fabled path became separated, and the Dutch captain Dirk Gerritsz of the
Blijde Boodschap
reportedly found himself at 64°S, where he saw a land of high mountains covered in snow, ‘like Norway'. No one knew what to do with this finding, and it was largely dismissed. However, another expedition, led by Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten, was not so easy to ignore. In 1616 the two Dutchmen showed it was possible to sail around Tierra del Fuego, and in doing so discovered a mountainous land in the fog that appeared to be a peninsula. This Staten Land seemed to confirm Drake's discovery, and it pushed the northern coastline of
Terra Australis Incognita
further south.

These discoveries took some time to filter through. Explorers and cartographers were reluctant to give up on the idea of a southern landmass, and they continued to join up small pockets of land across vast areas of the southern hemisphere, desperate to make sense of what lay there. A classic example is the Dutchman Abel Tasman, who in 1642 became the first European to sail along the southern coast of Australia, discovering Tasmania in the process. On reaching what we know as New Zealand, Tasman proclaimed his find Staten Land, believing it was connected to the same landmass his compatriots had seen in 1616. The following year the South Atlantic Staten Land was found to be just a small island with plenty more sea to the south. The supposed southern continent was becoming ever smaller.

With unsubstantiated reports and wild rumour continuing to emanate from the south, one of the greatest explorers came to the fore. Captain James Cook was appointed by the oldest scientific society in the world, the prestigious Royal Society in London, to make a thorough search for
Terra Australis Incognita
. On his first voyage he had sailed around New Zealand and shown there was yet more sea polewards. On his second Pacific expedition, between 1772 and 1775, Cook took the
HMS Resolution
further south, probing for a route through the sea ice and bergs. He was hundreds of kilometres inside the Antarctic Circle—and decades ahead of his time. Cooped up for months on a small wooden vessel dwarfed by towering icebergs that seemed to fill the ocean, Cook and the crew were increasingly on edge. Eventually it was too much: having reached 71°S, Cook turned the
Resolution
and headed for home.

Having worked his way through the icebergs and circumnavigating Antarctica without seeing it, Cook returned to Britain with tales of new islands and large seal colonies, pack ice and freezing conditions in the Southern Ocean. His achievement
attracted attention around the world. At most longitudes, Cook's record southern latitude is actually part of the Antarctic continent. Cook had pushed the limits of his craft—and men—as far as possible, but was in the wrong area to see any land; he was desperately unlucky not to discover Antarctica.

In 1777 he wrote: ‘I strongly believe that there does exist land close to the Pole, from which must proceed the greater part of the ice which we find spread across this vast southern ocean… It would have been folly on my part to risk all we had achieved on this voyage merely for the sake of discovering and exploring a coast which, once discovered and explored, would have proved useful neither to navigation, nor to geography, nor, in truth, to any other science.' He went on: ‘Should anyone possess the resolution and fortitude to [push] yet further south…I make bold to declare that the world will derive no benefit from it.'

In Cook's view, even if
Terra Australis Incognita
was there, it was of little significance. But not everyone agreed.

Cook's report of abundant marine life in the freezing polar waters of the southern hemisphere whipped sealers and whalers into a frenzy. The world was hungry for fur and oil, and the North Atlantic could not keep up with demand. Soon fleets of vessels rushed south to mine what seemed an inexhaustible resource. In their enthusiasm to head south, the hunters often reached unexplored areas years before scientific expeditions. For most, this was a commercial exercise: many took the view that science had little, if any, role to play in their operations. The locations of rich pickings were jealously guarded; ships' routes were left deliberately vague, for fear of giving away lucrative spots on an otherwise blank map. Fantastic stories, no doubt sometimes embellished to draw competitors away from rich
seal colonies, were retailed. Yet with the push south there came a series of discoveries that restored some faith in the idea of a southern continent.

One of the first significant finds was made by a British captain, William Smith, who was exploring the seas around South America in his brig, the
Williams
, in February 1819. Blown off course by the region's now-infamous strong winds, Smith found himself far south of Cape Horn and alongside a small cluster of ice-covered islands, which he called New South Shetland. He returned to the islands that October and, finding a landing place, took possession of the land for his monarch, King George III, before heading to Valparaíso, on the Chilean coast, where stories of what he had found soon circulated among sealers.

The British captain tried to convince the Royal Navy officials in Chile of his discovery but they were suspicious of the claims. Nevertheless, Smith and his ship were put under the command of a young naval officer, Edward Bransfield, and sent back south. By January 1820 they reached the islands Smith had claimed and planted the British flag again, this time officially. At the end of the month they probed further south, and at 64°S spotted land. It was late in the summer and the weather was poor—‘the most gloomy that could be imagined,' one of the men aboard reported, ‘and the only cheer the sight afforded was in the idea that this might be the long sought Southern Continent…The land [was named] Trinity Land in compliment to the Trinity Board.'

Word of Smith and Bransfield's find got out, and suddenly everyone seemed to be discovering parts of
Terra Australia Incognita
. Americans, Russians, British, Norwegians and Australians began tripping over one another to find new seal colonies in the icy southern Atlantic. A Russian explorer, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, recorded a sighting of land at 69°S, laying claim to being the first person to see the Antarctic continent. Then, a year after Smith returned from
Trinity Land, the American sealing captain Nathaniel Palmer reported having seen, independently, the same piece of ground as his British counterpart. Discoveries were a source of national pride as ever more finds were made in this new part of the world. And yet, perversely, the next notable revelation had little to do with land.

In 1823 the British sealer James Weddell was commanding two ‘small, insignificant' ships, the
Jane
and
Beaufoy
, in the search for seals to the immediate east of William Smith's route to the south. Others who had been in the region had complained bitterly of impregnable, ice-covered ocean. Like Cook, Weddell was way ahead of his time. Keen to mix science with business, he reported a series of observations while exploring, including the temperature of the ocean, the geology of the islands he visited en route and the wildlife he saw—all with accurate geographical fixes. Pushing as far as his supplies would allow, Weddell reached a latitude of 74°15'S and declared this the Sea of George the Fourth.

Not only was this the furthest south achieved in the South Atlantic—a feat that remained unsurpassed until 1912—it was the furthest south reached anywhere. Most importantly, Weddell had found no land. Realising his discovery might provoke controversy back home, on his return Weddell had his chief officer and seamen swear to the accuracy of the log before naval officials. He believed that sea ice was only formed in the vicinity of land and, as none had been found within 20° of his furthest south, there was most probably an open ocean all the way to the South Geographic Pole. His discovery and its implications constituted a case against an ice-covered
Terra Australis Incognita
. But, with later explorers finding the Sea of George the Fourth choked with ice, and reports of coastline in other parts—albeit not so far south—Weddell's claims were openly questioned. The British captain had been extremely lucky: it
was not until the 1960s that the sea he found would be so clear of ice again.

Unfortunately for Weddell, his trip was not as lucrative as his employers had hoped, and once home he was cited for a debt of £245, lent by the Commercial Bank in Edinburgh. This was probably the cost associated with Weddell's scientific equipment, and his ship owners washed their hands of him. He fled just before he was due to collect a prestigious fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh from the illustrious Sir Walter Scott. The British authorities remained sceptical of the explorer, and it was only in 1904 that a German geographer suggested the body of water be named the Weddell Sea in honour of the great pioneer.