than the seals and whales of Antarctica. Not until 1819 did interest in Antarctica awaken—promoted in part by the accidental discovery of the South Shetland Islands by William Smith, a British merchant captain blown off course by a storm, and in part by the systematic voyages of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who had been sent by Czar Alexander I on “an extended voyage of discovery” in the ships Vostok and Mirnyi. “Every effort will be made to approach as closely as possible to the South Pole,” read Bellingshausen’s instructions, “searching for as yet unknown land, and only abandoning the undertaking in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”10 The South Shetlands were fecund with fur seals, and after confirmation of the find by Capt. James Sheffield, an American sealer, word of their commercial possibilities spread rapidly. Within a year scores of sealers had swarmed around the islands, and the senior British officer at Valparaiso, Capt. Edward Bransfield, hastily organized an expedition (which included Smith) to the islands in order to claim them for Britain.
The rapid exhaustion of seals led to a search for other rookeries in the region, principally by British and American sealers. Capt. Benjamin Pendleton, overseeing a flotilla of five ships (1820–1821), dispatched Capt. Nathaniel Palmer of the Hero on a voyage from the South Shetlands to the Antarctic Peninsula (Palmer Land) across the Bransfield Strait. At one point Palmer visited Bellingshausen aboard his ship. Capts. John Davis and Christopher Burdick (1820–1821) also crossed the strait and made the first documented landing on the mainland. The Lord Melville unwillingly spent the first Antarctic winter. The next year, Pendleton and Palmer returned with eight ships, explored King George, Clarence, and Elephant islands, and, in the company of George Powell, a British sealing captain, discovered the South Orkney Islands. Pendleton later brought three ships south for a combination of sealing and scientific exploration (1829–1831); the accounts of the expedition’s naturalist, James Eights, inaugurate the scientific assimilation of Antarctica. Palmer’s exploits were publicized by his mentor, Edmund Fanning. Although others probably saw land at the same time (the place was swarming with sealers), they lacked the desire or talent for publicity that came to Palmer.
Meanwhile, Capt. Benjamin Morrell (1822–1823) entered the Weddell Sea on the east side of the peninsula. A book he wrote about his voyages, while perhaps inaccurate, roused considerable popular interest in the south polar regions—not the first or last time that literature would prove as powerful an incentive to Antarctic exploration as science. Nonetheless, a scientific expedition under Capt. Henry Foster of the Royal Navy visited the South Shetlands (1828–1831) to take gravity measurements, part of a series of global geodetic experiments, and Capt. James Weddell inaugurated the long involvement of the merchant firm Samuel Enderby and Sons in the economic and exploration history of Antarctica.
Enderby had previously opened up the South Pacific whaling grounds. Discovering the pack at a historic minimum (1822–1824), Weddell entered the sea that now bears his name to latitude 74 degrees, a feat never since duplicated. The Enderbys continued their mixture of business and patronage throughout the 1830s, with voyages under Capt. John Briscoe (1830–1832) that circumnavigated the Southern Ocean and discovered Enderby Land, under Capt. Peter Kemp (1833–1834) that led to the discovery of Kemp Coast, and under Capt. John Balleny (1838–1839) that mapped Balleny Island and may have sighted the mainland around what was later named Wilkes Land. Charles Enderby became a charter member of the Royal Geographical Society (1830), and in defiance of normal sealing and whaling practices, with their fanatical secrecy, he deposited ship’s logs with the society.
But the big story was an impressive display of international rivalry: in the late 1830s expeditions were launched more or less simultaneously by France, Great Britain, and the United States. To this group may be added a fourth, Imperial Russia; although it preceded the others by nearly twenty years and led to no further Russian interest in the region for another 130 years, the enigmatic voyages of Bellingshausen share the characteristics of the expeditions of d’Urville, Ross, and Wilkes. All built upon the example and accounts of Cook. Collectively, they confirmed the existence of an Antarctic continent, mapped as much of the coastline as wooden ships operating in fog and pack ice could, and closed out an era of Antarctic discovery.
Bellingshausen explored the region for two austral summers and found it pretty much as Cook described it. He conducted one pass from the South Sandwich Islands, along the pack, to Australia, probably sighting the continent in the vicinity of Queen Maud Land. His second voyage, from Australia to the Antarctic Peninsula, completed a successful circumnavigation of the Southern Ocean. While in the area of the peninsula, Bellingshausen discovered several islands, visited with some of the first sealers to the South Shetland Island area, and possibly spied the mainland. But, as he notes in his journal, “in this climate the sky is seldom unclouded,” fog and snow drizzles were endless, the seas were choked with icebergs, and floes from the loose summer pack made navigation treacherous. After “two years’ uninterrupted navigation” among the ice, Bellingshausen concluded, in words echoing Cook, that “this ice must extend across the Pole and must be immovable and attached in places to shallows or to such islands as Peter I Island.”11 Isolated from both the international scene and further Russian interest, however, the expedition was forgotten, its findings dormant until the advent of IGY and the revival of Soviet concern with the Antarctic.
Not so the later, competing exploratory voyages sent by France, Britain, and America. All were national exploring expeditions, well integrated into scientific institutions. All of the voyages aspired to advance the domain of useful knowledge no less than the prestige of their sponsoring governments. The French expedition under Capt. Dumont d’Urville and the British expedition under Capt. James Clark Ross had as primary objectives the exact determination of the south magnetic pole. This was a subject with both practical and popular appeal as well as scientific significance. Carl Friedrich Gauss had articulated a theory of terrestrial magnetism that predicted the exact location of the pole, and Alexander von Humboldt had championed the cause, pleading for a global magnetic survey that would lead to a geomagnetic map. In addition, d’Urville had specific instructions to proceed more deeply into the Weddell Sea than Weddell had and thereby claim for France the honors of the farthest voyage south. The United States Exploring Expedition, under the command of Lt. Charles Wilkes, proceeded—after enduring years of political buffoonery during which its existence was several times threatened amid the exuberant turmoil of Jacksonian democracy—under a bizarre mixture of purposes, among them the service of American whaling and sealing interests, the desires of fledgling scientific organizations, the nationalist sentiments of Capt. Benjamin Pendleton and Josiah Reynolds, and the crackpot idea of William Symmes (the popularly styled “Newton of the West”) that a subterranean paradise existed in the Antarctic which could be entered through a colossal hole at the pole. The d’Urville and Wilkes expeditions spent two austral seasons in their voyages, the Ross expedition three.
Although d’Urville had two prior voyages of discovery to the South Pacific behind him, his expedition was something of a disappointment. Not surprisingly, he failed to penetrate the pack in the Weddell gyre, and his travels along the coast of East Antarctica indicated that the magnetic pole lay impossibly distant from him, on the other side of the ice. He did, however, sight the mainland (Terre Adelie) at nearly the same time as Wilkes. Sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society, as well as by the Royal Navy, Ross had no better luck with the Weddell Sea or the magnetic pole. But the handsome veteran of Arctic voyages (he had already been to the north magnetic pole) made fundamental discoveries in the area of the Ross Sea, including Ross Island and the Ross Ice Shelf. His two ships, Terror and Erebus, provided the names for the volcanoes on Ross Island, an area of great significance to subsequent Antarctic exploration.
It was Wilkes, however, whose orders were nebulous, whose expedition existed in almost constant disarray, and whose ships were ill-fitted for polar travel; it was Wilkes who first proclaimed an “Antarctic continent” based on his scattered but consistent observations of the East Antarctic mainland. Predictably, too, it was the prickly Wilkes who generated the most controversy. While his maps of Antarctica and Pacific islands proved remarkably sound, and the expedition’s collections helped launch several scientific careers and became an argument for the establishment of a national museum (eventually, the Smithsonian), Wilkes endured scorn from Ross over conflicting sightings of land, faced a court-martial upon