Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler Page B

concluded, ‘There is not the least room for the possibility of there being a continent, unless near the Pole and out of reach of navigation.’ Four years later this great man, only fifty years old, was stabbed to death with an iron dagger by natives in the clear blue waters of Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii.
    After Captain Cook, sealers and whalers ushered in the next phase of discovery as they eddied around southern waters in the 1820s. The continent probably wasn’t sighted before 1820, and it was almost certainly the Estonian Fabien Bellingshausen who saw it first. Born the year Cook died, and despatched south by Tsar Alexander I, Bellingshausen turned out to be a great explorer, and took up Cook’s baton. The British Edward Bransfield and the American sealer Nathaniel Palmer also made early sightings. Palmer was twenty-one when, in 1820, he rang the bell of the Hero in thick fog off the coast of the South Shetland Islands. He thought he was hundreds of miles from another ship, and then he heard a bell clanging in reply. It was from Bellingshausen’s ship, and the Admiral quickly put on his regalia and formally invited Palmer aboard the Vostok .
    James Clark Ross crossed the Antarctic Circle and penetrated the sea which now bears his name during a Royal Navy voyage he led between 1839 and 1843. He discovered great swathes of the ice edge. Ross joined up when he was eleven, went off to the Arctic with his uncle to look for the Northwest Passage, the geographical grail of its day, became a scientist and located the North Magnetic Pole. He was said to be the most handsome man in the Navy. When he reached home, after more than four years in the south, he was knighted. He was also married, but only after his father-in-law had extracted a contract from him that there would be no more polar voyages. He settled in a small village near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where he now lies in the churchyard.
    In 1898 the Belgica expedition became the first to winter in the pack ice. Amundsen was on it, so was Frederick Cook, the man who later claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole. Seven nationalities were represented: as T. H. Baughman put it in his book Before the Heroes Came , ‘The Belgica expedition was a fugue in seven voices.’ The ship was not properly equipped for an Antarctic winter. Many of the crew showed signs of scurvy, and each man made his own private journey into despair during the long, dark months of the polar night. When a lieutenant died, it almost broke their spirit.
    Carsten Borchgrevinck went south aboard the Southern Cross at the turn of the century. Although it was a British expedition, Borchgrevinck was a naturalised Australian whose father was Norwegian, and to the British geographical establishment of the day this was tantamount to playing football for a non-league side. He got along so badly with physicist Louis Bernacchi that the latter refers to Borchgrevinck in his diary as l’enfant . Still, the dogs they had brought south proved remarkably successful when harnessed to the sledges, with ground-breaking results for the expedition. Another unsung hero, William Spiers Bruce, led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition in 1902–4. The artist of the voyage, W. G. Burn Murdoch, wrote a book called From Edinburgh to the Antarctic , and he ended it with an expression of malaise about the land they left unexplored. ‘And so we returned from the mysteries of the Antarctic, with all its white-bound secrets still unread, as if we had stood before ancient volumes that told of the past and the beginning of all things, and had not opened them to read. Now we go home to the world that is worn down with the feet of many people, to gnaw in our discontent the memory of what we could have done, but did not do.’
    We flew over the ice-locked Inexpressible Island, and the cockpit dials showed that 50-knot katabatic 1 winds were flying down from the Reeves Névé 2 . It was