Antarctic Explorers of the 19th Century: Sealers, First Coastlines, Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia
In the nineteenth century the South changed its nature. The great peopled continent had vanished from the maps; what remained was to find out what lay behind the pack ice. The first to learn were not scientists but hunters. In February 1819 the merchant captain William Smith, blown south by the winds off Cape Horn, sighted the South Shetlands. Within three seasons dozens of British and American ships had killed the fur seals there almost to the last animal. The sealers kept their routes secret, and their logbooks are often the only witnesses to those years.
In January 1820 Edward Bransfield, sent from Valparaíso with Smith as his pilot, charted the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula; in November the young Nathaniel Palmer of Stonington, Connecticut, sailed along the same coasts. On 7 February 1821 the American John Davis may have been the first man to set foot on the continent. The Enderby shipowners of London then sent their captains further: John Biscoe found the land that bears their name in 1831, and John Balleny the islands that bear his own in 1839. From 1838 to 1842 the United States expedition under Charles Wilkes followed an icebound coast for hundreds of leagues and concluded, against many sceptics, that a continent lay beyond it.
Then the South fell silent again. In 1874 the Challenger, the first steamship to cross the Antarctic Circle, dredged its ocean depths; the German whaler Eduard Dallmann explored the peninsula in the same season. Only at the International Geographical Congress in London in 1895 was the Antarctic declared the great task ahead. That year Norwegian whalers landed at Cape Adare; Adrien de Gerlache's Belgica wintered locked in the ice in 1898, with scurvy and madness stalking the crew, and Carsten Borchgrevink spent the first winter ashore in 1899.
Further north, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego were surveyed, then conquered. Robert FitzRoy took three Fuegians to England in 1830 and brought them home in 1833. Chile founded Punta Arenas on the Strait in 1848; Welsh settlers landed in Chubut in 1865; George Chaworth Musters rode with the Tehuelche in 1869 from Punta Arenas to the Río Negro, and Francisco Moreno reached in 1877 the lake he named Argentino. The Anglican mission at Ushuaia, the military conquest of the pampas in 1879, the gold rush and the sheep estancias closed the century with the collapse of the Fuegian peoples.
This collection brings together our editions and a directory of related texts.
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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James Weddell, A Voyage towards the South Pole, Performed in the Years 1822-24 (1825)
Three years after Bellingshausen, the Scottish sealer James Weddell takes the road to the ice again with two small vessels, the Jane and the Beaufoy. He visits the Orkneys and the South Shetlands, where hunting has already nearly emptied the beaches, then, in February 1823, takes advantage of an exceptionally mild season to go down to 74° 15' south latitude, farther south than any of his predecessors, in the sea that now bears his name. His account shows the other face of the Southern Ocean: no longer the state expedition with learned instructions, but the commercial enterprise that follows closely on discoveries and profits from them.
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Adrien de Gerlache, Quinze mois dans l'Antarctique (1902)
In 1897, the Belgica leaves Antwerp with an international crew that includes the young Roald Amundsen and the physician Frederick Cook. Caught in the ice in February 1898 near Peter I Island, the very one Bellingshausen had discovered, she drifts all winter in the sea that now bears the Russian navigator's name. It is the first overwintering of an expedition in Antarctic ice: the polar night, the madness lying in wait, scurvy fought with seal meat. Gerlache tells of these fifteen months with restraint. At the end of the century, his book lets us hear what it cost to linger where Bellingshausen had only passed through.