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Exploration at the Poles
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~This page was
last updated on 03/27/02
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Exploration at the Poles
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"The lure of the Arctic is tugging
at my heart. To me the trail is calling.
The old trail. The trail that is always new"
~Mathew Alexander Henson~
The Explorers
| Roald Amundsen | Richard E. Byrd | Samuel Hearne |
| Mathew Alexander Henson | Fridtjof Nansen | Donald Baxter MacMillan |
| Robert Edwin Peary | James Clark Ross | Robert Falcon Scott |
| Ernest Shackleton |
~ back home ~
Roald Engebreth Gravning Amundsen of Norway took pride in being referred to as "the last of the Vikings." A powerfully built man of over six feet in height, Amundsen was born into a family of merchant sea captains and prosperous ship owners in 1872. As a youth he insisted on sleeping with the windows open even during the frigid Norwegian winters to help condition himself for a life of polar exploration. Amundsen developed a fascination with Antarctica from the time he first glimpsed its frozen terrain in 1897. Antarctica, a continent the size of Europe and Australia combined, had not yet been traversed by humans. Amundsen aimed to be the first. In 1903 he established himself as a sailor and explorer of the first order when he successfully led a 70-foot fishing boat through the entire length of the Northwest Passage, a treacherous ice-bound route that wound between the northern Canadian mainland and Canada's Arctic islands. The arduous journey took three years to complete as Amundsen and his crew had to wait while the frozen sea around them thawed enough to allow for navigation. Soon after his return to Norway, he learned that Englishman Ernest Shackleton was setting out of an attempt to reach the South Pole. Shackleton would be forced to abandon his quest a mere 97 miles short of the Pole. Amundsen studied all he could of Shackleton's attempt and began the long process of preparing for his own. He was as highly regarded for his skills in organization and planning as he was for his expertise as an explorer. Amundsen, who was thought to be "taciturn under the best of circumstances," took special measures to be sure members of his crew possessed personalities suitable to long polar voyages. Crew members onboard his ships knew he was firm but fair, and affectionately referred to him as "the chief." By August of 1910, Amundsen was ready to make his own attempt to reach the South Pole, although all the world thought he was headed in the complete opposite direction. He had secretly ruled out attempting to reach the North Pole, because Americans Robert Peary and Frederick Cook had already laid claim to that feat. Amundsen even kept his plans for a South Pole expedition a secret from officials within the Norwegian government. He feared that government officials would be hesitant to challenge Great Britain, upon whom they were highly dependent, in a race to the Pole. It was not until Amundsen's ship, "Fram", was well off the coast of Morocco that he announced to his crew that they were headed for the South, not the North, Pole. Crucial to Amundsen's success in reaching the South Pole was his use of carefully selected sled dogs. Amundsen's canine crew members had been superbly equipped by centuries of natural selection for survival in the Arctic. He referred to them as "our children," and revealed, "The dogs are the most important thing for us. The whole outcome of the expedition depends on them." On October 18, 1911 Amundsen's entourage set out from the Bay of Whales, on Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, for their final drive toward the pole. His British counterpart, Robert Scott, dependent on Siberian ponies rather than on dogs, began his trip three weeks later. Aided by exceptionally cooperative weather conditions, Amundsen's party, passed the point where Shackleton was forced to turn back on December 7. At approximately 3pm on December 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen raised the flag of Norway at the South Pole, and naming the spot Polheim -- "Pole Home." He and his crew returned to their base camp on January 25, 1912, 99 days and 1,860 miles after their departure. Robert Scott's journey, on the other hand, was marred by tragedy. Scott wrote, "Our luck in weather is preposterous." From December 4 to December 8, 1911, Scott and his party were confined to their tents, forced to wait out a series of howling blizzards. As they ate away their precious rations, time slipped through their hands. By the time Scott's party reached the Pole on January 17, 1912, the Norwegians had come and gone. Scott's log records: "This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without reward of priority." Scott and his men had lost crucial time in reaching the pole and now faced the grim prospect of heading back to their base camp during the increasingly frigid Antarctic autumn. It was a journey they would never complete. On March 29, 1912, having endured blizzards and temperatures that fell to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, Scott crawled into a tent with his two surviving party members and put down his final words: "For God's sake look after our people." Eight months later a search party found the frozen corpses of Scott and his men. They were only 11 miles away from a food and fuel depot they had left on their trek out.
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| Richard E. Byrd |  |
Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd revisits his old hut at the site of the original Little America and revives memories by smoking a 12 year old corn cob pipe left there at the time of the departure of the Second Byrd Expedition in 1935. |
Richard E.
Byrd was a giant of 20th century exploration, but the expedition that first made him
famous--his 1926 flight
over the North Pole--has been mired in controversy since the moment it ended. Did
Byrd actually reach the Pole?
Some people think there's evidence that he did not.
Byrd, an expert navigator, and Floyd
Bennett, his pilot, took off from Spitsbergen Island, Norway for the Pole just after
midnight on May 9, 1926, and returned 15 1/2 hours later. Checking their position
with a bubble sextant (which Byrd invented),
they claimed to have reached the North Pole at 9:02 AM. But critics eager for Roald
Amundsen of Norway to make the first
North Pole flight argued that the Fokker Trimotor could not have completed the trip
so quickly. Byrd proponents said the
flight time is realistic, considering the mild weather that Byrd notes in his diary
and the fact that the plane would have gained
speed as it burned fuel and grew lighter.
Then there's the issue of the flags. Byrd
planned to drop several hundred of them over the Pole to mark his accomplishment,
but did not. He later asserted that they would have scattered too much. Those
who questioned his accomplishment said he
didn't drop the flags because he had never reached the Pole.
Seventy-five years after the flight, the
discovery of erased data in Byrd's flight diary fueled more controversy. It places
him 150 miles short of the Pole. Proponents of Byrd claim that the diary includes
raw data, and that Byrd could easily have
been fixing a miscalculation. Naysayers counter that claim by noting the consistent
accuracy of other entries.
Who's right? We may never know. But even
if Byrd did not reach the North Pole, his contributions to Arctic and Antarctic
exploration remain huge.
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(1745-1792), was an English explorer and fur trader. He was the first white
person to journey overland from Hudson Bay to the
Arctic Ocean. He reached the Arctic Ocean in July 1771, while exploring for the
Hudson's Bay Company. He arrived at Great Slave
Lake in northern Canada later that year. Hearne set up the first Hudson's Bay
Company inland post in Saskatchewan in 1774. He
commanded Fort Prince of Wales in Manitoba from 1775 until the French seized it in
1782. In 1783, Hearne established a post at
Churchill, Manitoba. He returned to England in 1787. Hearne was born in London. He
joined the Hudson's Bay Company about 1765.
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(1867-1955), was an African American explorer of the Arctic. The expedition of Henson and Robert E. Peary is generally credited with discovering the North Pole in 1909. |
| Henson was born on a small farm in Charles County, Maryland. At the age of 12 or 13, he became a cabin boy on a merchant ship. When he was 18, he put ashore and began working at various jobs on the East Coast. |
| In 1887,
Peary hired Henson to help him survey a canal route across Nicaragua. From 1891 to 1906,
Henson and Peary were partners on several Arctic expeditions but failed to reach the North
Pole. In 1908, they began another attempt. The expedition included several support teams,
but when the party neared the pole, Peary chose the experienced Henson and four Inuit to
make the final dash. Some historians believe that Henson and two Inuit were the first to
reach the pole. But Peary said that Henson miscalculated the location of the pole and that
he—Peary—was actually the first to reach it. Peary received credit for the
discovery. Decades after both Peary and Henson died, claims were made that they had gotten lost on their way to the Pole and missed it by a hundred miles. These claims, though, had little evidence to back them up. Peary took numerous sightings with his sextant to check his position and was as close to the Pole as his instrument would allow: about five miles. The position can be confirmed by looking at the sounding they did. The North Pole lays over a deep marine trench. Peary's sounding showed the depth was over 9,000 feet. If the Peary party had been carried west by drifting ice, as some believe, they would have been over shallower water. Further evidence can be found through a technique known as photogrammetic rectification. Photogrammetic rectification can be used to examine a picture and determine from the angle of shadows at what latitude the photo was taken. The photos taken by Peary have been analyzed and prove the expedition was truly at the Pole. |
| It wasn't until 1937, at age seventy, that
Henson got some of the attention he deserved. In that year he was made an honorary member
of the famed Explorers Club in New York. In 1946 he was honored by the U.S. Navy with a
medal. His most-prized award, though, was a gold medal from the Chicago Geographic
Society. Henson died on March 9th, 1955, and
was buried in a small plot at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. In 1987, Dr. S. Allen
Counter, a Henson biographer, led a movement to have the remains of both Henson and his
wife moved to lay adjacent to Robert Peary in Arlington National Cemetery, a more fitting
location for an American hero. President Ronald Reagan granted permission and on the
seventy-ninth anniversary of the discovery of the North Pole, Henson was laid to rest near
his old friend. On Henson's tomb is written a quote from his autobiography: |
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(1861-1930), Fridtjof Nansen was a famous Norwegian polar
explorer. He was also a humanitarian, a statesman, a marine zoologist, and a pioneer
oceanographer. Nansen made his first Arctic cruise in 1882 as a zoological collector
aboard a whaler. In the summer of 1888, he
and five other men made the first east-to-west crossing of the Greenland Icecap, a
feat experts had declared impossible.
Nansen hoped to obtain valuable scientific information by exploring the North Polar Basin.
For this expedition, he had a ship built
to withstand the grinding ice floes. This ship was named the Fram (Forward).
Nansen left Norway in the Fram on June 24, 1893.
He deliberately let the ship become jammed in ice north of Siberia. For the next
three years, the ice drift carried the ship across
the Arctic Ocean to waters near Svalbard.
In the second year, Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen left the Fram and tried to reach
the North Pole with kayaks and sleds. They
came within 272 miles (438 kilometers) of the pole, nearer than anyone before them.
After meeting many dangers, they boarded a
British ship at Franz Josef Land in 1896 and went to Norway.Nansen played a
prominent part in the separation of Norway from
Sweden in 1905. From 1906 to 1908, he served as Norwegian minister to Britain.
On his return to Norway, he became a professor of marine zoology (later oceanography) at
the University of Christiania. He went
on ocean voyages in 1910, 1912, 1913, and 1914, and published his results in many
books. His writings include Farthest North
(1897) and In Northern Mists (1911), a history of Arctic exploration. After
World War I, Nansen was Norway's delegate to the
League of Nations. He aided Soviet refugees in Asia Minor and directed the return
of German and Soviet war prisoners to their
homelands. He devised the Nansen passport--an identification certificate for
refugees. He received the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize
for his services. Oceanographers use a metal container, called a Nansen bottle
in honor of him, to trap seawater. Nansen was
born in Christiania (now Oslo).
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(1874-1970), Donald Baxter MacMillan an American polar explorer, added much to our knowledge of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. He found coal deposits 9 degrees from the North Pole. These deposits contained the remains of 36 kinds of trees, showing that the climate there had once been milder. |
| MacMillan
was born in Provincetown, Mass. He studied at Bowdoin College and at Harvard University.
MacMillan taught school until 1908. After a
decade of teaching, he went on the expedition (1908-9) of Robert E. Peary to the North
Pole. Later (1911, 1912) he made ethnological studies among the Labrador Eskimos. Leader
of the Crocker Land expedition (1913-17), MacMillan established a base at Etah, Greenland,
from which he explored the Greenland coast and Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands. By a
notable march over the frozen ocean NW of Ellesmere Island he proved the nonexistence of
Peary's supposed Crocker Land. He subsequently commanded a number of arctic
expeditions and brought back much valuable scientific information. MacMillan's 1924 Arctic expedition used radio extensively. His 1925 expedition was one of the first to use airplanes in the Far North. His men made many special aerial photographs. MacMillan received the Special Congressional Medal for surveying and charting Greenland and the Canadian Arctic for the U.S. Army during World War II (1939-1945). Later he was placed in command of arctic expeditions in 1944, 1946, and 1947. In the 1944 voyage to Greenland, Baffin Island, and Labrador he made extensive air surveys and brought back some 10,000 photographs. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor that year. Sponsored by Bowdoin College (after which he named his noted exploration ship, the Bowdoin), MacMillan conducted expeditions to Ellesmere Island in 1948 and to Baffin Island in 1949, returning with rare bird specimens and other material. The expedition of 1949 was his 28th voyage of arctic exploration. On a polar trip in 1954, MacMillan and his party barely escaped having their ship destroyed. His other writings include Etah and Beyond (1927) and How Peary Reached the Pole (1934). On his voyages to the Arctic, MacMillan helped to train many younger explorers, including Richard Evelyn Byrd. In 1957, at the age of 82, MacMillan went on his 31st trip to the Arctic. He wrote several books about his experiences, including Four Years in the White North (1918), Etah and Beyond (1927), and How Peary Reached the Pole (1932). |
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| On July 17, 1908, Peary led another expedition to the North Pole,
and on April 6, 1909, he and a small party consisting of his assistant Matthew A. Henson
and four Inuit either reached the Pole or came very close to it. On September 6, 1909, the
day he announced his achievement, Peary learned that the [1908] discovery of the pole had
been claimed five days previously by the American explorer and surgeon Frederick Albert
Cook. Examination by experts established that the doctor's claim was false; Peary's
records were accepted as genuine. In 1911, the year Peary retired, the Congress of the
United States recognized his discovery, and he was given the rank of rear admiral before
his retirement. Nevertheless, the scientific community still debates whether Peary
actually reached the exact location of the North Pole. His books include The North Pole (1910) and Secrets of Polar Travel (1917). |
 the great race of 1908 |
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James Clark Ross, born in 1800, entered the
Navy at 11 years of age. During his first years of service he was tutored and watched
over by his uncle, Sir John Ross. In 1818 he joined his uncle on a controversial
voyage in search of the Northwest Passage. Between
1819 and 1827 he joined Edward Parry in four more expeditions to the Arctic.
Between 1829 and 1833 Ross spent another four and
one half years exploring the Arctic, achieving the rank of commander. On May 31,
1831, Ross located the position of the north
magnetic pole on Boothia Peninsula in northern Canada.
On April 8, 1839, Ross took command of the 370-ton Erebus with his friend
Francis Crozier assuming command of the 340-ton Terror. Antarctica was the new
challenge and a voyage was planned. Both ships were strengthened from bow to stern for the
tough voyage
ahead. The three-masted ships were ruggedly constructed warships used for carrying
mortars. The Terror had already seen service
in Arctic waters during 1836.
Due to Ross' extensive experience in the Arctic voyages,
substantial supplies of preserved meat was loaded aboard to head off the
risk of scurvy. In addition, extraordinary amounts of soups, vegetables,
cranberries, pickles and other foodstuffs were included. Ross
knew that a happy crew was a well-fed, comfortable crew so extensive work was also
done to the ships' interiors. Senior
representatives of the Admiralty inspected the ships on September 2, 1839 and
approval was granted. The crew was paid three
month's salary in advance and on October 5, 1839, Erebus and Terror
left England on their southern voyage.
Ross was instructed to sail to Tasmania where they were
supposed to set up a permanent station for making magnetic observations.
Along the way they were to set up similar observatories at St. Helena Island and
the Cape of Good Hope. For two months Erebus
and Terror stayed at Īles Kerguelen where a team of officers made hourly
magnetometric observations while Ross made astronomical
and tidal observations.
Erebus and Terror encountered a hurricane
only two days after leaving the islands and became separated from each other. It was
at this point that the expedition experienced its first fatality when the Erebus's
boatswain fell overboard and drowned. The voyage
to Tasmania became filled with excitement as icebergs made the trip quite
hazardous. Ross and the Erebus landed in Hobart on
August 16, 1840; the Terror had landed the day before. While there, the
magnetic observatory was built with the help of 200
convicts brought in by the Lieutenant Governor of Tasmania, Sir John Franklin.
While in Hobart, Ross read newspaper accounts of
the French and American searches for the magnetic south pole. Both Dumont d'Urville
and Charles Wilkes were doing research in an
area that Ross felt was his expertise and his alone. Wilkes was kind enough to
leave Ross charts of his course and discoveries,
although Ross never truly acknowledged the gesture. Ross made the decision to take
a more easterly course for his search of the
south magnetic pole rather than follow in Wilkes' footsteps. At daybreak, on
November 12, 1840, Erebus and Terror pulled up their
anchors, sailed down the Derwent River, and said good-bye to Sir John Franklin as
they left Hobart for the Antarctic.
One week later, they came upon the Auckland Islands.
Approaching the islands, they noticed two boards erected on tall poles. On
one board was a hand-painted sign recognizing American Charles Wilkes visiting the
island on March 10 of the same year while the
other painted sign was a notice from Dumont d'Urville recognizing his visit on the
following day, March 11! Some magnetic observations
and survey work was accomplished and the ships then sailed on to Campbell Island.
On December 17 the two ships left Campbell Island
and on December 27 they encountered the first icebergs and whales. On December 30
they crossed Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen's
path and on New Year's Day, 1841, they crossed the Antarctic Circle.
They soon came upon the Antarctic pack of ice that had yet
to be penetrated by man. Encountering bad weather, the ice stretched
before them "motionless and menacing". Poor weather continued but on
January 5 Ross decided to "make the attempt on the ice and
push the ships as far into it as we could get them". They forced their way
slowly through the pack until after "about an hour's hard
thumping" they came to lighter, scattered ice. They continued on "at
times sustaining violent shocks, which nothing but ships so strengthened could have
withstood". At 5 am on January 9 they broke into an open sea. Ross had discovered the
Ross Sea and he
now set his sights on the south magnetic pole. On January 11 land was reported
straight ahead. Ross first thought it to be an ice-blink
(a whiteness in the sky caused by the reflection of ice ahead) but as they
approached they realized the ice-blink was actually a
mountainous, snow-covered land. Ross was actually disappointed to find land between
him and his search for the south magnetic pole
but, nevertheless, quickly determined the sighting to be a "way of restoring
to England the honor of the discovery of the southernmost
land, which had been nobly won by the intrepid Bellingshausen, and for more than
twenty years retained by Russia". They next saw a
range of mountains, rising to 8000 feet, which he named the Admiralty Range. He
named as many of the peaks as he could see. His
compass needle was behaving oddly; Ross determined he was within 500 miles of the
magnetic pole. Taking a westerly course, they
sailed through the Ross Sea and on January 12 Ross and Crozier planted a flag on
newly discovered Possession Island, one of two
islands located just off the mainland. A toast was offered to "Her Majesty and
His Royal Highness Prince Albert" with the region claimed
as Victoria Land.
On January 22 Ross calculated that they had reached a
higher latitude than James Weddell had in 1823. On January 27 Franklin Island
was formally possessed and on January 28 there was another surprise.
Robert McCormick, Erebus's surgeon,
described the discovery as "a stupendous volcanic mountain in a high state of
activity". Dr.
Hooker ran to grab his notebook and quickly wrote down his reaction: "All the
coast one mass of dazzling beautiful peaks of snow
which, when the sun approached the horizon, reflected the most brilliant tints of
golden yellow and scarlet; and then to see the dark
cloud of smoke, tinged with flame, rising from the volcano in a perfectly unbroken
column, one side jet-black, the other giving back the
colors of the sun....This was a sight so surpassing everything that can be
imagined...that it really caused a feeling of awe to steal over
us at the consideration of our own comparative insignificance and helplessness, and
at the same time, an indescribable feeling of the greatness of the Creator in the works of
His hand". The peak was 12,400 feet above sea level and was belching flame and smoke.
Ross
named it Mount Erebus and the smaller extinct volcano to the east, Mount Terror.
As the ships sailed south, Ross saw a low white line
"extending from its eastern extreme point as far as the eye could discern to the
eastward. It presented an extraordinary appearance, gradually increasing in height, as we
got nearer to it, and proving at length to
be a perpendicular cliff of ice, between one hundred and fifty feet and two hundred
feet above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and
level at the top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward
face". Ross realized there was no possible penetration
further as Ross stated that "we might with equal chance of success try to sail
through the cliffs of Dover, as to penetrate such a mass". Naming it the Victoria
Barrier, it was later changed to the Ross Ice Shelf. By the middle of February, after
sailing eastwards along the
shelf for 200 miles, Ross decided to abandon his search for an entrance until the
next season. The expedition arrived at Derwent River
on April 6, 1841. Ross was delighted and took pleasure in the fact that their
efforts had been "unattended by casualty, calamity, or
sickness of any kind, and that every individual on both ships had been permitted to
return in perfect health and safety to this southern home".
On November 23, the expedition once again left Hobart, Tasmania for Antarctica. In three
weeks they were among the ice bergs and
on December 17 they entered the ice pack. By January 19, 1842, Erebus and Terror
were in "an ocean of rolling fragments of ice, hard
as floating rocks of granite, which were dashed against them by the waves with such
violence that their masts quivered". Terror's
rudder was smashed by the ice and the Erebus's didn't fare much better. Ross
wrote: "There seemed to be but little probability of
our ships holding together much longer, so frequent and violent were the shocks
they sustained". Miraculously they did survive and,
after repairs, continued south on February 4. By the end of February the Ross Ice
Shelf was in sight again. It was so cold that while
the crewmen were chipping ice from the bows of Terror, a small fish was
found frozen in place where it had been thrown against the
ship's side. Terror's surgeon and naturalist, Dr. Robertson, tried to
retrieve it for analysis but the ship's cat was a little quicker.
The weather remained a constant problem. Ross spent much of
the summer frustrated by his hopeless efforts to find a route through
the pack. He sailed eastward and a little further south than the previous season
but, up against the wall, he decided to give it up as
winter was rapidly approaching. They recrossed the Antarctic Circle and set a
course for Cape Horn. The expedition progressed
uneventfully for several hundred miles. In the darkness on March 12 a massive
iceberg loomed directly ahead and "the ship was
immediately hauled to the wind on the port tack with the expectation of being able
to weather it. But just at this moment the Terror
was observed running down upon us, under her top-sails and foresail; and as it was
impossible for her to clear both the berg and the
Erebus, collision was inevitable. We instantly hove all aback to diminish
the violence of the shock, but the concussion when she struck
us was such as to throw almost everyone off his feet. Our bowsprit, foretopmast,
and other smaller spars, were carried away, and the
ships hanging together, entangled by their rigging, and dashing against each other
with fearful violence, were falling down upon the
weather face of the lofty berg under our lee, against which the waves were breaking
and foaming to near the summit of its
perpendicular cliffs. Sometimes she rose high above us, almost exposing her keel to
view, and again descended as we in our turn rose
to the top of the wave, threatening to bury her beneath us, whilst the crashing of
the breaking upperworks and boats increased the
horror of the scene". The ships were able to separate but the Erebus
was completely disabled and drifting on to the berg "so close
that the waves, when they struck against it, threw back their sprays into the
ship". It was a very serious moment but, as the Erebus's surgeon wrote,
"Captain Ross was quite equal to the emergency, and, folding his arms across his
breast, as he stood like a statue on
the afterpart of the quarter-deck, calmly gave the order to loose the sail".
Ross then ordered the use of a stern-board, a hazardous three-point turn that
"perhaps had never before been resorted to by seamen in such weather". It took
forty-five minutes to execute
but "In a few minutes, after getting before the wind, she dashed through the
narrow channel between two perpendicular walls of ice,
and the foaming breakers which stretched across it, and the next moment we were in
smooth water under its lee". There was a huge
amount of damage to the Erebus but repairs were quickly made and by March 15
they resumed their voyage. The expedition finally
arrived at the Falkland Islands, after a brief stay at Cape Horn, where they
remained for nearly five months.
Ross departed the Falklands on December 17, 1842, for his
third and final season in the Antarctic. His desire was to penetrate the
Weddell Sea and add to the research done by Weddell in 1822. Unfortunately, he met
with "dense, impenetrable, pack ice".
Abandoning his plan, Ross crossed the Antarctic Circle on March 5, 1843, and the Terror
sailed for home. Ross wrote: "The shores
of Old England came into view at 5h 20m A.M. on the 2nd of September, and we
anchored off Folkestone at midnight of the 4th".
The voyage was completed after four years and five months at sea.
From Ross's departure in 1843 until the last decade of the
19th century, Antarctica was almost solely the domain of the sealer.
There were a few exceptions. In 1844-45 the Admiralty sent out Lieutenant T.E.L.
Moore in the barque Pagoda to carry out magnetic
work in the south Atlantic and southern Indian Oceans. The Challenger Expedition of
the British Admiralty in 1872-75 cruised through
the south Indian Ocean in January and February 1874, mapping Prince Edward Island,
Īles Crozet, Īles Kerguelen, and Heard Island.
Reasons for the lack of further exploration were varied. America was involved with
the Civil War and there was an extreme interest in
the Arctic by both the Americans and Europeans. It was a resolution, passed by the
Sixth International Geographical Congress in London
in 1895, that ushered in the "Heroic Era". Before World War I halted the
scientific research, some 16 exploring expeditions were launched
from Australia, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Scotland, and
Sweden.
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| Robert Falcon Scott |  |
"Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale." |
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Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912), British naval officer and explorer of Antarctica, born in Devonport, England. Scott entered the Royal Navy at the age of 14. In 1900 he was placed in command of the National Antarctic Expedition. Leaving England in 1901, Scott established a land base on the shores of McMurdo Sound, in Antarctica. He explored to the east of the Ross Ice Shelf and named Edward VII Peninsula. He also led a party that achieved a record latitude of 81° 17' south and sledged over Victoria Land. The expedition, which returned in 1904, was responsible for scientific discoveries of marked importance. |
In 1910 Scott embarked on a second Antarctic expedition, with the aim of
being the first man to reach the South Pole. He again
landed at McMurdo Sound and with four companions began a trek of 2964 km (1842 mi), the
longest continuous sledge journey
ever made in the polar regions. Scott reached the South Pole on January 18, 1912, only to
find the tent and flag of the Norwegian
explorer Roald Amundsen, who had achieved the goal 5 weeks earlier. The return journey
ended in the loss of the entire party. Petty
Officer Edgar Evans died from a fall; Captain Lawrence Oates sacrificed his life, hoping
thus to save his comrades; Henry R. Bowers,
Dr. Edward Wilson, and Scott perished of starvation and exposure on March 29, 1912, within
18 km (11 mi) of a supply depot. Their
bodies, along with valuable documents and specimens left by Scott in his tent, were found
by a search party almost eight months later.
His diaries and other documents were published as Scott's Last Expedition (1913).
He is also the author of The Voyage of the Discovery (1905).
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Shackleton made another
attempt to reach the South Pole between 1907 and 1909 as the leader of the British
Antarctic
Expedition. After sailing on the Nimrod to a base on Ross Island, Shackleton and
three companions pioneered a route up through
the Transantarctic Mountains to the polar plateau by way of the Beardmore Glacier. By
January 9, 1909, they had trekked to
latitude 88°23' south, within 179 km (111 mi) of the South Pole, but dwindling food
supplies forced them to turn back. Shackleton
later told his wife, Emily, "I thought you'd rather have a live donkey than a dead
lion." Shackleton was knighted in 1909 by British
monarch Edward VII for setting the record for the farthest southern latitude reached.
Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in late 1911,
followed five weeks later by Scott (who died with his
entire team on the return journey). Shackleton then turned his attention to crossing
Antarctica. His British Imperial Trans-Antarctic
Expedition set sail from England on the Endurance in August 1914 with the goal of
crossing Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the
Ross Sea via the South Pole. However, in January 1915, before reaching Antarctica, the Endurance
became trapped in pack ice in
the Weddell Sea. The ship remained stuck in the drifting ice for ten months before it was
crushed and sank. Shackleton and his
crew of 27 men abandoned the ship a month before it sank. They lived on the floating ice
for almost six months before their ice floe,
drifting north, broke apart. The group then embarked for the South Shetland Islands in
three small boats taken from the Endurance,
sailing seven days from ice floe to ice floe before reaching uninhabited Elephant Island.
Leaving all but five of
his crew on Elephant Island, Shackleton set off to seek help in one of the boats, the 7-m
(23-ft) James Caird.
His target was a whaling station on the island of South Georgia, 1,300 km (800 mi) across
the open South Atlantic Ocean. After 16
exhausting and extremely perilous days at sea, the six men reached South Georgia,
accomplishing one of the greatest feats of
navigation in history. They had landed on the opposite side of the island from the whaling
station, however. Shackleton and two
of his men then hiked for 36 hours straight, completing the first crossing of South
Georgia's mountainous interior, to reach help at
the whaling station. After three unsuccessful attempts over the next four months,
Shackleton rescued his men stranded at Elephant
Island on August 30, 1916, in a tugboat lent to him by the government of Chile. In the
end, not a single member of the Endurance
expedition was lost.
In 1921 Shackleton led another expedition to Antarctica,
but he died of a heart attack aboard his ship at Grytviken, South Georgia.
His body was buried in the whalers' cemetery at Grytviken.
Despite never reaching the South Pole, Shackleton has a reputation as
one of history's ablest leaders. A tireless worker with a
charming, forceful personality, he inspired fierce loyalty and admiration from his men,
who called him "The Boss." Shackleton wrote
two accounts of his expeditions, The Heart of the Antarctic (1909) and South
(1919). He is commemorated in the names of no
fewer than ten geographical features in and around Antarctica, including a coast, a
mountain range, a glacier, an ice shelf, and a
submarine canyon.
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