Off the Map by Fergus Fleming

Author:Fergus Fleming
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780802142726
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHARTING THE ANTARCTIC

James Clark Ross (1839–43)

Since Antarctica had been circumnavigated, first by James Cook in 1773 and then by Thaddeus Bellingshausen in 1820, naval and scientific circles had shown little interest in the bottom of the world. A number of fantasists insisted there was a continent inside all that ice, conjecturing variously that it contained a portal to the inside of the globe, was home to a race of undiscovered humans, and was the site of either Atlantis or the Garden of Eden. But the general view, as propounded by Cook, held that there was nothing down there and that, even if there was, it was too difficult to reach and not worth finding anyway. During the 1820s and 1830s, however, as whalers and sealers explored the region in search of new and profitable killing grounds, it became clear that there was land and that it could be reached. In 1820 the American John Davis landed on the Antarctic Peninsula; and in 1830–2 a captain from the British firm of Enderby Brothers sighted a portion of the continent that would later be called Enderby Land. As these and other reports came in, European and American governments took a renewed interest in Antarctica. In 1837 Captain Jules Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville sailed south with orders to find the South Pole. He came nowhere near the Pole, but he did very creditably nonetheless, becoming the first man to land on the main continent and naming the territory Adélie Land after his wife. In 1838 a US expedition under Lieutenant Charles Wilkes charted 1,500 miles of Antarctic coastline – or said it did; the findings were later proved false – that duly entered the charts as Wilkes Land. Then, not wanting to be left behind, Britain launched its own expedition in 1839. The man chosen to lead it was Commander James Clark Ross.

James Ross was, in 1838, the Admiralty’s most experienced polar officer. Of the last 20 years he had spent 17 in the Arctic and had overwintered for six; he had reached, with Parry, the furthest north over the Arctic pack; and he had discovered the North Magnetic Pole. He had received little kudos for his trouble, never having been the leader of an expedition; but now he seemed the obvious choice, not just because of long service but because, as the discoverer of the North Magnetic Pole, he was considered a magnetist of distinction. This was an important qualification, for the first British Antarctic Expedition of the 19th century was to be a scientific one. This did not mean that it was driven any less by a desire for national prestige than its Arctic predecessors, just that unlike them it did have a genuinely worthwhile purpose. In 1838 it had been proposed that Europe’s leading maritime powers should take simultaneous readings across the world with the aim of creating a geomagnetic map of the globe. Ross’s expedition was part of that project, and so he was instructed to erect and maintain observatories throughout the known lands of the southern hemisphere.

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