The savage killing and dismemberment of Captain Cook on a Hawaiian beach in 1779 helped make him a cult figure among the educated classes of Europe. In paintings and popular accounts published from London to Moscow, he was celebrated as an exemplar of Enlightenment, selflessly searching for answers to the mysteries of the world. In England, he was also celebrated as a flag-bearer of the empire, adding to its territories and enhancing its prestige. Both guises brought him widespread acclaim, albeit posthumously.
One of Cook’s distant admirers was the Russian naval officer Captain Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who would repeat Cook’s voyage to the most southerly reaches of the Earth and achieve success where Cook had failed – by actually sailing his ship within sight of the Antarctic continent. Strangely, the feats of this Russian navigator have remained largely unknown to the wider world.
Cook’s voyage to the south had revealed a vast expanse of storm-tossed ocean, beset with massive icebergs and blocked by impenetrable pack ice. If there was a continent beyond the ice, Cook was convinced that it would be a frozen wasteland of no value to any European empire. But there was one European empire that was not deterred by the cold, and which had found wealth aplenty in similar latitudes of the far north.
Russia’s reach stretched eastwards from Europe to the frozen tundra of Siberia, and across the Bering Sea to the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. There was money to be made in those far-off places, with Russian traders enslaving the local Aleut people to hunt for sea otters and fur seals, the skins of which were shipped for sale to the merchants of China. By 1812, the rich crescent of Russia’s Pacific empire extended from the Kamchatka Peninsula to northern California. With Russia’s imperial standing boosted by its victory that same year over Napoleon, Tsar Alexander I sought to boost the Russian presence in the Pacific Ocean, in the face of competition from the British, French and Spanish empires, as well as the expanding American republic.
In 1819, the Russian emperor dispatched two expeditions to follow in the wake of Cook’s second and third voyages. One was sent to explore the northern Pacific Ocean and the other to explore the high southern latitudes that had been the focus of Cook’s second voyage. The tsar wanted the southern expedition to surpass Cook in both daring and discovery, and to bring even greater glory to Russia than Cook had brought to England. The forty-year-old commander of the southern expedition was Bellingshausen, who was instructed to ‘approach as closely as possible to the South Pole, searching for as yet unknown land, and only abandoning the undertaking in the face of insurmountable obstacles’.1 The Russians would find that they were not alone in the Antarctic seas.
The publication of Cook’s journals had alerted the world to the rich marine life that was there for the taking, with American, British and Argentinian sealers being quick to respond to the news. Both fur seals and elephant seals were easy for an enterprising mariner to harvest en masse from the rocky shores of the islands off the southern tip of South America. Fur seal skins had a ready market in China, while oil from elephant seals was in great demand in Europe, both as fuel for lamps and as lubrication for the machinery of the dawning industrial age.
Cook’s journals and the subsequent English decision to establish a penal colony in New South Wales also alerted rival European empires to the scope of Britain’s territorial ambitions in the Pacific. As independence movements brought turmoil to Spanish-controlled South America, with Argentina declaring independence in 1816 and Chile in 1818, Britain was keen to fill the power vacuum left by Spain and take control of the vital Magellan Strait, which linked the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
The Magellan Strait also figured in the Russians’ calculations. In 1803, the tsar had dispatched an expedition of two ships to the North Pacific by way of South America. Rather than supplying Russia’s Pacific trading posts by the tortuous land route from Moscow, Alexander I wanted to discover more economical ways of doing so by sea. This made knowledge of the Magellan Strait an important asset to the Russian Empire.
Bellingshausen had been an officer on that earlier voyage, which was the first Russian expedition to circumnavigate the world from east to west. Along the way, the vessels called at Hawaii to replenish their stores and explore the possibility of bringing those strategically placed islands within the ambit of Russia’s growing Pacific empire. While there, the officers visited the site of Cook’s murder and souvenired some of the retaliatory English bullets from beachside tree trunks. The experience helped to reinforce the heroic image of the English navigator in the mind of the Russians. Now, sixteen years later, Bellingshausen was attempting to outdo Cook’s achievements by taking his two well-equipped ships, the Vostok and the Mirny, further south than even Cook had dared to go.
While the northern expedition reinforced Russia’s claim to its territories in the North Pacific, Bellingshausen’s southern expedition was more in the nature of a reconnaissance. It would assert Russia’s growing naval presence, ascertain the power of its rivals in the Pacific and try to establish secure sea routes for Russian commerce. Perhaps the tsar hoped that the spreading Russian empire might one day control both poles. That would mean locating the land mass that Cook had suggested was still to the south of his furthest voyaging.
In the event that this land was inhabited, the Russian government had struck special medals for Bellingshausen to distribute to the inhabitants of ‘any islands or shores’ that he might discover, just as Cook had done during his second voyage to the Pacific. One side of the Russian medal bore an image of Alexander I, while the other bore an inscription recording the names of the ships and the date of their departure.2 The silver and bronze medals were meant to be valued by their native recipients, making it likely that they would be displayed to subsequent explorers. Such explorers would then see that the Russians had preceded them, and consequently had a stronger claim to possession of that particular place, although Bellingshausen had no specific instructions to perform the sort of ritual claiming ceremonies that Cook had done during his voyages.
These expeditions were also designed to embellish the growing prestige of Russia’s burgeoning empire. Bellingshausen was instructed to compile a journal that might later be published for the edification of the wider world, detailing everything that was ‘new, useful or interesting, not only with regard to navigation, but as being of general service in the spread of human knowledge in all parts’.3 Two German naturalists were recruited to assist him, but they apparently had second thoughts about spending two years on such a dangerous voyage and failed to meet Bellingshausen when his ships arrived at Copenhagen to collect them. Disappointed that his ‘hopes of making discoveries in the field of natural history were dashed to the ground’, he went on to London, where he purchased books, charts and scientific equipment and attempted in vain to recruit a British naturalist.4
Science was a vitally important aspect of the expedition. Plant and animal specimens could prove commercially valuable to the Russian Empire, as the spices of the East Indies had been to the Dutch and the sea otters of the North Pacific had been to the Russians and the British. As well, rock samples could provide evidence of valuable minerals, such as copper, gold or silver. Strange specimens from distant lands were also important for their own sake. Men and women of the Enlightenment valued such specimens for their private collections, or gazed with wonder at them in the display cabinets of grand public museums. They also purchased the richly illustrated editions of expedition journals, and the ornithological and other books that sought to bring order to the natural world. Adding to the sum of human knowledge was regarded as important for its own sake, and for the prestige of empires. It was necessary for nations with territorial ambitions to be able to show that they had greater knowledge of the desired territory than their rivals. To achieve this without his two naturalists, Bellingshausen would have to rely on his own observations, supplemented by the work of his expedition artist and astronomer.
Without naturalists, Bellingshausen knew he would struggle to exceed the public success of Cook, whose widely read journals had been supplemented by the scientific publications of Banks, Forster and others. Ensconced in his cabin aboard the Vostok, Bellingshausen would have been concerned about how he could now fulfil his tsar’s expectations. He planned to follow the path of Cook’s second voyage, then to attempt to venture even further south. The reputation of his expedition would have to rest on the perspicacity of his journal, the accuracy of his charts and the value of any discoveries he might make. Yet he could not have hoped to make any great discoveries in seas Cook had already explored so exhaustively.
Moreover, what would be the use of any discovery in such remote latitudes? The most that could be hoped for was to find lands similar to those of Russia’s newly claimed territories of the North Pacific, with their valuable resources of sea otters and fur seals, or a port that could serve as a southern trading post and way-station for ships plying the route between Russia and the North Pacific.
Bellingshausen took his two ships to Rio de Janeiro before heading south, firstly to the island of South Georgia, where he encountered two British sealing ships. The Russian noted how the seal colonies of Cook’s time had already been decimated by the depredations of the sealers. Despite the British presence and Cook’s prior claim, Bellingshausen charted the island’s southern coast, which Cook had neglected. Bellingshausen now ‘sprinkled [it] plentifully with Russian names’.5 Then he sailed east to clarify the position and extent of Cook’s Sandwich Land, which the Englishman had thought could be part of a continent stretching all the way to the South Pole. By taking the time to chart its coasts more closely, Bellingshausen proved instead that it was just a lonely group of islands. Any lingering belief that the temperate Great South Land might still exist was extinguished. If there was a southern continent, it must lie much further south.
Heading south to search for it, the Russian ships crossed the Antarctic Circle on 27 January 1820, becoming only the second expedition to have done so. The following day, Bellingshausen reported that he could see a ‘solid stretch of ice running from east through south to west’.6 Although it was probably an ice shelf attached to Antarctica, and although he was only about thirty kilometres away from it, some twentieth-century historians concluded that Bellingshausen was unaware that he was within sight of the continent, supposedly because of the poor visibility caused by the thickly falling snow. As a result of these assumptions, Bellingshausen was long denied the honour of having been the first explorer to see any part of the Antarctic coastline. Due to the poor editing of his journals, and to later errors made during its English translation, it had been easy for historians to make this error. It was only after a re-examination of the original journals and the publication of additional documentary evidence in the 1950s that it became clear that Bellingshausen and his officers were aware of land which they took to be a continent.
One piece of evidence was a letter that Bellingshausen wrote on 8 April 1820 to the Russian minister for the navy, in which the explorer described his experiences of 28 January. He reported how he had reached latitude 69° 25’ S and longitude 2° 10’ W, from where he could see ‘continuous ice, at whose edge were pieces piled one upon another, and with ice mountains seen at different places in a southerly direction’. Further proof came from the captain of the Mirny, the experienced explorer Mikhail Lazarev, who had climbed the mast of his ship to view the awesome sight. Upon his return to Russia, he wrote of how they had ‘encountered an ice shore of extreme height, and that evening, which was very fine, as we watched from the crosstrees, it stretched before us as far as the eye could see’.
Expecting that the South Pole was ocean rather than land, the expedition continued eastward, trying repeatedly to find a way south past the ice barrier. However, as Lazarev later reported, ‘we kept encountering the ice continent each time we approached 70°’.7 On one such encounter in mid-February, Bellingshausen described how the sea ice was attached to ‘cliff-like, firmly standing ice’, the edges of which were ‘perpendicular and formed bays’, while the surface of the ice ‘rose in a slope towards the south, over a distance whose limits we could not see’.8
Although the later destruction of his logbooks during the Russian Revolution made absolute confirmation impossible, it is clear that Bellingshausen and his colleagues saw the coast of Antarctica on 28 January 1820, and that they believed they were looking upon a continent of indeterminate extent. They were the first to have done so. But it was only by a matter of days.
At the time of Bellingshausen’s voyage, there were also British and American vessels in the seas south of Chile and Argentina. On 19 February 1819, William Smith, captain of the British ship Williams, was on his way from Montevideo to Valparaíso, in Chile, when he chanced upon previously unknown land about 450 nautical miles south of Cape Horn. Smith had earlier worked in the Greenland whale fishery and could distinguish between pack ice, icebergs and ice-covered land. When he reported his finding to Captain William Shirreff, the British naval commander in Valparaíso, he was met with disbelief. Shirreff considered that Smith had most probably seen ice rather than land.
Undaunted, Smith retraced the voyage in May 1819, but was prevented by wild weather from reaching that far south. When he continued on to Montevideo and Buenos Aires, the stories of his discovery circulated among American whalers and sealers in those ports. According to Smith’s later account, they offered him ‘large Sums of Money’ to reveal the location of his discovery. Refusing to do so, supposedly for ‘the Good of his Country’, Smith sailed his vessel back towards Valparaíso, determined this time to confirm the existence of the land. Blessed with better weather, he was able not only to locate it but also to sail along its coastline for a considerable distance before sending his first mate ashore. The landing party ‘planted a board with the Union-jack, and appropriate inscription, with three cheers, taking possession in the name of the King of Great Britain’.9
Smith had found what is now known as the South Shetland Islands. Not realising that it was a line of islands, he initially called his discovery New South Britain, thereby suggesting that it was greater in extent than New South Wales and might therefore be part of the southern continent that Cook had been unable to find. This time, Smith was believed when he arrived in Valparaíso on 24 November 1819 and reported his find to Shirreff.
Having confirmed the existence of land and numerous offshore islands, Smith also reported that there were ‘seals in abundance’, which made the territory a valuable acquisition for the British Empire. Accordingly, he was commissioned by the Royal Navy to return there with a British naval officer, Edward Bransfield, who took command of the Williams. With Smith showing him the way, Bransfield charted the coastline of ‘New South Britain’ and formally claimed the place for the British Empire.
News of Smith’s find appeared in British newspapers and journals, with an account by a British engineer in Chile, John Miers, reporting that Smith had ‘observed [a] great abundance of whales and seals’, with sperm whales being ‘in greater abundance than he imagines has ever been elsewhere known’. Miers also claimed that Smith had seen sea otters in abundance. In fact, no such animals exist there. Smith was also supposed to have seen trees like the ‘Norway pine’, but again, there are no trees there. Yet Miers asserted that Smith described the ‘whole appearance of the land, the structure and shape of the hills’, as ‘more like the Norwegian coast than any land he ever saw’. Miers went on to suggest that the new-found land was probably connected to Cook’s Sandwich Land in the South Atlantic, with the two widely separated lands forming ‘two points of one large continent’.10
The value of New South Britain was lauded by Miers as a possible British settlement, with a climate comparable to northern Scotland. It could, therefore, become a safe haven from which British business interests could organise their operations in the tumultuous political environment of South America. It might also provide a base for the thirty or forty British whaling ships that operated in the Pacific, giving them some advantage over the 200 or so American whalers in the Pacific. And it could provide an entrepôt port through which British goods and capital could be channelled to the growing countries of South America, as well as to India and China. Such a settlement could combine with the British-controlled colonies at the Cape of Good Hope and New South Wales to provide ‘equidistant depots in the Southern Hemisphere’, which might defend and command a huge trade ‘with more extensive markets than were ever offered to any commercial nation at any former period of the world’.11
It was a grand vision of a future that would never come. This was partly because New South Britain was not the arcadia Miers had portrayed. By the time his account was published in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, Smith and Bransfield had completed their survey and found the place to be very different to that of Miers’ imagination. As later visitors would attest, there was ‘not a tree, not a bush, not a shrub, not a flower, in all the islands’.12
Bransfield had been ordered to see whether Smith’s discovery was ‘merely an Island or part of a Continent’, with Shirreff suggesting that the latter was ‘not improbable’. If it looked like being part of continent, Bransfield was to follow the coast eastward to determine whether it was connected to Cook’s Sandwich Land. He was told that ‘the great and leading object’ was to survey ‘the Coast and Harbours’. He was also to confirm Smith’s report about the ‘uncommon abundance of the Sperm Whale, Otters, Seals etc’, to collect samples of any animals and plants and to assess the potential of the place for supporting a colony. If it was already inhabited, he was to report on ‘the Character, habits, dress, customs and state of civilization of the Inhabitants’. If he met with a foreign vessel, Bransfield was to inform its captain ‘that the Country has already been taken possession of’.
To strengthen Britain’s rights in that regard, Bransfield had been ordered to land at several places and take possession in the name of the king, ‘planting a board with an Union Jack painted on it, and words written under to the above purpose’. If his survey took more than six months, he was instructed not to return to Valparaíso but to go straight to London and report the results of his survey to the Admiralty. At any ports en route, he was counselled ‘to conceal every discovery that you have made during your Voyages’.13 Nobody could be allowed to learn of these discoveries and exploit their resources, or make a rival claim for their ownership.
In fact, stories of Smith’s discovery had already reached as far as Washington. The American secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was informed by letter from his representative in Valparaíso, Jeremy Robinson, of Smith’s discovery and of Bransfield’s expedition. Robinson urged Adams to send a US Navy ship to do its own exploration of the islands – and, presumably, to claim them for the United States.
As more details of the discovery became available, further pressure was applied to the American government to protect its sealers. The New York merchant and ship-owner James Byers informed Washington in August 1820 of the ‘great numbers of Seal and much Sea Elephant Oil’ taken by the British on South Georgia, and of how Americans had been prevented from sealing there because of the British claim of ownership. Byers was anxious that the same should not happen at this new land, and he planned to establish an American claim to the place by sending building materials with his sealing ships so that a permanent American settlement could be established. Byers argued that only actual occupancy would give the United States a legal claim to the place. But an American naval vessel would also be needed, to ensure that the British Navy or British sealers could not easily expel the Americans by force of arms. Appealing for such a vessel to be sent, Byers declared that ‘it would afford great satisfaction to every American if our Government was the first to survey and name the new World’.14 Of course, the British were already doing just that.
Adams was sympathetic to Byers’ appeal, advising him to confer with the secretary for the navy about the possibility of establishing an American settlement and of ‘sending a Frigate to take possession’. Adams told President James Monroe of the correspondence from Robinson and Byers, noting that the intended settlement was simply ‘a very good expedient for protecting the real objects, to catch Seals and Whales’. With American and British sealers racing to be first to arrive for the coming summer season of killing, there was no time to lose. Monroe agreed that it was important for the United States ‘to aim at the occupancy’ of this new land ‘of great extent’.15 However, the small US Navy had no suitable ship to send, and so the settlement never eventuated. For the time being, America’s territorial ambition exceeded its naval reach. Washington could only watch from afar as Britain cemented its hold on the apparent continent.
Meanwhile, Smith had no trouble directing Bransfield to New South Britain, arriving off its northern coast on 16 January 1820, just as Bellingshausen was charting the Sandwich Islands far to the east. While the Russian was proving that Cook’s Sandwich Land was actually a group of islands and not part of a southern continent, Bransfield and Smith were trying to determine the nature of New South Britain.
Sailing north-east along the northern coasts of the island chain until no more land could be seen, Bransfield carefully charted the coast as best he could, in the face of frequent fogs and often contrary winds and currents. Rounding the land’s easterly point, still unsure whether he had been sailing along a continental shore, he came across an extensive bay on 22 January. He was able to land on a narrow shingle beach that was edged by high cliffs. Hoping to collect fresh water, the naval surgeon on board described, in an article for the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, how the explorers had to force their way through a tumultuous mass of penguins defending their young, along with albatrosses, gulls and other birds, and seals and sea lions.
A junior officer, Charles Poynter, noted how the ‘penguins disputed our landing’ and wrote that ‘it was not until great slaughter was made, and a lane cut through them, that we could proceed’. Like many visitors to the Antarctic, and perhaps subconsciously emulating the imperial conquistadors who had dispossessed native peoples, Poynter invested the penguins with human qualities, calling them ‘amphibious Islanders’ and describing how the men had to fight their way ‘thro’ the Islanders’ to get at some seals they wanted to kill.
Going some way inland, they found neither animals nor people, and the vegetation was restricted to patches of stunted grass and moss. But it was the pullulating life on the rocky shore that made the place a valuable acquisition. Poynter reported how they came upon many elephant seals. Even when disturbed, noted Poynter, ‘they eyed us with the utmost indifference, but when we attacked them with our lances, &c., they betrayed their astonishment in a stifled bellow’. Twenty-one were killed in less than half an hour, along with some seals and penguins.16 The rich killing gave the voyage purpose and profit.
Following his instructions, Bransfield claimed the place for the king, ‘with due ceremony’, formally naming it New South Britain and the landing point as George’s Bay. Of course, Smith had already done so the previous year in his private capacity. Bransfield was still unsure whether he was taking possession of an island or a larger landmass, as the fogs and partly ice-covered straits between the islands gave the impression of a continuous land mass. Watching through a telescope on board the Williams, an officer saw Bransfield raise a board with the Union Jack painted upon it. The ship responded by hoisting its ‘ensign and pendant’, firing a gun to salute the occasion. Although no official journal of the voyage has survived, an eyewitness account by Poynter reported that Bransfield also ‘buried a bottle, containing several coins of the realm, given by different people for that purpose’. Then the sailors were given glasses of grog, with which they toasted the health of King George.
Cook had performed these same rituals on several occasions during his voyages of exploration in the Pacific. Just as Cook and others had done, prominent geographical features were now given names by Bransfield, both to facilitate the navigation of ships coming after him and as a way of making the ownership of those places more securely British.17 Although Bransfield imagined at the time that he might be laying claim to a continent, the ceremony was actually performed on an island, which was later named King George Island.
Antarctica had still not been sighted by the watchers on the Williams. For the next week, the ship sailed in a south-westerly direction, with New South Britain appearing intermittently through the mist to the north. They did not know it at the time, but they were sailing along a strait that separated the line of South Shetland Islands from the Antarctic Peninsula. It was not until 30 January 1820, seeing no more land to his north, that Bransfield turned the ship south, heading away from the South Shetland Islands through waters crowded with ‘a multitude of whales’. It was then that Bransfield saw a mountainous land mass appear before him.
Like Bellingshausen, who was then skirting the Antarctic coast thousands of kilometres to the east, Bransfield now had no doubt that he was in sight of previously unseen land. Poynter described the moment that afternoon when, ‘after having their attention attracted by three immense icebergs, the haze clearing, they very unexpectedly saw land to the S.W.’. Being caught in unfamiliar seas, with uncharted coasts and rocky shoals and icebergs all around, was an awkward position for a sailing ship to be in. ‘The only cheer the sight afforded,’ wrote Poynter, ‘was in the idea that this might be the long-sought Southern Continent.’18 It would be more than a century before the world would know for certain that this was, in fact, part of the Antarctic continent.
Naming the section of coastline as Trinity Land, and mistakenly believing that he had come to the end of a closed-off sound rather than being in an open strait, Bransfield decided to head back in a north-easterly direction, carefully charting the ice-encrusted coast as far it could be followed. He made no attempt to make a landing, thereby unwittingly passing up the historic opportunity of being the first person to step onto the Antarctic continent. He also eschewed the chance to erect a board displaying the Union Jack, which would have claimed at least that part of the continent for the British Empire.
His caution was understandable. After all, Trinity Land could have been just another island, and the often foggy conditions, swirling currents, huge icebergs and half-hidden shoals made close investigation a perilous undertaking. As Poynter explained, ‘sheet-ice abounded a-head, and not fewer than 31 icebergs were counted at once. The weather was very stormy, and the fatigue of officers and men excessive.’19 Instead of attempting a landing or charting the full extent of the coastline, Bransfield decided to answer the larger question of whether there was a connection between Smith’s ‘New South Britain’ and Cook’s ‘Sandwich Land’. This had, after all, been his principal instruction.
Heading north-east along the coastline of Trinity Land, Bransfield charted it as best he could to its conclusion, until sea ice forced the ship further north. It was then that he made his second landing, this time on Clarence Island, where he performed another claiming ceremony and erected the usual board with the Union Jack. Smith was not going to be outdone by his naval companion and took the opportunity of going ashore on another small island, which he named Seal Island. It was so crowded with seals that he quickly killed more than 300, all the while desperately trying to keep marauding gulls from spoiling their valuable furs. In the end, Smith only managed to get ninety of the skins away in his small boat, while the rest of the valuable carcasses were left to the depredations of the birds or to be sucked away by the tide.
Bransfield then took the Williams eastward, before turning south and sailing as far as he could go, still trying to determine whether this new-found land was connected to Cook’s Sandwich Land. The vessel was eventually stopped by a mess of icebergs and pack ice, which blocked the way southward. With the summer over, it was becoming too dangerous to linger so far south. Although he had been authorised to sail all the way to Britain to report his findings, Bransfield headed back to Valparaíso, via the northern edge of New South Britain. An attempt was made to perform a third claiming ceremony, but the rocky and wave-dashed coastline made it too dangerous to attempt a landing. So Bransfield headed home, confident of the importance of his discoveries. His naval surgeon noted their great value ‘to the commercial interests of our country’.20 And they had the seal skins to prove it.
But the British were not alone. The American sealer Captain James Sheffield and his first mate, Nathaniel Palmer, also had some 9000 skins from the South Shetlands, which they had collected in just fifteen days. The haul emphasised the fortune that could be made from these new sealing grounds. After hearing stories of Smith’s discovery, Sheffield had rushed there from the United States in the newly built Hersilia, owned by Edmund Fanning, a wealthy sealer, merchant and explorer who was based in the Connecticut port of Stonington.
Fanning had made a small fortune by trading skins in China for tea and other goods, which he brought back for sale in New York. As early as 1797, Fanning had been sealing off the tip of South America. In 1812, after the seals on the known islands had been exterminated, he had convinced President James Madison to send him on an expedition in search of new islands. Although that expedition had been cancelled when the war with Britain erupted, Fanning had remained convinced that there were lucrative discoveries to be made south of Cape Horn.
Sheffield’s haul of skins proved him right. It also sparked a call for the United States to challenge Britain’s claim to the islands, with several American newspapers arguing that American sealers had been secretly visiting them in the years before Smith and Bransfield had arrived to ‘discover’ and claim them.21 No documentary evidence has ever been produced to confirm such visits.
With reports reaching New York that there were hundreds of thousands of seals waiting to be plundered, James Byers went ahead with his plan to send a fleet of three ships to secure the seals for himself and his partners. Promising to have his American ships there by October 1820, Byers again petitioned the United States government to send a naval vessel to support the sealers and help establish an American claim to the islands. With Byers warning that there was ‘not the least doubt … the British will attempt to Drive our Vessels from the Islands’, and with the American sealing vessels being ‘armed for their own defence’, there was every possibility of a serious conflict developing. Secretary of State Adams was alive to the threat, again urging the secretary for the navy to send an armed vessel ‘to protect the Sealing and Whaling Settlement on the Newly discovered land south of Cape Horn’. Yet the navy remained opposed to sending a ship to such unexplored and dangerous coasts, and was concerned that a tussle for the islands would lead to ‘a collision with the British’, with the American navy being in no position to fight a war in Antarctic seas.22
The British were certainly on guard against rival claims being made to the islands. When Bransfield and Smith returned to Valparaíso on 14 April 1820, they handed their charts, journals and logbooks to the newly arrived British naval officer there, Captain Thomas Searle, who, in a forlorn attempt to keep news of the discovery secret and to prevent a possible rival claim being made by the newly independent Chileans, forbade the sailors from coming ashore. Searle also changed the name of their discovery from New South Britain to New South Shetland, apparently to prevent ‘confusion to other places’.
With his public service now over, Smith was eager to pursue his private profit and promptly took his ship back to New South Shetland, this time ‘for the purpose of fishing for Whales and Seals’. However, no sooner had he arrived than he was joined by up to twenty British ships, and even more American ones that were responding to Sheffield’s report of countless seals. All were intent on reaping a bloody harvest of the marine life. Smith later reported to the Admiralty on the ‘great difficulty’ that he had in keeping peace ‘between the Crews of the two Nations, who were on shore’ laying waste to the previously undisturbed wildlife.23
More were set to arrive, as news of the rich harvest spread across the world, from Valparaíso to Buenos Aires, New York and London, and west across the Pacific to the sealers and whalers of the British convict colony of Port Jackson (now Sydney). By October 1821, maps and charts of New South Shetland were reported to be ‘selling in all the principal shops in London’, while a British journal was reporting excitedly on the discoveries of Smith and Bransfield, predicting that ‘a very lucrative trade in seals may be carried on, as the sea absolutely swarms with these creatures, of great size, full of oil, and with the finest furs’.24 By the time of this publication, an armada of sealers had already descended on the islands and flensed many of the hapless fur seals of their skins and boiled down the blubber of the elephant seals.
Oblivious to the activities of Bransfield and Smith and the crescendo of killing on the rocky beaches, Bellingshausen continued his daring circumnavigation, venturing much further south than Cook had done. After surviving furious gales that almost swamped his ships, and with winter darkening the days and extending the pack ice, Bellingshausen finally quit these dangerous climes in mid-March 1820 and headed for Port Jackson. The colony had grown in wealth and significance since its establishment in 1788, with a brisk export trade based on sealing and bay whaling now giving way to one based on wool, as the interior was gradually opened up. Bellingshausen spent a month there, repairing his ships and restoring the health of his crews. He then took the Vostok and the Mirny on a four-month exploration of the South Pacific, reaching as far as Tahiti before returning to Port Jackson in September 1820.25
As he waited in Port Jackson for warmer weather to begin his onward voyage south, Bellingshausen received a letter from the Russian minister in Rio de Janeiro, who informed him of Smith’s discovery of a place that the minister called ‘New Shetland’. It was a report that the Russians could not ignore. The discovery was located at a strategically important point on the strait, linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans south of Tierra del Fuego. The name ‘New Shetland’ suggested to Bellingshausen that it could be part of the much looked-for southern continent.26
The information would have made Bellingshausen anxious to be on his way. Departing Port Jackson on 12 November, he again went further south than Cook. Although sea ice kept the Russian vessels outside the Antarctic Circle until they were well past the Ross Sea, Bellingshausen managed to cross into it briefly twice, before making a much more extended voyage within it than Cook had done.
His courage and persistence paid off. After sailing eastward for weeks, Bellingshausen suddenly caught sight through his telescope of partially snow-covered land. It was the first such land, bare of ice or snow, to be discovered within the Antarctic Circle. ‘Words cannot describe the delight which appeared on all our faces,’ wrote Bellingshausen, ‘at the cry of “Land! Land!”,’ coming as it did ‘after our long monotonous voyage, amidst unceasing dangers from ice, snow, rain, sleet and fog’.27 But the hazy conditions left him uncertain of just what he had discovered. Was it the southern continent that Cook had so assiduously searched for, or just an uncharted island of little consequence?
By the following day, as the two ships ventured as close as they dared to the icy shore, it became clear that they had stumbled upon an island of considerable height rather than a continent. With the ice keeping them nearly twenty kilometres offshore, Bellingshausen abandoned his plans ‘to survey the land more accurately or to take away anything of interest which we could deposit in the Museum of the Admiralty Department’. Had it been part of a continent, noted Bellingshausen, he would ‘certainly have surveyed it in greater detail’. Instead, with the crews of both vessels giving three cheers, the sailors were given glasses of punch to toast the health of the tsar. Because of the encircling ice and the lack of an obvious landing place on the steep volcanic island, Bellingshausen made no attempt to send men ashore to raise the Russian flag and claim the place for the tsar. He simply named it Peter I Island, perhaps hoping that the name would suffice to make the discovery Russian.28 Unbeknown to Bellingshausen, however, the Antarctic continent actually lay about 400 kilometres to the south, through the impenetrable sea ice.
Convinced that there must be more land nearby, Bellingshausen ordered his two ships to continue along the edge of the ice, keeping to an easterly course that was designed to take them far to the south of South America. It was dangerous work, as they picked their way carefully through the fog, past looming icebergs and shifting ice. The vision of the officers was obscured by thick snow showers, and the work of the crew aloft was made difficult by the bitterly cold wind.
Finally, on 29 January, as Bellingshausen was enjoying ‘the most beautiful day’ with freezing temperatures and bright sunshine, land was again sighted. This time, there was a headland that ‘stretched to the northward and ended in a high mountain which was separated by an isthmus from another mountain chain extending to the southwest’. Peter I Island had only been twenty-five kilometres long but there was no telling how far this new discovery extended. Because of ice floes, Bellingshausen was unable to get closer than about sixty kilometres from the shore. Unsure of its size, but suspecting that it was ‘extensive’, Bellingshausen gave the land a name of great consequence. Just as Cook had named South Georgia in honour of his king, thinking it was part of the Great South Land, so Bellingshausen called this new territory ‘Alexander I Land’.29
While bronze monuments to the tsar might disappear over time, Bellingshausen was convinced that Peter I Island and Alexander I Land would remain as ‘indestructible monuments’ and would ‘commemorate the name of our Emperors to the remotest posterity’.30 He presumably believed that the grand Russian names would keep those territories securely Russian for just as long, and that, because of their barren and forbidding nature, a formal claiming ceremony was not required. But merely naming a place did not bestow ownership upon the nation that did so. Further acts of possession were required before ownership would be recognised by other nations, and Russia did not follow up on the work of Bellingshausen. It would be more than a century before another Russian expedition ventured into Antarctic seas, by which time Peter I Island had been claimed by Norway. Likewise, Alexander I Land had been found to be an island. Renamed as Alexander I Island, its ownership was claimed by both Britain and Chile.
The Russians did not linger long enough to confirm the true nature of Alexander I Land. Bellingshausen was more concerned to check on Smith’s discovery of New Shetland. By approaching the close-packed line of islands from the south, the Russian hoped to determine ‘whether this recently discovered land belongs to the supposed Southern Continent’ or whether Smith had mistaken a number of islands for a large land mass, as Cook had done with Sandwich Land.31 Russia might be able to claim its ownership if Bellingshausen could confirm that the reported ‘New Shetland’ was part of an undiscovered continent.
This was the sort of discovery that the tsar wanted Bellingshausen to make. In fact, he had instructed Bellingshausen, if ‘very important discoveries’ were made, to ‘promptly despatch one of the ships under his command to Russia to report them’.32 The tsar was aware that being first to report such a momentous discovery would enhance the prestige of his empire and give Russia priority of possession over other claimants. But Bellingshausen was too late. Bransfield had already tried to put the ownership of the islands beyond dispute by performing several claiming ceremonies.
By approaching from the south-west, Bellingshausen confirmed what Bransfield had found the previous year. Another supposed continent had failed to live up to the expectations of its discoverer. Yet there was no sense of disappointment revealed in the journal of the phlegmatic Bellingshausen, who did not bother landing on the first two islands that he encountered. Nor did he try to claim them, except by giving them Russian names. Not knowing that the British had already done so – naming them Smith Island and Snow Island – Bellingshausen named the two islands in memory of recent military victories over Napoleon. The first was about thirty kilometres long and was named Borodino Island, while the second was about half the size and was dubbed Little Yaroslavetz.33
In fact, by the time of Bellingshausen’s arrival, the islands already had multiple names. The reports of Smith’s discovery in 1819 had inspired both an American and an Argentine sealing ship to venture south in his wake. While only a few vessels explored the sealing potential of the islands in the summer of 1819–20, the rich harvest of seal skins that they took back to their home ports had prompted many other merchants and captains to emulate them. A small party of sealers could kill and skin around 10,000 animals in a few weeks, which was sufficient to reap a sizeable fortune.
It was not surprising, then, that as Bellingshausen approached the South Shetland Islands from the south-west in late 1820, about twenty American sealing ships from various ports in New England were approaching the islands from the north-east, along with a similar number of sealing ships from England and Scotland. There was even one from Port Jackson, which had followed Bellingshausen across the Pacific. The American vessels included the Stonington sloop Hero, which was little more than fourteen metres long and was captained by the twenty-year-old Nathaniel Palmer, who had been first mate on another American ship during the previous summer that had collected 9000 skins. There was also the New Haven ship Huron, captained by John Davis, while the British ships included the Leith-based brig Jane, captained by James Weddell. Their names, along with those of some of their colleagues, would be forever associated with the Antarctic.34
Bellingshausen picked his way carefully along the island chain, avoiding icebergs and rocky shoals as he charted the coastline through the swirling mist and fog. After reaching the eastern limit of Little Yaroslavetz, he came across a narrow strait full of submerged rocks and turbulent water, which he decided not to enter. Continuing instead to the adjacent and much larger island, which had previously been named Livingston Island by the British and was now named Smolensk Island by Bellingshausen, the Russian ships found themselves in a strait about fifteen kilometres wide. Smolensk Island lay to the north, while to the south was the spectacular sight of ‘a high island, with steep cliffs and its heights covered with clouds’.35 Bellingshausen called it Teille Island, after the Russian representative in Rio de Janeiro who had informed him of Smith’s discovery. Named by the British as Deception Island, it was actually a dormant volcano, the collapsed side of which allowed the sea to form a protected harbour above the sunken crater. When Bellingshausen found the harbour, he stumbled into an area of frenzied activity.
Anchored off the western end of Livingston Island were eight British and American sealing ships, some of which had been at the islands for nearly three months, creating putrefying wastelands of rotting carcasses on the previously unsullied shores. Many of the rocky coves had become practically devoid of seals, and the competition to gain control of the remaining beaches was threatening to spill over into violence.
Just days before Bellingshausen’s arrival, the crews from nine American vessels had joined together under the leadership of Captain Davis to confront a large party of British sealers on Livingston Island who had prevented them from landing on a beach where there were said to be plenty of seals. The Americans had determined ‘to take Seal by fair means if we Could but at all Events to take them’. With a hundred or so Americans and sixty or so well-armed British sealers ready to defend the beach, the scene was set for a bloodbath. The battle was only abandoned when the approaching Americans noticed that the much-vaunted beach was largely devoid of seals. There was clearly no point to proceeding with the confrontation, so the Americans had sensibly withdrawn.36
Bellingshausen’s two vessels sailed into this tense situation, having spent three months traversing isolated and dangerous seas without sighting another ship. Bellingshausen had hoped to be the first navigator to confirm the existence of the southern continent but was now confronted by the small American boat Hero and its youthful Captain Palmer. Invited aboard the Vostok, Palmer explained to the Russians how he had come in partnership with three other American boats and had managed to kill thousands of seals during the previous four months, leading Bellingshausen to note that killing on such a scale must cause seal numbers to ‘rapidly decrease’, as had happened on South Georgia. Not only had Bellingshausen been beaten to the South Shetlands, but the islands were rapidly being made worthless by the unrestrained killing of their seal stocks. Bellingshausen made no mention in his journal entry of having talked with Palmer about the Antarctic Peninsula, which lay about a hundred kilometres to the south. Indeed, the discussion between the two sailors took less than an hour, after which Bellingshausen continued his voyage along the southern shores of the South Shetlands.37
A very different account of the meeting was published in 1833 by Captain Edmund Fanning,38 the Stonington sealer and keen claimer of new territories. In his belated account, intended for a popular audience, Fanning asserted that Palmer had told Bellingshausen that he had seen a large and mountainous land mass from a high point on Deception Island. Sailing off in the Hero to investigate, Palmer had been disappointed to see no sign of seal colonies and had returned without charting or landing upon the shore. If the account is accurate, Palmer had seen and investigated part of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Bellingshausen had then supposedly asked to see Palmer’s logbook and chart. When the documents were fetched by rowboat, the Russian was said by Fanning to have expressed amazement that Palmer had been able to achieve in his small boat what he, ‘in command of one of the best appointed fleets at the disposal of my august master, have for three long, weary, anxious years searched day and night for’. Bellingshausen had then expostulated: ‘What shall I say to my master? What will he think of me? But be that as it may, my grief is your joy; wear your laurels with my sincere prayers for your welfare. I name the land you have discovered, noble boy, Palmer’s Land.’39
This was Fanning at his fictional best, inventing an imaginary conversation to put Palmer forward as the acknowledged discoverer of the southern continent.
Although Palmer’s search for new sealing grounds had probably brought him within sight of the Antarctic Peninsula, his logbook does not even mention the brief meeting with Bellingshausen and offers no support for Fanning’s account. Further doubt is cast on Fanning’s claim by Bellingshausen, who made no attempt, in the days after his meeting with Palmer, to sail south to check the truth of Palmer’s story.40 Instead, he continued to chart the South Shetland Islands before heading back to Russia. If there had been any hint of a continent nearby, Bellingshausen would surely have checked it out.
It is possible that other sealers may also have caught sight of the peninsula, and some may even have explored its coastline. But their feats are lost to history. Few logbooks have survived, and many of the sealers were naturally reluctant to tell the world the details of their lucrative voyages. The unresolved questions about Palmer’s story did not prevent several later American geographers from seizing upon Fanning’s account to support their campaign to have the United States regarded as the rightful claimant to all or part of the Antarctic continent.41
In fact, a surviving logbook has since revealed that the first people to record their sighting of Antarctica, to sail along a small part of its coastline and to step ashore were the crew of the small American schooner Celia, who had headed south in February 1821 under the command of Captain Davis to search for seal colonies. Davis had found what Bransfield had seen the year before: ‘a Large Body of Land’ that was ‘high and covered intirely with Snow’. As the crew reefed the sails to cope with the heavy seas and snowstorms, Davis wrote in his log, ‘I think this Southern Land to be a Continent.’42
Davis’s relatively brief sighting did not justify such an assessment, just as the similar assumptions by Cook and other explorers were not supported by what they had actually seen and surveyed.43 It would take more than a century for the increasing suspicions about an Antarctic continent to be finally confirmed.