The blood-and-guts sealers of New England had good cause to celebrate their fortune in 1820, as they nudged their small ships into the congested harbour of New York. After risking their lives in the fog-shrouded and storm-tossed waters of the South Shetlands, they had returned laden with hundreds of barrels of seal skins and oil. They had proved that James Cook was wrong to dismiss the Antarctic as a profitless wasteland.
Fortunes were made with the bang of an auctioneer’s gavel as their cargos were sold to eager bidders. As news spread of the great bonanza, a rush of enterprising American, British and Argentinian mariners raced south the following summer to look for any untouched sealing grounds on the rocky shores of the sub-Antarctic islands. Slaughtering without thought of the morrow, it would take only two summers for the thriving seal colonies to be exterminated. Anxious to find more, some sealers wanted to prove that Cook was also wrong when he had suggested that there was no point in exploring further south, where there seemed to be only snow and ice.
Despite the frenzied activity in the South Shetlands and the voyages of Cook and Bellingshausen, most of the area within the Antarctic Circle remained unmapped. John Davis might have written in his log that he thought ‘this Southern Land to be a Continent’, but he had no way of knowing whether his supposition was correct.1 Many thought otherwise. Even some twentieth-century maps of the southern polar region portrayed it as an Arctic-like ocean of ice and islands.2
The prospect of such islands harbouring new seal colonies made the avaricious sealers and merchants of New England and Britain keen to find them. It would not be an easy task. As the captain of a sealing vessel wrote to an American newspaper in January 1821, the ‘large body of land’ south of the islands is ‘little known, and will probably so remain by reason of the danger and difficulty in approaching the shore, from the great quantity of floating ice with which it is surrounded’.3 Mapmakers nevertheless tried to make sense of the new discoveries, both for dilettante geographers at home and for the merchants and mariners who wanted reliable maps for their own voyages to the region.
Mapping and naming islands and other land masses was important not only for safe navigation but also for countries making claims to new territories. Securely attaching a name to a territory was a crucial step towards its acquisition. It is not surprising, then, that British and American mapmakers depicted the new-found territories in different ways. While an American map of November 1822 had part of the Antarctic Peninsula as ‘Palmer’s Land’,4 a London map of the same year had the coastline as part of a much larger land mass called ‘New South Shetland’, the name having been shifted south to the Antarctic Peninsula from what we now know as the South Shetland Islands.
The London mapmaker had received his information from the British sealer George Powell, a friend of Palmer, who acknowledged the American discoveries by naming about sixty-five kilometres of the ‘New South Shetland’ coastline south of Deception Island as ‘Palmer’s Land’. Bransfield’s ‘Trinity Land’ covered a similar distance to the south-east of Livingston Island. While both Palmer and Bransfield were thereby acknowledged on the London map, it was the British name ‘New South Shetland’ that was used to describe the overall coastline that had been discovered so far.5
Despite the maps, no one could be sure whether or not that coastline was just another island, as other discoveries had turned out to be. The publication of Bellingshausen’s journal and charts, with his sightings of an ‘ice continent’ on the other side of the South Pole, might have strengthened the cause of those who believed that Bransfield and Palmer had sighted part of a continent. But Bellingshausen’s return to Russia in August 1821 resulted in only brief reports in London newspapers, which merely noted that Bellingshausen had proved that Bransfield’s ‘New South Shetland’ – the South Shetland islands – and Cook’s ‘Sandwich Land’ – the Sandwich Islands – were not part of any southern continent.6
It took a decade for a poorly edited version of Bellingshausen’s journal to be published in Russian, apparently without any input from its author. Again, the published journal had no mention of an ‘ice continent’.7 It was another eighty years before an abbreviated version appeared in German, and only in 1945 was an English edition edited by a polar explorer, Frank Debenham. Even then, the mistaken translation of crucial passages, and the absence of other records that have since surfaced, caused Debenham to conclude that Bellingshausen was unaware he was gazing upon a new continent.8 As a result, it would be more than a century before geographers were certain that there really was a continent at the South Pole, and for it to be clear that Bellingshausen’s expedition had been the first to see it.
As for Bransfield, Palmer and his fellow sealers, none had seen more than a small part of Antarctica’s extensive coastline and only a few had stepped upon its shores. Moreover, not even Bransfield had conducted a claiming ceremony on the continent itself. Most sealers had little interest in claiming ownership of despoiled islands whose economic value they had already destroyed, although some of the British had made symbolic attempts to do so. With British naval contingents present in the newly independent nations of South America, the British sealers would have been more confident than their American counterparts in having their territorial claims supported by their government.
These different attitudes were clear when Palmer set off with Powell in their separate ships to search for new islands. When they discovered islands about 600 kilometres north-east of the Antarctic Peninsula in December 1821, Palmer declined to go onshore, noting that there were no seals evident. In contrast, Powell rowed ashore in his whaleboat to claim the islands for Britain and give them British names, with the islands as a whole being named ‘Powell’s Group’.9 In 1954, State Department geographer Samuel Boggs observed, with some exasperation, that the early American sealers ‘were not predisposed to assert territorial claims in the name of the young “U.S.A.”’.10 The American government of the time was more concerned with extending its existing territory across the continent to the Pacific Ocean than with grabbing inhospitable sub-Antarctic territories, whose animal resources had already been mostly exterminated.
Two months after the visits of Powell and Palmer, another patriotic British sealing captain, James Weddell, chanced upon Powell’s Group and named them the South Orkneys, thereby associating them with the nearby South Shetlands and the British-owned Orkneys and Shetlands in the northern hemisphere. Weddell had served in the Royal Navy for eight years before taking command of the Jane, a 160-ton brig whose crew hunted for seals in the South Shetlands from 1819 to 1821. When those islands were depleted of their seals, Weddell was commissioned by the owners of the Jane and the sixty-five-ton cutter Beaufoy to search the far south for new sealing grounds. Although Bellingshausen had shown that Cook’s ‘Sandwich Land’ was not part of a southern continent, the news had not reached Weddell and his backers by the time he left England in September 1822.
As a result, Weddell notes how he set out in the belief that Sandwich Land was possibly ‘a projecting point of a southern continent, or range of land lying east and west behind the islands of South Shetland’.11 It would be likely, therefore, to have rich sealing grounds on its extensive shores. Consequently, Weddell set course for the seas between Sandwich Land and the South Shetlands, confident that he would encounter the elusive continent. Like so many other explorers searching for the southern continent, Weddell found only sea.
Further and further south the two ships went, until, on 20 February 1823, Weddell reached latitude 74° S and longitude 34° W. This was more than 320 kilometres further south than Cook or any other navigator had managed to reach, and Weddell had not been blocked by the ice that he had expected to find, and which he had found much further north around the South Shetlands. The ice-free conditions that allowed Weddell to venture so far south were so unusual that no navigator was able to emulate his feat for more than a century.12
Weddell never realised that only good fortune had permitted his success. In fact, he and his crew did not count the discovery of relatively open sea so far south as a success. It was seals they were after, and there were none to be caught in the open sea. With his crew ‘much disappointed at our ill success in not finding a southern land’, Weddell ordered the ships to head back north. He allayed the resentment of his crew by announcing their historic feat in sailing further south than any other ship. Then, to the cheers of the men, he hoisted the colours, fired the ship’s gun and doled out grog to dispel ‘their gloom’. With no new lands to claim, Weddell had to be content with naming the empty sea after his king, George IV, although it would later come to bear his own name.13
Also in the Weddell Sea that season was a young sealer from Stonington, Benjamin Morrell, who imitated Weddell by taking the schooner Wasp, owned by New York merchant James Byers, in search of seals and a possible continent south of Cook’s ‘Sandwich Land’. Venturing south of the Antarctic Circle, thus becoming the first American to do so, he finally abandoned his southward reconnaissance on 15 March 1823, a month after Weddell had similarly turned north. Morrell had not reached as far south as Weddell, only attaining 70° 14’ S, but the days were shortening, winter was approaching, his supplies were seriously depleted and there were no sealing grounds in sight.
Morrell remained convinced that, with calm conditions and open sea before him, he could have continued all the way to the South Pole, if it was not for his lack of ‘nautical and mathematical instruments’ and the absence of ‘such scientific gentlemen as discovery ships should always be supplied with’. Although he subsequently roved around the world in a specially commissioned vessel – named the Antarctic in honour both of his feat and of ‘the future probability of her penetrating still farther towards the south pole’ – Morrell never again slipped below the Antarctic Circle. Most historians have agreed that the ghost-written account of his voyage was more fiction than fact.14
Despite being unsuccessful in the search for seals, Weddell’s discovery of an open and largely ice-free sea beyond the Antarctic Circle had important consequences. Because he saw few icebergs at the limit of his southerly voyage, and because he believed that icebergs were generated from land, Weddell concluded that the land beyond the South Shetlands, including Graham and Palmer Land, did not extend any further south than 73° S. According to Weddell, this meant that the polar sea could be ‘less icy than is imagined, and a clear field of discovery, even to the South Pole, may therefore be anticipated’.15 It gave credence to those who argued that the South Pole was at the centre of an unfrozen sea, rather than being the centre of a frozen, southern continent.
An American writer went even further, arguing that the earth was an oblate spheroid composed of ‘several concentric spheres, with polar openings’ thousands of kilometres across. It was suggested that the native peoples of the Americas had originated from within these openings, while some animals of North America were said to migrate each winter to a supposedly temperate inner sphere that was bathed in almost perpetual sunlight.16 These wild imaginings helped inspire a surge of American interest in the South Pole and led to popular demands for an official expedition to test the truth of the theory.
The fantastical theory of an Earth that was hollow and habitable originated in 1818 with the former American army officer John Cleves Symmes, who proposed that a party of one hundred men join him in trekking northward from Siberia with reindeer and sleighs to find the northern polar opening and gain entry to the temperate inner world. That expedition never eventuated, but the shy and increasingly frail Symmes lectured on his theory to thousands of curious Americans. With many remaining incredulous, but some scientists giving it credence, the young and articulate newspaper editor Jeremiah Reynolds joined with Symmes to spread the word along the eastern American seaboard.
The two men began their tour in September 1825, with Reynolds’ oratorical skills convincing otherwise sceptical audiences – who paid fifty cents each for admission – that the ‘facts’ underlying Symmes’ theory were ‘so natural, so consistent with reason … that they almost irresistibly enforce conviction on the mind’. So convinced were many local worthies that they besieged Washington with calls for an expedition to test Symmes’ theory and take possession of whatever lands might lie beyond the Antarctic Circle.17
This was something Reynolds wanted more than Symmes, whose focus remained on the Arctic. Reynolds became convinced that an expedition to the Antarctic had greater potential for arousing public interest and attracting both public and private money.18 The two men went their separate ways in 1826, and Reynolds saw a chance to combine national pride, scientific curiosity and commercial expansion into a popular crusade for an Antarctic expedition, with him at its head.
In August of that year he began his lobbying of government by approaching the secretary of the navy, Samuel Southard, a lawyer and former senator who had done much to expand the US Navy and support practical scientific endeavours through his membership of Washington’s Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences. Southard had heard Reynolds lecture in Washington, then a town of just 10,000 people. Although he made clear that he did not believe Symmes’ theory, the navy secretary was ‘anxious’ that Reynolds should have support for an expedition ‘towards the South Pole’, which ‘cannot fail to be profitable to science’. Southard believed that the new nation had made little contribution to the general knowledge of humanity.19 President John Quincy Adams, who was also a member of the Columbian Institute and who wanted the United States to be ‘a great naval power’, was also well-disposed towards Reynolds, describing his lectures ‘as exhibitions of genius and science’.20
Reynolds boosted his chances of gaining political support when he abandoned talk of Symmes’ theory and talked instead of new seal colonies and the South Pole as an attainable objective in the light of Weddell’s voyage. In early 1828 he convinced politicians from New York, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina to petition Congress for money to send ‘a small expedition, to explore the immense and unknown regions in the southern hemisphere’. It was argued that such an expedition could find new islands, chart the coasts where American mariners ‘frequently suffer shipwreck’ and open new avenues for trade in animal fur, which produces ‘an immense revenue’ for the government and ‘greatly augments our national strength, by increasing the number of our most efficient seamen’. The Maryland Assembly pointed to the national prestige that would accrue from a polar expedition, which would add ‘to the general stock of national wealth and knowledge, and to the honor and glory of the United States’.21
Congress was less interested in notions of national glory, or in adding to the store of human knowledge. It asked Reynolds to explain how an expedition might benefit the nation’s commerce. Being a man never lost for words, and sensing how he might yet achieve his purpose, Reynolds emphasised the growing importance of American commercial activities in the Pacific, particularly whaling, which had expanded there when whale numbers in the Atlantic became heavily depleted by hunting. He also pointed to the more than seven million seal skins that had been taken by American sealing ships.
However, seals were now harder to find, and Reynolds suggested that they had retreated to ‘more remote regions’. If an expedition were sent further south, he predicted, seals would be ‘found in great abundance’. There was also the likelihood that the highly profitable sea otters of the North Pacific ‘may yet be found in the southern hemisphere’, along with sandalwood, the tusks of sea elephants, oil from porpoises, feathers from sea birds and much more besides. There might also be valuable territories to claim, since the southern polar region had about four million square kilometres that could conceal countries corresponding in nature to ‘Lapland, Norway, part of Sweden, and the northern parts of Siberia’.22
There were other factors to consider. Reynolds reminded congressmen of the ignominy American seamen felt at having to rely on the maps and charts of other nations. The United States was the only major commercial nation, wrote Reynolds, not to have spent a dollar adding ‘to the accumulated stock of commercial and geographical knowledge, except in partially exploring our own territory’. An expedition to the unknown regions of the world would help to redress these embarrassing national deficiencies.
By protecting and promoting maritime commerce, the expedition would also indirectly assist the expanding US Navy, which relied on whaling and merchant shipping to provide experienced sailors for its ranks. In turn, modern commerce increasingly relied for its prosperity on merchants having a detailed knowledge of the world, and on the US Navy being able to protect American merchant ships from being plundered. Reynolds complained that American commerce was ‘extending everywhere and protected nowhere’ and the ‘spirit of the nation’ would no longer stand for it.23
While Congress calculated the commercial benefits of an American expedition, the British Admiralty was busily extending the British claim of possession from the South Shetland Islands to the mainland of the supposed continent. An expedition was mounted at the request of the Royal Society to ascertain the true dimensions of the Earth by taking observations with a pendulum at various points of the globe, with the most important point in the far south being ‘New South Shetland’ or ‘any other land in still higher southern latitude’. Scientific inquiry, rather than acquisition of territory, was the rationale for the expedition, with the committee noting that such inquiries would help ‘to sustain the high station which England at present occupies among the civilized nations of the world’. To emphasise the point, the man chosen to lead this prestigious expedition was the experienced naval officer and scientist Captain Henry Foster, who had served as astronomer during two Arctic expeditions and been awarded a medal by the Royal Society for his scientific work.24
On 21 April 1828, Foster took the barque-rigged HMS Chanticleer out of Portsmouth’s harbour, heading for the seas off Cape Horn. Arriving there in October 1828 and making his observations, Foster then sailed to the South Shetlands to continue his work. But the mission was not just about making observations. On 7 January 1829, Foster threaded the Chanticleer through a mass of icebergs and numerous whales to land on the extensive shore of what he named Clarence Land, after the Duke of Clarence. At a place that Foster appropriately called Cape Possession, he and another officer took ashore a copper cylinder in which was deposited a document written in Latin, taking possession of the land in the name of King George IV.
The ship’s surgeon, William Webster, described in his journal how the landing party soon returned from the brief ceremony with some limpets and rock samples, which provided evidence of their visit and of the serious scientific intent of their expedition. The exact location of the landing would later become the subject of fierce dispute between British and American geographers, with some arguing that Foster had actually landed on Hoseason Island – in the Palmer Archipelago – rather than on the Antarctic Peninsula itself, as one of the expedition’s maps suggested. Foster might have clarified the issue by publishing his account of the voyage, but he drowned on the way home after falling from a canoe in Panama. Whatever the precise location, Webster was not impressed with England’s newest acquisition, believing it was ‘destined to be of little account to man’, being ‘clothed in eternal snow’.25
Nearby Deception Island, where the expedition spent some weeks taking observations, was little better. There were few of the valuable fur seals to be seen, and its brooding volcano caused venting steam and gases to hiss from cracks in the ice. The crew found plenty of penguins and some leopard seals to kill, along with seabirds of various kinds.26 Despite the lack of fur seals, the island’s sheltered harbour made it worth claiming, so two midshipmen did just that on 26 February 1829, placing a flag on the summit of its 600-metre peak.27
As Foster was sailing south, the US House of Representatives finally decided in May 1828 that a naval ship should be sent south ‘to examine the coasts, islands, harbors, shoals, and reefs in those seas’.28 The costs would have to be borne by the existing navy budget, since the Senate was unlikely to approve any special funding for an expedition. Unfazed, President Adams and his navy secretary used the House motion to press ahead, even though the lack of special funding would limit the scale of the expedition. Adams was anxious that the expedition should be sent before the election of his likely successor, General Andrew Jackson, an opponent of the expedition.29
To convince the public of the expedition’s worthiness, it was argued that it would provide accurate charts for the nation’s whalers and sealers and would add to the nation’s store of scientific knowledge. There was support from Edmund Fanning, who had been promoting such an expedition since 1812. For Fanning, commerce and exploration were a compelling combination, although the disinterested quest for scientific knowledge and the enhancement of America’s national prestige were more attractive for the public and the government. Hence, the name chosen was ‘The First United States Exploring Expedition’. The New York Mirror thought the project accorded with the ‘spirit of the age’. The rebuilt warship Peacock was prepared, with Captain Thomas Jones appointed as its commander and Lieutenant Charles Wilkes as astronomer.30
Because the navy had limited experience in the Pacific, Southard sent Reynolds to New England to gather information from whaling and sealing captains. Reporting back in September 1828, Reynolds told Southard that the whale and seal fishery was much larger than he had thought, with at least 200 American ships involved. The average size of the ships was increasing to cope with the much longer voyages that were required to find the decreasing stocks of both whales and seals. The planned expedition could address this shortage, wrote Reynolds, by exploring the Antarctic region for the so-called ‘right whale’, a species that was preferred by whalers as it was relatively slow-moving and rich in oil-producing blubber. He suggested that an expedition could ‘advance with no great difficulty into very high latitudes’, and even to the South Pole itself.31
It soon became clear that a single ship could not achieve the objectives of the expedition, so the plans were expanded to include two more. Southard had a 200-ton whaling vessel surveyed with a view to it being purchased as a supply ship to accompany the Peacock. But he needed the sanction of the Senate for this additional expenditure.32 With sheathing of the Peacock’s bow about to be undertaken to protect against ice,33 and with Adams telling Congress at the beginning of the 1829 session that the expedition was ‘nearly ready to depart’,34 the chairman of the Senate’s naval committee, Senator Robert Hayne, demanded that Southard provide more information on the expedition’s purposes.
He wanted to know whether it was intended just to discover the true situation of known coasts, islands and reefs, or whether it was intent on ‘the discovery of unknown regions’. Hayne suspected that the real purpose of the expedition was to approach the South Pole, perhaps with Symmes’ now discredited theory in mind. His suspicions were confirmed when Southard conceded that it was intended to explore both known and unknown lands, with the ships being instructed to sail to ‘high southern latitudes’, going ‘as far to the south as circumstances would permit them safely and prudently to go’.35
Since America’s own coasts and harbours were not yet properly charted, Hayne declared, it was ‘altogether superfluous to attempt the discovery of unknown lands’. Not only would it divert American energies from securing possession of North America, but the discovery of new lands would inevitably lead to the establishment of American colonies, which would have to be defended at substantial cost and would drain people and resources from the United States. Creating an overseas empire would also contravene the American image of itself as a free and democratic nation that stood in contrast to the aged, monarchical and rapacious empires of Europe. As a result, instead of an expedition to discover new lands, ‘whether … within the opening [at the South Pole] or anywhere else’, the Senate committee would only approve a small expedition to survey the already known islands and reefs ‘which lie in the track of our vessels engaged in the whale and other fisheries in the South seas’.36 This was hardly the sort of grand expedition envisaged by Reynolds and Fanning, or by Adams and Southard.
The election of President Jackson and the installation of a new navy secretary spelled doom even for this scaled-down expedition. Reynolds and Fanning were forced to press ahead with a private expedition using experienced sealing captains Benjamin Pendleton, Nathaniel Palmer and his brother Alexander. Bereft of official support, the expedition’s name was changed to ‘the South Sea Fur Company and Exploring Expedition’. The costs would be recouped by filling the holds of the three sealing vessels with seal skins and oil. Reynolds would accompany the expedition, along with a ‘scientific corps’, composed of the opium-taking and sometime alcoholic naturalist Dr James Eights – a founding member of the Albany Lyceum of Natural History – the Philadelphian John Frampton Watson, and two assistants.37 The inclusion of the ‘scientific corps’ was designed to generate a level of public and official interest that a mere sealing voyage could not hope to match, although Eights would later complain that he was supplied with hardly any ‘conveniences for collecting & preserving objects of Natural History’. Indeed, the expedition was so strapped for funds that a New York newspaper appealed for its readers to loan it ‘Books, Voyages, Charts, (if ever so ancient) Time Keepers, Nautical Instruments’.38
Before departing on 16 October 1829, the New York Enquirer reported that Reynolds would search for ‘undiscovered islands’ that ‘will become the property of the United States’ – not that Reynolds made any direct mention of claiming new lands. He simply told a journalist that he planned to ‘sail round the icy circle, and push through the first opening that he finds’. This was not the opening in the Earth envisaged by Symmes but the opening in the ice envisaged by Weddell, which would allow entry to the open sea and islands beyond. By the time Reynolds arrived at the Cape Verde Islands to take on salt for preserving skins, his ambition had been scaled back. Instead of trying to reach the South Pole, now it would only acquire sufficient ‘practical knowledge’ for a subsequent and ‘more efficient expedition’ that might do so.39
Reynolds’ hopes went unfulfilled. Hunting for seals took precedence over exploration, although there were few left to kill. The years of exploitation had severely reduced their numbers in the South Shetlands, and repeated snow storms and freezing conditions impeded the search for undiscovered islands on which new colonies might be found. Before their departure, Pendleton had confidently assured Reynolds that there were ‘many valuable discoveries to be made’, but the sealer was soon forced to concede that their search for seal-rich islands south-west of the South Shetlands was proving fruitless.
The search became more desperate as the ships and the men became exposed to the worsening weather of the approaching winter.40 Eights remained convinced that they were tantalisingly close to finding the non-existent islands. He was also convinced by Weddell’s experience that the South Pole could be approached by sea. But there was little that Eights or Reynolds could do to confirm these suppositions while their fellow expeditioners were single-mindedly hunting for seal skins.41 With no geographical discoveries, the expedition’s discoveries were limited to the scientific samples that Eights gathered, mainly from the South Shetlands. These included the first discovery of fossils, which showed that the barren islands had once boasted rich vegetation. As scurvy began to affect the health of the crews, Pendleton and Palmer finally quit the icy seas and incessant snow showers for the recuperative relief that could be found in the Chilean port of Valparaíso.
When the men’s health had recovered, the ships went to Chile’s south coast to collect more seal skins so that the sailors might have something to show for the dangers and privations they had endured. Pendleton planned to send the skins back to the United States and to investigate possible sealing grounds and trading opportunities in the North Pacific, before making another attempt at reaching the South Pole. However, some of his sailors refused to continue with a voyage that had nearly cost them their lives and produced little profit.
Faced with desertions, Pendleton decided to return to the United States while he still had sufficient men to work the ships. There was little to show for the venture. As one American botanist caustically observed, the expedition had returned ‘without having accomplished much, for it turned out just as several of us suspected, that the Expedition was destined, not for discovery and scientific purposes – but to catch seals!’ Arriving in New York in September 1831, Pendleton reported to Fanning that it would require a government expedition to rescue the fortunes of the seal fishery by discovering new sealing grounds.42
Reynolds had been left ashore in Valparaíso when the vessels had been forced to make their hasty departure. He was eventually picked up in October 1832 by a US Navy brig, the Potomac, which was returning from a punitive voyage to Sumatra, where it had exacted retribution on a local ruler who had seized an American merchant ship and killed some of its crew. Reynolds was appointed secretary to the ship’s commander and occupied his time on the homeward voyage by writing a popular account of the expedition, in which he called for the American flag to be ‘borne to every portion of the globe’ to show the world ‘the power we possess’. He devoted part of the book to the disputed sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, where the new Argentine republic was challenging British title to the unoccupied islands, and where both nations were attempting to block access by American whalers and sealers. Appealing to the rising nationalism of the times, Reynolds called on the American government to ensure unfettered American access to the Falklands.43
The voyage of the Potomac, and the subsequent publication of Reynolds’ popular account, helped to refocus official and public attention on the economic opportunities and strategic importance of the Pacific Ocean and the seas around Cape Horn. There was also a growing constituency for oceanic exploration, led by publicists such as Reynolds, and self-seeking whalers and sealers such as Fanning, whose 1833 book, Voyages Round the World, opened the eyes of many American readers to the adventure and wealth to be had in the Pacific and Southern Oceans.
British exploration of the Arctic during the 1830s also led to further speculation concerning the hidden mysteries of the Antarctic. The British naval officer Captain James Clark Ross had discovered the North Magnetic Pole in 1831, and British expeditions continued to search the Arctic for a north-west passage to the Pacific. Recently formed geographical societies in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin – supported by their governments – helped to finance many of these explorations into the unseen recesses of the world.44
Fanning remained convinced that another expedition should be sent south. With Pendleton having found nothing to the south-west of South America, Fanning suggested that an expedition following Weddell’s approach – in the seas south-east of the continent – might have better luck. Indeed, he thought that it could not fail ‘in either reaching the South Pole, or making new discovery of land’, the value of which ‘may far exceed our imagination’. So convinced of success was Fanning that he offered to help fund the expedition, lest rival nations ‘snatch it away’.45
His campaign was supported by the publication in December 1832 of Benjamin Morrell’s long-delayed account of his own Antarctic voyaging in the sea discovered by Weddell. Like Weddell, he argued that both experience and logic suggested that ‘a clear sea is open for voyages of discovery, even to the south pole’. Despite well-founded doubts about the book’s veracity, its publication helped to underpin a renewed clamour for Washington to sponsor an official expedition to the South Pole, so that ‘the glory of exploring’ it should go to ‘the only free nation on earth’ and not to the ‘vassals of some petty despot’. The South Pole could then be ‘set among the stars of our national banner’.46
In November 1834, Reynolds and others successfully petitioned the Rhode Island Assembly to call upon Congress to send ‘a voyage of discovery and survey to the South seas’. The call was echoed by the Salem East India Marine Society, composed of ships’ captains who had risked their lives sailing the world and who wanted protection from the many dangers of the high seas.
In February 1835, the question came before the Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives, which was sympathetic to the petition after being told by Reynolds of the massive size of the sealing and whaling trade. The committee agreed that locating the position of islands that could act as refuges and places of refreshment for these world-ranging whalers was worth the cost of an expedition. There were also the ‘collateral advantages to be derived in the attainment of much useful knowledge, so highly prized by every enlightened mind’. The committee was advised by Commodore John Downes, who had employed Reynolds on the Potomac, that there were ‘immense portions of the South seas, bordering on the Antarctic circle, well deserving the attention of such an expedition’. Downes predicted that ‘a speedy examination of this portion of the South seas’, particularly in the vicinity of Palmer’s Land, was likely to ‘yield rich returns in animal fur’ and add to the credit of the United States for ‘promoting such an enterprise’.47
If Congress did not act promptly, the committee was warned, the United States might be beaten by the British. A powerful whaling and sealing company, Enderby Brothers of London, had sent a former British naval officer, Captain John Biscoe, to continue Weddell’s search for new sealing grounds. Commanding two sealing vessels, Biscoe only managed to gather thirty seal skins during his two-and-half-year voyage. But his sighting in February 1831 of a coastline far to the south of Africa, complete with snow-free mountaintops, was further confirmation that a continent might be found at the South Pole.
Biscoe named it Enderby Land, and named each mountain after one of the Enderby brothers. He tried to land and claim the place for Britain but was prevented by ice from doing so. Going on to become the third mariner to circumnavigate the South Pole, he followed in Bellingshausen’s track towards the South Shetlands. When he discovered more land, adjacent to Bellingshausen’s Alexander I Island, he named it Adelaide Island after the queen. Further islands were passed and suitably named before Biscoe landed on the nearby Antarctic Peninsula on 21 February 1832, naming it Graham Land in honour of the First Lord of the Admiralty. ‘This being the mainland,’ wrote Biscoe, ‘I took possession of it in the name of His Majesty King William the Fourth.’48 It was the first territorial claim on the Antarctic continent.
Having seen 500 kilometres of land, Biscoe informed the Royal Geographical Society that he was convinced that ‘this is a large continent’. The editor of the society’s journal agreed, noting that the discovery of land on opposite sides of the Antarctic Circle had revived the probable ‘existence of a great Southern Land’. The society rewarded Biscoe for his discovery, while the Admiralty appointed an officer to accompany him on a follow-up voyage. It also provided Enderby with funds to finance a new vessel to make ‘a further and more accurate investigation into the new land or continent’.49
Some in the United States were alert to the danger of Britain usurping the American discoveries. They were aware that Biscoe’s ‘Graham Land’ was the American ‘Palmer’s Land’, although its ownership had never been formally claimed by Palmer or the US government. Nevertheless, Congress was warned that the British were intruding upon a chain of islands that was ‘entirely and undoubtedly an American discovery’, with the Americans now facing the danger of having that honour ‘snatched from us’, along with ‘the glory of naming them’.50
Ten years after Reynolds began his campaign for a government expedition, the tide of opinion in Congress was finally turning in his favour. In February 1836, Connecticut whalers petitioned for an exploratory expedition to the South Seas that might obtain ‘a more perfect knowledge’ of the oceans into which they were extending their operations. They also wanted the government to provide a greater naval presence to protect them from attacks by hostile islanders.
With hundreds of vessels now involved in the industry, and with the prosperity of New England dependent on it, their call could not be easily brushed aside. It was supported by the former navy secretary Samuel Southard, who was now a powerful senator on the Naval Affairs Committee. In a report on the Connecticut petition in March 1836, Southard reminded senators of the economic importance of whaling, the potential of America’s growing commerce in the Pacific, and the necessity to protect that commerce and US citizens from attack. There was also ‘the duty which the government and the nation owe to its own character, and the common cause of all civilized nations – the extension of useful knowledge of the globe which we inhabit’. Moreover, Southard argued, the Pacific and South Seas were ‘peculiarly our own’.51 The nascent American empire was starting to take shape in the minds of American leaders.
With Southard now finding support in the Senate, the bill was sent back to the House of Representatives for approval. To boost its chances of success, Reynolds was given permission to use the House of Representatives hall on 3 April 1836 for a Saturday night address on the proposed ‘Voyage of Discovery’ to congressmen and their guests. His wide-ranging lecture sketched out a vision of the United States as a great maritime power, arguing forcefully against those who believed that Americans should remain ‘tillers of the earth’ and eschew the supposedly ‘contaminating effects of commerce and manufactures’. Americans had always been outward-looking, said Reynolds, and nothing would prevent them emulating the example of the British nation, from which so many of them had come. While the British were concentrating on the north and searching for a northwest passage, Reynolds declared, ‘a wider range, a nobler field, a prospect of more comprehensive promise, lies open in the south’. And it was incumbent upon the ‘national dignity and honor’ of the United States to expand its beneficent influence across the globe. So long as there was ‘a spot of untrodden earth accessible to man,’ Reynolds declared, ‘no enlightened, and especially commercial and free people, should withhold its contributions from exploring it.’52
To attract the support of commercially minded congressmen, Reynolds emphasised the practical necessity of providing accurate charts and protection for the fast-increasing American merchant fleet that now ranged the globe. He estimated that about 460 of those vessels, operating out of forty ports along the northeastern seaboard, were involved in whaling and sealing. They had to face both the perils of the sea and the hostility of Pacific islanders, while the American government did little to protect them. National honour and national interest demanded that Congress should send an exploratory expedition, led by a well-armed naval ship, to chart the seas and overawe the islanders with American power. And any American expedition, argued Reynolds, must be on a greater scale than ‘has been attempted by any other country’. Anything less ‘could never content a people proud of their fame and rejoicing in their strength!’53
To ensure support from the nationalists and navalists in Congress, Reynolds reminded them of Biscoe’s challenge to the American claim on Palmer’s Land. Despite having merely touched at ‘a single spot’, Biscoe had removed its American name and given it ‘an English name’. It was an outrage, expostulated Reynolds, since American sealers had symbolically taken possession of Palmer’s Land – in the name of our sovereign, the people – some fifteen years earlier.
The priority of discovery of Palmer’s Land was certainly American, but Reynolds was on slippery legal ground in arguing that it was thereby an American possession when neither Palmer nor the American government had made a formal claim to it.54 Visiting a place and killing its wildlife did not invest a nation with ownership of that territory. But this was a political audience rather than a court of law, and Reynolds’ rhetoric struck a responsive chord.
Reynolds avoided any mention of his previous life as a purveyor of fantastical theories about the South Pole, and eschewed any suggestion that the expedition was primarily about exploring the South Pole. This was an expedition with a wider purpose. It would explore the Pacific Ocean from South America to Asia, and would require at least six vessels. It was only towards the end of his lecture that he raised the question of the South Pole, ‘where the discovery ships should spend a few months during the most favorable season of the southern summer’.
Anticipating political opposition to the idea of exploring in regions where the commercial imperative was not so obvious, Reynolds asked his audience whether they wanted Americans to be always reproached with the accusation that they ‘can do nothing, think of nothing, talk of nothing, that is not concerned with dollars and cents’. It was only by showing ‘some devotion to science and liberal pursuits’, he argued, that the United States could be ‘truly great’. After all, it was in these high southern latitudes that there was the most potential for discovery, with vast regions ‘which have never been trodden by the footsteps of man, nor its waters divided by the keel of the adventurous navigator’.55
In light of Weddell’s experience, Reynolds tended to believe that a ship might well be able to sail all the way to the South Pole unimpeded by ice. Not that he thought an American expedition should be sent south for the sole purpose of testing that proposition, which had faint echoes of Symmes’ discredited theory. It would be all right to make such an attempt, he argued, if it was done along with ‘the other great objects of the enterprise’. And what an achievement that would be, he exulted, to reach the South Pole by ship and ‘cast anchor on that point where all the meridians terminate, where our eagle and star-spangled banner may be unfurled and planted, and left to wave on the axis of the earth itself’.
The image of the American flag flying at the South Pole was a potent one, with Reynolds stressing how it would ‘crown with a new and imperishable wreath the nautical glories of our country’.56 It would be a discovery fit for the great nation that the United States aspired to become. So the great republic, after breaking free of its imperial fetters, was pointed by Reynolds down a path that would gradually see it obtain an empire of its own.
In the wake of Reynolds’ speech, Congress agreed to provide for a massive expedition, adopting his plan for a squadron led by a frigate and supported by five smaller ships. After a decade of agitation, it should have been a triumph for the plucky publicist. However, on the night of the decision, a jaunty Reynolds encountered the new secretary of the navy, Mahlon Dickerson, at a Washington theatre and was dismayed to hear him declare that the expedition would take twelve months to organise.57 Dickerson had long been an opponent of the expedition in Congress and remained intent on impeding it. He was also determined to prevent Reynolds from being leader of the scientific corps.
In this, he was assisted by Edmund Fanning, who had fallen out with his former ally. On the other side were the scientists commissioned for the expedition, many of whom signed a strong letter of support for Reynolds, noting the widespread expectation of the ‘whole country’ that he would ‘occupy a prominent station in the expedition’.58 Reynolds had some support from President Andrew Jackson, who now supported the expedition. He instructed Dickerson to appoint Reynolds as ‘corresponding secretary to the commander’, with responsibility for condensing the scientific reports. This was not the sort of position that Reynolds wanted. After his ten-year campaign, he wanted to be its leader, not its factotum.59
To allay concern about Dickerson blocking the expedition, Jackson instructed his navy secretary to take ‘prompt measures’ to implement the will of Congress, which he did by sending Lieutenant Wilkes to Europe to buy scientific instruments and books, and by asking the nation’s scientific societies to advise on which scientists should accompany the expedition and what their tasks should be.60 All this took time. Dickerson caused additional delay and distraction by appointing the young and ambitious Wilkes to the command of one of the vessels without consulting with the squadron commander, Captain Jones. This provoked a heated public dispute that forced Dickerson to retreat. More delays were caused when the ships were found to require additional alterations.61
Instead of being ready to sail by early 1837, the dilatory recruitment of seamen and scientists and the slow refurbishment of vessels saw the expedition still unready in June. Dickerson then caused additional delay by convincing the incoming president, Martin Van Buren, to order an inquiry into whether the expedition needed to be so large.
Reynolds was now furious. Having been at the Norfolk naval base when he heard the news, he rushed to Washington to intercede with Van Buren and alert him to Dickerson’s ‘treacherous conduct’. When Reynolds found that Van Buren was not prepared to countermand his navy secretary, he feared that the expedition would suffer the same fate as its predecessor. Determined to avert such an outcome, Reynolds launched a long and sustained campaign against the sixty-seven-year-old Dickerson in the pages of the New York Times.62
The first of Reynolds’ many broadsides, published under the pseudonym ‘Citizen’ at the end of June 1837, accused Dickerson of incompetence and of allowing America’s rivals to pre-empt the United States by mounting their own expeditions. According to Reynolds, Dickerson was trying to generate opposition to the expedition by suggesting that its purpose was ‘to go as near to the South Pole as possible’ and by omitting any mention of its great purposes to protect and promote American trading and whaling interests in the Pacific. Reynolds knew that the expedition’s success would depend on it retaining its original size and wide-ranging aims. If it was just to go to the South Pole, the inquiry would have to conclude that such a substantial expedition, led by a thirty-six-gun frigate, was not warranted. But a scaled-down expedition would struggle to achieve its purposes in the Pacific, where a well-armed frigate was necessary to overawe any hostile natives. Although Reynolds remained privately committed to reaching the South Pole by ship, he continued to portray himself primarily as a champion of Pacific exploration, and motivated by commercial rather than scientific impulses.63
It was a month before Dickerson replied. In the first of several long letters to the New York Times, under the pseudonym ‘A Friend to the Navy’, he attacked Reynolds for ‘producing an impression through the country that this is his expedition’. So prevailing was this impression, wrote Dickerson, that some officers of the navy were loath to serve with the expedition because they considered it was ‘the expedition of an individual rather than of the country’. Dickerson poured further scorn on Reynolds by reminding readers of his association with Symmes’ theory of concentric globes. He claimed that naval officers feared Reynolds would order the ships to approach the supposed polar opening or make ‘some other movements to test the truth of his strange theories’. Even if Reynolds had ‘renounced his former theory’, wrote Dickerson, he now harboured a similarly ludicrous belief if he envisaged that the expedition could drop anchor at the South Pole and leave ‘the star-spangled banner to wave on the axis of the earth itself’, as if it were ‘a huge flagstaff’.64
Accusing Reynolds of suffering from ‘monomania’, Dickerson informed his readers that the expedition would be instructed not to endanger itself by approaching too close to the iceberg-cluttered South Pole. He assured its officers that their lives would not be ‘unnecessarily exposed … for the purpose of testing certain wild theories that had long been before the public’. They would nevertheless fulfil the public expectation of examining the ‘high southern and unexplored regions’ by going further south than previous expeditions had done.
While he sought to disparage Reynolds’ Antarctic theories and portray Reynolds as deranged, Dickerson was conscious of his opponent’s public support, as well as the great public interest in the Antarctic. Conceding that the results from the Antarctic ‘will be looked to with more intense interest than any others of the whole cruise’, Dickerson clearly hoped that he could deflect Reynolds’ attacks by taking seriously the matter of discoveries in the Antarctic.65 But Reynolds was not about to lay down his pen.
The ninth and final letter in Reynolds’ sustained broadside was published by the New York Times on 23 September 1837. The paper had had enough and closed the discussion, although it praised Reynolds for his ‘unbounded zeal in the great cause’. Reynolds maintained his terrier-like attack on the hapless navy secretary, noting that the French king had recently endorsed Reynolds’ vision by instructing a French expedition to approach as near as possible to the South Pole. The French sailors would be rewarded if they reached 75° S, with the reward being progressively increased the further south they reached after that point. If they reached the pole itself, the king promised that ‘everything will be granted to the sailors that they may demand’. Reynolds cheekily suggested that Dickerson should redeem his reputation by getting Congress to similarly reward the American sailors.66
With French and British expeditions now heading for the South Pole, while the American one faced fresh delays, Reynolds turned to another New York newspaper to launch a renewed attack on Dickerson in late December 1837, accusing him again of being ‘an enemy to the undertaking’. Dickerson was in a bind. The funds voted by Congress had all been spent on the vessels, and now additional funding was required. To curb the cost, Dickerson announced another inquiry into how the size of the expedition could be reduced. At the same time, he blasted Reynolds for having caused the expedition to be organised on a more lavish scale than that of any other country.67
With the expedition becoming a growing political embarrassment, in January 1838 President Van Buren transferred responsibility from Dickerson to the secretary of war, Joel Poinsett. By no means was Poinsett more warmly disposed towards Reynolds than Dickerson had been. Indeed, he seems to have been so hostile that, when Captain Jones resigned as the fleet’s commander, Poinsett outraged senior officers by giving the command to the relatively junior lieutenant Charles Wilkes, expecting that the well-connected Wilkes would ensure the exclusion of Reynolds from the expedition. The scientific corps was also greatly reduced, with James Eights being one of those who were distressed to find that they no longer had a berth.68
Reynolds made repeated appeals, backed by petitions from congressmen and letters from the public, to be allowed to go with the expedition. But Poinsett stood firm, even after Reynolds offered to go at his own expense.69 Meanwhile, with French and British expeditions well on their way to the South Pole, the squadron of six ill-assorted American ships was manned and loaded for the long voyage. On 26 July 1838, Poinsett and President Van Buren visited the specially decorated vessels and gave their blessing to Wilkes and his men. Three weeks later, the first United States Exploring Expedition finally weighed anchor and set sail for the Southern Ocean, with a chagrined Reynolds looking on from the shore.
Reynolds would later assert that the expedition’s departure meant his ‘triumph was complete’.70 Yet his exclusion from the expedition greatly reduced that triumph, and thereafter he slipped from public view. America, too, would find that its hoped-for triumph was less substantial than it had expected. The years of political bickering and repeated delays had given its European rivals a head start in the race to discover whether there really was a continent worth claiming at the South Pole.