The late 1830s saw the approaches to the South Pole become the scene of intense rivalry between expeditions from the United States, Britain and France. Picking their way past icebergs, and pushing to the edge of the shifting pack ice, enterprising explorers sought to fill in the remaining blank spaces on maps of the world and find lands that might harbour hidden sources of wealth. The explorers were joined in their search by avaricious sealers and whalers, who were drawn further and further south in search of their disappearing quarry.
The various voyages found land at widely separated locations, both outside and within the Antarctic Circle. Whether these lands were linked and comprised a continent, or whether they were large islands in a great Antarctic sea remained a topic of continuing speculation among mariners and geographers. It was partly to resolve this question that the various governments had decided to dispatch their men to the South Pole.
The French expedition was led by Jules Sébastien Dumont d’Urville, the son of an impoverished and stroke-afflicted aristocrat from Normandy who had narrowly avoided the guillotine during the Revolution. An avid reader of accounts of exploration, and driven by an urge to be famous, the young d’Urville joined the run-down French navy, the vessels of which were mostly locked in their ports by a British blockade. There was little scope for gaining renown in battle, which anyway did not interest d’Urville, who could see no glory in ‘killing one’s fellow men for differences of opinions over things and words’. Instead, he devoted his life ‘to the advancement of knowledge’ and used his naval position to become an explorer. A modicum of fame came to him in 1821 during a cruise in the eastern Mediterranean, when he chanced upon the beautiful marble statue that became known as the Venus de Milo. which he helped secure for France.1 He would soon have a much greater claim to fame.
As executive officer on a French expedition to the Pacific in 1822, d’Urville journeyed to the Falkland Islands and on to Tahiti, New Guinea and around the west coast of Australia to Sydney. His commander, Louis-Isidore Duperrey, had been instructed to explore the Swan River, site of present-day Perth, and the commodious harbour at King George Sound in the south-west of Australia as possible sites for a French convict colony. Duperry was unable to do so, however, because of contrary winds and a shortage of food.
Anxious to be the commander of any new expedition sent to find a site for a colony, d’Urville wrote to Paris with plans for another voyage to King George Sound. Appointed as commander, d’Urville sailed the corvette Astrolabe on a voyage between 1826 and 1829 that saw him visit Australia, New Zealand and several islands of the South Pacific. Although the voyage proved the colonisation possibilities of both King George Sound and the North Island of New Zealand, the French government allowed itself to be preempted in both places by the British, who were wise to the French intentions.2
Sidelined upon his return to France by a newly installed royalist regime, the staunchly republican d’Urville spent five years publishing a multi-volume account of the voyage, complete with atlases and scientific volumes. He also wrote a popular two-volume history of great voyages of exploration, including his own. It seemed that his hunger for fame would have to be satisfied by his own writing.
While biding his time in Paris, and later in the port of Toulon, d’Urville never lost his curiosity about the world beyond Europe, nor did he abandon his desire to lead another great voyage. ‘Haunted by the example of Cook,’ he wrote, ‘I would often think about the three voyages of that great navigator, and I was tormented almost nightly by dreams in which I saw myself making my third cruise around the world.’ Interestingly, these dreams always had d’Urville going towards the frozen waters of the South Pole, although his preference was to sail under ‘burning equatorial skies’ and pursue further research into the languages of Oceania. Finally, a change of government saw the forty-four-year-old navigator selected in 1837 to lead another voyage around the world.3
King Louis-Philippe I wanted the expedition to go as far south as possible. He had read an account of an American sealer – presumably the unreliable Morrell – who had been able to approach close to the South Pole. The king would have been aware of the American decision to send a large and prestigious expedition towards the South Pole, and he was anxious for the French to have the glory of success where the Americans had failed. There was talk in London of doing likewise. The dispatch of d’Urville might see France get there first and garner the laurels of any discovery that was to be made.
Although confessing that he had been left ‘dumbfounded and irresolute’ by ‘this completely unexpected proposition’, d’Urville soon accepted ‘that an attempt to get to the South Pole would have the character of novelty, of greatness and even of wonder in the eyes of the public’.4 Far better for his chances of renown if he could exceed the accomplishments of Cook among the icebergs, rather than just wander among the islands of the South Pacific, where so many other French expeditions had gone before. This way, he could satisfy the king by reaching the South Pole and then explore the islands of the South Pacific during the southern winter.
The instructions d’Urville was given made clear that the voyage to the South Pole was a relatively minor part of the French expedition, which would be mainly occupied in calling at many islands of the South Pacific and New Zealand to ascertain where French whaling ships might obtain supplies and French goods be traded. The French goal was to show the French flag and publicise their presence by leaving with local people specially embossed silver and brass medallions. D’Urville was also instructed to check on the spread of British settlement in Australia and New Zealand, to see whether France might yet be able to establish a colony in one of those places.
Because the French had little experience in polar seas, d’Urville was compelled to go to London to find the latest charts. Although he was received cordially, d’Urville sensed the British regret at having ‘someone other than an Englishman’ attempting a voyage into what ‘they considered their nation’s exclusive domain’. Hurrying back to France, d’Urville pressed ahead with the refitting of his two corvettes, the Astrolabe and the Zélée. Throughout the heat of the Mediterranean summer, the gout-ridden explorer was there each day at the Toulon dockyard, coaxing and badgering the officers and carpenters to meet his demanding schedule. On 7 September 1837, d’Urville headed the ships out to sea, their decks still a shambles of unstowed stores and equipment. There was no time to waste if the expedition was to reach the Southern Ocean in time for the southern summer, the short interlude when exploring became possible.5
D’Urville had convinced the king to reward the crews if the ships reached 75° S, which was as far as Weddell had managed to reach. An additional reward was to be paid to the sailors for every degree of latitude thereafter. This was meant to provide some compensation for the privations they would suffer and to draw them ever further south, perhaps to the pole itself. The reward would also ‘focus public attention on the progress of our expedition’, d’Urville wrote.6 A century before the media-driven expeditions of the twentieth century, the ambitious d’Urville was bringing a remarkably modern sensibility to the business of Antarctic exploration.
With Weddell having indicated that a passage to the South Pole was possible by way of the ice-free Weddell Sea, d’Urville headed there after first calling at Patagonia, where he left a plaque announcing to any passing ships that he was headed for the South Pole.7 D’Urville was particularly anxious to show the American expedition that he was winning the race to the South Pole. As he anticipated, the news was picked up by a passing American whaler, which returned in time to notify Wilkes prior to his departure from Virginia.8
Having established the precedence of his voyage, d’Urville sailed south-east from Cape Horn along the track pioneered by Weddell and searched in vain for the passage that Weddell had suggested would lead him south. There was only a solid line of ice, which the vessels had no hope of penetrating. On 25 January 1838, after barely getting beyond the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and with no sign of a break in the ice, the French headed north-east for the nearby South Orkney Islands, where d’Urville hoped to collect seals and penguins to feed the crew.
Prevented by fog and snow storms from doing so, he made a second attempt to follow in Weddell’s wake, only to be brought up short again by the ice. It was ‘austere and grandiose beyond words’, wrote d’Urville, and ‘filled us with an involuntary feeling of dread’. With the officers and crew keen to push on to earn their reward, d’Urville nudged the ships into a basin of relatively clear water about three kilometres wide. The ships were tied to the ice and the crews celebrated with punch at having ‘sailed boldly into the Antarctic ice.’ D’Urville alone seems to have recognised the danger they were in. With the ice closing behind them, he armed the sailors with picks and crowbars and sent them onto the ice. They barely managed to cut the vessels free and escape the clutches of the fast-freezing sea.9
Although d’Urville had hardly passed the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula – he was not even within the Antarctic Circle – there was nothing more to be done that summer. The health of the crew, who were beginning to show signs of scurvy, demanded that d’Urville head for Chile. It was none too soon. With more and more sailors succumbing to the dreaded disease, caused by deficiency in vitamin C, the difficulty of manoeuvring the vessels through the stormy seas of the Magellan Strait increased.
Nevertheless, d’Urville took some time to survey the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetlands, naming the peninsula after King Louis-Philippe I, and dubbing a large island off its tip ‘Joinville Land’, after the Prince of Joinville, one of the king’s sons. This enabled him to report some minor achievements from this first part of the voyage, and to add several French place names to the existing British, American and Russian ones. There was little else to be triumphant about. In his account of the voyage, d’Urville conceded that his first attempt at approaching the South Pole ‘was a complete failure’. It made him wonder whether Weddell had concocted his account of being able to sail through the ice into an open sea.10
Despite his failure, d’Urville could take some comfort from the fact that the Americans would be similarly blocked. Yet he continued to worry about his expedition being overshadowed by the Americans. When his two ships limped into a Chilean port on 6 April 1838 and anchored near a British frigate, d’Urville questioned a British officer about the American expedition. He was relieved to learn that nothing had been heard of it. If the expedition had not been sighted in Chile by then, it presumably meant that it had missed that summer’s opportunity for Antarctic exploration. That was some solace, but d’Urville knew that he had little to show for the advantage he had gained. Indeed, he had to fend off malicious stories circulating in Valparaíso that ‘at the first sight of ice our corvettes had fled’. At a meeting with British officers, d’Urville displayed all his charts and illustrations to disprove the allegations.11
D’Urville had other things on his mind. Among the letters that were awaiting him at Valparaíso were two from his wife, telling him of their infant son’s sickness, apparent recovery and then terrible death from cholera. He was the third child they had lost, leaving them only one son. D’Urville’s distraught wife noted that he would receive the news after ‘you have finished your work in the ice’, and presumed he would therefore be able to return home to comfort her. ‘It is my only desire,’ she wrote, ‘glory, honour, wealth, I curse you … the price is too high for me.’ She warned that she might not survive if compelled to suffer the anguish alone.
Along with these tear-stained letters was one from his eleven-year-old son, who also implored him to return and questioned why he had to make such a long voyage. Although upset by the news, d’Urville could not bring himself to abandon what would almost certainly be his final chance to win glory. After writing a letter of sympathy and explanation to his wife, he turned his attention to planning the remainder of the long voyage.12 He spent the next year and a half visiting many of the island groups in the South Pacific to survey their harbours, showing the French flag and punishing some islanders who had attacked a visiting French ship. While his officers and men enjoyed the delights of the islands, d’Urville remained aloof, as Cook had, keeping his cabin door firmly closed to the island girls who were allowed to climb each night onto the anchored ships.13
By January 1839, d’Urville should have completed his work in the Pacific and reached the convict settlement of Hobart, from where he was to sail to New Zealand and back into the South Pacific for a final round of research before heading home. But a series of delays meant that he did not even reach northern Australia until March 1839, when he investigated the site of a British outpost that had lately been abandoned.14 D’Urville went on to investigate the Dutch trading posts in the Dutch East Indies, the British settlement at Singapore and the Spanish position in the southern Philippines, before finally heading south towards Hobart.
By now, dysentery was rife among the sailors, with sixteen officers and men having had their bodies committed to the deep during the two-month voyage from Sumatra. Others had to be hospitalised when in December 1839 they finally reached Hobart; several would succumb. Such was d’Urville’s despair during the voyage that he had written his will, asking for his heart to be preserved and given to his wife.
Once safe in Hobart, a relieved d’Urville rushed to refit the Astrolabe. He had made a momentous decision to ‘again try to make some discoveries in the south polar regions’, although his instructions had made no provision for a second voyage south. However, letters from friends in France had reached him in Hobart, warning that his ‘first attempt on the ice’ had created ‘very little stir’ in France. The letters ‘proved to me more strongly than ever’, wrote d’Urville, ‘that I had to persevere in my determination to return to the polar regions’. He resolved to make a quick lunge southward before the winter, hoping that another way to the South Pole might be found.15
Any doubts that d’Urville entertained about taking his ship into such dangerous seas – with crew members who were barely recovered from their recent ordeal – were quashed by the news he received on Christmas Day 1839. A British official told him that Wilkes’ American expedition had arrived in Sydney, where it was preparing ‘to go back into the ice’. In fact, Wilkes and his ships left Sydney the very next day, having spent nearly a month there. There was no telling whether Wilkes had made any significant discoveries on his way to Sydney, or where exactly his next move would take him. D’Urville learned that the American officers had been ‘instructed to remain absolutely silent, so that nothing has transpired about the discoveries and the work of that expedition’.
Further news came when d’Urville was visited on the Astrolabe by the recently arrived British sealer and Antarctic explorer John Biscoe, who had talked with Wilkes and been similarly stonewalled. Yet he was able to tell d’Urville of his own recent attempt to explore south of New Zealand, where he had met with impenetrable ice at 63° S. Biscoe assured him that ‘several sailors presume that land does exist to the south of Macquarie Island’. D’Urville determined to head there immediately. There was no time to lose if he was to beat Wilkes to any discoveries that might be made.16
The British lieutenant-governor at Hobart was the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, who celebrated the French presence with a ball on New Year’s Eve at Government House. The following day, d’Urville sailed the Astrolabe down the Derwent River, with sheep and pigs on board to provide fresh meat for the crew and quantities of lime juice to guard against scurvy. There were no protests from the men at the prospect of enduring another voyage to the icy depths of Antarctica. One officer on the Zélée declared that ‘every one felt that having failed the first time, it was vital for our honour to have another try’.17
D’Urville believed that he was heading for an area that ‘had not been explored by any navigator’. Only later would he learn that two of Charles Enderby’s whaling vessels, the schooner Eliza Scott, commanded by John Balleny, and the cutter Sabrina, had preceded him by a year. Balleny had left London in July 1838 with instructions to go ‘as far as he could to the south, in hopes of discovering land in a high southern latitude’. Sailing south of New Zealand in February 1839, he had gone kilometres further south than Cook, discovering five volcanic islands and a nearby stretch of coastline. The islands were subsequently named after him, while the coastline was named ‘Sabrina Land’ to honour the men of the cutter, which was lost in a storm with all its crew.
Balleny had landed on one of the islands and brought back a rock from an iceberg, making him the first person to have stepped ashore on land below the Antarctic Circle. However, he had not found the new sealing grounds that Enderby had been seeking, and he had seen only a small stretch of coastline. As the editor of the Royal Geographical Society’s journal opined, the voyage had kept alive the supposition that there was either ‘a great southern land or a vast mass of islands’ at the South Pole. There was much left for d’Urville to discover.18
It was Cook whom d’Urville had most in mind as his two ships sailed towards the ice. Ensconced in his cabin, he marked the known voyages of other explorers on a chart of the region he planned to explore, and saw that Cook had been the only one to traverse the same area. He noted, however, that ‘the great English navigator still had not tried to go deep into those regions, he had remained below the 60° parallel’. D’Urville planned to go further. Indeed, he later wrote that he had been ‘hoping to beat my way south as far as it was possible to go’.
By 16 January 1840, the lookout on the Astrolabe reported the first sighting of a small ice floe, when the ships were only at 60° S. As the two vessels pushed on, massive icebergs began to heave into sight, with the sun creating a ‘ravishing and magical effect’ on the crystalline walls of the floating islands of ice. Three days later, with icebergs all around them, the crews of the two ships celebrated crossing the Antarctic Circle, even though d’Urville calculated that they were just shy of it. Nevertheless, a sailor dressed as Father Antarctic, along with others dressed as a penguin and a seal, welcomed them to his realm. Rather than ducking the initiates, as was traditional when crossing the equator, d’Urville thought it more sensible to allow wine to be distributed; he did not want freezing water thrown about the decks.19
D’Urville was excited by what loomed ahead of his ships. For a day or so, the lookouts had reported the appearance of land, but d’Urville could not be certain that the completely snow-covered and gently sloping coastline was not cloud, a gigantic iceberg or some other trick of the Antarctic atmosphere. It was not until 20 January that he was sure it was a coastline – only to find, as they edged closer through the jostling icebergs, that the coast was a sheer ice cliff of great height. Landing was therefore impossible.
The coast stretched east and west, seemingly without limit. It was clear that they had encountered a land of great extent. They were the first to have done so in this region. With no native inhabitants or rival claimants to consider, d’Urville was keen to lay claim to it all but could see no way of getting ashore to do so. The next day, when eight or nine rocky islets were sighted, the race was on to effect a landing. Each of the ships lowered a boat with a French flag at its prow, whereupon the sailors rowed furiously the several kilometres to the largest of the islets. An ensign from the Astrolabe likened the race, which took them through the protective ramparts of tall, tabular icebergs, to being ‘amongst the ruins of those great cities of the ancient Orient just devastated by an earthquake’.20 But there were no inhabitants of these imagined ruins, just a scattering of bemused penguins watching the frantic approach of the two French boats.
An officer from the Zélée described in his diary how the sailors scrambled onto the rocky shore of the islet and hustled the occupying penguins off, with a sailor being detailed to ‘plant the tricolor on this land that no human being before us had either seen or set foot on’. There was an implicit sense that their actions were rather inappropriate. As this officer observed, ‘the abuses that have sometimes accompanied this act of taking possession of territory have often caused it to be derided as something worthless and faintly ridiculous’. Accordingly, he made clear in his diary that they were simply following ‘the ancient and lovingly preserved English custom’ when they ‘took possession of it in the name of France, as well as of the adjacent coast where the ice had prevented a landing’. Their ‘peaceful conquest’ meant that they had ‘just added a province to France’, with the officer believing that they had ‘sufficient lawful right’ to do so because they had not dispossessed anyone.
After celebrating with a welcome bottle of Bordeaux, they set about attacking the rock with picks and hammers to collect what small samples they could as evidence of their landing, together with several squawking penguins, which were bundled into the boats. D’Urville had remained aboard the Astrolabe; he now decided to name the land they had found ‘Adélie Land’, to honour – and possibly appease – his distant and distraught wife.21
As the French ships wended their difficult way westward along the barrier, enduring fog and occasional snowstorms, d’Urville was disconcerted to see a man-o’-war, with all its sails set, loom out of the fog at speed toward the French corvettes. On 29 January 1840, in this most isolated place on Earth, Lieutenant Cadwallader Ringgold, in the American ship Porpoise, had chanced upon their French rival. But no meeting took place between them, not even a shouted greeting across the water.
D’Urville had been in the process of resetting the Astrolabe’s mainsail and gave orders for the activity to be suspended so that the American vessel could get close. However, when the Porpoise showed no sign of taking in its sail or otherwise reducing its speed, d’Urville instructed that the mainsail of the Astrolabe be set so that he might at least keep alongside the faster ship for a time. This move was interpreted by the Americans as indicating that the French had no wish to communicate and wanted to keep their discoveries secret, or so Wilkes later wrote in his account of the voyage. In fact, Wilkes had been instructed by the navy secretary to keep strictly secret any information ‘referring to discoveries, or any circumstances connected with the progress of your enterprise’.
For d’Urville, the Porpoise’s apparent refusal to slow down was consistent with the accounts he had received of the Americans’ behaviour in Sydney. Later, he rejected allegations that it had been the French who had behaved secretively, noting that the time had long passed ‘when navigators, in the interests of trade, believe themselves obliged to conceal their routes and their discoveries carefully to avoid the competition of our rival nations’. The French, he said, were motivated by a desire to ‘enlarge the extent of our store of geographic knowledge’, rather than by a desire simply to beat their rivals to new territory.22 Yet the discovery and possible claiming of new territory had of course remained on the French agenda, as they had shown by their self-conscious claiming of Adélie Land.
For the Americans, scientific inquiry had given way to the more practical concerns of commerce. In order to ensure political support for an Antarctic expedition, Jeremiah Reynolds had been forced to emphasise the benefits for American whalers and merchantmen of knowing the precise location of shoals and reefs that might otherwise endanger their vessels. Wilkes’ instructions had noted that the ‘primary object of the Expedition is the promotion of the great interests of commerce and navigation.’ The intention to ‘extend the bounds of science, and promote the acquisition of knowledge’ was secondary.
Nevertheless, whereas d’Urville’s instructions had only envisaged one attempt on the Antarctic, the American instructions had envisaged two. Like d’Urville, Wilkes was ordered to begin his exploration by taking his smaller vessels ‘to explore the southern Antarctic’ by following the path taken by Weddell. Then he was to head into the Pacific, visiting Fiji and other islands before fetching up in Sydney, from where he was to make ‘a second attempt to penetrate within the Antarctic region, south of Van Diemen’s Land, and as far west as longitude 45°E, or to Enderby’s Land’. After that, he was to head for the northern Pacific coast of the United States, then to Japan, before returning home by way of Singapore. It was an expedition concerned primarily with creating an informal economic empire rather than a formal territorial one. At each place he visited, Wilkes was told to respect the rights of the peoples he might encounter, since the expedition was ‘not for conquest, but discovery’.23
The expedition left Norfolk, Virginia, in mid-August 1838, which meant it had plenty of time to reach Orange Harbor in Tierra del Fuego, from where Wilkes would launch his voyage towards the South Pole. He was meant to return from this southerly foray by the latter half of February 1839, thereby avoiding any danger of his ill-prepared ships being trapped by the ice. However, the six ships did not reach Orange Harbor until mid-February, which meant that any thought of following Weddell’s path was out of the question. Instead, Wilkes left the larger Vincennes to survey Orange Harbor while he went aboard the smaller Porpoise to survey the south-east coast of Palmer’s Land, accompanied by the schooner Sea Gull.
At the same time, he instructed Lieutenant William Hudson to take the other small ships, the Peacock and the Flying-Fish, on a voyage south-westward, to the southernmost point Cook had reached – about 71° S, 105° W – and then to return by way of the western extremity of ‘Graham’s or Palmer’s Land, (its proper American name)’. Assuming that Palmer’s Land was a large island rather than the peninsula of a continent, Wilkes ordered that the two ships go along the southern coast of Palmer’s Land. If his assumption was correct, this would be ‘a very important discovery’, he wrote.24
Hudson’s two ships managed to get to the point where Cook had abandoned his voyage south, but the lateness of the season saw them confronted and almost captured by the freezing of the sea. Rather than continuing south-east, Hudson called off the quest and headed for Valparaíso, justifying his abandonment by noting the great danger in which he would otherwise have placed the lives of his men, one of whom had already slipped to his death from the height of the icy yardarm.
Wilkes, too, was confronted by hostile elements while trying to survey the south-east coast of Palmer’s Land and step onto its shore. With the deck of the Porpoise covered in ice, and with the sailors’ clothes woefully inadequate for the conditions, Wilkes was beset by impenetrable fog and blinding snowstorms, looming icebergs and masses of floe ice, as well as the occasional fierce gale. After just nine days at sea, Wilkes turned his ships about and headed back.25 Their failure had been even more short-lived and miserable than d’Urville’s.
The dangers were not imaginary, with the Sea Gull later being lost without trace in a gale during its voyage to Valparaíso. Unsure of its fate, Wilkes continued the expedition with his diminished fleet of four vessels, while the storeship Relief returned home. It bore several disaffected officers who had fallen out with the ill-tempered and insecure Wilkes, who had become more despotic and increasingly isolated the longer the voyage continued.
By appointing the relatively lowly Lieutenant Wilkes as commander over officers who had been above him on the promotion list, the government had guaranteed trouble on deck once the ships set sail. To try to enforce subordination among his officers, Wilkes had made the desperate decision to display from his ship the pennant of a captain, rather than of a lieutenant, and to add a captain’s epaulets to his uniform, as if he really were one. The deception provoked puzzlement among his officers, who had received no official notice of any promotion. It would prove to be a useless ruse. Almost to a man, the officers, sailors and scientists of the expedition continued to withhold their respect from Wilkes.26
After spending more than six months visiting various islands in the Pacific, the expedition sailed into Sydney on 29 November 1839. After offloading the scientists, who would have little to do amongst the ice, the ill-assorted ships left Sydney on 26 December, with three convict stowaways hidden in the hold of the Vincennes, presumably unaware of their dangerous destination.27 As the ships ploughed their way through the Southern Ocean, a young officer on the Peacock, William Reynolds, relished the thought of finding ‘a Continent, the Existence of which has been so much disputed’, and which would allow the United States to ‘reap the fame of having at last Contributed Something to the general Knowledge of the World’. His hopes seemed likely to be disappointed when a solid barrier of ice was reached and no passage was found to the supposed Antarctic sea beyond.
Along with Henry Eld, a fellow officer, Reynolds climbed to the masthead on 16 January 1839 to obtain a better view. Convinced that they were looking at more than just ice, the pair returned aloft with a spyglass. They were surprised to see what they took to be mountains in the distance, their peaks disappearing into the clouds. Eld described in his journal how the two men ‘almost at one accord … pronounced it the Southern Continent’ But there had been a number of reports of land being sighted that had subsequently been shown not to be the case, and their excited report was ignored by the ship’s commander, William Hudson, who cautiously headed the ship away.
Three days later, back among the ice, Reynolds saw something ‘very much resembling high craggy land’. Even Hudson seemed convinced, but attempts to get closer proved futile and doubts began to surface; the ‘land’ was dismissed as an iceberg.28 And so it went on, with several more sightings being dismissed.
On 23 January, more signs of land appeared, including a penguin that was captured from an iceberg and taken aboard the Peacock. The bird was considered by all to be ‘a Most Beautiful Creation’, with the crew being amused by its antics before it was killed and skinned for science and its flesh prepared for the delectation of the officers. Small pebbles found within its stomach were sold by the cook to eager buyers among those sailors keen to have ‘South Pole stones’. The existence of the pebbles was seized upon by Hudson as solid evidence that land was nearby. He was now convinced that the ice barrier was attached to a continent. He might have been able to confirm his suspicion if the Peacock’s rudder had not been badly damaged in a collision with the ice. Although makeshift repairs were made, it was too dangerous for them to continue. Instead, Hudson headed for Sydney to have a replacement rudder installed. ‘And so ended our attempt South!’ wrote Reynolds.29
Wilkes was a worse sailor than Hudson, and more cautious. Back on board the Vincennes after his foray on the Porpoise, he kept the larger ship a good distance from the ice barrier. Although his officers reported from the masthead that they could see the appearance of land on the horizon, Wilkes could not be induced to risk his vessel in the drift ice and icebergs that lay between it and the barrier. The sightings kept coming during the latter part of January, although there was never unanimity among the officers as to what they had seen. The frequent gales and snowstorms interrupted their attempts to stay within sight of the barrier.
From mid-January, the American ships had been sailing along the ice barrier in zigzag fashion because of the winds and weather. Originally reaching the continent at about 160° E, they had sailed some 1300 kilometres and reached 112° E by 12 February 1839, when Wilkes climbed the mainmast to see a snow-covered mountain range rising in the distance above the ice barrier. After so many sightings of land over the previous fortnight, Wilkes wrote in his journal how the sighting of the mountains ‘settles the question of our having discovered, the Antarctic Continent’. It was only now that he and his officers celebrated in his cabin with champagne. Nine days later, after passing his original goal of 105° E, Wilkes announced to the assembled crew that they were returning to Sydney.30
As Wilkes headed north, Ringgold and the Porpoise were still several days’ sailing behind him, having become separated during a three-day gale. The officers on the Porpoise had not had the good fortune to make any confirmed sightings of the continent, although they believed that it was likely hidden somewhere beyond the barrier. They did not realise that the ice barrier, some 200 feet high, was attached to the continent and formed its coastline. Ringgold and his officers noticed rocks in an iceberg, which they could have taken as confirmation of the existence of nearby land, but the iceberg was believed instead to have drifted all the way from the distant Kerguelen Islands.
On 30 January, at 135° E, the Porpoise chanced upon d’Urville’s two ships, initially believing them to be the Vincennes and the Peacock. Then it was thought they were the two British ships of James Clark Ross. Only when the French flags were raised was the truth realised. Then followed the misunderstanding as the American and French ships sailed past each other without any attempt at communication. Ringgold continued on his westerly track until 14 February, when he had reached about 105° E, the limit of his instructions. He then ordered the ship to head for the expedition’s rendezvous point in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands. Ringgold believed that they had to find a way through the barrier if the supposed continent was to be found, and he had not been able to find such a passage. As a result, he and his officers concluded, there was nothing ‘to warrant the belief that land exists anywhere in our vicinity’. The officers on the schooner Flying-Fish came to a similar conclusion when their foreshortened voyage ended abruptly at 143° E. Its sickly crew had beseeched the captain to do so, arguing that the journey would otherwise ‘soon terminate in DEATH’.31
While the Porpoise and the Flying-Fish headed for the Bay of Islands, where the scientists were awaiting them, the Peacock went to Sydney for repairs to its rudder and hull. Wilkes also took the Vincennes back to Sydney, arriving there on 11 March 1840. The three convict stowaways were handed in and flogged for their escape; the youngest died during the ordeal.
Wilkes learned that d’Urville had arrived in Hobart and was telling all and sundry that the French had discovered the continent on the evening of 19 January. Putting aside his instructions to maintain secrecy, he met in his cabin with the US consul and drew up a statement for the Sydney press, which announced that the American search for a southern continent had been ‘completely successful’, with land having first been sighted on the morning of 19 January.
In fact, although there had been an unconfirmed sighting by an officer on the Peacock as early as 16 January, and although Ringgold later claimed to have seen a distant mountain that same day from the Porpoise, there was no record in any of the ships’ logs of land being definitely sighted before 30 January, when Wilkes saw rocks on an elevated area a few kilometres from the Vincennes and mountains beyond. On that day, he had declared in his journal: ‘Antarctic Land discovered beyond cavil.’32
Despite his talk of an ‘Antarctic Continent’, Wilkes had not discovered Antarctica; that honour had already been won by Bellingshausen twenty years before. However, Wilkes had done much more than simply bestow on it the name ‘Antarctica’. By sailing more than 1300 kilometres along its barrier, he had shown the existence of a large land mass that might well be part of a polar continent.
Although one of the scientists now assured Jeremiah Reynolds in New York that ‘his expectations respecting the Southern Continent have been realized’, the original promoter of the expedition was far from impressed by the news.33 It was all very well to find land and to argue that it was part of a continent, but Reynolds had envisaged the expedition claiming such a continent for the United States. He was mortified that Wilkes had coasted so far along the Antarctic coastline without once ‘planting the Stripes and Stars high on the mountain top’.34 Reynolds could not comprehend the difficulty of landing ashore when confronted by the sheer face of the ice barrier.
After all, the French had stepped onto solid land in the Antarctic, albeit on an islet. Moreover, d’Urville had done what Wilkes had seemed disinterested in doing. He had claimed the nearby coastline for France by performing traditional rites of possession, and he had named the place after his wife. As a result, French ownership would be clear to the world, and d’Urville’s own association with the place would be forever memorialised. Wilkes had been more concerned with securing for himself and his nation the glory of the place’s discovery. By maximising the extent of the discovery in calling it a continent, Wilkes thereby maximised the glory.
In fact, D’Urville wanted both the glory of discovery and its possession. His encounter with the Porpoise on 29 January made him realise that both would be imperilled if the Americans were the first to return to civilisation with news of their voyage. Just three days after the chance meeting, d’Urville turned his ships about and headed for Hobart, despite conceding that ‘it would have been possible to push further west and to chart a longer stretch of the ice barrier, perhaps even to encounter land there’.35
Reaching Hobart on 17 February 1840, d’Urville immediately wrote a long report to the French navy minister. He enclosed it, along with charts of the voyage, in a dispatch that he sent aboard an English ship leaving for Europe the following day. He also provided an account of his voyage to the local newspapers. While waiting to translate it, one newspaper noted that d’Urville seemed to ‘have discovered a large continent to the Southward, but we suspect it is the same land seen by Captain Biscoe’. This brought an immediate retort from d’Urville’s secretary, who pointed out that Biscoe’s discovery – Enderby Land – was 2700 kilometres distant from d’Urville’s Adélie Land. The French navigator was not going to have the credit for his discovery usurped by a British sealer.
D’Urville had suspected that the American ships might follow him to Hobart but there was no sign of their sails coming up the Derwent estuary. His inquiries for news of the Americans proved fruitless, since they had not yet arrived in Sydney. More frustration would come in New Zealand, where d’Urville arrived to discover that the Porpoise had preceded him, leaving behind a plaque that made no mention of any American discoveries. D’Urville responded with a plaque of his own, reporting his own visit and proclaiming the French ‘discovery of Adélie Land’.36
Meanwhile, Wilkes had done what he could in Sydney to ensure his own accomplishments were recognised by the world before he disappeared from view for two more years of exploration around the Pacific.
Wilkes knew that it was not only the French who might snatch his glory. There was also the expedition of the famous British explorer James Clarke Ross, who was reported to be on his way to the Antarctic. Having located the North Magnetic Pole in 1831, Ross was set on doing likewise in the south. Both Wilkes and d’Urville had taken magnetic readings during their voyages in an effort to locate the South Magnetic Pole, but neither had managed to reach it. If Ross proved successful, his expedition could well overshadow that of Wilkes.
In order to forestall such a possibility, when the Vincennes joined the other American ships in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands Wilkes wrote to Ross in Hobart, advising him of the American discoveries and enclosing a chart showing where the Americans had gone. Although it was a breach of his instructions, Wilkes clearly felt compelled to notify Ross of the discoveries, thereby precluding him from later proclaiming them as his own. There was also much advice for Ross about the nature of the winds, currents and ice conditions in that part of the Antarctic, and a prediction by Wilkes as to where the South Magnetic Pole was likely to be located.37
Ross was grateful for the information, although he interpreted the inclusion of the chart as an inducement to have him head for the same stretch of coast. He refused to take the bait. As he later explained, it was demeaning for an explorer from a country such as England, which had always ‘led the way of discovery in the southern as well as the northern regions … to follow in the footsteps of the expedition of any other nations’. Instead, he resolved to set his two ships on a course that would take him to parts of the Antarctic coastline unseen by either Wilkes or d’Urville.
Rather than heading south from Hobart, Ross went across the Tasman Sea to Enderby Island, south of New Zealand, where he recorded magnetic observations and found the plaques left by d’Urville and Ringgold, together with a bottle containing a water-stained note written by Ringgold that gave more detail about the movements of the Porpoise but made no mention of finding a continent. Ross ascribed this omission either to the American obsession with secrecy or to Ringgold having taken a more northerly route than Wilkes.38
The two naval ships of the British expedition, the Erebus and the Terror, were the best equipped vessels to have ventured to the Antarctic. Although each was only about half the size of the Vincennes, they were mortar ships specially designed for bombarding shore fortifications, which meant that their timbers had been strengthened to withstand the recoil of their guns. They had been further strengthened for the polar voyage. Now they were headed for the testing conditions of the gale-prone Antarctic seas.
Before his departure from London, Ross had met with Balleny and learnt of his discovery of the Balleny Islands, just to the east of the discoveries by Wilkes and d’Urville. Balleny had also reported finding an open sea near those islands, which might allow Ross to sail much further south than Wilkes and d’Urville. Although the expedition had been proposed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society to investigate terrestrial magnetism, the Admiralty had included instructions relating to geographical discovery. If Ross found ‘any great extent of land’, he was to chart its coastline, and he was also to confirm the positions of the already discovered Graham Land and Enderby Land.39
Wilkes had reported to Ross that the magnetic pole was probably located at about 70° S, 140° E, and that he had been blocked by the ice barrier from reaching it. Balleny’s discovery of an open sea at about 170° E raised the prospect that Ross could perhaps approach the magnetic pole from a more easterly meridian. That was where he headed in December 1840, roughly following the 170° meridian southward, only to encounter a coastline with an extensive mountain range. It would turn out to be the western entrance of the Ross Sea.
Although disappointed at this apparent setback to his southerly heading, Ross took solace from having ‘restored to England the honour of the discovery of the southernmost known land’, which had hitherto been held by Bellingshausen’s more northerly discoveries. Naming the closest point of land ‘Cape Adare’ in honour of one of his aristocratic supporters, and the mountain range ‘the Admiralty Range’, Ross attempted to land on the shore of what he called ‘Victoria Land’, named after the young English queen. When a landing proved impossible, Ross instead went ashore on the stony beach of a nearby island.
With the weather worsening and an army of penguins protesting their invasion, Ross ordered that a hasty ceremony be performed to take ‘possession of these newly-discovered lands, in the name of our Most Gracious Sovereign, Queen Victoria’. The British flag was raised to the cheers of the men, who then ‘drank to the health, long life, and happiness’ of the queen. Taking whatever rocks and penguins they could fit in their rowboats, Ross headed back to the safety of the ships. Following James Cook and many other British explorers, Ross named the place ‘Possession Island’.40
Finding that he could still proceed southwards, Ross carefully took his ships into the partly frozen waters of the sea that opened before him; it would later come to bear his name. Hoping that he might still find a way towards the South Magnetic Pole, he gradually realised that it could not be reached by ship. He had to be content with claiming possession of another island, which he named after Sir John Franklin. On it he discovered two massive volcanoes, one of which was ‘emitting flame and smoke in great profusion’. Ross did not realise that the volcanoes, which he named after his two ships, were on an island that was attached by ice to the mainland.
More British names were scattered onto other snow-covered geographic features, before Ross was finally halted by an ice shelf some 200 feet high, which stretched across the southern reaches of the Ross Sea. He had reached 78° S, much further south than Weddell or any other explorer had managed to go. The sailors were rewarded with a double ration of rum, while the blacksmith on the Erebus correctly surmised that from there to the South Pole ‘must be one Solid continent of Ice and Snow’.
Ross considered whether the well-supplied ships could winter in some sheltered spot and then make an overland approach the next summer to the South Magnetic Pole, where he hoped to plant the British flag, just as he had done in the Arctic. However, the lack of a suitable protected anchorage forced him instead to return through the encroaching winter ice to Hobart. It was only now that he deigned to follow the track of Wilkes. Heading west past the Balleny Islands, Ross was bemused as his ships sailed over what Wilkes had marked on his chart as the coastline of the continent. Ross was ‘compelled to infer’ that the land claimed to have been seen by Wilkes ‘has no real existence’.41
The later publication of Ross’s expedition report touched off a fierce dispute with Wilkes, whose reputation by then was being assailed by his own officers. Wilkes suggested that it was the sighting of land by Balleny that had prompted him to extend further east the chart of the Antarctic coastline that he had sent to Ross, which had given Ross the mistaken impression that Wilkes had sighted the entire coastline. This failed to convince Ross, who responded by expressing doubts about the rest of Wilkes’ supposed discoveries.
To emphasise those doubts, Ross refused to include on the published chart of his own discoveries any of the geographic features that Wilkes claimed to have found in the Antarctic. Only those of d’Urville, Balleny and Biscoe were included on the new map, while the misleading chart that Wilkes had sent him in Hobart was included only in an appendix. By omitting Wilkes’ discoveries from his ‘South Polar Chart’, Ross ensured that the coastline he had discovered was by far the largest discovery depicted.42
After spending much of the winter in Hobart and Sydney, Ross returned to the Antarctic in December 1841, taking up where he had left off in the Ross Sea before heading to the Falkland Islands. The following summer, he tried to replicate Weddell’s feat of sailing south into the ice-free sea that promised a passage to the South Pole. However, it was early March 1843 when Ross made his attempt, which was too late in the season to venture so far south.
After nudging his ships through forty-three kilometres of loose pack ice, reaching 71° 30’ S and 14° 51’ W, the thickening pack ice and an approaching gale forced Ross to call a halt. Before turning north, he and his officers signed a document detailing their feat, which was then consigned to a cask and thrown overboard, so that their deed might still be known even if the ships met with disaster.43
It proved to be the last of his southern voyages. After four years at sea, Ross returned to London in September 1843, having failed in his ambition to reach the South Magnetic Pole. However, he had succeeded in taking magnetic observations that would assist future navigators, and he had discovered an ice-free sea with a coastline that would allow future explorers easy access to the continent’s interior.
Ross also returned with a new appreciation of the Antarctic. Whereas Cook had memorably described the ‘inexpressibly horrid aspect of the country’, Ross described how the members of his expedition had ‘gazed with feelings of indescribable delight upon a scene of grandeur and magnificence beyond anything they had ever before seen or could have conceived’.44
Together, d’Urville, Wilkes and Ross had added a few thousand kilometres of coastline to maps of the southern polar region, but there was still no agreement as to whether the stretches of coastline connected to make a single, large continent.
Wilkes had suggested that they did, and had given it the name ‘Antarctica’. He would laud his voyage as having ‘discovered not a range of detached islands, but a vast Antarctic continent.’45 D’Urville was more cautious. Although he thought it likely that ‘land does surround most of the south polar circle’, this could only be confirmed if an explorer were ‘lucky enough and daring enough to break through the accumulation of pack ice that usually encircles it’.46 Ross was even less inclined to believe that Wilkes was right. Although he was convinced that the coastline he had discovered was connected with the nearby coastlines discovered by Balleny, Wilkes and d’Urville, he was not convinced that they were connected to the much more distant coastlines of Kemp Land and Enderby Land. Ross thought it more likely that the widely separated coastlines formed ‘a chain of islands’ rather than ‘a great southern continent’.
This belief had important implications for the area’s ownership. If the land was composed of large islands, they properly belonged to their separate discoverers, whether English, French or American. If they were a single continent, Ross argued, neither the Americans nor the French had any claim whatever to the land they had discovered, since the discovery of the continent would rightfully belong to the British sealers – Biscoe in 1831 and Balleny in 1839 – rather than to Wilkes or d’Urville.47 It would take another century before the existence of the southern continent was proved beyond doubt.