After three years at sea, and debilitated by gout, Dumont d’Urville was exhausted when he returned to France in November 1840. For two months he stayed within the bosom of his diminished family at their Toulon home, restoring his strength and commiserating with his wife, Adélie, over the death of their young child. Eventually, he was drawn to Paris as the honours of his grateful nation were heaped upon his frail frame. He was promoted to rear-admiral, admitted to the Légion d’Honneur and awarded a gold medal by the Société de Géographie.
Among his achievements, d’Urville had discovered a new stretch of coastline in the Antarctic, which he had claimed for his king and named for his wife. With the support of the government, d’Urville began work on a multi-volume report of his expedition, which would enshrine his achievements and reinforce the territorial claim that he had made. He was partway through this massive work when he took his wife and son on a Sunday excursion to see the royal festivities at Versailles in May 1842. The day ended in disaster when the crowded steam train in which they were travelling ran off the rails, causing the first three carriages to land amidst the burning coal of the overturned engines. Along with more than fifty others, d’Urville and his family were trapped in the wreckage and burned to death.1
A month after d’Urville’s terrible demise, Charles Wilkes directed the Vincennes back into Virginia’s naval dockyard, completing a voyage that had been even longer and more dramatic than d’Urville’s. There was no official reception awaiting the American explorer as he stepped ashore alone. There was just ‘a cold insulting silence’ from the administration of President John Tyler, noted Wilkes, while one of the principal scientists, Titian Peale, recalled how they were ‘received with a cold shoulder’. Peale had hoped that his work with the expedition would secure him a position at the new Smithsonian museum in Washington, where the expedition’s scientific material had been deposited, but he was passed over for the post.
The officers and scientists waited in vain for the honours and promotions that they believed they deserved. Peale complained that he and his fellow scientists had ‘returned poorer than when we started; and we have been much mortified in being deprived of the honors hoped for, in the non-publication of reports – an injustice to us, and our country’. There was a similar lack of regard by Congress, with the House of Representatives refusing to pass a motion of commendation and the Senate declining to honour Wilkes and his officers with an invitation to its chamber. Although Congress ordered that Wilkes’ report of the expedition was to be published – with expensive illustrations on a scale that matched d’Urville’s multi-volume work – it only authorised the printing of 100 copies. Wilkes was permitted to have another 150 copies printed at his own expense.2
At the time, the president and Congress were at loggerheads, and the return of a mostly scientific expedition was unable to seize either political or public attention. Moreover, while there might have been glory to be won in the Antarctic, Wilkes had not done so. His attempt to follow Weddell’s track towards the South Pole had begun too late in the season and had ultimately been abandoned, while his later attempt on the South Pole had been thwarted by the ice barrier, along which he had sailed but upon which he had not landed. He had bestowed the name ‘Antarctica’ on the supposed continent, but he had not made any territorial claim on behalf of the American nation.
Consequently, there had been no waving of the Stars and Stripes, which might have excited patriotic feelings among the public. The news of his fractious command had also preceded his return, and his disgruntled officers would heap more opprobrium on his proud head as they began to submit further complaints to the navy department. The charges by his officers, and his counter-charges against them, were played out in a series of courts martial. One of the most serious charges against Wilkes was that he had lied when he tried to outdo d’Urville’s discovery of land on the evening of 19 January 1840 by claiming that he had done so hours earlier that same day.
The charges by Wilkes against his officers were dealt with first, resulting in a mixture of acquittals and minor punishments. The charges against Wilkes were more serious and cast a shadow over the whole expedition. While he was exonerated on some charges, and others were dismissed on technical grounds, he was found guilty and reprimanded for excessive floggings of his men. On the crucial charge of lying about the discovery of Antarctic territory, the overbearing lieutenant found that none of his officers were willing to bear witness to him having seen land from the Vincennes on 19 January. (In fact, it would later be shown that there was no land at the location where Wilkes had claimed to have seen it.) Just one sailor claimed to have heard Wilkes make such a declaration on deck that day.
Wilkes’ reputation was in tatters, although national honour was somewhat retrieved when Reynolds and Eld testified that they had seen land from the topmast of the Peacock on 16 January. The captain of the Peacock, William Hudson, who had dismissed the sighting and ordered it to be recorded in the ship’s log as an iceberg, now testified that he believed he had been mistaken and that it was land that they had seen. This did not exonerate Wilkes of lying about his sighting there days later, but the court was unable to find him guilty. If he swore that he had seen land, how could they judge to the contrary?3 Still, there was no happy ending to the sorry saga, and the reputation of the expedition was sullied ever after. The testimony at the court-martial did, however, enable the United States to claim that the sighting of land from the Peacock had preceded by three days the sighting of land by the French.
None of this was of any account to James Clark Ross, who was determined to assert the primacy of British explorers over both the Americans and the French. In his account of his voyage, Ross argued that the British sealers Biscoe and Balleny had discovered the Antarctic coastline well before both Wilkes and d’Urville, which therefore negated any right of these later arrivals to be regarded as the discoverers of the land mass lying to the south of Australia.
Moreover, Ross used the misleading chart that Wilkes had sent him before his own voyage south to question the supposed achievements of the American navigator. He told the Admiralty hydro-grapher Francis Beaufort that Wilkes had made a ‘great mistake’ with his careless charting, which was ‘sufficient … to throw great doubt over all he has done and I have no doubt that many other of his Mountain Ranges will prove to be delusive appearances by which an unpractised eye in Icy Regions is so likely to be deceived’.
When calling at New Zealand’s Bay of Islands in August 1841, Ross had made a point of showing Wilkes’ chart to the captain of an American naval vessel, explaining how his own ships had sailed over locations that Wilkes had marked as being mountainous land. The American officer was no friend of Wilkes and had spread the story around when passing through Honolulu. It had then been relayed to newspapers in the United States, causing Wilkes and his expedition to be lampooned long before they had arrived home.4
Wilkes tried to rebut the accusations, but the stain on his reputation remained, even though England’s Royal Geographical Society awarded him its founder’s medal in 1847. He had given a name to the continent, but the world remained mostly unsure whether there really was a continent there. In 1928, a leading British historian of the Antarctic, J. Gordon Hayes, was dismissive of the American’s achievements:
Out of at least eight new lands, which Wilkes claimed to have discovered, six have no existence, the seventh is improbable and only one is a possibility … The only land claimed by Wilkes, that has been verified, was discovered by d’Urville nine days before Wilkes saw it.5
Ross’s reputation was not greatly enhanced by his Antarctic expedition. Although he was knighted and received medals from the geographical societies of both London and Paris, he did not receive the public acclamation that had greeted his discovery of the North Magnetic Pole. The account of his voyage took four years to publish, had a small print run and was written in a way that did not excite the public’s interest. Yet he was convinced that he had made important discoveries and had blazed a trail that others would soon follow.6
It was not the newly discovered land that was important, which he mistakenly regarded as just one of several large islands in a polar sea, but the abundant marine life that he had seen in the surrounding seas. On his voyage south from New Zealand, Ross reported, a ‘great many whales were seen’; he and his men ‘might have killed any number we pleased’. Most of the whales, wrote Ross, were ‘of unusually large size, and would doubtless yield a great quantity of oil, and were so tame that our ships sailing close past did not seem to disturb them’. When he reached the Ross Sea he saw even more. Ross reported that ‘wherever you turned your eyes, their blasts were to be seen’. He thought most were humpback whales, with a smaller number of the more sought-after sperm whales. The whales had ‘enjoyed a life of tranquillity and security’, but Ross predicted that they would now ‘be made to contribute to the wealth of our country’.7
Later, while surveying islands south of the Falklands, Ross saw ‘a very great number of the largest-sized black whales, so tame that they allowed the ship sometimes almost to touch them before they would get out of the way; so that any number of ships might procure a cargo of oil in a short time’.8 Ross clearly expected that this would be an alluring vision for whalers, who were always on the hunt for fresh whaling grounds.
If Ross was right, Britain was well placed to reap the benefit. Its navigators had claimed ownership of many of the sub-Antarctic islands that had previously hosted extensive seal colonies and which could now become sites for shore stations for the whaling fleets. The South Shetlands, the South Orkneys, South Georgia and the Falklands all provided possibilities in this regard, as did the newfound Victoria Land, which Ross had recently claimed for Britain.
But such developments did not happen. There was a hiatus of half a century before the wildlife of the Antarctic was again disturbed by significant human intrusion. Despite the abundance of whales reported by Ross to live in Antarctic waters, there were still ample whales in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Moreover, the whales in the northern hemisphere were easier to catch, being the slow-moving bowhead whales, which were restricted to the Arctic and grew to lengths of twenty metres. The bowheads had a thick layer of blubber, which caused them to float when killed rather than sink to the bottom of the sea, as many other species of whale were prone to do. Their large percentage of blubber, which could be boiled down for oil, made them particularly profitable for whalers, as did the length of their baleens, through which they filtered their food and which were used for a large variety of products, from mattresses to dress hoops.
Bowheads were part of the family of so-called ‘right whales’, whose main member in the southern hemisphere was the southern right whale. It is doubtless that many of the whales seen by Ross and other explorers were southern right whales, which resorted to Antarctic waters in the summer to feed on krill before heading towards the equator to breed during the winter. Their predilection for breeding in shallow bays in temperate climes, where they were relatively easy to kill and haul ashore for processing, meant that there was little incentive for whalers to confront the greater difficulties and dangers of hunting and killing them in Antarctic waters.
Some whalers and sealers did venture to the Antarctic during the middle and latter parts of the nineteenth century, but invariably they returned disappointed. One such voyager was Mercator Cooper, an American who left New York in August 1851 for the Southern Ocean. Attracted by Ross’s description of Victoria Land, he reached there in January 1853 and stepped onto its ice shelf on 26 January, thereby making the first documented landing on that part of the continent. There were penguins aplenty but no valuable fur seals, and he left without further ado.9
Polar explorers also failed to follow in Ross’s wake. Their focus was on the Arctic and the obsession with finding a northwest passage that might provide an easy, ice-free route between the North Atlantic and the North Pacific, thus connecting the consumers of Asia with the factories of Europe. Britain was determined to be the first nation to do so.
Ross’s two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, which had proved their worth in the Antarctic, were sent by the British government in 1845 on just such an expedition. Ross was offered the command but declined. He was exhausted from his years in the Antarctic, and he had his expedition report to write and a wife to placate. The command went instead to Sir John Franklin, the elderly Arctic explorer and lieutenant-governor in Hobart who had hosted the visits of both d’Urville and Ross. It was an unfortunate appointment. The ships left the Thames in May 1845, never to return.
Franklin had sufficient stores to last four years, and so no alarm was raised until 1848, when Ross was sent with two ships to mount a search that proved fruitless. Many more expeditions followed over the succeeding decades, both British and American, as the mystery of Franklin’s disappearance deepened. The successive searches, and the sad story of Franklin’s grieving widow, captivated the attention of the world. Eventually, some remains of the missing men were found and an account of the tragedy was pieced together. It told a dreadful tale of death from hunger and disease aboard the trapped ships. The local Inuit people suggested that the survivors who had tried to escape from their icy imprisonment had been driven to cannibalism.10
With the unresolved details of Arctic geography beckoning polar explorers from relatively close at hand, there was less impetus to answer the many remaining questions about Antarctic geography. There was also much colonial activity in Africa and Asia during the nineteenth century, as Britain, France, Germany and other European countries carved up those continents between them, opening up new areas of exploration and geographic discovery, and new fields for scientific research. The coastlines discovered in the Antarctic by d’Urville, Wilkes and Ross, apparently barren of life and largely devoid of accessible geology, could not compete with the life forms and geology to be found in these other places.
It was only when the science of oceanography was developed that some fleeting scientific attention was again directed towards the far south. After rich marine life was discovered in the deep ocean off the coast of Scotland in the late 1860s, where no life was thought to exist, Britain’s Royal Society combined with the Royal Navy to send a scientific expedition to explore the depths of the world’s oceans. In 1872, six scientists were commissioned to join the corvette Challenger and take detailed observations of currents and water temperatures every 320 kilometres of the voyage, and to dredge the sea floor for rocks and new life forms.
Powered by sail, and with an auxiliary steam engine for working among the ice, the Challenger reached the Antarctic, south of the Kerguelen Islands and west of where Wilkes had left off his exploration. By dredging the sea floor for the debris dropped there by melting icebergs, the naturalist John Murray found that the rocks were similar to those of other continents, which led him to postulate the likely existence of ‘a mass of continental land quite similar in structure to other continents’.11 Of course, whether it was a single large continent, as Wilkes maintained, or several large islands, as Ross argued, still could not be confirmed.
At the same time, a German whaling captain, Eduard Dallmann, was commissioned by the German Polar Navigation Society to take the steam-driven whaling ship Grönland to look for right whales and seals in the waters around Graham Land, and to confirm the accuracy of the existing charts of the region. The society was funded by the wealthy German ship-owner Albert Rosenthal; its aim was to increase German participation in whaling and sealing and in the exploration of polar seas.
When Dallmann reached the South Shetlands in November 1873, he found that there was already a British party killing seals, which by now had repopulated the islands’ shores. After leaving a plaque on King George Island to record his visit, he went westward along the Antarctic Peninsula, charting Anvers Island and discovering a strait along its south-east coast, which he named ‘Bismarck Strait’ after the German chancellor. Dallmann’s discoveries corrected the existing charts and added detail, but were not of great importance and were only published in German.
The commercial results were even less important. Dallmann found none of the slow-moving right whales he had been sent to kill, only the faster-moving rorqual whales, such as fin, sei and blue whales. He tried to recoup his losses by hunting for seals on the beaches of the South Orkneys and managed to obtain a fair cargo of skins and seal oil, although only a small proportion were from the valuable – and now rare – fur seal. It was a disappointing result for Rosenthal, and Dallmann thereafter concentrated his activities in the Arctic and New Guinea.12 The Antarctic had gained another reprieve, but it would not last much longer.
European scientific organisations designated 1882–83 as the ‘First International Polar Year’, and year-long observations were taken at stations established at both ends of the globe. Most were in the Arctic but two stations were established in the far south: a French station at Tierra del Fuego, and a German station on the island of South Georgia.13 Both were outside the Antarctic Circle, but their activities renewed international interest in the Antarctic.
Some of this interest came from Australia, where the German-born scientist Baron Ferdinand von Mueller was Victoria’s government botanist. With most of the great questions concerning Australian geography now answered, Mueller told a meeting of the Victorian Geographical Society in April 1884 that the Antarctic would now provide ‘some of the grandest results for geographic science’. Australia was looking outward and would soon colonise part of New Guinea, while Mueller wanted it also to annex the Auckland Islands, as well as Macquarie and Campbell Islands, south of New Zealand, arguing that they were ‘naturally Australian possessions’. It was hoped that the society might soon see ‘some adventurous explorer with a steam vessel at his command attempting a summer’s dash into our antarctic regions, where an almost virgin field is offered’.14
Although there was no immediate response in Australia, Mueller’s challenge prompted both German and British scientists to echo his call. One was the German scientist Georg von Neumayer, who had been the government astronomer in Victoria in the late 1850s before returning to Germany in 1864. Neumayer, who had been appointed as the hydrographer of the German navy, noted in October 1885 that no one had ever spent a winter in the Antarctic. There was a pressing need, he argued, for an expedition to ‘pass a winter there, in order to compare the conditions and phenomena with our Arctic knowledge’. He believed that a sledge party might even be able to get all the way to the South Pole. In Britain, the Association for the Advancement of Science established a sub-committee in September 1885 to encourage research in the Antarctic. This, in turn, gave fresh impetus to the Australian proponents of Antarctic exploration.15
In June 1886, the Royal Society in Victoria joined with the local geographical society to establish an Antarctic Exploration Committee. Its aim was to promote geographic discovery, as well as ‘extended investigations into climatology, terrestrial magnetism, geology and natural history’ and into the ‘accessibility and the utilitarian resources of that part of the globe’. As befitting a gold-rich colony of relatively recent creation, practical questions were to the fore. There was the possible commercial benefit from whales and seals, and the benefit to Australian meteorology from studying the Antarctic, from where much of southern Australia’s weather was believed to originate. Even at this early stage of Antarctic research, there was an expectation that it might shed light on whether ‘climatic change is in progress’.
There was also the prestige that an Antarctic expedition would bring to a colony whose capital, Melbourne, had grown to compare in size and wealth with some of the larger cities of Europe. As one of the expedition’s supporters argued in 1888, an Antarctic expedition would ‘secure to this colony universal attention, and the approbation of the entire civilized world’. And if Australia did not do it, then the rising German Empire surely would, ‘to our mortification and disgrace’.
But there was a limit to what even a wealthy Australian colony could do, and a realisation that Britain would have to take the lead in funding and organising any expedition, while Australia would provide some of the scientists. When Britain declined to help fund an Australian expedition, or to send its own, the Australian interest died away.16 It was left to the whalers to take the lead.
The whaling industry had been in a state of decline since the 1860s, as the use of whale oil for lighting was replaced by gas and kerosene, and for lubrication of machinery by petroleum oils. The whalers were kept afloat by new uses that were found for baleen. Female fashions, for instance, dictated the wearing of tight-fitting corsets that used the flexible whalebone. Fluctuations in the price of baleen became as important as, and sometimes more important than, the changing price of whale oil in determining whether a voyage returned a profit.
Yet even the demand for baleen could not prevent the gradual extinction of the American whaling fleet during the latter half of the nineteenth century, along with much of the British fleet. More than thirty American boats were lost to the Arctic ice in 1873, and the American Civil War saw others lost. There were still whalers operating in the Arctic from Dundee in eastern Scotland, where whale oil was used to soften jute. It was also used for cheap soaps and candles. Even greater quantities of oil were imported into Dundee from Norwegian whalers, who gradually became the dominant force in world whaling, as British and American capital was largely shifted to other enterprises. With the price of whale oil slumping in the 1880s, there was even less reason to mount a speculative whaling voyage to those far distant seas.17 But that was about to change.
Several important developments occurred during the last decades of the nineteenth century that would have profound effects on the Antarctic. One was the invention in the late 1860s of a grenade-tipped harpoon gun with a flexible head, introduced by the Norwegian Svend Foyn. It killed fast-moving rorqual whales quickly, and secured them to the ship with a steam-powered winch, thus reducing the chances of them diving or sinking to the depths. A steam-powered compressor was then used to fill the whales with air so that they would float. American whalers had experimented since the 1850s with cannon or rocket-fired harpoons or lances, but had met with indifferent results. They usually shot and lost many more whales than they captured. With Foyn’s harpoon gun mounted on the bow of a small steamship, it became much easier to hunt the rorquals.
This did not produce an immediate rush to the Antarctic, as there were plenty of rorquals in the North Atlantic and Arctic whose numbers would have to be severely reduced before whalers began hunting further afield. It was only when that occurred in the late 1880s that attention began to turn again to the Antarctic, although even then efforts were concentrated on the hunt for the more lucrative and easily caught right whales rather than rorquals.
The southern summer of 1892–93 saw whaling ships from Scotland and Norway head for the Antarctic in search of the right whales that Ross and other explorers had reported were there in abundance. A Scottish pamphlet printed in 1874 had called on Scots to create an Antarctic whaling industry, but it made little sense when whales were still relatively abundant in the North Atlantic. That had all changed by 1891, when whale stocks in the Arctic had declined; the pamphlet was reprinted for a more receptive audience.
Attracted by Ross’ descriptions of whales off Graham Land, and by the suggestions of the Antarctic Exploration Committee in Melbourne, a Dundee whaling company dispatched four of its whaling ships to the western Weddell Sea in September 1892. Rather than being fast, modern steamships capable of chasing and killing rorquals, they were old barque-rigged sailing ships with auxiliary engines. The expedition also had a scientific purpose, with the Royal Geographical Society and the Meteorological Office both providing instruments for weather observations and geographical discoveries. In charge of these was a young doctor and amateur naturalist, William Bruce, who would become a passionate advocate for scientific investigation of the Antarctic.18
News of the Dundee expedition provoked calls in Norway for its whalers to mount their own. The Norwegians had come to dominate the northern whaling industry and had experienced men and suitable ships. One of the centres of Norwegian whaling was the port of Sandefjord, near Oslo, where the whaling company owned by Christen Christensen was located. He had offered to supply four ships for the proposed Melbourne expedition, and when the Australians had failed to secure finance had decided instead to mount his own expedition. The same week that the Dundee ships headed south, Christensen sent the double-masted sealing vessel Jason off in pursuit. It was effectively a joint German–Norwegian expedition, since the ships and crews were Norwegian and the controlling company was financed largely by German capital.
However, just as the Dundee expedition had been sent south with equipment designed to catch the slower right whales, so too had the Jason. In charge of the vessel was a young sealer, Carl Larsen, who had much experience in the Arctic and who expected to reap an easy harvest of right whales. Instead, both the Scots and the Norwegians found there were plenty of blue, fin and humpback whales, which they were not equipped to kill, and no right whales at all. Cargoes of seal oil and skins had to suffice, although their value was not enough to recoup the cost of their nine-month voyages.
Although Christensen was persuaded to try again the following year, this time sending four ships intending to catch only seals, again the venture proved unprofitable. The Dundee expedition was similarly unsuccessful, although it returned with some scientific specimens and observations and made some minor geographical discoveries.19
The now venerable Svend Foyn thought that he had the answer to finding riches in the Antarctic. He argued that his Norwegian and Scottish rivals had been looking for right whales in the wrong places. Pointing to Ross’s sighting of whales in the Ross Sea, Foyn suggested that it was there that the whalers would find right whales.
He had been approached by a Norwegian friend who had returned from Melbourne with news of the Australian proposal for an Antarctic expedition. The eighty-four-year-old Foyn put his informant, Henrik Bull, in nominal charge of an expedition on the renamed Antarctic, a former Arctic sealing ship, which left Norway in September 1893 with Leonard Kristensen as captain. After stopping in the Kerguelen Islands for water, Bull stayed long enough to kill about 1600 elephant seals for their skin and oil. He noted how the large, lumbering animals ‘look on with quiet curiosity and interest at the preparations for their own execution’.
Yet the killing was wasted. The ninety-five tons of oil was sold in Melbourne for a disappointing result, while the skins had to be sent to London and earned even less. Moreover, the delay caused by the hunting meant that the meandering expedition now had to wait until the following summer to make the onward voyage to the Antarctic. Some of the time was spent whaling off New Zealand, but harpoon problems meant that only one right whale was actually killed and processed. Several others were shot and lost.
Although the expedition had been feted in Melbourne, some disquiet was expressed at the Norwegians mounting an expedition to a part of the Antarctic which was regarded as being rightfully British, because of its relative proximity to the British colonies of Australia and New Zealand and the claim of ownership made by Ross. Bull pushed on regardless, with his multi-national crew – ‘a mixture of Swedes, Danes, Poles, and Englishmen’. Also among the crew was a Norwegian-born resident of Melbourne, Carsten Borchgrevink, who would go on to have a distinguished record of Antarctic exploration. In mid-January 1895 the Antarctic finally reached the Ross Sea, where Foyn’s hopes of finding right whales were not borne out. There were plenty of fast-moving blue and fin whales but the men were unable to catch them.20 Financially, the expedition was another disaster, although it was successful on other grounds.
After exploring part of the Ross Sea without result, and having landed on Ross’s Possession Island, Bull decided to attempt a landing on the continent itself. On 24 January 1895, with the Antarctic anchored in calm seas off Cape Adare in Victoria Land, Bull, Kristensen, Borchgrevink and four of the crew clambered into one of the ship’s boats and set out for the precipitous coastline. It would become a matter of fierce dispute as to who was first to step ashore. Kristensen, Borchgrevink and one of the crew all claimed that honour, oblivious to the fact that the American sealer Mercator Cooper had done so in 1853. Bull made no claim for himself, being content to observe the ‘strange and pleasurable’ feeling of being among ‘the first men who had set foot on the real Antarctic mainland’.
Their landing on the narrow beach was contested by the inhabitants, it being the site of a massive colony of Adélie penguins, some of which ‘bravely attacked’ the boots of the interlopers. A drawing of the scene suggests that at least two seals were killed during their two-hour sojourn ashore, while the penguins had to be driven away with sticks.
Bull and Kristensen had named some of the islands and other geographical features they had seen in the Ross Sea, although they were conscious that they had probably already been named by Ross. Believing their landing on the mainland to be the first, they erected a pole, on top of which they had fixed a box painted with the Norwegian colours, together with the date of their visit and the name of their ship. It was done as evidence of their feat, rather than as a claim of possession to a land that Ross had long ago discovered and claimed for Britain.21
The expedition had done what d’Urville, Wilkes and Ross had all been unable to do. With little effort, the seven men had stepped ashore onto the mainland and thereby opened the possibility of future expeditions exploring by land. As Bull later argued in his book about the expedition, they had:
… proved that landing on Antarctica proper is not so difficult as it was hitherto considered, and that a wintering-party have every chance of spending a safe and pleasant twelevemonth at Cape Adare, with a fair chance of penetrating to, or nearly to, the magnetic pole by the aid of sledges and Norwegian ski-es.22
There were additional reasons for exploring on land. Borchgrevink had discovered the existence of lichen on Possession Island, which overturned the accepted view that the Antarctic was too cold for vegetation. The discovery would add to the growing scientific interest in the Antarctic, which Bull helped to encourage by pointing to the ‘millions of unexplored square miles [that] offer problems of the most fascinating character to the meteorologist, geologist, and geographer’, as well as to the botanist, biologist and zoologist. That was little consolation to Foyn, who had lost a small fortune on the venture. He would have been pleased by Bull’s landing on the Antarctic shore, but he died before Bull could telegraph him the news.23
The failure of so many whaling voyages might have been expected to dissuade any others from venturing there. However, they had not failed through lack of whales. The problem was simply that they had gone hunting for a species of whale that was no longer in great numbers in the Antarctic. Bull argued that the lack of southern right whales did not mean that it was impossible to make a profit from Antarctic whaling. After all, they had sighted numerous rorquals during their expedition. They just did not have the fast steamships required to chase and kill them, or the factory ships or shore stations to efficiently process them.
The Norwegians had developed the means of doing so in the Arctic, and Bull confidently predicted if these methods could be brought to the Antarctic and used to hunt rorquals, they would bring ‘great wealth to whoever sets about their capture’. The Norwegians in the Arctic mostly towed their catches to nearby shore stations, but there were no suitable places for such bases in the Ross Sea. Even this was not an insurmountable problem, argued Bull, suggesting that two ships be sent on any future whaling expedition: one a small steamer for hunting the whales, and the other a larger ship for processing and storing the oil, and for holding fuel and supplies.24
The stage was set for the return of the whalers, this time steaming south in the hunt for the mostly fast-moving rorquals. And the whalers would be joined in the Antarctic by a new rush of explorers and scientists.