Standing on the pitching deck of the Dundee whaler as it returned home in 1893, the young Scottish doctor William Bruce had much to ponder. He had gone to the Antarctic in the hope that he could pursue his interest in natural history, but the whalers’ vain hunt for right whales had taken precedence over science and Bruce had been forced to make do with whatever observations he could take at sea. Nevertheless, he had been captivated by the environment and was convinced that many scientific discoveries would be made there. He told a friend that ‘the taste’ he’d had of the Antarctic had made him ‘ravenous’.
This most passionate Scottish nationalist called for a government-financed, national expedition to be sent, with scientific research as its priority. It would ‘show that the Britain of to-day is not behind the Britain of our fathers’, and would thereby allay the concerns of those who feared that Britain was being overtaken by the rising empires of Europe and North America. If the British government would not do it, Bruce was convinced that he could organise a Scottish expedition of his own. Prestige would come before profits. It would be the honour that came from scientific discovery, rather than from financial success or from feats of manliness, such as a race to the South Pole.1
This view put him at odds with the leading English advocate of Antarctic exploration, Clements Markham, who had the conquest of the South Pole firmly in his sights. Markham had been born to a religious family in Yorkshire and had joined the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen. Sailing the world, from South America to the Arctic, he sought to understand all that he encountered. When in South America, he felt impelled to learn Spanish and he read voraciously about the history of the Incas. When he went to the Arctic in 1850 to search in vain for Sir John Franklin’s long-lost expedition, the young Markham returned to write a justificatory book about the much-criticised search.
The navy could not contain such a restless and forthright adventurer. He established a geographical department within the India Office but was forced to resign in 1877 after he went without permission on a naval expedition to the Arctic. By then, he was the secretary of both the Royal Geographical Society, which promoted exploratory expeditions, and the Hakluyt Society, which published historic accounts of discovery, many of them translated from Spanish by Markham. In 1893, the sixty-three-year-old adventurer had become the president of both societies, which gave him the perfect platform from which to campaign for an Antarctic expedition. 2
In Markham’s view, the ‘real objects’ of an Antarctic expedition were finding new lands and the opportunities that would provide for ‘young naval officers to acquire valuable experiences and to perform deeds of derring doe’. And he had identified a young naval officer, Robert Scott, as one of several candidates who might lead such an expedition.3
To assist his campaign, Markham turned to the esteemed Scottish oceanographer from the Challenger expedition, Sir John Murray, whom he asked to lecture at the Royal Geographical Society on the need for England to renew its interest in the Antarctic. William Bruce was among the audience in November 1893 when the venerable oceanographer called on Britain to secure its ‘power and progress’ by unravelling ‘the many riddles’ of the oceans. Arguing that there was an enormous Antarctic continent waiting to be discovered, Murray asked whether ‘the last great piece of maritime exploration’ was to be ‘undertaken by Britons’ or by ‘those who may be destined to succeed or supplant us on the ocean’. He could not promise that there would be any commercial advantage, but he did argue that ‘the results of a well-organized expedition would be of capital importance to British science’. There was also the prestige that would accrue to a nation that was prepared to support an expedition for no other purpose than the furtherance of human knowledge. Britain had done so with the Challenger expedition, said Murray, and it now led the world in oceanography, whereas its lacklustre support for other branches of science had seen it ‘outstripped by foreigners’.4
For Markham, science was just the means that enabled him to mount an expedition. He had already convinced the Royal Geographical Society to appoint a committee to plan the best way ‘of achieving the objects of Antarctic exploration’. As Markham assured the audience gathered for Murray’s lecture, he was committed to the cause of Antarctic exploration and would ‘never swerve until it is completed’. It was not only for geographical research and science, said Markham, but because he was ‘an Englishman’ who regarded the expedition as a means to encourage ‘that spirit of maritime enterprise which has ever distinguished the people of this country’.
It was stirring stuff. Roused by the rhetoric as much as by the scientific challenge, the audience was supportive. After several had risen to express their approval and offer suggestions, Markham asked Bruce to tell of his experiences on the whaling expedition. The Scotsman confessed that it had not been successful from either a commercial or a scientific viewpoint. Nevertheless, he agreed completely with Murray’s proposal for ‘another great Antarctic expedition’, this time one with ‘a national character’ that would maintain Britain’s leading reputation in Antarctic research. Bruce offered to join it and be among the first to spend a winter on land in the Antarctic.5
Markham’s campaign still faced the disinterest of a British government that could see little advantage in the Antarctic and had no wish to add those frozen wastes to its bloated empire. Although a succession of British explorers from Cook onwards had named and claimed parts of the Antarctic Peninsula and its nearby islands, no British government had ever followed up those claims with an official assertion of ownership. That left the way open for other countries to make their own claims.
The Argentine government began to show interest in 1892, when a Buenos Aires company requested fishing rights off Graham Land and the South Shetland, South Orkney and South Sandwich islands. The company claimed that ‘no act of sovereignty had been performed there’ and argued that the geographic position of those places made them the rightful property of Argentina, which should ‘take possession of them and execute acts of sovereignty and occupation’.
When this proposal was reported in Britain, government officials searched through dusty files for evidence of their claims. Although reports were found of explorers raising the British flag on those frozen, fog-prone shores, bureaucrats could find no evidence of the government backing those claims. This meant that any British title was tenuous at best. The Colonial Office showed some interest in forestalling the Argentinians, noting that the islands ‘abounded in seals’, yet the Admiralty could not see any strategic reason for annexing them and the Foreign Office thought doing so was ‘quite undesirable’.6 Argentina had also failed to see any compelling reason to assert its own sovereignty over the islands, and the matter was allowed to lapse.
The lack of official British interest in holding onto the sub-Antarctic islands did not bode well for Markham’s campaign, which was also hampered by the depressed economic conditions of the mid-1890s. Struggling to get his Antarctic expedition onto the government’s agenda, Markham turned to the international scientific community for support. He had been encouraged by the news of Henrik Bull’s voyage in the Antarctic and the landing at Cape Adare, which showed that even a small expedition might land men ashore. If government funding was not forthcoming, perhaps private funding could be raised for an expedition on a smaller scale. If men could be landed from the Ross Sea, they might be able to strike out for the South Magnetic Pole – or even the South Pole itself.
The Norwegian-born Carsten Borchgrevink was among those who had landed at Cape Adare, and he was eager to lead an expedition of his own. Unable to raise funds in Australia, he rushed to Europe so that he could be the first to provide a personal account of the group’s feat, and use his presence to seek British support for his own expedition. Borchgrevink arrived in time to address the International Geographical Congress, which met in July 1895 at the recently built Imperial Institute in London’s South Kensington. Under Markham’s chairmanship, the delegates agreed that the Antarctic was the place that most required explorers’ attention. They called for the dispatch of Antarctic expeditions ‘before the close of the century’.7
There was a rush to respond. As Markham well knew, there was already support among scientists in Germany, where the long-time proponent of Antarctic exploration Georg Neumayer had proposed a German expedition to a congress of geographers in Bremen in April 1895. With the support of the Arctic explorer and professor of geography at the University of Berlin Erich von Drygalski, a committee was established under the chairmanship of Neumayer. Its report recommended that a German expedition be sent to fill in more of the blank spaces of the Antarctic map and to undertake ‘the study of meteorology, of terrestrial magnetism, of the shape of the globe, of zoology, botany and geology, and finally of the investigation of Antarctic ice’. As befitting a rising empire, the Germans did not want to explore areas that had been mapped by other nations but planned instead to head for an area that had ‘not yet been searchingly examined, and [where] new results cannot fail to be secured’.8 The interests of scientists and the emperor might thereby coincide, and the government might be forthcoming with funds.
While Drygalski and Markham were struggling to obtain sufficient funds, Belgium put larger nations to shame by announcing its own expedition, which would be led by a young naval lieutenant, Adrien de Gerlache, and supported by the Brussels Geographical Society and funds from a wealthy patron. However, it received little support from the Belgian government and had to look to other countries for experienced crew members and scientists. Some would go on to have distinguished polar careers, such as the twenty-five-year-old Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the thirty-two-year-old Frederick Cook, an American doctor who had been the surgeon on the 1891 Arctic expedition of American explorer Robert Peary. Cook had subsequently tried unsuccessfully to organise an American expedition to the Antarctic.9 Also aboard Gerlache’s multinational expedition were scientists from Poland and Romania.
As Cook’s experience indicated, there was now little American interest in the Antarctic. The American Arctic explorer General Adolphus Greely suggested that there was more interest in the Arctic because of the relative ease and economy of voyaging there, and the ‘comparative paucity of results to be obtained from explorations of the Antarctic circle’. Moreover, he argued, the Antarctic was a place of ‘freezing temperatures’ and ‘blinding snow-squalls’ where few living things could subsist, which made it a much harsher place for explorers to survive.10
The American state of Alaska lay partly within the Arctic Circle. It attracted much attention in the late 1890s, when it became the scene for a frenzied gold rush. At the same time, the great trading opportunities of the Pacific were the focus of considerable American attention, particularly after the Spanish–American war of 1898 brought the Philippines and Cuba under American control.11 Compared to the South Pole, there was the promise of profit aplenty in both those places, and much to occupy the attention of American generals, admirals and diplomats.
Profit was not at the forefront of de Gerlache’s mind when he planned his expedition to the eastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Leaving in August 1897 in a former Norwegian whaler, renamed the Belgica, de Gerlache did not reach the peninsula until late January 1898, as summer was coming to an end. The lateness of the season threw his plans into disarray. Instead of heading to its iced-up eastern coast, de Gerlache began exploring its western coastline, discovering a number of islands and the 320-kilometre channel that would later bear his name. Frederick Cook described the scene, noting that the:
… scores of new islands which dot the virgin waters are inhabited by countless millions of penguins and cormorants, while great numbers of seals are in evidence on every accessible rock or ledge of ice. In the waters are huge numbers of finback whales which, with the seals, will in the near future offer a new industry.12
The exploration came to an abrupt end within six weeks when the ship was caught by the remorseless grip of the spreading ice of the Bellingshausen Sea. It remained drifting in the current for the next thirteen months.13
De Gerlache’s men had not been provided with proper winter clothing or sufficient stores to see them through such an extended stay. As the encroaching dark and pervading cold wore away at their physical and mental health, the indomitable Cook could still find ‘many pleasures for the eye and the intellect in the flashing aurora australis, in the play of intense silvery moonlight over the mountainous areas of ice, and in the fascinating clearness of the starlight over the endless expanse of driven snows’.
On a more practical level, Cook and Amundsen had killed and stored sufficient penguins and seals as food to last the winter, with Cook correctly believing, at a time when the cause of scurvy remained in dispute, that fresh meat was essential in order to keep the disease at bay. A novel aspect of Cook’s treatment for scurvy was to have the men sit naked by an open fire for an hour each day. The ever-present threat of darkness-induced depression, or even insanity, among the crew was reduced by regular rounds of work and entertainment. Despite Cook’s precautions, one scientist who refused to eat life-giving penguin meat died, and two of the crew were driven mad by their dreadful situation.14
The party’s fate was almost sealed when the ice refused to release the ship the following summer. Only after they had spent more than a month using ice saws to cut through to an open basin was the ship finally freed, when on 14 March 1899 a channel fortuitously opened to the sea. Instead of proceeding with his planned exploration, de Gerlache promptly returned to Belgium.15
The voyage had been the first to winter, however unwillingly, below the Antarctic Circle, which gave confidence to those planning future expeditions. The months in the ice had also given the Belgian scientists a rich scientific haul, and the results of their work were subsequently published in ten volumes.16 But the expedition had not been all about science. Cook concluded that there was money to be made in the Antarctic, excitedly describing it as a ‘penguin El Dorado’ and urging that ‘the penguin world [should be put] into the field of man’s conquest’. He called for ‘red-blooded men’ to establish a ‘new empire’ centred on the South Shetlands, with penguins and seals providing the food for a fur industry worked by ‘a few healthy families of wild Eskimos, and a breeding stock of white bears, dogs, foxes and some other arctic fur bearers’.17
The prospect of profits raised the inevitable question of ownership. As Cook noted in his account of the Belgica expedition, anyone who was considering investing in the Antarctic would first need to know ‘to whom do these lands belong’. In Cook’s view, the vast, ice-covered expanses of the Antarctic ‘belong to nobody; at least, there are no valid claims filed, except for those which accrue from the right of discovery’. Yet those rights of discovery could be asserted by several countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Russia, Norway and now Belgium. But they had mostly been established decades before, without any subsequent action being taken, and had weakened over time.
With a great deal of legal force, Cook argued that ‘any one who now takes the trouble to occupy any portion of it would undoubtedly become the owner’. Extolling the economic possibilities of fur-farming, Cook predicted that ‘these wild wastes’ would soon ‘form an island empire of thrifty fur-farmers’. Which nation, asked Cook, would step forward to ‘guard the interests of this coming race of hardy pioneers’?18 He later urged the United States to press its claims to the ownership of these unoccupied territories, since ‘God is with those that help themselves’.19
Cook did what he could to reinforce any future American claim by giving American names to several geographic features, thereby creating an aura of American possession and priority of discovery. While de Gerlache named four large islands after Belgian towns, Cook named the whole group of associated islands the ‘Palmer Archipelago’ after the American sealer Nathaniel Palmer. Cook also gave American names to several islands, while his fellow officers bestowed their own national names on other features.20 Such naming did little to advance any of the tentative claims of ownership that had been made during the nineteenth century. Governments would have to take much more definite action for any of these claims to be recognised, but British and European governments were still prevaricating over sending expeditions to the Antarctic.
The Belgians were followed by another private expedition, this time British. Both American and European newspapers had financed Arctic expeditions and published dramatic reports of icy adventures to boost sales of their papers. In 1898 a British newspaper owner, Sir George Newnes, agreed to finance an Antarctic expedition by the pushy Borchgrevink. Having stepped ashore at Cape Adare in 1895, he now wanted to build a base there before heading south across the ice. It was a plan designed to capture the public imagination, in the same way that attempts to reach the North Pole had done.
With £40,000 from Newnes, the thirty-four-year-old Borchgrevink purchased a former Norwegian whaling ship, which was renamed the Southern Cross, and assembled an experienced crew and several scientists. They included the Belgian-born physicist Louis Bernacchi, who had migrated to Hobart as a child. He had originally hoped to join the ill-fated Belgica, but when that plan had collapsed he travelled to London to offer his services to Borchgrevink. Although many of the crew and one of the scientists were from Norway, the expedition was dubbed by Newnes as ‘the British Antarctic Expedition’. 21 It would be the first Antarctic expedition to leave in a blaze of publicity, which was essential to its profit-making purpose.
Before setting out from London in August 1898, Borchgrevink did his best to stimulate public interest by raising the possibility of finding native people in the Antarctic. Even if there were no people, he wrote, there were millions of penguins that were ‘so fat that … if you dropped a wick down one of their throats and lighted it you would have a living lamp’. The scientifically minded Bernacchi must have squirmed at such statements. He had been advised by his father to stay at his scientific post in Melbourne and ‘not seek after Cheap Notoriety’. But the ‘vast possibilities’ for ‘scientific research and geographical discoveries’ caused him to ignore his father’s advice.
With more than seventy sledge dogs barking and defecating on the deck of the Southern Cross, Newnes celebrated the expedition’s imminent departure by holding a farewell lunch. The Scottish geographer and librarian of the Royal Geographical Society, Hugh Robert Mill, told the diners that the venture ‘reflected the greatest credit on the human race as a whole’, since it was ‘a real disgrace … that there should be any part of this ridiculously small earth of ours upon which no one had ever set foot on or had even tried to tread’.
Markham was notable by his absence. He had been maddened by Borchgrevink’s success in raising funds and had poured scorn on the expedition and its leader. While he had convinced learned societies to remain aloof from the expedition, the general public was suitably excited. As the ship pulled into the Thames, thousands of people lined the river banks to cheer it off, while pleasure boats accompanied it downstream. It was ‘striking proof of the popularity of the Expedition’, Bernacchi wrote.22 Newnes would have been pleased at the sight, which promised a good return on his investment.
There would be little in the way of geographic discoveries, since Borchgrevink was intent on returning to the familiar Cape Adare, although there was some excitement en route when the captain of the Southern Cross thought he saw new land in the distance, which he promptly named ‘Newnes Land’. Bernacchi eventually convinced him that it was one of the Balleny Islands. Disappointed, the captain continued to steer the specially strengthened ship through the jostling ice floes. An emperor penguin was captured on one of the floes and later killed and stuffed. Later, when three other penguins were sighted on another floe, the stuffed penguin was put onto the ice to entice the others closer, but they wisely kept their distance, looking on with ‘an expression of infinite sadness’ before slowly waddling to the edge of the floe and disappearing beneath the water.23
When the ship arrived at Cape Adare on 17 February 1899, the men erected what Borchgrevink described as ‘the pioneer camp’, two prefabricated huts made of Norwegian pine. They were the first man-made structures and the first human settlement to be established on the Antarctic continent. The huts were designed to house ten of the men during the coming winter, while the Southern Cross retreated to New Zealand.24
On 2 March 1899, as the ship prepared to leave, Borchgrevink hoisted a massive British flag – given by the Duke of York – and told the assembled officers and men that he was ‘hoisting the first flag on the great Antarctic Continent’.25 In fact, the Norwegian colours, albeit painted on a box, had been erected at the same place five years before, with Borchgrevink looking on. But his account of the British colours would satisfy his British readers, with the supposed primacy of its display giving added significance to the event. Bernacchi took a photograph of the scene, the first photograph to be taken on the continent. He later described the ‘picturesque and impressive sight’, with ‘the men grouped around the flagpole on this little strip of land surrounded on nearly all sides by grim, high peaks of snow’. As the ship steamed away and Bernacchi focussed his camera for another photograph, the men on shore ‘fired a volley from their rifles, answered by guns from the ship’.26
The raising of the flag was not accompanied by a claiming ceremony on behalf of Britain. That would have been inappropriate, given the mixed group of British, Norwegian and Finnish men. Anyway, Borchgrevink had no authority from the British government to do so. Nor was a ceremony performed during the year that the party spent ashore, although small British flags provided by Newnes were scattered across the landscape to give a semblance of British ownership. The party occupied themselves with their scientific observations, collecting rocks and biological specimens, and using the dogs and sledges to make short forays into the hinterland.
Surveying the surroundings of their ‘pioneer settlement’ from a nearby mountaintop, Bernacchi described in his diary how it was ‘unexpressibly desolate’, with ‘snow peaks rising beyond one another until by distance they dwindled away to insignificance. The silence and immobility of the scene was impressive. Not the slightest animation or vitality anywhere.’27 For Bernacchi, there was no economic use to which this desolate place could be put. In a subsequent book, he described the Antarctic as being ‘enveloped in an atmosphere of universal death’.28
In many ways, the expedition was a disappointment. It made no geographic discoveries of any great consequence, nor any other achievements of historic significance other than being the first party to survive a winter onshore. Borchgrevink wanted to achieve something more. When the Southern Cross returned to take them home in February 1900, he took the ship south into the Ross Sea. When it reached the edge of the ice shelf, a party was landed, making them the first to have landed on the Ross Ice Barrier, and set out across the ice with sledge and dogs for a token distance, reaching 78° 50’ S. After this brief symbolic foray, Borchgrevink was able to declare that he had gone further south than Ross’s 78° S, and indeed further south than anyone else to that time.
But it was hardly a feat fit for headlines. It was nowhere near the coveted South Pole, or even near the South Magnetic Pole, which Ross had wanted to reach, although it did open the way for other expeditions to achieve those goals. The expedition was notable for having had the first person to be buried on the continent. The unfortunate man was a Norwegian zoologist, Nicolai Hansen. As he died a lingering death from beriberi, caused by thiamine deficiency, he told his companions that he wanted to be buried on the bleak ridge overlooking Cape Adare. They regretted their ready agreement to do this when it took two days to excavate a shallow grave in the rock and ice. Finally, Hansen was interred, his body wrapped in the Norwegian flag and the grave topped with a wooden cross and brass plate.29
Reaching New Zealand on 31 March 1900, Borchgrevink told journalists of his winter in the Antarctic. However, much more dramatic events were hogging the headlines of newspapers throughout the British Empire. The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 had shifted the public’s gaze from the Antarctic to South Africa. Borchgrevink later complained that they had returned to London at a time when the public ‘only wanted books about Transvaal and the Great Boer War’.30
Moreover, there did not seem to be any profit to be made from a return visit to Antarctica. Bernacchi even dismissed the idea of whaling being profitable, wrongly claiming that the whales were almost extinct. Although he conceded that the conquest of the South Pole would attract future expeditions, Bernacchi argued that the Antarctic was only important for science, which required ‘a steady, continuous, laborious, and systematic exploration of the whole Southern Region with all the appliances of the modern investigator’.31 Such a high-minded purpose was unlikely to attract people such as Newnes to sink their money into another expedition. But money was forthcoming for expeditions pitched to the baser emotions of imperial competition and territorial acquisition, with four more expeditions going south soon after Borchgrevink’s.
German and British expeditions left within days of each other in 1901. The Germans had been late starters in the race to acquire imperial territory around the world and had to be content with seizing lands that other empires had not bothered to grab for themselves, from arid south-west Africa to jungle-clad north-east New Guinea. Yet not even they rushed to add the icy Antarctic to Germany’s scattered territories, nor was the allure of scientific discovery sufficient to stir the Berlin politicians’ interest.
The German explorer Karl Fricker was so frustrated by the continued inaction that he published a book in 1898 warning his fellow citizens that they were in danger of being beaten to the Antarctic by Belgium and Sweden. How could Germany ‘retain its designation of the “Nation of Thinkers and Investigators”’, asked Fricker, if it allowed others to take the lead in proving ‘the existence or nonexistence of an Antarctic continent’? He wanted German science to ‘have her share in the solution of this last and greatest problem of geography’. And if the government would not contribute, he wrote, all Germans with an interest in science and exploration should ‘aid in the realization of this aspiration’.32
With Germany’s newspapers reporting the preparations for expeditions by other nations, its scientific organisations agreed in February 1898 to support a proposal by Drygalski for a privately funded expedition. It was a matter of ‘national honor and duty’, argued Drygalski, invoking sentiments that impelled the German government to offer its support. Following a joint meeting of the Berlin Geographical Society and the German Colonial Society in January 1899, the government finally agreed to finance the expedition. The rising German navy was particularly keen to learn more about the oceans that it wanted to dominate. With ample funding, a three-masted barquentine, the Gauss, was built with room for a crew of thirty-two, including five naval officers and five scientists. Geographic discovery and scientific investigation were the expedition’s public aims, while prestige for the burgeoning German empire was the reward that was confidently expected by Kaiser Wilhelm II and the expedition’s supporters in the Reichstag.33
Similarly, the British expedition was initiated only with the support of the Royal Geographical Society, which agreed with Markham’s proposal of June 1898 that it should commit £5000 to a public appeal. It was another nine months before a private benefactor agreed to contribute £25,000, which inspired further contributions and made the expedition a viable proposition. Markham’s prolonged campaign had finally been successful.
Officers began to be recruited, with Markham choosing the men who were to be what he called ‘the Antarctic heroes’. With the massive donation in hand, Markham was able to pressure the government, which until then had offered only to contribute scientific instruments. Markham used his trump card, declaring that there was ‘a duel in progress between England and Germany as scientific nations – an international race to the South Pole’. Thus, the idea of a race was born between the fading empire and its rising rival. British mettle would be pitched against German, acting out in the Antarctic the great imperial rivalry.
The idea of a race helped convince the Prince of Wales to become the expedition’s patron, and prompted the government finally to commit £45,000 and provide naval officers and sailors.34 The government’s support came after a meeting between Markham and the chancellor of the exchequer, Arthur Balfour, who agreed that it was not acceptable for people of the ‘scientific age’ to remain in ‘total ignorance’ of the Antarctic. He was assured by Markham that scientific cooperation with Germany would ensure that there ‘cannot be any territorial rivalry between any of the countries engaged in Antarctic exploration’.35 This was a forlorn hope, given that Markham himself was fomenting the idea of a race.
In planning for the expedition, Markham tried to have Britain’s primacy in the Antarctic recognised by the division of the area into quadrants to which he attached British names, calling them the Victoria, Ross, Weddell and Enderby Quadrants. Their boundaries were set along the 90° lines of longitude. Markham thereby paid no regard to the exploration efforts of other nations and effectively raised a British flag over the whole Antarctic. He announced the nomenclature in September 1899 to a bemused audience at the International Geographical Congress in Berlin.
His talk was also a diatribe against the use of dogs in polar exploration, arguing that their use was ‘very cruel’ and that the achievements of expeditions with dogs could not be ‘compared with what men have achieved without dogs’. British explorers had hauled sledges in the Arctic, and he could see no reason why they should not do likewise in the Antarctic. He wanted the expedition to be a test of British manhood, to reassure the country after the desultory fighting of British soldiers in the Boer War.
Two days after the Berlin congress, Markham met with Drygalski and agreed that the Germans would go to the Enderby and Weddell Quadrants, south of the Kerguelen Islands, while the British would explore the Victoria and Ross Quadrants, between Australia and South America. Markham assured the Germans that all four quadrants ‘present equal opportunities for penetrating into the unknown, and for making discoveries of the greatest value to science’. Despite the scientific cooperation, there was an inevitable rivalry between the expeditions, which carried the hopes and expectations of their respective empires.36
Markham hoped to preserve English naval supremacy by providing a proving ground for the heroism of young officers such as Robert Scott, who would be tested in the icy conditions and judged as much by their feats of courage and endurance as by their geographic discoveries.37 Markham had supreme confidence in his young acolyte, lauding him as ‘an admirable organizer’ and ‘a born leader of men’ who had ‘the instincts of a perfect gentleman’.
Being well-bred was important to Markham, who sketched out the lineage of his chosen officers. He also designed the flags that would adorn their sledges and make them easy to identify from a distance. The common element of the flags was the English Cross of St George, which was also prominent on the flag of the expedition’s expensive and purpose-built ship, the Discovery. Markham was following the tradition of the historic knights of the age of chivalry, with each officer’s flag intended to indicate that he was ‘first and foremost an Englishman’.38 For Markham, dispatching the expedition was akin to sending an army of English knights into battle, with science a secondary consideration. When the Royal Society tried to have a geologist and experienced explorer, John Gregory, appointed leader of the expedition over Scott, Markham made sure that his chosen naval officer remained leader on both ship and shore. It was a victory of adventure over science. Among the subordinate scientists would be Louis Bernacchi, who had arrived back from the Borchgrevink expedition in time to take responsibility for magnetism observations, while a biologist and a geologist rounded out the small scientific party.
Markham ensured that William Bruce would not be aboard the Discovery. As soon as the expedition had been announced in early 1899, Bruce had dashed off a letter to Markham offering his services and proposing a meeting. Markham took more than a month to reply, and in the end the meeting never happened. It was nearly a year before Markham sent a message to Bruce, suggesting that he apply to be a scientific assistant. This was a gross insult to Bruce, who probably had more experience than any other applicant. Yet he complied, at the same time notifying Markham that he was close to raising sufficient funds to mount an expedition of his own, which he described as ‘a second British ship to explore in the Antarctic Regions’.
Bruce appeared to be keen to cooperate with Markham on a joint British enterprise, although Markham regarded his words as a threat to his own funding and railed against the ‘mischievous rivalry’. Before receiving this criticism, Bruce informed Markham that ‘the sending of a second ship is now assured’ and that it would constitute a ‘Scottish Expedition’, which he wanted to make ‘complementary to … the German and British Expeditions’ by concentrating on the Weddell Quadrant.39 The fight was now on between the English and the Scots, with Murray and other Scottish scientists and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society lining up with Bruce.
Markham’s fears for his funding were unjustified. With government backing, his preparations were unimpeded by Bruce’s activities. In late July 1901, Markham’s long campaign finally reached fruition. He was aboard the Discovery at London’s East India Dock as the ship was readied for its voyage. Amidst the chaos of eager spectators and tearful relatives, bags and crates were heaved aboard, including heavy gas bottles for the hydrogen balloon that would later take Scott aloft. Two pianos were also carefully taken aboard, one for the officers and one for the sailors. The provisions for entertainment during the long winters ahead did not end there. Junior officer Ernest Shackleton had practiced conjuring and been provided with a typewriter, a make-up box and dresses for shipboard dramas. The bishop of London went aboard in his robes to remind the assembled men ‘never to forget that God is always with them’. Then they were off, with Markham staying aboard for the short voyage to Cowes, where King Edward inspected the ship, telling Scott that his ‘labours will be valuable not only to your country, but to the whole civilized world’. As Markham took his leave of the ship, he noted that the young men he had so carefully chosen were ‘on a glorious enterprise; fighting no mortal foe, but the more terrible powers of nature … Truly they form the vanguard of England’s chivalry.’40
The focus of the expedition was to be the Ross Sea, from where Scott intended to strike out for either the South Pole or the South Magnetic Pole. The ship would press as far south as possible, leaving stone cairns along the coast in which Scott would deposit records of his passing for the subsequent relief ship. When the Discovery could go no further, the party would go ashore to erect prefabricated huts – provided by the Asbestos Company – in which most of the scientific observations were to be taken. The men would spend the winter months ensconced in their ice-bound ship. At the end of the first winter, they would make sledge trips into the interior. Markham made clear that the ‘whole force of the expedition must be concentrated on a great scheme of inland exploration’.41 As it turned out, Scott’s experience had hardly prepared him for the tasks that Markham had set him.
It began well enough, with the voyage to New Zealand taking them past Macquarie Island, where penguins were captured and eaten to accustom the men to the taste.42 Heading south from New Zealand, there was a sense of trepidation about what they might experience. Scott’s steward, Reginald Ford, wrote to his sister that they were all ‘looking forward to our first introduction to that dread monster [the ice] whose fastnesses we are going to invade, and we hope, to conquer’.43 By 9 January 1902, the Discovery had reached Cape Adare and proceeded to follow the coastline south.
When it finally reached the Ross Ice Barrier, the ship skirted east along the forbidding cliff of ice, looking for the mountains that Ross had seen. At the eastern end of the ice shelf, with mountains looming in the distance, Scott went aloft in the tethered balloon to get a better view of what he dubbed ‘Edward VII Land’. Shackleton followed in a flight of his own, taking photographs when the balloon reached the limit of its nearly 200-metre rope. But there was only ice stretching into the distance. Scott then took the Discovery back to the western end of the ice shelf and established his base at Hut Point on Ross Island, which was connected by ice to the adjacent land mass.
There they endured the long winter darkness, entertaining themselves with amateur theatrics. In one comic play Scott acted as a housemaid, while twelve sailors gave a ‘nigger minstrel performance’. All these diversions were reported in a monthly newspaper, the South Polar Times, which Shackleton produced with his typewriter.44 Among other activities, the officers and scientists debated whether Antarctica was a continent. They resolved the question by six to five in favour.45
When the sun finally emerged, sledge parties flying the Cross of St George headed off in several directions across the ice. Scott, Shackleton and one of the expedition doctors, a devout Christian, Edward Wilson, headed south in November 1902, hoping to reach all the way to the South Pole. Starting out with nineteen dogs, they failed even to get off the huge Ross Ice Barrier to the mountainous land beyond. They travelled about 440 kilometres and reached just beyond 82° S, which was further south than ever before, but it was still about 800 kilometres short of the South Pole.
Even that effort nearly ended in disaster, when the dogs sickened from their tainted food and died one by one, and the men weakened from hunger and became stricken with scurvy. Shackleton became so ill that he was coughing up blood, suffered chest pains and was unable to help pull the sledge. The dogs, meanwhile, had become so weak and few in number that they were allowed to walk along behind the sledge until they were killed for food with Wilson’s scalpel.
In their desperate situation, relations between Scott and Shackle-ton soured. They were never to be repaired. When they reached their furthest point south – 82° 15’ S – Scott pointedly pushed on with Wilson for another kilometre or so, leaving Shackleton behind with the surviving dogs so that he would not share in the honour. The outbreak of scurvy was a poor reflection on Scott’s leadership; he was slow to concede the protective effects of fresh seal meat.
With their food almost gone, the three men barely made it back to Hut Point alive. When in January 1903 the scheduled relief ship arrived, it left supplies that would allow Scott and the ice-bound Discovery to remain there another year, while it took away those men considered by Scott as unsuitable to remain. To Shackleton’s great chagrin, he was one of those sent home, although he was hailed as a hero in London.
During the second year, Scott led a two-month sledge journey that went more than 550 kilometres south-west and onto the continent itself, reaching into the heart of Victoria Land. Scott wanted to do more, but that would require him remaining for a third year, which was not an option.46
With funds running short, and with it no certainty that the Discovery would be able to break free of the ice, Markham organised two ships to bring Scott’s party home. One was the Morning and the other a Dundee whaler, the Terra Nova. If the Discovery had to be abandoned, these two ships would have sufficient capacity to accommodate Scott and his party, along with all the scientific collections, instruments and stores that were worth saving. It seemed on 5 January 1904, when the two relief ships arrived, that they might have to do just that: the Discovery was still stuck fast in the ice. It took another six weeks and the use of explosives before the ice relaxed its grip.47
Bernacchi, who had taken over the editing of the South Polar Times from the departed Shackleton, was taking his second leave of the Antarctic. He had held great hopes that the English and German expeditions would finally be able to confirm whether or not the great masses of land that had been found in the Antarctic comprised ‘a vast continent, or an archipelago of islands smothered under an overload of frozen snow’. Yet he was forced to concede that they had not explored sufficiently to know the truth.48 All the sledging across Victoria Land had done nothing more than confirm what Bernacchi already knew: that it was a land of great extent. Its precise boundaries remained unknown.
As for the Antarctic’s ownership, Scott had paid little attention to claiming a territory that had no obvious value. Nevertheless, his voyage of discovery, the two years spent at Hut Point and the exploration of the interior all added weight to any claim that Britain might make. Markham lauded Scott’s ‘story of heroic perseverance’, which had uncovered ‘a new and hitherto unknown world’. Markham implied that these discoveries would be followed by ownership, writing that:
… Britannia’s flag has thrown
Her shadow on the ice, and hailed the land her own.49
For others, though, the expedition had been about discovery and the glory that accrued from it, rather than adding worthless wastes of indeterminate size to Britain’s empire. Reginald Ford, the purser on the Discovery, later told those in Britain who wondered about spending so much money on an enterprise without any tangible benefit that science and national glory were sufficient justification. It would be ‘a very bad day for England’, said Ford, ‘when she thought of nothing but the possession of land or wealth or power’.50
Despite the limited achievements of the costly expedition, and the questions about its organisation, Scott was received with considerable acclaim on his return to Britain. He had an audience with the king at Balmoral, where he lectured the monarch for two hours, before returning to London for a public lecture at the packed Albert Hall on 7 November 1904. The sledge flags that the men had taken to the Antarctic were arrayed on stage like knightly regalia as Scott told the 7000-strong audience of their feats, which were dramatically illustrated with 150 slides of their two years in the Antarctic.
The United States’ ambassador to Britain used the occasion to present Scott with a medal from the Philadelphia Geographical Society and to suggest that he be allowed to ‘complete the map of the world by planting the Union Jack upon the South Pole’, while America’s Arctic explorer, Robert Peary, should ‘plant the Stars and Stripes upon the North Pole’. This sharing of discoveries, declared the ambassador, would leave the world ‘in the warm and fraternal embrace of the Anglo-Saxon race’.51 But Britain and the United States were not the only contenders for the poles.
The German expedition had left just five days after Scott in August 1901. Drygalski had agreed to explore south of the Kerguelen Islands because he expected that it had better prospects of geographical discoveries. There remained a serious dispute as to whether there was a coastline between about 50° E and 110° E, or whether there was open sea all the way across the Antarctic to the Weddell Sea. Drygalski was prepared for either eventuality.
The Gauss reached the edge of the previously unseen ice barrier at about 90° E in February 1902, which suggested that there was such a coastline all the way west to Enderby Land, rather than an open sea. To confirm it, the Gauss would have to survey the barrier for hundreds of kilometres. But within a few weeks the ship had become trapped by the ice about ninety kilometres from the coastline, with no hope of escape until the following summer.
The scientists spent the following eleven months making meteorological and other observations, writing by the light of penguin oil, and organising relatively short dog-sledge trips into what Drygalski dubbed ‘Wilhelm II Land’, situated between about 85° E and 95° E. There, he found an extinct volcano, which he named ‘Gaussberg’. On one of these sledge trips, Drygalski built a cairn into which he deposited a bottle containing a document ‘detailing the history of the expedition so far’. The German flag was then raised beside it, both to signal their accomplishment and to act as a claim of ownership of the place, although, as Drygalski later noted, the document ‘will probably never be seen again’. Like Scott, the Germans used a hot air balloon, tethered nearly 500 metres above the ship, to obtain an elevated view of the ice-covered land, which sloped inexorably upwards and southwards from the barrier.52
The scientific results of the German expedition, which were later published in twenty volumes, should have produced enough prestige for any empire. Yet the German emperor wanted more. He had wanted to raise his flag on a larger swathe of new territory. However, when the Gauss was eventually freed in February 1903, the ice prevented the ship from getting sufficiently close to the coastline to continue mapping it.
With conditions only set to worsen with the approaching winter, Drygalski decided to head to Cape Town. There, he cabled for permission to await the following summer and make another attempt at extending the territorial limits of Wilhelm II Land. While in Cape Town, Drygalski was disappointed to read of critics who attacked his failure ‘to reach a record high latitude’. Sadly for Drygalski, the German emperor was among these critics and refused his request to head south for another summer’s work. As he headed home, Drygalski comforted himself with the thought that he had ‘achieved all that could have been achieved, and that we were bringing a wealth of certain knowledge about the Antarctic with us’.53
Drygalski’s fellow geographers and scientists were more appreciative of his achievements, warmly congratulating him when he subsequently addressed the Royal Geographic Society in London. With Markham absent, the evening was a celebration of international cooperation in the Antarctic. The chairman of the meeting, Sir Thomas Holdich, welcomed the collaboration, which, he envisaged, should allow the remaining mysteries of the Antarctic to be revealed ‘more quickly, more accurately, [and] more satisfactorily’.
Drygalski agreed that the Antarctic was ‘too large to be satisfactorily dealt with by one expedition’. Moreover, his team’s scientific observations would be more valuable when compared with observations made elsewhere. Although Sir John Murray gave the Germans a backhanded compliment for having ‘proved by their work that this continent exists where we predicted it would be found’, Holdich thought there was still some doubt whether the Antarctic was ‘one great continuous land’.54 Drygalski had certainly added to the evidence that it was a single continent, but he too was cautious in his conclusions. He was content to have discovered and named a relatively small stretch of coastline, which allowed Germany to establish a tentative claim to its ownership. Much more would need to be done if that claim were to be made definite.
The British and German expeditions had been accompanied south by a Swedish one. Sweden had made its mark in polar exploration when Adolf Nordenskiöld had sailed around Europe’s Arctic coastline to the Pacific in 1880. The young Otto Nordenskjöld had been inspired by his uncle’s feat and led a Swedish expedition to Tierra del Fuego in 1895. Now he was off south again, enlisting the services of Henrik Bull’s Antarctic, with the whaler Carl Larsen as captain. The focus of this private Swedish expedition was Snow Hill Island, near the eastern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and it was there that Nordenskjöld was landed with five companions in February 1902. They remained throughout the winter in a prefabricated hut, while the Antarctic retreated to ice-free islands.
When the ship returned the following summer to collect Nordenskjöld’s party, the ice was too thick to penetrate. Three men went ashore to walk to Snow Hill Island, while Larsen searched for a way through. Both parties met with ill luck. After making their way across the ice, the land party was thwarted by a stretch of open water that separated them from Snow Hill Island. They returned to where they had been landed so that Larsen could pick them up, but he was having troubles of his own. The Antarctic had been caught by ice and sunk, with its twenty-man crew and their cat finding shelter on a nearby island.
The three separated parties had to spend the winter of 1903 surviving as best they could, living in makeshift shelters and eating a monotonous diet mainly of penguin meat. With summer approaching, the three-man land party made a second attempt, this time successfully, to reach Snow Hill Island, where a rescue party on an Argentine corvette found them a few weeks later. Larsen and some of his men then stumbled into the camp after enduring a hazardous journey by small boat and on foot. The remainder of the crew was then rescued and the whole party taken to Buenos Aires.
The expedition’s limited scientific results were later published in six volumes, the most important finds being fossils that proved the ancient existence of a giant continent.55 There had been no official Swedish support for the expedition, and there would be no further Swedish activity in the Antarctic for nearly fifty years.
With national prestige to be gained, it might have been thought that France would also be in the race. Although a French expedition eventually was mounted, leaving Le Havre in August 1903, it wallowed in the wake of its European rivals and was on a smaller scale than most of them. The fact that it went at all was due to the enthusiasm of its wealthy commander, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who financed much of it from his inherited wealth. The son of a famous doctor, Charcot had abandoned his own medical career for the demanding life of a polar explorer. He later lamented the ‘extremely limited’ official support that he had received and expressed a hope that France would one day ‘take her part with the other great nations in the peaceful struggle against the unknown’.56
French eyes were elsewhere. Exploration was concentrated in its colonies, particularly in Africa. D’Urville’s claiming of Adélie Land in 1840 had left little impression on the French psyche. Charcot might have excited more interest had he pitched his expedition in terms of national rivalry and honour, as the British and Germans had done, but his interest was purely scientific. He had no time for national rivalry, declaring that the poles had ‘no Frenchmen, no Germans, no English, no Danes; there are only people of the Pole, real men’.57
Charcot wanted to make his mark through cooperative scientific investigation of a small region, rather than by making a dash to the South Pole or searching for large stretches of new coastline. As he later wrote, it was better to thoroughly explore ‘a narrow corner’ than sail ‘listlessly up and down the seas, exhausting our efforts in haphazard researches which might prove more satisfactory to our vanity, but would assuredly have been far less useful to science’. He would do this by continuing the work of the Belgian and Swedish expeditions along the north-west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula and its associated islands.
His small purpose-built ship, the Français, carried twenty officers and crew and six scientists to the South Shetlands and the nearby peninsula. They spent the winter of 1904 ensconced on the ship and in a prefabricated hut on Wandel Island. Observations were taken during the winter and specimens collected from land and sea, but there was little to capture the public imagination until stories began to circulate in France that the ship had foundered and the men perished. The fears for their fate boosted the public interest when Charcot eventually returned safe and well in early 1905. He had made no attempt to lay claim to any Antarctic territory, which had in any case already been discovered by others. Glory would have to come from the eighteen volumes of scientific reports that Charcot went on to publish.58
Science and national glory were the motivating forces of William Bruce’s Scottish expedition. He made this clear by changing its name from ‘the Scottish Antarctic Expedition’ to ‘the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition’. With support from the wealthy owners of a Scottish textile manufacturer, James and Andrew Coats, and token assistance from the British government, Bruce purchased a barque-rigged Norwegian whaler with an auxiliary steam engine, which was refitted and installed with laboratories. Renamed the Scotia – after the ancient Scottish nation-kingdom – the 400-ton vessel housed twenty-seven crew members and seven scientists and assistants. Bruce planned to winter ashore for three years, ‘as near to the South Pole as practicable’, while the ship would carry out deep-sea research in the ocean south of South America. The expedition was farewelled from Edinburgh at a dinner hosted by the venerable Sir John Murray in October 1902. The Scottish origins and non-government nature of the expedition were celebrated, with the Scotsman arguing that the expenditure was ‘a good national investment’.59
With kilts and bagpipes aboard, the Scotia reached the South Orkneys in February 1903. It headed east towards the South Sandwich Islands, before turning south into the eastern reaches of the Weddell Sea. Like other explorers who had tried to emulate Weddell’s feat of finding open water and a possible passage to the South Pole in that sea, Bruce pushed through the pack ice to about 70° S, 15° W, only to find impenetrable ice beyond. He had long before decided that he would not allow the Scotia to be trapped in the Weddell Sea for the winter, which would prevent him from continuing his all-important oceanographic research, so he retreated north to the South Orkneys and anchored in a sheltered bay of Laurie Island.
Although Laurie Bay, at 60° S, was far outside the Antarctic Circle, it was there that Bruce decided to build his land station for meteorological and other observations. It was a more permanent structure than that of any other expedition. Rather than a prefabricated wooden building, Bruce used dog sledges to gather large rocks for a solid stone building with walls up to five feet thick. Taking more than six months to complete, it was designed to last centuries. To announce his expedition’s presence to the world, Bruce built a massive stone cairn, which he topped with a flagpole that flew both the ancient Royal Standard of Scotland and the Cross of St Andrew. Throughout the long building process, Bruce’s party used the ship as their base; it soon became ice-bound during that particularly cold winter.60
The icing of the bay ended Bruce’s hopes of continuing his oceanographic research before the next summer, although he did what work he could by cutting holes in the ice and dropping a dredge to the seafloor below, and by netting various marine specimens. He explored and surveyed the island, giving Scottish names to prominent features, including the name of the ship’s engineer, who had died of a heart ailment and was buried on shore. Whenever the weather allowed it, the scientists and their helpers roamed the shore, killing penguins, seals and birds for the expedition’s specimen collection, as well as for the cooking pot. On one day in October 1903, the botanist Robert Rudmose Brown recorded that twenty-three penguins were killed by members of the crew who had become ‘quite keen on penguin meat’. Brown noted that it was ‘very difficult to restrain the men from killing indiscriminately’. One only had to ‘turn away for a moment and they’ll batter into pulp the nearest living thing they can lay hands on’.
Bruce had tried to enforce rules about which animals could be killed and the best way of doing so to prevent their scientific value being destroyed. Bludgeoning their heads was not approved, since Bruce wanted to collect skulls and skeletons as well as organs. He preferred to strangle penguins, noting that it was ‘the quickest and the most satisfactory way’, since there was little ‘chance of blood getting on to the feathers’ and it was ‘the least painful death’. Bruce was a keen photographer of the wildlife and the spectacular scenery. He had brought to the island both still cameras and a cinematograph, the first such movie camera to be taken to the Antarctic. He had also taken a phonograph to record the sounds of the birds and animals. Newborn Weddell seal pups were captured and taken back to the ship so that their pitiable cries, which Bruce likened to those of a human infant, could be recorded before they were killed and preserved.61
On 27 November 1903, Bruce left meteorologist Robert Mossman and five others at the shore station and sailed to Buenos Aires, where the Scotia would go into dry dock for repairs. He was also seeking further funds so that he could remain in the Antarctic for another year. Bruce realised that public attention and the satisfaction of his supporters would depend on the expedition reaching a high southern latitude, which he planned to do in 1904 – so long as he could combine it with oceanographic research. He did not want to race the English expedition to be furthest south, noting that he would ‘not sacrifice oceanography and other scientific research for the sake of getting one degree – or mile – further than somebody else’.
His beseeching letters to Edinburgh soon brought the desired result, with £6500 being sent by James Coats. Support also came from Argentine companies in the form of coal and other stores, while the Argentine government agreed to take over the shore station on Laurie Island and retain it as a permanent meteorological station after Britain had declined to do so. In return, Bruce agreed to take three Argentinians to staff the station, while Mossman would remain in command there for another year as an employee of the Argentine government.62
After taking stores to Laurie Island and dropping off the Argentinians, Bruce sailed the Scotia southwards. Mossman bid him farewell from the shore, where the Argentine flag joined the Union Jack on the flagpole, even though there was no official British involvement other than its tentative title to the ownership of the island. Bruce headed back into the Weddell Sea, this time managing to get further south than the previous year, reaching 74° S. More importantly, the ship finally came in sight of what Bruce described as an ‘ice face’ with a ‘gradually rising ice-sheet behind it’. It was actually the Antarctic continent, although Bruce could say no more than that it was a land mass of some extent, which he presumed was connected to Enderby Land and which he named ‘Coats Land’ in honour of his benefactors.
The slaughter of wildlife and the collection of specimens continued apace whenever Bruce and his party could safely get onto the ice. On 10 March 1904, Bruce shot, skinned and dissected a large Weddell seal. Then, after dinner, he ‘spent a considerable time, as it was sunny, photographing the piper, the ship and [an] Emperor penguin’. Laboratory assistant Gilbert Kerr, who had become ‘a proficient skinner’ of penguins, was dressed in his kilt and played his bagpipes as Bruce photographed the penguin, which was apparently standing calmly alongside him. In reality, Kerr was standing on a tether that was tied to the foot of the unfortunate penguin, which was then killed and dissected. And so it went on, along 240 kilometres of the ice face, before Bruce quit the forsaken place on 12 March 1904.63
The occasion of the Scottish expedition’s departure from Antarctica was marked with a suitable ceremony. The Scotia was surrounded by ice at the time, so Bruce had all hands get onto the ice for a photograph in front of the ship, which was dressed with the ‘Royal Scottish Standard on the foremost, the bargee and blue ensign from the mizzen, the Union Jack and the silk Saint Andrew’s cross made by my wife, ahead of the ship’. Back on board, they found that the ice still would not let go, so Bruce tried to force the issue with explosives. He even had all the men on the ice, ‘shoving with their backs against the ship’s side’. Finally, he tried getting ‘all hands running at given signals from one side of the ice to the other’. It was all to no avail.
Later that day, the ice released the ship of its own accord and they were able to head for home. A small group of captured Emperor penguins accompanied them, although they did not get far. There were no fresh fish to feed them and they soon sickened, but not before Bruce walked them out on deck during an increasingly rough sea and ‘cinematographed them’. Their eventual fate was not recorded.64
Bruce’s presence, and the proposal for Argentina to take over the shore station, led to renewed calls for Argentina to claim sovereignty over all the South Orkney Islands. When British officials in Buenos Aires alerted London, the British government showed no more interest in the South Orkneys than it had in the 1890s. The Admiralty advised that the islands were ‘desolate’ and mostly ‘ice-bound’, and that they had never been formally claimed by Britain; ‘nor does it appear that they would ever be of any value’. The Colonial Office agreed, and the Foreign Office instructed its ambassador in Buenos Aires not to raise any objection to Argentina running the meteorological and magnetic observatory.
With Britain seemingly uninterested in owning the islands, Argentina proceeded to lay the basis for a claim of its own. It not only took over the meteorological station, but also designated one of the Argentinian party as a postmaster and the stone house as an Argentine post office.65 Thus, whenever this official banged his cancellation stamp onto a letter affixed with an Argentine stamp, it constituted an effective exercise of Argentina’s authority on an island that was now deemed to be Argentine territory. What was more, the first batch of such letters were sent off in the Scotia and passed on to British postal authorities in Cape Town, who thereby implicitly acknowledged Argentine authority in the South Orkneys.
Or so the Argentinians argued. The British lack of interest would soon change when wealth was discovered in the Antarctic. The question of ownership would come to dominate the history of Antarctica.