The diminutive Leo Amery was the man who wanted it all. A forty-five-year-old former journalist, he was the politician who put the whole Antarctic squarely on Britain’s political agenda. As a junior minister at the Colonial Office and a staunch enthusiast of empire, Amery had been a member of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where the colonies of the vanquished empires were carved up among the victors.
Almost as an afterthought, Germany was forced to relinquish any rights it might care to claim over those parts of the Antarctic that had been discovered by German explorers. It was the least of the concessions made in those months of tense negotiations, with Germany being stripped of its empire, its borderlands, its navy and much of its industrial apparatus. The empty and icy wastes of the distant Antarctic meant little to the disheartened German delegation, but Amery recognised its potential strategic and economic value. In a secret memo, he urged his colleagues to seize the moment and move ‘quietly to assert our claim to the whole continent’.1
The post-war world had seen the hunt for whales in the Antarctic take on a new intensity. The Atlantic was safe again from submarines, and the market for whale oil continued to promise good returns. As the mainly Norwegian-owned whale catchers returned to scour the iceberg-infested ocean for signs of their quarry, Amery convinced his colleagues to adopt a secret strategy that would vastly expand Britain’s territorial claim in the Antarctic. Britain already controlled the Falkland Islands and had extended its control southward to bring the sub-Antarctic island groups and the Antarctic Peninsula within the ambit of its authority. Now Amery wanted to grab the remaining millions of square kilometres of ice-bound fastness, most of it still unseen by man, and bring it within the ambit of the British Empire. It was the beginning of a decades-long struggle for supremacy in the Southern Ocean.
For Amery, the attraction of Antarctica lay in the wealth of its surrounding waters, where thousands of oil-rich whales congregated each summer, and in the mineral resources of the continent, where deposits of coal had already been discovered. With these in mind, he argued that Britain should make its move while the war-weary world was distracted by the discussions in Europe and the problems of post-war recovery. He blithely dismissed the ‘vague French claims’, which were based upon Dumont d’Urville’s raising of the French tricolour off Adélie Land in 1840, and what he called the ‘shadowy’ American claim, based upon the United States Exploring Expedition of Charles Wilkes that same year. Although Wilkes had been the first to recognise the continental extent of Antarctica, British officials had long disparaged his supposed territorial discoveries.
Their scorn had seemed justified when other explorers reported having sailed over locations where Wilkes claimed that land existed. Mawson had been one who had done this, but he had nevertheless continued to refer to a large swathe of the Antarctic coastline south of Australia as ‘Wilkes Land’. Yet this did not give the United States any right to the land, argued Amery, since ‘no American has actually seen the land in question, still less set foot on it and I don’t think there is any evidence, except in our own imaginations, that the Americans ever would claim it’.2 Amery ignored altogether the claims made by Norway, Belgium, Argentina and Chile.
Britain might have been able to seize Antarctica had its government moved quickly and decisively in 1919. But it too was distracted by the many other pressing post-war issues that were competing for the country’s depleted resources. There was the subjugation of Germany, the takeover of German and Turkish colonies, the ongoing war in Soviet Russia and the risk of political upheaval at home. The Antarctic did not bulk sufficiently large in Britain’s strategic or economic calculations.
Aware of this reality, Amery wanted his colleagues to commit themselves in principle to controlling the whole continent, and to begin by moving to ‘assert our effective authority’ over the Ross Sea area, south of New Zealand. This was where whales had been reported to be in abundance. One of Ross Sea’s inlets was even called the Bay of Whales. Amery advised that the Ross Sea was ‘the best known and in some ways most accessible part’ of the continent. It was also ‘the scenes of Shackleton’s and Scott’s expeditions’, which would enhance Britain’s claim to the area.3 Of course, it was also the scene of Norway’s triumphant assault on the South Pole, an inconvenient fact that Amery neglected to mention. Shackleton had, after all, been first to discover the South Pole plateau, although he’d failed to reach the pole itself.
As Amery embarked on his ambitious program of territorial aggrandisement, Shackleton was planning to return on a fourth expedition to Antarctica, where he wanted to explore the 3200 kilometres of uncharted coastline of west Antarctica. Deep in debt, as always, the inveterate schemer had originally planned to lead a Canadian expedition to the Arctic, after Canada became concerned that its isolated Arctic islands might be claimed by the United States or Denmark. When the Canadian government was slow to back Shackleton’s plan, the impatient explorer convinced a private benefactor to finance it and then had him agree that the expedition should go south instead.
Shackleton had bought a small Norwegian sealing ship for the Arctic expedition, driven by sails and an unreliable auxiliary engine. Now it would have to go much further and face more testing seas. Shackleton planned to take a two-seater seaplane to scout a safe passage through the shifting ice, to look for lost islands and to take dramatic photographs of the landscape.4 Scott and Shackleton had taken to the air in a tethered balloon in 1902 and Mawson had taken a wingless aircraft to the Antarctic in 1911. Now there was the prospect of an explorer using an aircraft to explore and map large swathes of ice-bound territory that would otherwise take months or years to cover.
The possible use of aircraft raised interesting questions about the claiming of new territory, which traditionally had been done by stepping onto newly discovered land and raising a flag, leaving a cairn of stones or some other marker, or erecting a building. Diplomats and lawyers would have to decide if territory could be claimed without anyone actually standing upon the ground and performing a ceremony of possession. They would also have to decide if the explorer could claim only the territory that his aircraft passed over, or whether all the territory that he could see in any direction was able to be claimed. Despite the potential of aircraft to assist Amery’s plan to bring Antarctica under British control, the heavily indebted and hard-drinking Shackleton was denied government help, apart from the loan of some equipment from the Admiralty. He was forced to make economies by having his fifteen expeditioners crew the ship as well as perform their scientific and other roles.5
Another British expedition, led by John Lachlan Cope, was being organised for 1921–22. Cope was an explorer of even more dubious reputation than Shackleton, and his plans were even more ambitious. He had signed on as a surgeon and biologist with the Ross Sea party of Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition in 1914, during which he ‘suffered from constant boils’ and displayed ‘childish outbursts of temper’. By the end, he was complaining of ‘shitting nanny-goats turds’ and was regarded by his companions as ‘quite irrational’.6 The latter quality was still very much in evidence when he announced, in January 1920, that he would ‘circumnavigate the Antarctic continent’ and ‘explore the interior by means of aeroplanes’, flying across it by way of the South Pole.
It was to be an elaborate expedition of about fifty men, costing a massive £100,000 or more, and would last up to six years. The name of the expedition – ‘the British Imperial Antarctic Expedition’ – certainly promised great things. According to Cope, it would be the largest and longest expedition ever sent to the Antarctic, with twelve aircraft charting and photographing the unknown interior. He even talked of establishing permanent bases there. As one writer has recently observed, Cope’s plan for permanent bases ‘would have put Britain in a position to annex three-quarters of the entire continent – the last and greatest land grab in history’.7 However, it was all hokum.
While Shackleton and Cope were planning their expeditions, British naval officials were poring over historical reports of voyages that could allow Britain to extend its claim over the entire continent. The Admiralty’s hydrographer, Admiral Sir Frederick Learmonth, produced a lengthy report on all the claims that nations might mount to different parts of the Antarctic, dividing them into those that were ‘indisputable’ and those that were open to challenge. Not surprisingly, the report largely reinforced Amery’s view of the superiority of Britain’s claim to most of the Antarctic continent.
It pointed out that the British naval captain Edward Bransfield had been the first to discover any part of Antarctica in 1820, although he had not realised it was a continent. As for the United States Exploring Expedition of 1840, Wilkes and his men were dismissed as ‘absolute novices in Polar work’, whose discoveries had mostly been proved to be non-existent. Of all the other nations, only France was considered still to have claims that could be classed as ‘indisputable’, and these were just to Adélie Land, a narrow sliver of land south of Australia that had been claimed by d’Urville in 1840, and to Charcot Land, on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, which had been discovered and charted by Jean-Baptiste Charcot in 1909.8 It would later be realised that Charcot Land was an island rather than part of the continent.
The Admiralty report gave comfort to Amery but also raised some important questions about the claiming of new territories – questions that the Admiralty was unable to answer. For instance, even if Bransfield was acknowledged as the first person to discover part of the Antarctic coastline, should that give Britain the right to claim the entire continent, given that Bransfield had been oblivious to the fact that it was a continent? Or should the United States have that right, since Wilkes had been the first to realise that Antarctica was a continent and to give it that name? It could even be argued that none of these early explorers should have any claim to territories that they had merely sighted from their vessels, often far from shore, when later explorers had actually clambered onto the continent itself. Some had gone even further, exploring the hinterland, raising their flag and performing some recognisable claiming ceremony.
These were matters for nations to negotiate or for an international court to adjudicate. The Admiralty was content to arm the Colonial Office with material that would ward off any challenges from rival nations. At the same time, it re-examined its charts of the Antarctic so that it could expunge any questionable discoveries and foreign names that might undermine Britain’s claims.9
Amery used the Admiralty report to enlist the support of Australia and New Zealand in his secret plan to claim the entire continent. There were clear benefits in having the two British dominions share the cost of exploration and administration. Britain’s claim to the Ross Sea area would also be strengthened by having Australia and New Zealand as fellow claimants, based upon their proximity and their history of exploration in that area. Their southern ports were also the best jumping-off points to that part of the Antarctic. So Amery told them of his desire to bring ‘the whole of the Antarctic … within the British Empire’. He would achieve this by a ‘consistent policy … of extending and asserting British control with the object of ultimately making it complete’. Amery pointed to the economic possibilities of the continent and even predicted that the Antarctic seas might become important trade routes. He also played on Australian and New Zealand fears, warning that Antarctica might provide secret bases for hostile airplanes and submarines, and advised that British control would allow better regulation of companies that wished to exploit the area’s marine resources. This issue was likely to find sympathy in Australia, where there had been a press campaign against the ‘wanton butchery’ of penguins and elephant seals.10
However, the Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes, was more concerned with the development of the Australian continent and its new territory in New Guinea, and could not see how Antarctica might offer economic benefits or pose a threat to Australia.11 It was only after pressure from Britain that Hughes finally asked Australia’s Antarctic explorers to give their views.12 They were unanimous in wanting Australia to control the Antarctic quadrant that lay immediately west of the Ross Sea. Professor David claimed that the region had a massive coalfield that was capable of yielding billions of tons of coal, while Mawson emphasised the profits to be had from whaling.13 Fearing that Hughes would ignore their recommendations, Mawson told a journalist in January 1921 that the government ‘should not neglect its duty’ to accept responsibility for the Australian quadrant. According to Mawson, Australia had a right to the territory because of its ‘work of exploration’ and the ‘international axiom’ that ‘uninhabited Polar regions should be controlled by the nearest civilized nation’.14
Mawson made his comments as dominion representatives were meeting with Amery in London. They could not agree on how the empire should proceed with Amery’s plan to seize the Antarctic gradually. While Australia and New Zealand wanted to control their own areas, Amery wanted to keep open the possibility of Britain sharing in their administration. More importantly, the meeting could not decide how the empire should assert its claim, ‘whether it was necessary to send a ship specially to the Antarctic to raise the flag, or whether approval of the raising of the flag in earlier years would be sufficient’. There was also the unresolved question of what legal acts had to be undertaken before British authority could exist over the Ross Sea.15 More fundamentally, how could a nation claim title to a territory that was so inhospitable that it was seemingly incapable of occupation? For centuries, nations had gained sovereignty over uninhabited places by ‘effective occupation’, but even temporary settlements in the Antarctic were fraught with difficulties.
The officials decided that ‘effective title’ could still be created by the act of ‘discovery and exploration’. In the case of the Ross Sea area, they suggested that British title could be claimed immediately, since its discovery and exploration had been done mainly by British expeditions.16 The Australian Sector, on the other hand, was more complicated because it included the French-claimed Adélie Land. Although the French had ‘done nothing to keep any claim alive’ since d’Urville’s fleeting visit in 1840, the Colonial Office warned that the French ‘are very touchy on such questions’.
Moreover, the British government had complicated the question in 1911 by asking France whether it claimed that part of the continent known as ‘Wilkes Land’, which had only recently been given that name by Mawson and which went all the way from 52° E to 160° E. It was the coastline along which Wilkes had sailed at the same time as d’Urville, but he had not formally claimed it for the United States. Because d’Urville had actually stepped onto an offshore islet and raised the French flag, Britain had carelessly suggested that d’Urville’s claim potentially extended over all the coastline that Wilkes had supposedly seen, rather than the much more limited coastline that d’Urville had actually seen. Not surprisingly, the French government had seized upon this suggestion, informing the British Foreign Office in April 1912 that ‘these lands were taken possession of in the name of France in 1840 and that [France] has no intention of renouncing its rights over them’.17
The French reply left Britain in a dilemma. France had confirmed that it still regarded itself as the rightful owner of what it called ‘these lands’, making reference to an article from 1840 in the Sydney Herald, which had reported d’Urville’s discovery. However, France had not defined the exact geographic extent of the territory that it was claiming. When British officials quickly examined their newspaper archive, they found that the Sydney Herald had reported d’Urville’s discovery as extending from 136° E to 147° E. Although this was much less than the extent of Wilkes Land, it was still greater than the area that Britain believed d’Urville’s voyage entitled France to claim. More worryingly, France had not explicitly confirmed that its claim was limited to the lines of longitude mentioned in the article.
Britain left the question unresolved in 1912.18 By the early 1920s, this uncertainty was proving to be a major impediment to Britain’s desire to claim the Ross Sea area. Indeed, the British were so wary of the French reaction to their claiming of the Ross Sea that they decided to delay any decision until the dominion prime ministers gathered in London for the imperial conference of June 1921.19 But that conference also failed to reach a decision, despite pressure from the new colonial secretary, Winston Churchill.20 Other urgent issues had dominated the discussions, from the Anglo–Japanese alliance to the continuing question of German war reparations. Moreover, some of the impetus for British action had dissipated in April 1921, when Amery lost his responsibility for the Antarctic after becoming First Lord of the Admiralty.
There might have been more interest in the Antarctic if the Shackleton and Cope expeditions had discovered new land or otherwise led to exciting newspaper headlines. However, both were dismal failures. Cope’s expedition had been first to leave Britain, but its prospects were dealt a deadly blow when the Royal Geographical Society refused to approve its plans or Cope’s leadership.21 Without such support, Cope’s cause was hopeless. Instead of his elaborate expedition of fifty men, it was a sad group of just four men who made their own way to the South Shetlands in December 1920. They only managed to get there through the generosity of the wealthy Norwegian whaler Lars Christensen, whose ship took them as far as the whaling station on Deception Island. Yet the scheming Cope told the New York Times that his plans were even more fabulous than before, involving five ships, 120 men, a budget of $750,000 and an adventure ‘more thrilling’ than any conceived in fiction by Jules Verne.22 In fact, on the day this account was published, Cope was trying to cadge an onward passage on a whaling ship from Deception Island to the nearby Antarctic Peninsula.23
Cope’s pathetic party comprised an experienced Australian explorer, Hubert Wilkins, a nineteen-year-old geologist, Thomas Bagshawe, and a twenty-two-year-old surveyor from the naval reserve, Michael Lester. Cope also had a handful of huskies, but he had none of the vaunted ships or aircraft and had to rely on the goodwill of a whaler to take them to Hope Bay on the eastern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. When a landing there proved impossible because of the ice, on 12 January 1921 they were dumped at Paradise Harbour on the west coast, where a beached and derelict barge boat gave them some shelter. From there, they hoped to cross the peninsula to their intended destination. When that proved impossible because of the difficult terrain, the bickering party faced the prospect of spending a year living in the cramped quarters of the boat.
Cope and Wilkins decamped and went their separate ways after getting passage on a passing whaler. Cope tried unsuccessfully to raise further funds, while Wilkins headed for the United States, from where he hoped to organise an expedition of his own. Lester and Bagshawe spent the following year expanding their living quarters at Paradise Harbour and collecting meteorological and other data before they too returned home, courtesy of a Norwegian whaler.24 The expedition had been a farce. It provided no headlines to stimulate British interest or activity in the Antarctic, and failed to reinforce Britain’s claim to other parts of the continent.
Shackleton might have been expected to do better. There was certainly a lot of favourable publicity at the start, after Shackleton invited Boy Scouts to join the expedition and around 1700 applied.25 The expedition was lauded as an inspiration to boys everywhere, and a photograph of the two successful boys with Shackleton appeared on the cover of the magazine Young Britain. As Shackleton’s ship, the Quest, was readied for departure on 17 September 1921, a large throng of people lined the Thames to watch the two scouts hoist yet another Union Jack given by the king to be raised on any territory that Shackleton might discover.26 Also on board was Wilkins, who, on Shackleton’s invitation, had rushed to London to join the Quest.
The voyage was dogged by difficulties, beginning with an unscheduled stop in Lisbon to repair the engine. A further month was spent in Rio de Janeiro so the engine could be given a complete overhaul. The delay forced Shackleton to cancel his plans to call at Cape Town to pick up cargo that had been sent ahead. Instead, the ship would head straight for the Antarctic before the summer exploring season closed. Without the stores that were left behind at Cape Town, it would not be possible to fly the aircraft. Both Cope and Shackleton had lost the chance to be first to use this novel means of claiming territory.
Shackleton’s plans were now in complete disarray. The forty-seven-year-old explorer had graver things on his mind, having suffered a heart attack during the stressful weeks in Rio. Treating the pain of his condition with champagne, Shackleton decided to head straight for the Grytviken whaling station on South Georgia. He was desperate to salvage something from the summer; he had already sent Wilkins ahead by steamship to South Georgia to collect whatever he could in the way of natural specimens.
Finally at anchor off the world’s southernmost township of Grytviken, where the pervading stink of the rotting whales clashed with the natural beauty of the place, Shackleton suffered a second heart attack, this time fatal. Still dressed in his blue and white pyjamas, his body was placed in a plain coffin, which was ‘covered with tar and draped with a stained Union Jack’ and then taken to the settlement’s Norwegian church. There it remained until a ship was ready to take his remains, and the news of his death, to South America and on to England. Shackleton’s shattered deputy, Frank Wild, took to drinking as he sailed the Quest on what would be an abbreviated voyage. The ship was caught by pack ice before heading back to South Georgia by way of Elephant Island, the scene of Shackleton’s great trial of 1916. Meanwhile, Shackleton’s body had been shipped as far as Uruguay before his long-suffering widow instructed from London that it should be returned for burial to the region that had made his reputation.27
On 5 March 1922, a few weeks before the Quest returned to South Georgia, Shackleton’s much-travelled remains were finally carried by Norwegian whalers to the cemetery at Grytviken, where he was buried with a brief ceremony. A few local British officials, stationed there to assert British sovereignty, attended the burial. When Wild and his companions arrived back on 6 April, they visited the simple grave with its small wooden cross and decided to leave a more visible memorial, erecting a cairn of rocks topped by a large cross and marked with a brass plate to ‘Sir Ernest Shackleton, Explorer’. The sight of the cairn would greet Norwegian whalers each time they sailed into the harbour. Along with Shackleton’s grave, it would serve as an implicit and enduring reinforcement of Britain’s claim to the area, which was part of the disputed Falkland Islands Dependencies.28
For all the hoopla of the Cope and Shackleton expeditions, the cairn was practically their only legacy. It was not much comfort for Britain’s Antarctic enthusiasts and their secret scheme to extend Britain’s control over the continent. Nevertheless, the Admiralty report of 1919 had shown just how much of Antarctica was potentially Britain’s to claim. Three years later, though, as Wild’s dejected party arrived back in England, there was still no decision on how Britain should achieve its ambitious scheme. It was only after a Norwegian whaling company asked London’s permission in June 1922 to hunt whales in the Ross Sea that Britain was finally impelled to act.
Whaling at South Georgia and the South Shetlands had involved a mixture of shore stations and factory ships moored in sheltered inlets. These worked in tandem with small, steam-powered whale-catchers, which scoured the surrounding waters, a keen-eyed harpooner on their bow to look for surfacing whales. Once their quarry was caught and killed, the whales were inflated with compressed air, and their quickly putrefying bodies were towed by the tail to the shore stations or factory ships. In the case of the factory ships, the smaller whales would be lifted onto the deck for processing, while the larger ones would be tied alongside and the blubber flensed off in great strips, which were then hoisted on deck. There it was cut into smaller portions and packed into massive boilers, where steam reduced it to oil. The whaling companies had enjoyed bumper seasons and strong prices. Now, one of them wanted to use the same methods in the Ross Sea, where the Bay of Whales held out the prospect of being a profitable killing field. It was the first move by a whaling company to explore the potential of the Antarctic coastline.
Most prominent among the companies operating South Georgia’s several whaling stations was the company headed by Carl Larsen and financed by investors from Norway, Britain and Argentina. Larsen had first recognised the potential of these seas in 1894; with a licence from the British government, he had established a land station at Grytviken ten years later. Now he wanted to exploit the potential of the Ross Sea. Britain was in a quandary, since Larsen was implicitly acknowledging British authority in an area where no such authority had been formally asserted. Undaunted, Churchill urged the immediate granting of a licence, noting that the Norwegian’s ‘acknowledgment of Sovereignty would be valuable support of British claims’.29 The New Zealand government agreed to confer with British officials on the exact terms of the licence and on how the empire’s authority should be extended to the Ross Sea.30
It was finally decided in early 1923 that the king should issue an ‘order in council’, rather than publish letters patent, as had been done in the case of the Falkland Islands Dependencies. This was an important distinction. Letters patent were generally used when a new territory was being annexed. Britain was careful not to do this in the case of the Ross Sea, since it would suggest that it had not previously had title over the area. In contrast, the order in council would allow Britain to perform ‘acts of ownership’ that would reinforce the idea that it had long enjoyed ‘an inchoate title’ over the territory, based upon discovery. In other words, it would demonstrate to the world that British sovereignty already existed over the Ross Sea area. Britain simply had to strengthen the area’s pre-existing status as a British possession by undertaking acts of administration. So an order in council was published on 30 July 1923, declaring that ‘the coasts of the Ross Sea, with the islands and territories adjacent thereto, between the 160th degree of East Longitude and the 150th degree of West Longitude … are a British settlement’.31
In keeping with the Falkland Islands Dependencies, the new territory was dubbed ‘the Ross Dependency’ and its administration placed under the control of New Zealand’s governor-general, Lord Jellicoe, who had been Britain’s naval chief during the First World War. New Zealand’s attorney-general, Sir Francis Bell, who had been instrumental in negotiating the outcome, told journalists that Jellicoe would follow instructions from the Colonial Office, although he expected that any such instructions would be drawn up in consultation with the New Zealand government, which was taking over ‘the Ross territory … on behalf of the Empire as a whole, and not specially in the interests of the Dominion’.32 This would present a more palatable picture of the continent being divided between several countries, even though all of them were members of the British Empire.
The peremptory British takeover of the Ross Sea caused outrage in Paris. The French government had made it clear in 1912 that it regarded itself as the rightful owner of the vaguely defined ‘Adélie or Wilkes Land’.33 In response to Britain’s order in council, Paris moved to put its own claim beyond doubt. Just as d’Urville had consciously followed British precedent by raising the French flag to claim Adélie Land, so the French government now followed the recent British precedent by issuing a decree on 27 March 1924 that simply asserted French control, rather than going to the trouble of sending an expedition to demonstrate French control by acts of exploration, mapping, naming or scientific endeavour.
In November 1924, France followed up its decree with an announcement that its Antarctic territories would be administered as part of its Madagascar colony. The colonial minister, Édouard Daladier, explained to the French president that successive French governments had not done anything about ‘the sovereign rights long since acquired by France’ because they had no knowledge of ‘the economic value of these uninhabited lands’. Now that its ignorance had been dispelled about the wealth to be won there, France was determined to retain its Antarctic territories, while still remaining remarkably reluctant to define their precise territorial extent.34
The British government was in a bind. While it could lightly dismiss the claims of Norway or Argentina, it could not wave away the claims of its powerful neighbour and wartime ally. However, it was determined to limit the French claim to the 240 kilometres of coastline that d’Urville had actually sailed along. Britain feared that France wanted to take much more. At least, that might be the implication of the French use of the words ‘Adélie or Wilkes Land’. As Admiral Learmonth warned, if the French wanted to claim ‘the whole extent of territory claimed to have been discovered by Wilkes, such a claim … might conceivably lead to a claim to the ownership of the entire Antarctic continent’. Even if the French were only using the term ‘Wilkes Land’ as a synonym for ‘Adélie Land’, Learmonth feared that this might create ‘a lever for putting forward a claim’ to the entire continent, which would undermine the ‘consistent policy pursued by this country with reference to the Antarctic regions’.35 Britain was not about to let France have more than a tiny slice of the continent.
While Britain might concede a narrowly defined Adélie Land to the French, the Australian government was not so sanguine, since that would remove a slice from the Australian quadrant, which the dominion wanted for itself. This quadrant was the region that Britain next wanted to annex after the Ross Sea, and which Australia planned to administer on behalf of the British Empire. The Cambridge-educated Australian prime minister, Stanley Bruce, urged Britain to ‘assert rights over these regions at the earliest opportunity’, and later noted that ‘Australia’s interest in this part of Antarctic is very great’.36
Mawson dismissed the French claim completely, telling journalists that d’Urville ‘did not go ashore at Adelie [sic] Land, but simply sighted it and coasted along for two days, whereas [Mawson’s] Australasian Antarctic Expedition spent three years exploring Adelie [sic] and other Antarctic lands’.37 This was not a compelling argument in London. Amery had returned to the Colonial Office in November 1924, this time as colonial secretary, and he was conscious that Britain’s claim to much of the Falkland Islands Dependencies was based upon similarly fleeting acts of discovery.38 As a way out of its bind, the Admiralty suggested that Britain negotiate with France to swap Adélie Land for the sub-Antarctic Heard and MacDonald Islands.39 That way, Britain might still get the complete Australian quadrant, and the whole continent might yet belong to the British Empire. But the offer was never put to France, as it was thought it would be rejected.
France was not the only nation the British had to consider. There was also the United States, as some Americans were becoming concerned that territory discovered by Wilkes was about to be seized by Britain or France. They did not realise that Mawson had named the territory ‘Wilkes Land’ to honour Wilkes’ voyage rather than to suggest that Wilkes had discovered or even seen that territory. Not that the United States government was about to claim it. In reply to a letter from a concerned American citizen in 1924, the US secretary of state, Charles Hughes, denied that any ‘valid claim of sovereignty’ had been created by the Wilkes expedition. Even if Wilkes had discovered and formally taken possession of Antarctic territory, Hughes argued that it could only be regarded as American territory if the discovery was ‘followed by an actual settlement of the discovered country’.40
Of course, this argument also meant that Washington was refusing to recognise the sovereignty of any country in the Antarctic until it had actually settled the territory. Although the United States did little to promote this view in London, Oslo or elsewhere, it remained on the backburner at the US State Department for possible use at a later time.
In the mid-1920s, the United States was much more concerned with the Arctic than the Antarctic. It was in the Arctic that a frenetic burst of exploration was taking place, as those nations bordering the Arctic Ocean sought to extend their domain northwards. With the use of aircraft and airships, explorers were racing to uncover the remaining secrets of the Arctic Circle. Some wanted the celebrity and wealth that was likely to accrue from being first to fly to the North Pole. But many were convinced that there was a greater prize to be had.
The Arctic was believed to hide the last undiscovered land mass on Earth. It was this that aroused the interest of nations as well as adventurers.41 If such a continent could be found, it was likely to be much more valuable, both economically and strategically, than the more isolated and much colder Antarctica. Apart from possible mineral deposits, much of its value would come from providing landing places for the air routes that were expected eventually to crisscross the Arctic, providing the shortest connection between northern Europe and North America and Asia.
The competition came to a head in the northern summer of 1925, with an excited report in the New York Times describing the ‘air race’ that was about to begin in the Arctic between three national expeditions. There was a large measure of journalistic licence in describing it as a ‘race’, since the expeditions were leaving from separate starting points and each had a different objective in view.
The first expedition was American, led by Donald MacMillan and sponsored by the National Geographic Society. It was also supported by the US Navy, which sent the soon-to-be-famous aviator Richard E. Byrd to fly one of its three seaplanes. In accordance with American government policy, MacMillan and Byrd were instructed not to make a formal claim over any land they might discover. But neither were they to acknowledge in any way the existing claims of Canada over islands in the Arctic. The second expedition was led by the veteran Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and included Lincoln Ellsworth, the forty-year-old son of a wealthy American coalmine owner, and a Norwegian pilot, Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen. The Norwegian government had instructed Amundsen to carry Norwegian flags on his two aircraft ‘and to claim new lands in the name of Norway’. The third expedition was the British Arctic Expedition, led by the young Icelander Grettir Algarsson. It would use a vessel and a small airship.
Although the newspaper headlines suggested that the goal of the three expeditions was to fly over the North Pole, one of MacMillan’s former colleagues, the US Navy officer Fitzhugh Green, wrote excitedly in the magazine Popular Science that the pole was ‘just an excuse. Three nations are racing for the last undiscovered continent on the surface of the globe!’ Green called it the ‘most sensational sporting event in human history’. In fact, none of the expeditions reached the North Pole, nor did any of them discover a new land mass.42 But so long as the apparition of an undiscovered continent continued to beguile the nations of the northern hemisphere, and to consume the funds and energy of polar explorers, Britain might yet be able to extend its domain over the Antarctic continent.
However, the great wealth to be had from whaling ensured that Norway followed France in challenging Britain’s Antarctic ambitions. If Oslo recognised Britain’s claim to the Ross Sea, and then perhaps to the Australian quadrant, Norwegian whalers intending to operate in those areas would be burdened with the same British fees and duties they were forced to pay in the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Consequently, Norway disputed Britain’s right to claim all the Ross Sea area. For one thing, it argued, Britain could not claim any yet-to-be-discovered islands in the Ross Sea. It also disputed Britain’s right to claim waters in the Ross Sea that were beyond the three-mile territorial limit. This posed a particular problem in the Antarctic, where the actual shoreline was often impossible to discern; in the Ross Sea, much of it lay under a thick layer of ice. As for the hinterland, Norway pointed out that Amundsen had been the first to reach the South Pole from the Ross Sea, and he had formally claimed the South Pole plateau ‘in the name of the King of Norway’. Norway also demanded that Britain exclude the territory on either side of Amundsen’s route to the pole.43
With its whaling fleet operating in the Ross Sea each summer, Norway was the best placed of all the aspiring Antarctic nations to establish a shore station and effectively occupy the territory that Amundsen had claimed. Britain would not let that happen. It simply denied the validity of Amundsen’s prior act of discovery. The Admiralty pointed out that Shackleton, although he had not quite reached the South Pole, had taken possession of the South Pole plateau three years earlier than Amundsen. It went on to deprecate Amundsen’s historic achievement, arguing that he had merely ‘penetrated a few miles further than Shackleton’. While there was some basis for this argument, Britain was on much weaker legal ground regarding its attempt to claim the international waters of the Ross Sea and any possible undiscovered islands. But it refused to engage with Oslo on these issues. With the confidence that comes from controlling the world’s largest empire, Amery recommended that Britain simply ‘resist any pretensions on the part of the Norwegian Government to any part of the … Ross Dependency’.44
At the same time, the Australian government continued to pressure Britain to resist the French claim to Adélie Land.45 Prime Minister Bruce was being pressured in turn by the Australian National Research Council, which wanted Australia to make a much wider claim of its own. If the French claim was allowed, the council warned, that would permit the United States to do likewise for the part of Wilkes Land that lay to the west of Adélie Land. This would further reduce ‘the territory that should be Australia’s by right of its geographical position and its exploration work’.
As the Norwegians had, the council argued that it was ‘continuous occupation or exploitation’ that gave rise to a recognisable claim under international law. In this respect, Mawson had done much more than d’Urville. He had made Adélie Land his main base and ‘added a thousand miles of coastline to the map, collected physical and biological scientific information over a wide field’, and had claimed possession by raising both the British and Australian flags. The latter act reflected the conflicting Australian identity of the time. Although still attached to the British Empire, Australia had imperial aspirations of its own, with the council noting the alluring prospect of Australia controlling territory ‘from the Equator [New Guinea] to the Pole’.46
A delegation from the council, including Mawson, met with Bruce in July 1925 to press their case, pointing to what they called the ‘broad principle’ that ‘empty lands should be administered by the nearest civilised power interested in them’. Describing the Australian Sector as ‘the birth-right of Australia’, Mawson told Bruce that Australia knew the place better than any other nation because of the ‘immense quantities of facts’ that he had brought back. These could be found in his popular record of the expedition, Home of the Blizzard, a copy of which he presented to Bruce, as well as in the volumes of scientific reports that would soon be published. Bruce told the deputation that ‘the matter had to be treated very carefully’, however, since the French were ‘apt to get a little hysterical’ if Australia challenged their claim to Adélie Land.47
This was the reason Britain had remained reluctant to annex the still vaguely defined Adélie Land. Nor would it accept the Australian suggestion to stop France from extending its claim from the coastline to the South Pole, along the lines of the sector principle used by Canada in the Arctic and by Britain in the Antarctic. Nor did Britain support the Australian argument that the closest civilised nations should control the different sectors of the Antarctic, since such an argument could be used by Argentina to reinforce its claim to the Falkland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. The Australian argument about discovery and exploration was also regarded with some coolness in London, since other European nations had done much exploration in the Falkland Islands Dependencies, as well as in other areas of the Antarctic that Britain wanted to incorporate into its empire.48 Britain certainly wanted to secure control of the Australian quadrant, but it had to be careful about the possible implications elsewhere of the arguments it used to justify the annexation.
Although Amery wanted to press on and annex the large Australian quadrant, minus Adélie Land, he remained hamstrung by the fact that the French had never defined the territorial limits of Adélie Land. Britain could not ask the French directly for fear that they might define Adélie Land very widely. Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain suggested that Britain should simply annex the whole Australian quadrant and wait for the expected French protest. Britain would then have an excuse to ask France to define and justify the limits of Adélie Land, which would allow Britain to adjust the limits of the Australian quadrant accordingly.
Armed with Chamberlain’s advice, Amery asked the Admiralty for ‘the geographical limits of the maximum area’ that Britain could now ‘reasonably’ annex in Antarctica. In response, the Admiralty cautioned that Britain should claim only those parts that ‘had been discovered by British [Empire] explorers’. These comprised large, discontinuous stretches of the coastline, beginning at the Weddell Sea and moving eastward to include Coats Land, Enderby Land, Kemp Land, Queen Mary Land, Wilkes Land, King George V Land and Oates Land’. In the Admiralty’s view, France’s Adélie Land should be restricted to a small sliver of territory from 137° E to 142° E. When these large areas were added to the Ross Dependency and the Falkland Islands Dependencies, more than half of the continent would still remain unclaimed by anyone. Indeed, most of it still remained unseen by anyone.49
This was hardly what Amery had envisaged in 1919, and he remained determined to have the whole continent, except for Adélie Land. Rather than accepting the Admiralty’s advice, Amery suggested that Britain annex all the territory, other than Adélie Land, from the western boundary of the Ross Dependency to the western boundary of Coats Land – that is, from 160° E to 20° W. This was much larger than the quadrant that Australia wanted to claim, which stretched from 160° E to 90° E. Amery was advocating that Britain ignore completely the claims that other nations, such as Norway, Argentina, Chile, Japan, Belgium and the United States, might care to make. In his view, the key was getting the French to limit the extent of Adélie Land to the coastline that d’Urville had actually seen. If the French restricted their claim, the Admiralty recommended, then Britain should annex the rest of that region.50
The Foreign Office agreed in November 1925 that Amery could proceed with his land grab, on the understanding that it ‘may have to be … modified in the event of any other foreign government successfully contesting some part of it’, such as the United States in regard to Wilkes Land. As for the legal basis of Britain’s annexation, the Foreign Office argued that it came from Britain’s acts of discovery, with sovereignty then being ‘acquired by occupation’. In London’s view, occupation did not mean having people actually living there but arose from the performance of two symbolic acts. The first was ‘a formal claim of annexation or some public act which implies a definite claim to sovereignty’. The second was to establish ‘an administration over the territory’, as New Zealand had done for the Ross Dependency. Before getting the king to issue an order in council for Australia to do likewise for the Australian quadrant, the Foreign Office suggested that the government should decide on the method of administration, so that both acts could be done together.51 But they put off any final decision until the imperial conference in 1926, when all the dominion prime ministers would be in London.52
In the meantime, the Norwegian whalers were pressing ahead with their plans to expand their operations from the Falkland Islands Dependencies to other areas of the Antarctic, which potentially threatened Britain’s territorial ambitions in those areas. At least Carl Larsen’s company had acknowledged British sovereignty in the Ross Sea, when it had asked in 1922 for a licence to hunt whales there. Now Larsen bought a steel cargo steamer that had formerly plied the Britain–India route, which he converted into a factory ship and renamed the Sir James Clark Ross, in honour of the British explorer.
The ship had the latest German-designed boilers and bulk storage tanks for whale oil, while its bow was protected by a sheath of African hardwood. The ship had many other modifications and carried supplies and equipment to guard against disaster, including a powerful radio transmitter, a searchlight to guide it through the ice, and timber for huts in the event that the ship was crushed and sank and the crew had to shelter ashore. The huts could also be used to establish a Norwegian claim to sovereignty over the territory on which they were erected. Accompanied by five small whale-catchers, the Sir James Clark Ross would be the largest vessel ever to operate in Antarctic waters, and the first steel vessel to do so.53 The continent that had been the exclusive preserve of occasional exploratory expeditions was finally opening for business.
George Hooper was one of those who clambered aboard the Sir James Clark Ross when it reached Hobart in November 1923. The New Zealand government’s nautical adviser, Hooper had been hurriedly sworn in as administrator, magistrate and justice of the peace of the Ross Dependency. By rushing to Hobart to join the Norwegian fleet and report on its operations, Hooper showed that the British Empire was exercising its sovereignty over the region. By providing Hooper with passage on the ship, the Norwegians were again implicitly acknowledging British sovereignty. With Hooper ensconced in his cabin, the Sir James Clark Ross steamed slowly down the Derwent River, with the whale-catchers being towed in a line behind it to save fuel. Also aboard the ship, as it rolled with the prevailing westerly swell of the Southern Ocean, was a twenty-year-old Australian, Alan Villiers, an aspiring writer. He had signed on to the Sir James Clark Ross after convincing the editor of the Hobart Mercury to publish his reports.
The first voyage did not go according to plan. The Bay of Whales was strangely devoid of whales, and one of the catchers became separated from the fleet and was feared lost. This forced Larsen to mount a long search for the missing boat and to leave a cairn of supplies on the shore, topped with a Norwegian flag. After this, most of the whales they encountered were large blue whales that had to be flensed alongside the factory ship. This was dangerous in the open sea, where a carcass being heaved by the waves could toss the men working on it into the freezing waters. So three of the bloated whales were towed through the fog to the relative shelter of Discovery Inlet, which had been formed by the curling shape of a glacier that was pushing its way out from the ice barrier.
Although Villiers noted how ‘awe-inspiring it all is’, Discovery Inlet was not the sort of protected anchorage that Larsen had hoped to find.54 Its deep waters made it difficult for a ship to anchor, while the prevailing southerly winds could erupt into blizzards and force a sheltering vessel against the curving cliff of ice. The only way to escape was to head for the open sea, which meant having to stop work on the tethered whales for days at a time. Even normal winds could make the inlet too choppy for the flensing to proceed. At one time, Villiers counted thirty-two blue whales that were rotting in the cold waters as they waited to be processed.55
With these drawbacks, there was no profit to be had that first year. The storage tanks, which were capable of holding 60,000 barrels of oil, were less than one-third full when the ship left for New Zealand in March 1924. Nor was there much revenue for New Zealand, since duty was only payable when the catch exceeded 20,000 barrels. So the dominion was paid only the £200 annual fee, which was not much return for Hooper’s time and expenses. But Larsen would be back.
While the whale-catchers wintered in New Zealand, the factory ship went to Norway for further modifications.56 The elderly Larsen returned aboard it the following season, only to die of a heart attack in Antarctica in December 1924, just as the company was about to earn its first profit from the new venture. The whaling pioneer would not see his factory ship return at the end of the season with 31,500 barrels of oil, a figure that vindicated his vision in exploring the possibilities of the Ross Sea. The company continued without him, and the Sir James Clark Ross returned the following season to take 38,000 barrels of oil – worth £250,000 – along with a collection of young Emperor penguins for the Auckland Zoo. A New Zealand newspaper predicted that the growing profits would doubtless cause other companies ‘to seriously consider the Ross Sea as a suitable location for an extension of their activities’.57 Ominously for the British Empire, whaling companies were about to implement a revolutionary change that, within a few decades, would spell doom for the large population of blue whales.
From late 1925, a new type of factory ship appeared in the Antarctic.58 Sloping ramps were installed at the rear of the existing factory ships so that the heavy blue whales that predominated in the Antarctic could be winched straight onto the flensing deck. Instead of being limited to one of the two inlets along the Ross Ice Barrier, the converted factory ships could remain at sea and process whales even in relatively rough seas, thereby reducing both their fuel costs and the problem of putrefaction, which had a bad effect on oil quality. More importantly, the new factory ships could remain beyond the three-mile territorial limit and therefore potentially avoid paying licence fees and duty.
By 1926, one Norwegian company had completed a successful season using a factory ship that operated completely in international waters. A second Norwegian company was in the process of being formed to do so in the Ross Sea. And a third Norwegian company was threatening to do likewise unless Britain granted it a licence. Companies now only applied for a licence if they wanted protection against their valuable ships and cargo being seized on some pretext by British officials.59
The new factory ships meant that the whole Antarctic coastline was open to the whalers’ operations. Fleets of Norwegian whaling ships would soon be charting coastlines that no explorers had seen, providing Norway with the basis for territorial claims. In a desperate attempt to stop this dangerous development from threatening Britain’s growing control over Antarctica – and the revenue of its Falkland Islands Dependencies – Amery instructed Britain’s officials there to stop whalers from taking on the supplies they needed to operate in international waters. He also urged New Zealand to deny its facilities to any unlicensed Norwegian company.60
While Amery tried to hold back the tide of Norwegian whalers, news of the profitable operations in the Ross Sea spurred Australia’s interest in the adjacent Australian quadrant.61 But there remained serious disagreements within the British bureaucracy about how the remainder of the continent should be claimed. While Amery wanted to claim most of the continent, regardless of whether its coastline had even been discovered, the Foreign Office and Admiralty wanted to restrict any claim to those areas that had been discovered by British or Australian expeditions.62 In the event, Amery’s more ambitious plan was overruled. The advice prepared by British officials for dominion prime ministers at the 1926 imperial conference recommended that only territory discovered by British explorers should be claimed. This meant that Australia could still claim sovereignty over its quadrant, apart from Adélie Land, but that Amery would have to put aside his grander scheme to incorporate the whole continent within the empire, at least for the time being.63
When the imperial conference convened in London in November 1926, Amery chaired a committee of British and dominion representatives to discuss ‘the potential importance of [Antarctica] to the British Empire’. Bruce was content to leave Antarctic policy in the hands of the British government; in fact, he only bothered to attend the last of the three committee meetings. In his absence, the second meeting was addressed by Sir Cecil Hurst, the legal adviser to the Foreign Office, who warned that Britain could only pursue Amery’s plan of getting title to the Antarctic by basing it upon ‘either actual occupation or effective control’. Hurst recommended that future assertions of sovereignty should include formal acts ‘on the spot’. Although that had not been done when Britain had claimed the Falkland Islands Dependencies and the Ross Dependency, Hurst ‘considered that the absence of opposition in those cases was a piece of good fortune which might not recur’. He warned that Australia should send ‘periodical expeditions’ to the so-called ‘Australian quadrant’ if it wanted to secure control of the region, to which it otherwise had an uncertain legal title.64
As a result of the discussions, the conference was assured that Britain could claim all the territory that its explorers had discovered. In Britain’s view, this comprised all the known territory of the Antarctic except for Adélie Land. But the empire would have to progress its claims gradually and not attempt to claim unexplored areas, which might provoke opposition from countries with potential claims of their own. If such countries protested at the British action or appealed to international law, delegates were warned that ‘it might become impossible to pursue the British policy of acquiring the Antarctic region’. However, if Britain were to ‘proceed cautiously, and steadily follow up and develop the valid claims they now possess’, it might be hoped that ‘foreign Powers will acquiesce, and that practically complete British domination may in time be established’.65 It was clear that Amery’s scheme to control the Antarctic remained very much on the imperial agenda, although whether it would ever be achieved remained a moot point.
The first step in establishing the British claims was taken with the publication of the conference report, which informed the world of the seven areas to which Britain believed it had title. The second step would come with the dispatch of an expedition that was to take formal possession of those territories for which a claiming ceremony had not previously been performed. And the third step would be to issue ‘Letters Patent annexing the area and making provision for its government’. There were already plans to expand both the western boundary of the Falkland Islands Dependencies and the eastern boundary of the Ross Dependency to include the intervening area, which presently was unclaimed by anyone. This was where the enterprising Norwegian whaler and explorer Lars Christensen was seeking British permission to hunt for whales. As had been done for Larsen in the Ross Sea, the conference decided that Christensen should be given a licence, as that would allow Britain to perform ‘a useful assertion of authority in this region’.66
Seven years after Amery had first formulated the British plan to take over the Antarctic, it had finally been rubber-stamped by all the representatives of the empire. As the dominion leaders took their leave from London, Amery wrote in his diary of how the ‘process of incorporating the Antarctic in the British Empire … is now going to make a substantial further stride’. At the same time, he wondered whether the ice-covered continent, as opposed to its surrounding waters, would ever be of any value – other than perhaps ‘for the purpose of all round winter sports’.67
Amery’s self-congratulatory musings show no sign that he had any sense that his ambitious plan was already under threat. Yet even as he farewelled the dominion prime ministers, the rival nations that Amery had so blithely ignored were busily preparing their own schemes to secure control of the world’s last continent and its bountiful seas.