By late 1929, the Antarctic continent was coming under sustained assault from several directions. Richard Byrd had spent the winter huddled beneath the ice at Little America and was about to launch a program of exploration that would take his men by dog sledge and aircraft into the unknown reaches of the continent. He feared that he might be beaten to the prize of the South Pole when he received news that Wilkins was on his way south again, intending to resume where he had left off the previous year. Out at sea, the Norwegian whaler Lars Christensen also had his sights fixed on Antarctica. Having already claimed Bouvet and Peter I Islands for Norway, he sent the Norvegia to claim parts of the continent itself. Lastly, there was the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson, who was intent on seeing off both the Americans and the Norwegians by charting the coastline of the so-called ‘Australian quadrant’. Once that was done, it could be formally annexed on behalf of the British Empire.
Byrd had assured the New Zealanders that his was a purely scientific expedition. But scientific activities did not preclude him from claiming territory on behalf of the United States. In fact, science had become almost a necessary condition for claiming territory. After all, claiming a place was not just about seeing a place for the first time, or raising a flag over it; it was also about mapping and naming and, more generally, knowing its geographic and natural features. Moreover, by cloaking his expedition with science, Byrd gave it the sort of serious purpose that Wilkins’ expedition largely lacked, allowing him to attract the greater funding that he needed from both private benefactors and government sources.
His winning ways and higher public profile also ensured that he had a much higher media profile than Wilkins, and much more lucrative media deals. The New York Times bought the newspaper rights to his articles and sent a reporter along with the expedition, while National Geographic bought the magazine rights. Paramount Pictures bought the film rights, Putnam the book rights, and a speakers’ agency the lecture rights. There were also the rights to radio broadcasts, which for the first time would be made direct from Antarctica.
With all these deals in place, few Americans would remain untouched by the Byrd ‘circus’, although some would resent the success and Barnum-like ways of the Virginian blue-blood. Nevertheless, as a result of all the media attention, Antarctica would come to occupy a place in the popular American consciousness that it had not enjoyed since Reynolds’ activities in the 1820s and 1830s. With this attention would come a growing sense of American entitlement to those parts of the continent explored by Byrd and his companions.
On the eve of Byrd’s departure from New York, the director of the American Geographical Society, Isaiah Bowman, assured Byrd that the expedition’s return would receive ‘as much rejoicing … as awaited [Sir Francis] Drake when he came home with a shipload of plunder after ravaging the Spanish coast’.1 The ‘plunder’ that this politically connected geographer mostly had in mind was geographic discoveries, and the prospect of claiming parts of Antarctica for the United States.2
While Byrd was always keen to win personal glory, he was ambivalent about claiming new land, which he feared could only promote territorial rivalry and create conditions conducive to another terrible war. Like Wilkins and some other Antarctic explorers, he had internationalist sympathies and would devote part of his life to fostering peaceful relations between nations. Indeed, one of his reasons for encouraging the development of aviation was based on his belief that aircraft would bring nations closer together and break down the prejudices and suspicions that could lead to war.
Despite fears in London and Wellington, Byrd was not going to provoke a dispute with Britain or New Zealand by claiming any part of the Ross Dependency, which went from 150° E to 160° W. Nor was he looking towards the Australian quadrant, whose coastline Charles Wilkes had partially discovered and charted nearly a century before. Byrd’s eyes were elsewhere, directed towards the ‘no man’s land’ to the east of the Ross Dependency, which Britain aspired to own but had not yet claimed. And Byrd wasted no time in staking an American claim to that region.
Within weeks of his arrival in December 1928, as a veritable village of huts and hangars and igloos was being created at Little America, Byrd sent aircraft on reconnaissance flights into those previously unseen eastern lands. Although much of their activity would necessarily be within the Ross Dependency, where Little America was located and across which the flight to the South Pole would take place, it was the region beyond the Ross Dependency’s eastern boundary that most interested Byrd. On 27 January 1929, the aircraft dubbed Stars and Stripes sighted a new range of mountains looming up from the ice, with just a scattering of snow on its rocky peaks. Byrd named it the Rockefeller Range after one of his most generous benefactors, the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, and sent his deputy, geologist Laurence Gould, on a flight to take a closer look. In fact, the Rockefeller Range was not a line of mountains and would eventually be renamed as the Rockefeller Plateau.
Gould landed to examine the rocks and used his theodolite to take an accurate fix on what turned out to be relatively low hills so that they could be properly mapped. In a report to the navy secretary, Byrd noted how it was the first time that ‘aviation has discovered a new land, surveyed and landed on it for scientific investigation’. All told, they had ‘seen at least 20,000 square miles … of hitherto unknown Antarctic areas’. Byrd named the region Marie Byrd Land after his wife and, because it was outside the Ross Dependency, claimed it on behalf of the United States.3
But was seeing this area from an aircraft, which was flying at 160 kilometres an hour and a kilometre or more above the ice, sufficient to claim it for the United States? Byrd could not be sure, so he sent an aircraft aloft with a movie camera designed for mapmaking so that he could have ‘permanent, authentic, and complete records of what the human eye only had time to scan’.4 Meanwhile, one of Byrd’s big planes had been destroyed in a storm, so the remaining planes were secured for the winter while he and his men prepared for his historic flight to the South Pole.
While newspaper proprietors promoted his flight to the pole as a race with Wilkins, Byrd did not regard the Australian as a serious threat. As he confided to Bowman, Wilkins was ‘a high type gentleman’ who would not try to steal a march on him, as Amundsen had done to Scott. Moreover, the Australian would not be ‘in any position to fly to the pole … without extraordinary and unwarranted hazzards [sic]’, since he would not have store depots laid down in case of the aircraft being forced to land.5 Nor did Wilkins have the additional aircraft and men to mount a rescue mission, if one became necessary. In fact, the real rivalry between the two men would not be about racing to the South Pole but rather being first to claim the territory between the Ross Dependency and the Falkland Islands Dependencies. By flying from Deception Island to Little America, Wilkins would be flying right across all that unclaimed land and might snatch it for Britain while Byrd was preparing for his South Pole flight.
After Wilkins’ first attempt in the summer of 1928, during which he claimed land on behalf of Britain, Wilkins wrote an article for the Hearst newspapers in which he questioned the validity of what he had just been doing. To the chagrin of his friend Richard Casey, he also ridiculed to his American readers ‘the idea of anyone claiming territory by having flown over it’. When Wilkins went on to London in May 1929 to seek additional funding from the British government for the coming exploration season, Casey got his friend back on message before helping him.6 Apart from the government funds, Casey secured for Wilkins the use of the British research ship William Scoresby. He also convinced the government to give Wilkins a commission from the king that authorised him ‘to take formal possession of any territories now unknown which he might discover between the Ross Sea and the Falkland Island Dependencies’.7
Unlike Hearst, the British had no interest in Wilkins racing Byrd to the South Pole. Their contribution to his expedition was intended to ensure he beat Byrd to the unclaimed territory east of the Ross Dependency. As Casey confided to the Australian prime minister, Stanley Bruce, in April 1929, the ‘most useful role [for Wilkins] in the coming Antarctic season is to try and complete his contemplated flight from Graham Land to the Ross Sea – and to do so before Byrd can do it in the reverse direction’. Likening Wilkins to a ‘tin-opener’, Casey told Bruce not to expect scientific results but to ‘look on him merely as an individual who can do a good deal to keep our end up in the way of straight discovery’. The assistance of the William Scoresby was designed to give Wilkins the measure of safety that he had lacked the previous year, allowing him to establish a takeoff point much further south than Deception Island and thus increasing his chances of being able to complete the 3000- kilometre flight to the Ross Sea.8
Both Byrd and Wilkins tried to keep their plans secret from each other, with Byrd warning his manager in New York that Wilkins was ‘going to make every effort to beat us to it’ and should not be given ‘any information as to when we start flying’. At the same time, he pestered Bowman to find out from Wilkins whether he planned to fly to the South Pole. Bunkered down in the isolation of the Antarctic winter, Byrd was worried that if Wilkins thought Byrd was going to start flying early in the summer, Wilkins would ‘naturally hurry the more and make it very difficult for us’.
Byrd need not have worried. Once again, Wilkins was dogged by ill luck as bad weather prevented him from making anything other than several short flights. Despite the support of the William Scoresby, all were confined to the Antarctic Peninsula, well within the boundaries of the Falkland Islands Dependencies. As a result, Wilkins made no significant new discoveries and was again limited to reinforcing the existing claim to the British territory, which he did by dropping three Union Jacks by parachute at the furthest extent of his flights, along with a document taking possession of the surrounding territory in the name of the king. On the flight that took him furthest south – to 73° S and 101° W – Wilkins was forced to drop his flag ‘on the pack-ice, far from land’.9
Although time would show Byrd that he had been panicking over nothing, he could not be sure in November 1929 that Wilkins’ small aircraft would not suddenly appear out of the eastern sky at Little America, quickly land, refuel and take off again for the South Pole. Although he wrote privately of doing his ‘utmost to uphold the prestige of the United States’,10 Byrd was still portraying his flight as a mainly scientific exercise. Its purpose was not a race to the pole, he said, but would ‘explore and make an aerial survey … between our base and the Pole’.
With a camera filming one side on the way to the pole and the other side on their return, Byrd planned to create a map of a strip of land about 1250 kilometres long and more than 300 kilometres wide. Without ground control points to get an accurate fix on geographic features, Byrd conceded that he ‘could not hope to get a very accurate survey’ but maintained nonetheless that the strip map ‘would be of much scientific value’.11 It was territory that had been walked over by the Norwegians and British and claimed by both those nations. But Byrd would be able to see much more of it from the air, and he would return with both a map and aerial photographs of the landscape. Although he would not explicitly contest the Norwegian and British claims by making a claim on behalf of the United States, he would perform acts that the American government, if it so desired, could use to sustain such a claim.
Byrd had intended that the pilot who had flown him on his North Pole flight would also take him to the South Pole, but Floyd Bennett had died of pneumonia in April 1928. As his replacement, Byrd chose the Norwegian-born Bernt Balchen, the pilot who had landed Byrd’s trans-Atlantic flight in the French surf. To create the symbolism of the same two men flying over both poles, Byrd named the tri-motor aircraft in which he would make the attempt the Floyd Bennett, and he took on the flight a stone from Bennett’s grave.
In fact, however, there were more than two men aboard when the aircraft finally lifted off from Little America in the late afternoon of 28 November 1929 for the 1300-kilometre flight. Apart from Byrd and Balchen, there were two cameramen: one from Paramount to capture the event for cinema audiences, and another to work the aerial survey camera. The extra weight of the additional cameraman and his heavy equipment would increase the ‘chance of failure’, wrote Byrd, but ‘it was worth the risk to secure photographs of every mile of our route, both to the east and to the west’. The presence of the cameramen would also dispel any doubts that might arise about the authenticity of his achievement. In the bowels of the aircraft there were also a dog team and sled, along with food and other supplies to be used in case of a forced landing.12 Some of these supplies were ditched overboard as the plane struggled to get sufficiently high to make it between the mountain peaks and above the 3400-metre-high polar plateau.
As navigator, it was up to Byrd to calculate when they had reached the South Pole, and he announced the milestone soon after midnight. He had talked in New Zealand of landing at the pole and hoisting the British flag to honour Scott but he made no attempt to do so. Having lost one of his two large planes, there would be no suitable aircraft to rescue him if the landing went awry. With threatening clouds rolling towards them, Byrd simply opened the trapdoor in the floor of the plane and dropped a small American flag, in which was wrapped the stone from Bennett’s grave. As it fell to the snow about 800 metres below, the four men ‘saluted our country’s flag and the spirit of our gallant comrade’.
Byrd then radioed the news to Little America and onward to the listening public of America. The British flag returned with Byrd to Little America, along with a Norwegian flag carried in honour of Amundsen. Dropping them along with the American flag would have reinforced the British and Norwegian claims to the Antarctic, and Byrd was not about to do that. He would later write of the amount of territory he had sighted from his plane, noting that he had ‘covered 160,000 square miles’. Indeed, Byrd had deliberately taken a more easterly route on his return to Little America so that he could ‘bring within range’ of his mapping camera ‘as much new territory as was possible’. At the end of it all, he exulted: ‘Well, it’s done. We have seen the Pole and the American flag has been advanced to the South Pole.’13
The world knew of Byrd’s achievement even before he had completed his nearly sixteen-hour flight. Having been radioed onward to the New York Times office in Times Square, the news was broadcast to thousands of excited people crowding the surrounding streets.14 As the Floyd Bennett landed in a flurry of snow, congratulatory messages were already arriving over the radio. From New York came a radiogram from the editor of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, who combined his congratulations for Byrd’s ‘successful mission’ with urgent advice from Bowman that ‘it is highly desirable that you complete a flight across Rockefeller Mountains to the coast [to the] east of one hundred and fiftieth meridian’.
This meant that the five flights that Byrd and others had made earlier in the year to the interior of the newly named Marie Byrd Land – each of which had been cut short by ice or bad weather – needed to be reinforced with a long flight that would tie it to a stretch of hitherto unclaimed coastline. There was a difficulty, advised Bowman, ‘in establishing [a valid] claim except where [the] section of land has in a sense been cut loose from the unexplored and unclaimed by means of a coastal connection’. Bowman also sent his own message to Byrd, urging him to be ‘sure to carry out suggestion conveyed in Sulzberger’s message and tie flights to new coast’. Byrd did not have to be told twice; he assured Sulzberger that he ‘had every intention of making a number of flights over to the eastward’ and was well aware of ‘what our mutual friend has stated’.15
On 5 December 1929, Byrd took off with three companions and headed for the Rockefeller Plateau, from where he pointed the plane towards the coast. Along the way, he discovered a substantial mountain range, which he named after his other major benefactor, Edsel Ford. This was where he wanted to be, flying beyond ‘the eastern boundary of the British claims’ and entering ‘an area which had been unseen before, unknown and unclaimed’. They were more than 1200 metres high and lurching along at a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour, and the new land was unfolding before their eyes at a rate that would have been unimaginable to Scott. Not only were aircraft ‘doing what surface craft had for many years been failing to do’, wrote Byrd, but ‘every foot of this area was being recorded precisely and in its full perspective’ by his cameraman.
With Bowman’s advice clearly in mind, Byrd noted how the photographer was careful ‘to keep the coast line in his photographs’, which was ‘a most important consideration in the discovery and mapping of a new area’. With the coastline indicating sea level, the height of any mountains in the photographs could be better estimated and the resulting maps made that much more accurate. Byrd was conscious of the mistakes made by his predecessors in the Antarctic, who had been misled by atmospheric conditions into claiming the discovery of lands or islands that later proved to be non-existent. Having all the advantages of modern technology, he was ‘determined to claim discovery only of those things which could be and were recorded by the unforgetting and unassailable memory of the camera’.16
‘Magnificent!’ exclaimed Bowman. Byrd had done ‘exactly the right thing’. By tying the ‘Rockefeller Mountains’ to about 400 kilometres of previously uncharted coastline, Byrd had given the United States the right to make a valid claim to about 90,000 square kilometres of territory that ‘lies entirely outside the Ross Dependency claimed by Great Britain’.17 If he had not connected the inland region to the coast, Britain would have been free to chart the coastline and use the sector principle to claim all the territory, including the Rockefeller Plateau, between the coast and the South Pole.
Although Byrd had made it difficult for Britain to claim the massive wedge of largely unexplored territory between the Ross Dependency and the Falkland Islands Dependencies, a formal claim by the United States government was still required before Britain could be properly checkmated in that part of the continent. And there was no sign of that happening any time soon. Nevertheless, Bowman ensured that the American Geographical Society awarded Byrd its prestigious Livingstone Medal, maintaining that it was only granted ‘after careful consideration of the purely scientific value of the work’. At the same time, the society noted that Byrd’s flight on 5 December, which had ‘established a sound basis for an independent territorial claim’, had been done ‘at the direct suggestion of the society’.18
While photographing and naming the new land were important steps in securing it for the United States, Byrd knew that the American claim would be all the stronger if some of his party could actually walk on that land, rather than just fly above its surface. The American Geographical Society’s polar expert and cartographer, W. L. G. Joerg, declared at the time that there was a distinction between seeing an Antarctic territory and exploring it; he argued that ‘the most important part of exploration must be done on the ground’.19 Since Gould was already leading a geological party exploring the Queen Maud Mountains, at the southern extremity of the Ross Ice Barrier, Byrd instructed him to work his dog sledges further eastward into the newly discovered land.
On 20 December 1929, Gould radioed Byrd at Little America, saying he had done as instructed and was now camped at 85° 27’ S, 147° 30’ W. Climbing the nearest mountain, Gould and his five companions made a cairn of rocks, in which he placed a page from his notebook reporting their feat in having reached beyond the 150th meridian. No longer being within the Ross Dependency, Gould was able to ‘claim this land as part of Marie Byrd Land, a dependency or possession of the United States of America’. They are the ‘first men to set foot on American land in the Antarctic’, wrote Byrd. It was that act that made the land securely ‘American’, in Byrd’s view. As he noted at the time, it allowed the area all the way to the South Pole to be ‘claimed for the United States’.20
Yet Byrd was careful to eschew such ambitions when the ice-scarred City of New York arrived back at Dunedin in March 1930. Questioned by journalists, he said that he was ‘not the least concerned with claiming the land for America’ and was ‘merely [continuing] the work begun by British pioneers’. Although he had named Marie Byrd Land after his wife, Byrd said that the territory was ‘not American’ but ‘belongs to the world’.21
That was not the prevailing view in the United States, where the excitement generated by the expedition had engendered a sense of ownership, which had been helped along by Byrd giving American names to geographic features, and calling his base ‘Little America’ and one of his aircraft the Stars and Stripes. The base had the appearance of a frontier village. Its various buildings included an administration building, a storehouse, a machinery shop, bunkhouses, a photographic laboratory, a mess hall for the men, an electricity generator hut, radio towers, a taxidermy station and even a ‘seal slaughter house’.22 Many were connected by tunnels under the snow and ice, so as to allow access during blizzards.
Although the base had been located in an area claimed by Britain, and despite the fact that seven of Byrd’s men were Norwegian and there were others who came from outside the United States, the Stars and Stripes was flown atop Little America’s mess hall as soon as it had been constructed. Although it was taken down with the coming of winter, as soon as the sun returned in August 1929 the flag was returned to its proud position; it would remain there until the base was abandoned.23 The sense of American ownership was also enhanced by the radio reports from Little America, which were regularly broadcast nationwide, and the newspaper reports of their activities that were splashed across the nation’s front pages. It all combined to strengthen the connection between Americans and that far-off land.
As a consequence, there were calls on the government to annex all Antarctic territories that had been discovered by Americans, from Nathaniel Palmer onwards. However, congressional motions and newspaper editorials to that effect failed to convince the government to take action. With the stock market crash of October 1929 causing mounting unemployment, the government of President Herbert Hoover had more pressing issues to address, although officials in the State Department did discuss the possibility of extending the Monroe Doctrine to the Antarctic as a means of warding off British and European claims.24
This would have been a disappointment to the growing number of Americans interested in Antarctica. Mostly, their interest had begun well before Byrd’s media-driven arrival on the continent. In the early 1900s, Edwin Balch and Frederick Cook had encouraged the descendants of sealers such as Palmer to search the attics of their Stonington homes for any logbooks or other documents that might prove the primacy of American discovery in the Antarctic.25 As these documents were gradually revealed to the world, they were written up by Balch and others.26
More popular interest in the saga of the sealers came with the publication in 1922 of a biography of Palmer by the maritime historian and journalist John Randolph Spears, who relied on Palmer’s niece, Elizabeth Loper, for material concerning her uncle. Spears was smitten by Loper’s first-hand description of Palmer. He told her he was ‘glad to learn that Palmer Land was discovered by an American who was great in every sense of the word instead of some little runt of a man who accidentally was in the place’.
By the time he had completed the first draft of his book, Spears had become convinced that Palmer was America’s unsung hero of the Antarctic. He intended to prove it by publishing relevant entries from the log of Palmer’s sloop, the appropriately named Hero. Barely containing his excitement, Spears dashed off a letter to Loper imploring her to send him a copy of the log, noting that ‘the English tried to rob Cap Nat of his honors, but the publication of the simple statements of the Hero’s log will end all controversy’, making it the ‘most important’ thing he had ever written.
But the scrappy and spasmodic entries in the log did not provide the conclusive evidence that Spears had expected to find. In particular, there was no explicit mention by Palmer of having found a new continent. Undaunted, Spears ascribed the gaps to Palmer’s young age, telling Loper that it was not surprising for ‘a boy of 21 to get tired of writing up each day’s work in detail. The weather was most uncomfortable and he was tired. He was hunting seals – not for undiscovered continents!’ Spears nevertheless dismissed British and Russian claims and called on Americans to celebrate Palmer as the real discoverer of Antarctica.27
Spears’ argument won the ready agreement of Colonel Lawrence Martin, chief of the maps division at the Library of Congress in Washington. The politically minded geographer had become an expert on glaciation in Alaska before working with military intelligence during the First World War. He later served with Bowman as an adviser on national boundaries at the Paris Peace Conference. Questions of territorial sovereignty came to occupy much of his subsequent work, and Martin had a particular interest in the Antarctic.28
As Byrd was preparing for his 1928 expedition, the bearded and bespectacled Martin was securing the evidence that might allow the United States to make territorial claims. In September 1927, he had gone to Stonington to get the Hero’s log and other documents from Loper so that he could mount an exhibition at the Library of Congress featuring the logbook, along with ‘maps showing the land discovered by Captain Palmer in 1821’. He promised Loper that her loan of the material would be acknowledged in the library’s annual report, along with a statement that ‘the Antarctic Continent was discovered by Captain Nathaniel B. Palmer’.29 Nevertheless, it was another thing for the government to honour the American discoveries, from Palmer to Byrd, by formally annexing those lands.
While the State Department saw no sense of urgency in making territorial claims, Byrd’s activities propelled the British and Australian governments into action. They were motivated also by pressure from the Hudson’s Bay Company, which wanted to exploit the marine resources of the Australian quadrant once its ownership had been clarified by an official act of claiming.30 This came as a relief to Mawson, who had been frustrated by the Australian failure to follow up his 1911 expedition with the formal annexation of all the territory he had explored and claimed on behalf of the British Empire. He had hoped that it could be done by simply issuing letters patent, as had been done in the case of the Falkland Islands Dependencies and the Ross Dependency. Although the 1926 imperial conference had approved Amery’s plan for the gradual takeover of the whole Antarctic continent, British legal advisers had warned that further acts of exploration and claiming were required before the Australian quadrant could be formally annexed.
When the question was referred by the Australian government to its National Research Council in March 1927, a committee that included Mawson and John King Davis pointed to the danger of being pre-empted by the Norwegians or the Americans and urged the government to take immediate action to establish the necessary legal basis for the quadrant’s annexation by Britain. With hundreds of whale-catchers scouring Antarctic waters each summer, the committee advised that there was money to be made from licensing their activities and controlling the killing in ways that would make whaling a ‘perpetual industry’ for Australians. All they had to do was send Mawson back on another expedition to ‘establish British domination in the Australian Sector of the Antarctic and to enable possession to be taken’ of unclaimed areas. However, the Australian government recoiled at the cost and suggested instead that it be claimed by the publication of an order in council. It was only when Britain rejected this as not achieving the desired legal validity, by which time Byrd had established himself in the Ross Dependency, that Australia reluctantly accepted the necessity of sending Mawson on another expedition.31
With permanent bases still considered impossible, there were limited ways in which nations could take possession of places with such a forbidding climate. For a clear legal title to be established, discovery was meant to be followed by occupation, which usually meant permanent settlements. But the 1920s dispute between Denmark and Norway over the ownership of East Greenland had seen a more limited definition of ‘occupation’ deployed to support their separate claims. According to these arguments, ‘occupation’ might encompass just flag-raising, exploration, scientific investigation, administration and merely temporary occupation.32 Although Mawson had done some flag-raising and exploration, mainly on land, during his 1911 expedition, the claims that he had made back then had not been ratified by either the British or Australian governments. Further acts of flag-raising, along with exploration and charting of the coastline, were deemed necessary before the Australian quadrant could be formally annexed by Australia and incorporated within the British Empire.
So these were the activities that Mawson was directed to do by the Australian government after a meeting at the home of Prime Minister Bruce on 6 December 1928, which was attended by Attorney-General John Latham, Minister for Defence George Pearce and Mawson himself. In the wake of this meeting, the British government was told that Australia would send an expedition ‘to carry out exploration and scientific work, together with flag-planting between Oates Land and Enderby Land’, on condition that Britain bore part of the cost by providing Scott’s old ship, the Discovery, free of charge for Mawson’s use.33
The Discovery had been used for some years for scientific voyages to investigate Antarctic marine life, particularly whales, so that they would not be fished to extinction. Initially, there was resistance by British Treasury officials, who argued that the threat of the United States or Norway annexing the Australian quadrant had been averted by Byrd concentrating his exploration elsewhere and by Norway acknowledging Britain’s claim to that region by right of discovery. They also argued that Australia should pay for the expedition, since it would reap the benefits of any annexed territory.
However, Amery convinced the chancellor of the exchequer that the danger came not just from the United States and Norway. The profits from whaling were attracting other nations, such as France and Germany, to the Antarctic. Germany had also flown a zeppelin to the Arctic.34 Although Germany had been compelled to surrender its Antarctic claims in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, there was nothing to prevent a resurgent Germany from returning to the location of its pre-war expeditions to the Australian quadrant to establish new claims to the place. That fear seems to have been sufficient for the British Treasury to waive its objections and agree that the Discovery would be given to Mawson for two consecutive summers of exploration, beginning in late 1929.
With the United States and Norway already exploring in the Antarctic, and other nations thought to be planning their own expeditions, Britain wanted to keep its activities and intentions relatively secret from the world. As with Byrd’s expedition, most of the public justification for Mawson’s venture concerned its scientific objectives. Privately, though, officials concentrated on questions of sovereignty. As Casey advised Bruce in June 1929, the ‘broad objects of the Expedition [were] the strengthening of our claims to the whole area from the Ross Sea to Enderby Land … by frequent landings’. Although the scientific activities were ‘most admirable’, Casey wrote, they were ‘really a means of bolstering up our claims to the area’.35 And the claims in turn were just a means of reaping the revenue that was expected to come from whaling, whether by licensing the existing Norwegian whalers or establishing new Australian whaling companies.
Although he was the scientific leader of the expedition, Mawson was less interested in its scientific than its economic possibilities. He had assured Bruce in January 1929 that his expedition would ‘report on the economic future of the Territory’ and that the cost to the government would be recouped ‘within 2 or 3 years from royalties on whale oil’. Moreover, Mawson hoped to profit from whaling himself. He had already been approached by Australian businessmen wanting to establish whaling companies, and he suggested to Bruce that he would join such enterprises once the forthcoming expedition was completed.36
Despite all the secrecy, the plans of Mawson’s expedition revealed its true objectives. Unlike Byrd’s expedition, it would spend little time ashore. There would be no dogs or sledges. Nor would there be long flights like those undertaken by both Byrd and Wilkins. Rather, it would be a largely ship-borne expedition, using a small aircraft with floats to survey some 4000 kilometres of largely uncharted coastline and investigate the resources of its offshore depths. Mawson had described these seas as being so ‘teeming with life’ that they were ‘the pastures of the future’.37 Wherever there was a suitable landing place, Mawson was to go ashore and conduct a claiming ceremony. The charting, the investigations and the claiming ceremonies were all seen as necessary preconditions for the formal annexation of the whole quadrant. But little of this could be revealed to the world.
Although the Australian, British and New Zealand governments were all supporting the expedition, Mawson was relying on private benefactors to make up the sizeable budget shortfall he faced; he also needed media companies to buy newspaper and other rights. Those deals and donations would be put at risk if the expedition was seen as being a government one. So Mawson emphasised its scientific credentials, noting that it was being done under the auspices of the ‘Australian National Scientific Council for oceanographic and other scientific work in the Antarctic’.38 Bruce adopted Mawson’s suggestion and established a mainly scientific committee to organise the expedition, and announced to the parliament that its aims were ‘mostly of a scientific nature’.39 After all, what’s not to like about science?
When the organising committee met, it became clear that science was far from the top priority. These were listed as being ‘firstly, political; secondly, economic and commercial; thirdly, scientific’.40 The choice of route provided a further indication of the real priorities of the expedition. Rather than heading south from Hobart and then sailing westward along the Antarctic coast, it was decided to head south from Cape Town so that Mawson could begin his survey in Enderby Land, at the western extremity of the Australian quadrant. He would then proceed eastward along the coast before ending in Australia. The Australians feared that the Norwegians were also interested in Enderby Land, which had remained unseen since its discovery by Biscoe in 1831.
In fact, Lars Christensen was planning to send the Norvegia back to the Antarctic in the summer of 1929–30, hoping to discover whether the elusive Enderby Land had suitable sites on which he might base his whaling operations. If he could claim it for Norway, he could avoid paying British license fees.
Time was of the essence for both Mawson and Christensen. As the head of Australia’s department of external affairs, Dr Walter Henderson, told Mawson, the ‘British title to this region was not very strong at present’. It had to be reinforced by Mawson’s expedition ‘before any other parties could get there’.41
When Mawson joined the Discovery at Cape Town in October 1930, he carried a commission from the king that authorised him to take possession of any lands he discovered that were not already claimed by another power. He was to take possession by planting ‘the British flag wherever [he found] it practicable to do so’. When hoisting the flag, he was ordered to ‘read the proclamation of annexation … attach a copy of the Proclamation to the flagstaff, and place a second copy of the proclamation in a tin at the foot of the flagstaff’.42 This was similar to ceremonies that British explorers had done ever since England had first started amassing an empire in the late sixteenth century, and not unlike the ceremonies that Christopher Columbus had done even earlier in the West Indies.
Apart from Adélie Land, the narrow sliver of territory claimed by France, the great stretch of coastline to which Mawson was heading seemed to be his for the taking. However, alarm bells went off when he received a cable from Casey warning him that the crew of the Norvegia had left Norway on 23 August aboard one of Christensen’s ships, the Thor I, while another of his ships was taking the polar explorers Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen and Finn Lützow-Helm and their aircraft.43 They would all join the Norvegia, which had remained at Christensen’s South Georgia whaling station since its previous voyage.
Although the objective of the Norwegians’ new voyage was not stipulated – except that they would replace the depot on Bouvet Island – Mawson was under no illusions about their other goals. Back in July 1928, he had privately warned the Australian government that ‘the Norwegians were preparing an expedition to seize Enderby land in the ensuing summer, and that their ship would continue year by year to explore the Antarctic and would take possession of the lands visited’44. The whole idea of sending the Discovery was to pre-empt the Norwegians, yet now it looked as though the Norwegians might reach the Antarctic first. The same day that the Discovery arrived at Cape Town, the Norwegian aviator Captain Finn Lützow-Holm also arrived there from Europe.
When the South African and British press realised that the two expeditions were making for the same part of the Antarctic, headlines talked of a race between Britain and Norway to claim undiscovered land. As he read these alarming reports, Mawson’s fears of being beaten by the Norwegians increased. The public veneer of scientific cooperation was now stripped away and their private race made very public. The reports claimed that the Norwegians were intent on establishing new whaling bases and were planning to annex territory by dropping flags from aircraft, as Wilkins and Byrd had done.45 This not only raised the possibility that the Norwegians might pre-empt Mawson’s flag-raising along that coastline, but also threatened Mawson’s hopes of establishing an Australian whaling industry there. His expedition seemed set for failure even before it began.
Desperate to ward off the Norwegians, Mawson sent a cable to London asking the government to find out from Norway what its expedition was planning; in return, Mawson would divulge his own plans to the Norwegians. Before he received a reply, a cable arrived from the London Daily News asking Mawson to comment on the reports of a race between the two expeditions to claim land.46 In a fit of pique, Mawson stoked the controversy by replying with an indignant cable in which he portrayed his own expedition as disinterested scientists conducting investigations ‘for the benefit of the world at large’, while the Norwegians were ‘not deeply interested in science’ and simply wanted ‘to extend their whaling industry’ and ‘hoist their country’s flag in unknown parts of Antarctica’. Moreover, argued Mawson, that part of Antarctica was properly ‘the heritage and concern of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa’. The Daily News joined in, blasting the Norwegians for pursuing whales to the verge of extinction while Mawson was concerned with studying ‘the life and habits of the whale from the point of view of preserving the mammal’.47 When the newspaper hit the streets of London, it caused immediate alarm in the Foreign Office and outrage from Norwegian diplomats.
The British government had accepted Norway’s earlier assurances that it would respect the British claim to those parts of the Antarctic listed by the 1926 imperial conference as being British by right of discovery. This did not mean that Norwegian whalers would not claim parts of those areas, only that the Norwegian government would not buttress any such unofficial claims by annexing those territories. Britain had not sought explicit assurances from Norway concerning the activities of the Norvegia, for fear that broaching the subject with Oslo could cause the Norwegians to change their view and dispute the tenuous British claims. Now that Mawson had caused ‘great indignation’ in the Norwegian press, the British government was forced to disown his comments and provide a ‘frank statement’ of the expedition’s plans to the Norwegian foreign minister.48 Norway was informed that Mawson would be exploring the area between Enderby Land and the Ross Sea, and that the Australian government intended to ‘establish British sovereignty formally over this sector’.49
Casey, who had been appalled by Mawson’s ham-fisted statement, cabled to Cape Town imploring Mawson not to exacerbate the issue with any further public statements and assuring him that Norway had declared its expedition to be ‘solely and absolutely scientific’.50 In fact, the Norwegians had also told London that Riiser-Larsen had been authorised to claim any new land he discovered in the name of the king of Norway, while respecting those British areas listed in the report of the 1926 imperial conference.
The problem was that Christensen was not as respectful as the Norwegian government. To assuage the anger in Oslo, Britain’s envoy assured the Norwegian government that Britain did not want the whole continent, pointing to the area between Enderby Land and Coats Land as being unclaimed by anyone and therefore open to the Norwegians. He also told the Norwegians that everywhere else, apart from Adélie Land, had an ‘unimpeachable’ British claim, which had been, or was being, translated ‘into concrete sovereign possession’.51
It was a rather chastened Mawson who stood on the deck of the Discovery with his eleven fellow scientists, all dressed in grey trousers and blue blazers, as the ship pulled away from the Cape Town dock to the cheers of the crowd on 19 October 1929.52 Having stopped at the Kerguelen Islands to take on coal left for him by a South African whaling company, Mawson headed south by way of Heard Island to chart the coastline that stretched some 2000 kilometres between Wilhelm II Land and Enderby Land. Australia’s Antarctic ambitions had grown greatly since 1914, when Mawson had called for Britain to annex the area between 160° E and 90° E. The 1926 imperial conference, when South Africa had disavowed any interest in the so-called ‘African quadrant’ of Antarctica, had seen Australia stretch its proposed claim to encompass all the territory between 160° E and 45° E.53
The western third of this territory, to which Mawson was now headed, was an area that had lain mostly undiscovered since Biscoe’s sighting in 1831 of the coastline that he named Enderby Land, after the British whaling company. It also lay just beyond the area that Mawson and his companions had explored in the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–12. With Britain’s title to the area so tenuous, it was vital for Mawson to survey and claim that sector before the Norwegians did so. However, he was already too late.
On 7 December 1929, Riiser-Larsen had, in Christensen’s words, ‘re-discovered Enderby Land’ after sighting it in the distance from their small seaplane, which had been lent to the expedition by the Norwegian navy. Steaming along the edge of the pack ice, using seal blubber to supplement the overloaded ship’s supply of coal, Riiser-Larsen and Lützow-Holm were the first people in a century to come within sight of Biscoe’s Enderby Land. On 22 December their ship reached Cape Ann, the Enderby Land promontory named by Biscoe. Unable to get through the ice to make a landing onshore, Riiser-Larsen and Lützow-Holm took off again in their seaplane, carrying a tent and rifle in the hope that they would be able to land on the continent and claim it for Norway.
However, their heavily laden aircraft could not get sufficient altitude to make it onto the continent, forcing them to land on the water and then power their plane onto the sea ice, from where they tried to reach the continent on skis. When a sheer twenty-metre-high ice cliff made that impossible, and with fog threatening their return to the ship, they decided instead to climb an offshore rocky outcrop. Although they were not on the continent itself, at least it was solid land.
Acutely conscious of being ‘the very first human beings who had ever visited this spot’, they set up a flagpole from which they flew a silken flag that had been presented to Riiser-Larsen by the king and queen for an earlier expedition to the Arctic. After photographing and filming the scene, and having left a tablet at the base of the pole noting the name of their ship and the date of their visit, he replaced that historic flag with one given to him by Christensen’s wife. Satisfied, Riiser-Larsen flew back to the Norvegia, declaring that ‘now Enderby is Norwegian’. He radioed the news to Oslo, where the press reported excitedly that the pair had ‘taken possession of this land for Norway in the … internationally recognized form’.54
At the time, Mawson was still more than a thousand kilometres to the east. His pilot, Stuart Campbell, was struggling to get the engine of the expedition’s Gipsy Moth to work, and Mawson filled in time by going off in his motor launch to take pot-shots at any wildlife within shooting distance. A hapless Emperor penguin was one such casualty. Mawson noted with amazement how it had been shot through the chest, shoulder and head but was still alive when it was lifted onto the Discovery an hour and a half later.55
It was not until 31 December that conditions became suitable for the first flight by the two-person biplane. After taking off from the water, it rose to 1500 metres, from where Campbell could see new land some eighty kilometres away, confirming the ‘appearance of land’ that Mawson had seen from the ship five days earlier. Mawson promptly named it ‘Mac. Robertson Land’ after his private benefactor, the Melbourne chocolate manufacturer Sir MacPherson Robertson, who was commonly known by the name of his chocolates, as ‘MacRobertson’. But there was no attempt to reach it by plane or to drop a flag upon its surface. Although naming it would help to bring it within the British world, a more formal claiming ceremony was required before it could be annexed. And that would require Mawson stepping ashore and raising the flag, rather than having Campbell simply drop one onto the ice.56
The forty-seven-year-old Mawson had other things on his mind, with almost daily disputes between himself and the Discovery’s captain, John King Davis, over the running of the ship. The two experienced explorers had been put in an impossible position. Mawson had been made commander of the expedition and the ship, while the irascible Davis had been given the authority to countermand Mawson’s orders if he considered the safety of the ship was at stake, which he often did. Not surprisingly, Mawson’s diary is dominated by long diatribes about Davis, who had captained the Aurora on Mawson’s 1911 expedition but had had a desk job for the last decade as Australia’s director of navigation. Mawson was so outraged by Davis’s behaviour that he considered him to be almost insane. The captain’s temper was not helped by his being kept in the dark about the expedition’s objectives. Mawson had waited until 2 January 1930 before showing Davis the instructions he had received from Bruce, who had since been tossed from office.
That same day, after newspapers in Oslo had carried reports of Riiser-Larsen’s claiming of Enderby Land, Casey had radioed the worrying news to Mawson. The claim had prompted a British protest to the Norwegian prime minister, who had assured the British minister that the Norvegia expedition was ‘a purely private venture’ and that Riiser-Larsen’s claim would not be supported by the government. Nevertheless, it lent a new sense of urgency to Mawson’s mission and finally prompted Davis to increase the speed of the ship and push on towards Enderby Land.57
The end of hostilities between Mawson and Davis was short-lived. The following day, the two men had a raging argument over lunch, during which Davis declared that ‘the Norwegians had every right to try and anticipate us at Enderby Land’ and that the British and Australians ‘had been most disgracefully secret’ about their plans. Mawson’s argument that the Discovery expedition was ‘a scientific expedition’ was dismissed out of hand by Davis, who rightly pointed out that it was ‘all eyewash, we were out to grab land’. He went on to argue that if they were really scientists, they should have remained in Australia, ‘where there was a much better field for scientific work’. It was not until one of the scientists deliberately turned up the volume of the gramophone that the argument was brought to an uneasy end.58 But it did not end the disputes between Mawson and Davis concerning the purpose of the expedition.
Convinced that the Norwegians were intent on seizing all unclaimed territories in the Antarctic, Mawson pressed on with his plans to find somewhere he could step ashore and proclaim Australian ownership. As the Discovery waited offshore for the weather to clear on 9 January, and as photographer Frank Hurley prepared a suitably impressive proclamation, a cable was received from Canberra indicating that the Norvegia expedition had not claimed the area between Coats Land and Enderby Land, as previously reported. Instead, they had discovered and claimed 100 kilometres of coastline between Kemp Land and Enderby Land. Mawson noted with dismay that this was ‘just where we now are’. It was all ‘most exasperating’, wrote Mawson in his diary, ‘for they have evidently made a direct voyage here to raise their flag, and they knew this was in our itinerary’. While the Norwegians had done this, Mawson had spent time on oceanographic research and consequently arrived too late. The behaviour of the Norwegians was ‘not helpful to science’, complained Mawson, because it would mean that future expeditions would have to abandon their scientific work and ‘just rush to [the] most likely points of the coast to make landing and raise flags’.59
Mawson was desperate to get ashore to raise the flag and read out his proclamation, but he did not want to land where the Norwegians had been and thereby cede primacy to his rivals. Mawson wanted Davis to take the ship to an untouched side of the short stretch of coastline claimed by the Norwegians. But Davis considered the weather was still too dangerous, fearing that the ship might be driven ashore or trapped by the pack ice for a year or more, as others had been before. He would not risk his ship for what he called ‘that bloody rubbishing business of raising the flag ashore’. With Davis continuing to complain that ‘this bloody flag-raising business’ was ‘all tosh’, Mawson instructed him to head further west to prevent them being ‘forestalled in everything’ by the Norwegians.60
Finally, on 13 January 1930, the seas were sufficiently calm and clear of ice for the Discovery to be eased towards a small rocky island. Mawson took his party of scientists ashore in a launch, and they quickly made their way through a bustling penguin rookery to the island’s 250-metre summit, from where they could see more than a hundred grounded icebergs. On this spectacular site, a flagpole was erected using a cairn of rocks, underneath which was buried a canister with the required proclamation, duly signed by Mawson and Davis. A wooden sign was then attached to the flagpole ‘on which Hurley had beautifully carved, “The British Flag was hoisted and British Sovereignty asserted on 13th Jan., 1930”’.
With the men formed in a hollow square in front of the pole, the flag was raised and Mawson prepared to read the proclamation, which unfortunately now lay deep beneath the rocks. He had to rely on his memory and help from Hurley to recite the required words, which he did precisely at noon, asserting in the name of the king ‘the full sovereignty of the territory of Enderby Land, Kemp Land, MacRobertson Land’ and all off-lying islands between 73° E and 47° E. Then came three cheers for the king and a singing of ‘God Save the King’. Without even stepping onto the continent, Mawson had claimed a massive wedge of territory comprising more than 1000 kilometres of coastline. Hurley took a commemorative photograph of the historic scene.
The ceremony done, the men made their way back to the ship, where the impatient Davis was pacing the deck, anxious to get away from what Mawson would later call ‘Proclamation Island’. Mawson wanted to push on further westward to 40° E, which was just past the western limit of the land he had been instructed to claim and where he feared the ‘Norwegians may be busy’.61
The following evening, Mawson discovered just how busy the Norwegians had been when the heavily laden Norvegia was sighted at about 49° E. A meeting with Riiser-Larsen took place in Mawson’s cabin. Ostensibly adopting the friendly attitude of two explorers meeting in the wilderness, it was nevertheless with wariness that the two men exchanged information about their activities. Both were conscious that what they said and did could have diplomatic repercussions. The British government had already protested to the Norwegians about Riiser-Larsen’s claiming of Enderby Land on 22 December and Christensen had instructed him on 10 January not to claim any more land east of 45° E. Riiser-Larsen now admitted to Mawson that he had been told not to do anything that ‘would be resented by Great Britain’, which Mawson wrongly presumed to mean that the Norwegian flag had not been raised on Enderby Land or Kemp Land.
Curiously, Mawson’s diary suggests that he did not ask Riiser-Larsen to confirm this, although the Norwegian later claimed that he had ‘explained in detail exactly what we had done, and what we intended doing during the remainder of the season’. Mawson may not have wanted to know. Making his own claim would have been complicated by the knowledge that the Norwegians had preceded him.
For his part, Mawson told Riiser-Larsen that he had mapped the coast all the way from 73° E to their current position. He deliberately exaggerated the extent of his work ‘in order to turn the Norwegians westwards’. During their hour-long exchange, he also told Riiser-Larsen of his dismay on learning in Cape Town that the Norvegia expedition might overlap his own, which was ‘intending a full scientific programme’ in what he called ‘the British area of Enderby-Kemp Land’. Riiser-Larsen riposted that the Norwegian plans ‘had been made public as far back as 1927’, and they ‘were not invading other people’s territories’. Mawson again suggested that the Norvegia henceforth remain west of 40° E, while Mawson would restrict his activities to the eastern side of that line of longitude. But the Norwegian refused to give any such commitment.
As Riiser-Larsen pulled away in his boat, the men of the Discovery lined the rails and gave three cheers for their departing rival, only to watch in dismay as the Norvegia headed east along the coveted coastline of Enderby and Kemp Lands. The Discovery continued its westerly course to the limit of the Australian quadrant.62
While the two men had been meeting, a coded message had been received from Australia instructing Mawson to raise the flag on the continent itself. Mawson was told to head west as far as 45° E and, if possible, to 40° E. But Davis had had enough. He regarded their job as complete and was concerned that there would soon be insufficient coal to get them home. He was also sick of what he called ‘this flag waving business’. In a long diatribe on 16 January, he told Mawson that the expedition’s work was ‘nothing but a cinema show’, and Mawson and his scientists ‘nothing but a lot of flag raising humbugs’. Mawson carefully recorded all the comments in his diary as evidence of ‘how utterly imbecile [Davis] is. He is not mentally balanced.’
Mawson was not going to head for home just yet. He worried about what the Norwegians might be doing and he had been reminded by a radio message from Canberra that the ‘flag should be hoisted as often as possible on lands seen’, noting that so far Mawson had only raised it once. And that had been done on an island rather than the mainland. Mawson was determined not to leave the Antarctic until he had raised the flag on the shore of Enderby Land and managed to take aerial photographs of its mountains. As well as claiming territory for the empire, he had lucrative media commitments to fulfil, which required him to return with spectacular photographs. He also needed to kill some seals to provide samples of oil and skin for the Hudson’s Bay Company.63
After passing 45° E, Mawson abandoned plans to go any further west and headed back east in pursuit of the Norvegia, all the while looking for somewhere suitable to land. Although the Norvegia continued eastward after leaving the Discovery, Riiser-Larsen reversed course after Christensen instructed him by radio to ‘refrain from occupying any more land east of 45° E’. In doing so, the whaling magnate was not relinquishing the claim that Riiser-Larsen had made to Enderby Land on 22 December, the resolution of which he was happy to leave to later adjudication by ‘international experts’.64
By 25 January, the Discovery had returned to Proclamation Island and Mawson was able to get the aircraft aloft so that Hurley could take both photographs and cinema film and so that Campbell could look for somewhere to land on the continent. After Hurley’s flight, Mawson went up in the plane with a flag and the required proclamation. As Campbell piloted them across the ice-splattered water towards the continental coastline, Mawson attached the flag to a short mast and passed it forward to Campbell. When they were well over land, Campbell cut the engine and dropped the flag over the side from a height of nearly 1000 metres as Mawson read out the proclamation. Mawson was confident that this ensured the ‘claiming once more [of] all the land discovered, and this time including the newly discovered slice at our furthest west’ – in other words, all the land along which they had sailed up to the western limit of the Australian quadrant at 45° E.
To confirm the claim, Campbell circled back over their drop point and ‘spotted the flag lying on the ice surface and drew my attention to it’. That was the most that could be done. Davis resolutely refused to attempt a landing ashore for a proper claiming ceremony, fearing that hidden rocks would endanger the ship, and insisted that they head for home while there was still sufficient coal for the engine. Mawson reluctantly agreed to do so. He carefully kept the news of his retreat secret from the Norwegians so that they would not return to explore the abandoned coastline.65
Riiser-Larsen’s attention was elsewhere. The Norwegians had taken the British hint and abandoned their original plan to be just the fifth expedition to circumnavigate the continent. Instead of continuing eastward, the Norvegia turned west to explore the vast unclaimed coastline between Enderby Land and Coats Land. Although hampered by the ship’s ice-damaged bow, and by an unusually wide belt of ice that kept them far from the coast between Enderby Land and Coats Land, they were able to discover and chart a stretch of coastline on the western edge of Enderby Land, which Riiser-Larsen named ‘Queen Maud Land’, and more coastline on the eastern edge of the Weddell Sea, which he named ‘Crown Princess Martha Land’. Because he could not get close enough to the shore, or even reach it safely by aircraft, the great expanse of coastline between those two places remained a mystery.
Nevertheless, Riiser-Larsen’s voyage had charted nearly 1000 kilometres of coastline, finding new bays and seas that were rich in whales. Sketches, maps and photographs were all carefully compiled, both to reinforce the Norwegian claim to the several stretches of coastline and to be of practical assistance to Christensen’s whaling fleet. At the beginning of March 1930, Christensen instructed Riiser-Larsen to take the Norvegia to Cape Town for repairs and to wait out the winter.66
It had been a frenetic two years. Aircraft had transformed exploration in the Antarctic. Wilkins had been first in the air and had returned with spectacular photographs of the landscape. His apparent discovery of channels cutting across the Antarctic Peninsula, dividing the continent into two land masses, would later prove to be wrong. More disappointingly for the British government, Wilkins’ flight had been cut short before he had reached the unclaimed territory lying between the Ross Dependency and the Falkland Islands Dependencies, which Britain had wanted to make its own.
With a wary eye on Wilkins, Byrd had mounted the largest ever Antarctic expedition, and had returned in triumph with the coveted prize of being first to have flown over the South Pole. More importantly, after ninety years of American disinterest in the Antarctic, he had placed Antarctica firmly on the national agenda of the United States. He had also made the first tentative steps towards claiming a section of the continent for the United States, flying across part of the territory that Wilkins had been unable to reach.
Norway also had returned in force with the largest whaling fleet the world had ever seen, complete with aircraft for whale-spotting and territorial acquisition. Britain was on notice that its dream of controlling the entire continent could not be realised. The carve-up of Antarctica by the rival powers had begun in earnest.