The successful use of aircraft in the Antarctic created a sense of human mastery of the continent. While reading newspapers at their breakfast tables, people from Berlin to Buenos Aires could behold the camera-captured stillness of crevasse-ridden glaciers twisting their way between snow-covered mountains. The veil that had hidden Antarctica’s secrets could now be swept away by planes that crisscrossed the continent, with regular newspaper updates showing more and more of the map being filled in.
Aircraft also accelerated the race to control the continent. Just when competition for the Antarctic had begun in earnest, the New York stock market collapse of October 1929 and the subsequent economic depression restricted the funding that governments and private benefactors would give to speculative ventures. After two unsuccessful summers in the Antarctic, Australian aviator Hubert Wilkins declared that he would give up polar aviation for good. America’s polar hero Richard Byrd wanted to go back after being feted by the American public, but he was forced to postpone a second expedition to Little America due to lack of funding. Only the Norwegian whaler Lars Christensen and the Australian geologist Sir Douglas Mawson returned in the summer of 1930–31 to resume their rivalry.
The Norwegians had the advantage, not only in the solo voyage by the small expedition ship Norvegia, but also in the carefully coordinated investigations by much of Christensen’s whaling fleet. The nimble whale catchers were often able to get much closer to the coastline than the more ponderous factory ships, and Christensen instructed them to chart any new land that they might encounter during their hunt. The factory ships carried coal and other supplies, and could transport aircraft, which allowed the Norvegia to make much longer voyages than Mawson could contemplate.
For the summer of 1930–31, Christensen wanted the Norvegia to circumnavigate the entire continent, which would be only the fifth time that the feat had been achieved, and the first for ninety years. Leading the expedition was the former Norwegian army officer and polar topographer Gunnar Isachsen, who joined the Norvegia in Cape Town in September 1930. His instructions were to circle the Antarctic, looking for islands whose existence or location was doubtful and which might provide bases for whaling, to investigate the number and distribution of whales and to reinforce and extend Norway’s existing territorial claims.1 The captain of the Norvegia, Nils Larsen, was given instructions on the ‘method of procedure’ for claiming any land that had ‘not previously been occupied by any other nation’.2
The sixty-one-year-old Isachsen was well suited to the task of leading the expedition, having been involved with exploration and mapping in the Arctic for more than thirty years before becoming the Norwegian Maritime Museum’s director. Most recently, he had served as a Norwegian government inspector on the Antarctic whaling fleet, which meant that he was heading for familiar seas when the Norvegia left Cape Town in October 1930.
After spending more than two months searching for islands that, it turned out, did not exist, Isachsen headed for Peter I Island. The island had been discovered by Bellingshausen’s Russian expedition in 1821 and claimed for Norway in 1929, when the Norvegia had landed a party who erected a hut for shipwrecked mariners. This act had both an obvious practical purpose and a symbolic meaning for Norwegians. It was a physical sign of Norwegian administration and occasional Norwegian occupation, and therefore – in Norwegian eyes – laid the basis for a territorial claim. Isachsen had instructions to reinforce the claim by erecting yet another hut and a depot of stores, but he was prevented by the kilometres of ice surrounding the island.
Isachsen was forced to press on with his voyage in order to meet up with Christensen and Riiser-Larsen, who were on board the tanker ship Thorshavn. Once that rendezvous was achieved on 9 February at 33° 53’ E, Isachsen handed over control of the Norvegia to Riiser-Larsen, and he and Christensen returned to Cape Town on the Thorshavn with a cargo of whale oil. Before they left, a small seaplane was transferred to the Norvegia to expedite the discovery and claiming of new land.3
Having been thwarted the previous year in having his claim to Enderby Land recognised by the Norwegian government, Riiser-Larsen wasted no time in exploring and claiming the nearby coastline, which lay within the sector that was as yet unclaimed and to which Britain had indicated Norway should direct its territorial ambitions. The previous year, Riiser-Larsen had risked his life to stand upon the continent and raise the Norwegian flag. Following the examples of Byrd and Mawson, he had since decided that it was sufficient to see land from an aircraft in order to be able to claim it.
Although this contention had not been tested in any international court, both Riiser-Larsen and Christensen argued that there were numerous historical precedents of explorers claiming land from the deck of a ship offshore, from which position they could have had little sense of its topography or extent. At least from the vantage point of an aircraft the location and size of a territory could be more precisely determined, and much more accurate charts could be created.4 Others argued that it was necessary to actually step onto a land in order to claim it. As a Scottish newspaper observed in the wake of Byrd’s flight to the South Pole, the American aviator had looked upon the Antarctic in the same way ‘as we all have seen the moon’; the United States could no more gain legal title to the Antarctic by Byrd looking upon it from a great height than any person could gain legal title to the moon merely by having seen it from afar.5
The Norwegians were content to follow the precedent set by their powerful rivals, Britain and the United States. On 17 February 1931, Riiser-Larsen and the Norvegia’s captain, Nils Larsen, climbed to a height of more than 1100 metres in their seaplane, from where they saw a landscape of snow and ice stretching into the mist-draped distance. As soon as they passed over what they took to be ‘the edge of the inland ice’, Riiser-Larsen ‘dropped the flag and documents, taking possession of the land for Norway’. Once back on the Norvegia, he radioed the news to Oslo, asking permission of King Haakon VII to name the land after the monarch’s granddaughter, Princess Ragnhild. Permission was promptly given.6
A few days later, the Norvegia met up with the factory ship Antarctic, whose captain reported that he had been mapping Queen Maud Land and Enderby Land. It was just one of several Norwegian whaling ships that had been mapping the coastline and bestowing Norwegian names upon its geographic features, both to improve the safety of their navigation and to buttress the Norwegian claim to the sector lying between the eastern boundary of the Falkland Islands Dependencies and the western boundary of the sector that Australia was intent on claiming. As that Antarctic summer drew to a close, the Norvegia and its sister ships returned to the north with details of their sightings.
When the Norvegia steamed slowly into the whaling port of Sandefjord on 15 May 1931, there were great festivities to honour the four-year exploration, with Christensen handing out silver medals to the crew. Nils Larsen was awarded a medal from the Norwegian Geographical Society, while Christensen was made a commander of the second class of the Order of St Olav. During the speeches, the name for the newly discovered territory was announced as ‘Lars Christensen Land’. It was among the sightings that were subsequently traced on two new hydrographical charts published at Christensen’s instigation by the Whalers’ Mutual Insurance Association. The Norvegia also brought back results from its meteorological, hydrological and other observations, which were later published at Christensen’s expense by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences.7
All this helped to cement the unofficial Norwegian claim to the African quadrant, with Christensen’s maps showing that his whalers had mapped the principal features of the Antarctic coastline all the way from 20° W to 100° E. Much of what had been blank or conjectured on Antarctic maps was now filled in, and Christensen invited people to compare his maps with the much less detailed British maps that had been published in 1926.8
Christensen had not relinquished his hopes that Norway might lay claim to the Australian quadrant too. As he argued in his account of the Norwegian expeditions, Norway had ‘great and real interests to safeguard in the lands that we have discovered’. Christensen had a special reason for wanting to do so. It would not only extend the area in which his whalers would be able to operate free of British licences, but a large part of the sector was named after himself.
Isachsen wrote a report for the American Geographical Society’s Geographical Review in which he listed the many discoveries by Norwegian whale-catchers along the coastline of what they now called Lars Christensen Land. Located between 75° E and 60° E, this was practically identical to Mac. Robertson Land, the sector that had been named, claimed and inaccurately mapped by Mawson a year earlier. Mawson had not been the first to see the coast, having arrived some weeks after the Norwegians. Now they had preceded him for a second time.
While Isachsen brought that fact to the attention of American geographers, Christensen did so for a wider audience in a book that was first published in Norwegian before being translated into English in 1935. Titled Such Is the Antarctic, Christensen told the world about the series of Norvegia expeditions and the associated discoveries of his whaling ships, including three voyages that he and his wife had made aboard the Thorshavn. Describing the coastline between Lars Christensen Land and Queen Maud Land as a ‘maiden area’ that had not been visited for a century, the wealthy whaler recounted how it had ‘become, in the course of two years, a happy hunting-ground for the Norwegian whaling industry’.9
Conscious that the Norwegian government had agreed not to formally claim any land within areas that Britain had marked out for itself, Christensen wanted nevertheless to place on the public record the priority of the Norwegian discoveries. Although he acknowledged Mawson’s work, he made clear that Mawson’s names for the geographic features of Lars Christensen (or Mac. Robertson) Land had prior Norwegian names, with the Norwegians often using the names of Christensen’s ships and their officers. For instance, the Norwegian name of ‘Thorshavn Bay’ had been overlaid by Mawson with the rather grander name of ‘Mackenzie Sea’.
The Norwegians had also mapped and named other regions within the sector that Mawson was intent on claiming. Just west of Lars Christensen Land, they explored and charted Kemp Land, Enderby Land and Queen Maud Land. Isachsen made clear that they had made careful calculations of their location each time, by taking ‘many observations on the sun as well as on the stars’, and had made similarly careful calculations of the position and height of any mountain peaks that came within sight of their ships. The Norwegian maps of that coastline were, consequently, much more accurate than those of Mawson, which might become an important consideration if Norway ever considered claiming that sector.10 As far as Christensen was concerned, the voyages of the Norvegia and the discoveries of his other whaling ships marked the time when ‘the Norwegian mainland in the south came into being’.11
Mawson was determined that the ‘Norwegian mainland in the south’ would not intrude into the Australian quadrant. His first voyage had gone some way towards doing this, before it had been cut short when the Discovery had run low on coal and its captain, John King Davis, had been panicked into returning early to Australia. Although Britain had loaned the Discovery for two years, the all-important funding for a second year from the Australian government had not yet been guaranteed.
Mawson did what he could to convince the new Labor government of James Scullin, emphasising the amount of territory that he had claimed, the oceanographic and meteorological research that had been conducted, and the rich whale fishery he had discovered off Enderby Land. The whale fishery alone, he argued, would return millions of pounds within the next few years. Mawson was supported by Macpherson Robertson, who had laid on a welcoming dinner after the first voyage during which he spoke of the Antarctic’s ‘great economic and Imperial importance to Australia and Great Britain’. Robertson promised to contribute £6000 for a second voyage if the government agreed to match the amount.12
The British government also urged Australia to fund a second voyage, noting that the first expedition had ‘succeeded in occupying and making a detailed survey of a long stretch of coast-line’, thereby preparing ‘the way for a formal assumption of sovereignty and the vesting’ in the Australian government of its administration. Although Australia had dallied with the idea of not proceeding with a second voyage, the sight of four Norwegian factory ships and tankers calling into Australian ports with full cargos of whale oil – on their way back to Norway – helped to change its mind.
On 10 May 1930, Scullin informed the British government of Australia’s decision and outlined Mawson’s plans for the second voyage.13 With the Depression lengthening the unemployment lines, the prospect of creating a local whaling industry and taxing the Norwegian whalers made the cost of another voyage seem relatively trifling. Now that Norway had agreed not to claim any more territory within the Australian quadrant, it also made sense for Mawson to be sent south for a second year so it could finally be annexed and brought within the British Empire.
While Mawson was finalising his preparations for the second voyage, delegates were assembling in London for another imperial conference at which the question of British territorial claims in the Antarctic would be reviewed. Britain’s hopes of controlling the whole continent had had to be revised when France let it be known that it would not let go of Adélie Land. Meanwhile, South Africa advised that it had no interest in administering the African quadrant on behalf of the empire. British officials now conceded that the Norwegian discoveries of new land in that sector, and their charting of the coastline, gave it the strongest claims to sovereignty there.
That left the sector between the Ross Dependency and the Falkland Islands Dependencies, as well as the Australian quadrant. Despite Byrd’s aerial forays into the former, Britain had not relinquished its hopes of bringing it under its control. That had been why Britain had supported Wilkins’ proposed flight over that sector to the Ross Sea in 1929. Although bad weather had prevented Wilkins from venturing any further than the Antarctic Peninsula, Britain believed that Byrd’s limited activities had not established an unassailable claim by the United States to the region. Once Mawson’s voyages had been completed and the Australian quadrant had been brought within the empire, British officials argued, ‘there still remains a vast stretch of coastline lying between longitude 80°W and 140°W, which has never been explored, either from the sea or from the air’. That was where future British exploration should be concentrated. Firstly, though, Mawson had to complete his mission.14
For his second voyage, Mawson intended to cover as much coastline as possible from the Ross Sea to Mac. Robertson Land, although the British government wanted him just to concentrate on consolidating their claim to the sector west of Adélie Land, from 130° E to 75° E.15 After the debacle of the previous year, when Mawson had only managed to conduct one flag-raising ceremony on an offshore island, he planned to go onto the continent itself as often as possible, in order to firmly cement in place a British territorial claim.
There was no question in his mind that he had the right to do so. In a newspaper article prior to leaving, Mawson made clear that he was going to be exploring land that was British by right of discovery, based upon the visit of British sealer John Balleny in 1839 and the work of Mawson’s own expedition in 1911–12.16 However, ‘discovery and formal acts of annexation’ were insufficient to provide a valid title of ownership. It also required ‘occupation’, although international legal rulings suggested that ‘occupation’ had a special meaning in polar regions, where it was considered impossible for people to survive. Rather than requiring permanent settlements, a title based upon occupation would exist when a nation could show that it was exercising a suitable ‘degree of control’ over the area.17 In the Antarctic, this might be done merely by occasional visits and the regulation of whaling in nearby seas. British and Australian officials believed that by returning and visiting the place, and by raising the flag, Mawson’s British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition – known as ‘BANZARE’ – would be effectively fulfilling the legal condition regarding ‘occupation’.
Funds for the tight-strapped expedition were sought from newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States, although Mawson found, to his chagrin, that editors were not as excited as he hoped by his plans. Sailing along the Antarctic coastline and occasionally scrambling ashore to raise a flag were not activities that were likely to grip the imagination of readers who had been raised on stories of Scott and Amundsen, and of the younger Mawson himself. Where was the daring and the danger this time? The London Times and America’s Hearst Corporation both declined to buy the rights to Mawson’s second expedition, despite having supported his first. Although Casey was able to find an alternative British news service that was willing to buy the rights, Mawson was forced to write to American geographer Isaiah Bowman for advice regarding a replacement press organisation in the United States. He was fortunate to secure the support of the New York Times, albeit at a much reduced rate.18 Even Australian newspaper editors were unimpressed at the prospect of a second voyage; they were particularly annoyed at being charged for the second voyage after the reports from the first voyage had been distributed free of charge in Australia.
Privately, Mawson berated the press for taking ‘an extraordinarily narrow view’, predicting that when his reports started being received ‘more of them will wish to have it’. The government official in charge of the expedition conceded that the ‘absence of untoward incidents may detract to a certain extent from their news value’, but he believed ‘a certain percentage of readers’ would be interested in the daily doings of the scientific staff on the Discovery as they hauled up another net of marine creatures or released yet another weather balloon into the Antarctic sky.19
It was not just about money for the expedition. Publicising the expedition’s activities was an important prelude and justification for the annexation that would come later. With the press reluctant to take his stories, Mawson had to rely even more on the ability of his accomplished photographer, Frank Hurley, to bring the expedition to the attention of the world through his dramatic pictures and cinema film.
Hurley was even then putting together a film of the first voyage, which would incorporate a lot of footage of the Antarctic wildlife along with shots of the science and the claiming of territory. Called Southward Ho!, the government-sponsored film was meant to provide much-needed revenue for the expedition, while also engendering a sense of ownership of the Antarctic in the minds of British and Australian audiences. But it was threatened by the arrival in Australia of the Paramount film of Byrd’s expedition. With Hurley’s film not due for release in Sydney cinemas until August 1930, the government had its film censor keep the American film from Australian audiences until Southward Ho! had completed its run, free from competition. The delay helped maximise ticket sales of Hurley’s film and emphasised Mawson’s achievements over those of his American rival.20
Hurley’s film would still have been playing in some Australian cinemas when the Discovery left Hobart on 22 November 1930. As a missing crew member leaped on board, clad only in his underwear after a last night ashore, the ship was cheered on its way by a large crowd of well-wishers waving handkerchiefs.21 The irascible and ageing Davis had been replaced as captain by the Discovery’s former chief officer, Kenneth Mackenzie, while the problem of providing sufficient coal to steam hundreds of miles along the ice-prone coast would be solved by drawing on supplies from Norwegian factory ships operating in the same seas.
After calling briefly at Macquarie Island, which was now unoccupied after the mass slaughter of penguins and elephant seals was banned, Mawson headed for the Balleny Islands, off the western entrance to the Ross Sea, where he was due to take on 100 tons of coal from the Norwegian factory ship Sir James Clark Ross. The two ships met on 15 December 1930, using the inflated carcass of a dead whale and long strips of blubber as fenders between the vessels, so that bags of coal could be slung across to the deck of the Discovery. As Mawson and Mackenzie dined with the Norwegian officers on whortleberries and Swedish punch, the Australian aviator Stuart Campbell was preoccupied by the ‘gargantuan scale’ of the slaughter and the industrialised processing of the kill. With numerous carcasses bobbing in the water alongside the Sir James Clark Ross, and with up to four whales being processed at one time on the ship’s huge flensing deck, it was ‘literally one mass of blood and guts’. Campbell watched with some horror as the whalers worked in ‘rivers of blood 2 to 3 inches deep and fully 20ft. wide’. Such was their success that year that oil of inferior quality from decomposing whales was dumped over the side to make room for the more valuable oil from freshly killed whales. Even 800 tons of fuel oil was jettisoned to make room.22
With the coal safely stowed, the Discovery wallowed its way westward, making regular stops for Mawson to plumb the depths of the ocean for marine life and signs of a continental shelf. Mawson wanted to land on the coastline of what he had earlier named King George V Land, the scene of his disastrous sledge journey with Ninnis and Mertz. At the limit of that journey, he and Mertz had raised the British flag, but they’d no authority to claim the newly discovered territory for Britain. Now that Mawson did have the authority, he was determined to exercise it.
As the Discovery probed the northern edge of the pack ice for a way through to the coast, Mawson described in his diary how on 26 December they were blocked by ‘large rafts of even floe of fair thickness, evidently broken out of coast off King George V Land and not long at sea. Too heavy to push through.’ The disappointed explorer reported by radio to Casey that it was ‘probably impossible to hoist flag at King George V Land as defined by myself in 1911 expedition’. Instead, he proposed to push on to Commonwealth Bay, where he had based his 1911 expedition. Although that was not within King George V Land, as he had previously defined it, Mawson suggested that he stretch its western boundary to encompass Commonwealth Bay. That would allow him to land at his old base and ‘hoist the flag at Commonwealth Bay taking over King George V Land’.23 So the ship continued to heave itself westward through the sizeable swells.
On 28 December, as the Discovery skirted the edge of the pack ice and the sun arced low across a cloudless sky, Campbell came on deck to see the horizon dotted with ‘majestic icebergs and small floes glinting in the light or standing out as purple shadows against the golden heavens’. He likened it to ‘standing on the rim of the world looking across into eternity’. But the tranquillity was disturbed by more Norwegian whalers towing their dead quarry to the massive maw of the factory ship Kosmos, which had the dubious distinction of having processed forty-five whales in a twenty-four-hour period. As the Norwegians provided Mawson with fifty more tons of coal, Campbell wondered how long the unrestricted slaughter of whales could continue. Some sense of the scale of the slaughter was seen as the coal was being transferred to the Discovery and a tanker arrived to offload 60,000 barrels of oil from the Kosmos. The transfer allowed the factory ship to remain until its capacity of 120,000 barrels was reached. With that much whale oil being worth about $1.5 million, it would not be long, thought Campbell, before the whales followed ‘the fur seal to extinction, never to return’.24
Mawson would also have been conscious of this risk and doubtless been concerned as to how it might undermine the value of Australia’s territorial ambitions and his own fortune-seeking ambitions in the whaling industry. However, the disappearing whale stocks did not divert him from his mission of claiming the Australian quadrant, starting with King George V Land. He began doing this as soon as he reached his old base at Cape Denison on 4 January 1931. Watching through binoculars as the Discovery edged its way carefully into Commonwealth Bay, Mawson saw with satisfaction that the main hut where he had waited out the winter after the deaths of Mertz and Ninnis was still standing. Nearby was the poignant memorial cross. Campbell noted how Mawson was ‘very excited at getting back to the old spot … and was shouting frantic instructions to all’.
The hut’s roof had almost collapsed, and snow and ice had worked their way inside, compelling Mawson and his party to scramble their way in through the skylight, whereupon they looked with wonder on the ‘great masses of delicate ice crystals hung in festoons’.25 While magnetic readings were made and two decades of ice movement measured, the old hut was reoccupied for the two days of their visit to give some semblance of Australia being in actual occupation of the millions of square kilometres that it was intent on claiming. If the issue was ever challenged in an international court, this might provide evidence for the Australian case.
While marooned at Cape Denison in 1913, Mawson had sought permission to name the surrounding area ‘King George V Land’. Now he lost no time in formally claiming the area, vesting sovereignty in the British king and ‘His heirs and Successors forever’. The territory comprised the sector between 142° E and 160° E, included all the offshore islands and extended all the way to the South Pole. It therefore enclosed the previously unclaimed sector between the Ross Dependency and Adélie Land.
Mawson had precise instructions as to how the claiming ceremony had to be performed. One requirement was to have his party form a hollow square in front of the flagpole – but the terrain made this ‘utterly impossible’, wrote Campbell. So they formed a circle instead, as Mawson, ‘slightly embarrassed, read the Proclamation’, which was signed by Mawson and witnessed by Mackenzie. A copy of this was placed in a sealed container and buried beneath the cairn of rocks that secured the flagpole. With his tripod balanced on the rock-strewn slope below the ridge, Hurley photographed the Union Jack being raised triumphantly as the men gave three cheers and sang ‘God Save the King’. Then they did it all again for the cinematograph.
When the film of the expedition was released, Australian and British audiences would see the claiming ceremony for themselves and gain their own sense of ownership over the world’s last wilderness. Some, though, would doubtless share Campbell’s derisive view of the carefully staged event: he described with a mocking tone in his diary how ‘thousands of square miles of virgin ice clad land was claimed on behalf of His Majesty, King George the Fifth, by his beloved servant, Douglas Mawson (what a bloody farce)’. The aviator found the ceremony more than a little ludicrous, wondering whether their failure to form a hollow square would ‘arouse international complications’.26
This was not altogether a groundless fear, particularly when they learnt from the Norwegian factory ship Falk on 6 February that Riiser-Larsen in the Norvegia had discovered new land in the vicinity of 76° E, which was where Mawson was headed. The news ‘takes the wind out of our sails to a certain extent’, wrote Campbell, although there was ‘still a chance for us a bit further to the east’. As the Falk took on coal from a Swedish cargo ship, some of the men on the Discovery were even more dismayed ‘to see a woman leaning over the bridge’. Although Campbell thought it was one woman on the Swedish ship, Harold Fletcher recalled seeing two women ‘looking over the rail of the Falk; one with bare arms and the other in a thin dress’. Whether one or two, the Antarctic’s place as an exclusive male preserve had clearly ended. In fact, it had ended the previous year, when Christensen had taken his wife with him on the Thorshavn. Campbell now wryly observed how the ownership of ‘man’s last place of exclusive retirement [has] gone’.27
Campbell’s colleagues would have been even more dismayed had the plans of the Discovery’s former captain, J. R. Stenhouse, come to fruition. In early 1930, he had announced a twelve-month round-the-world cruise aboard a trans-Atlantic liner, which would dip down to the ‘Great White South’ to allow its British and American passengers ‘to join in a two day’s dash in dog sleighs over the Antarctic continent’ and stay in the abandoned huts of Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen. It was expected that the cruise would particularly ‘appeal to women, as the Antarctic is the only remaining part of the earth on which they have not set foot’. Originally scheduled to depart in December 1930, it was postponed to the following year and changed to a three-month cruise. But the prospective passengers, hard hit by the Depression, never appeared.28
Nor did Mawson’s nemesis, Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, appear on the horizon as the Discovery continued its westward voyage. There were just the smudges of smoke from some of the hundreds of whaling ships that were in the Antarctic that year. A passing Norwegian whaler reported to Mawson that Riiser-Larsen was now much further westward, exploring Enderby Land.29 With heavy pack ice preventing the Discovery from approaching the coast, Mawson was uncertain about what he should do. He had wanted to visit the hut of his so-called ‘western base’ during the 1911 expedition, but the 100 kilometres or so of intervening ice prevented him from doing so. Mawson cabled to Casey for instructions, unsure whether he should press on all the way to Queen Mary Land before conducting another flag-raising ceremony – although there would be no guarantee that he could get through the ice to make a landing there either. It is not clear whether Casey replied to Mawson’s cable, as he had relinquished his post in London and was returning to Australia to forge a career in politics.
Whether or not he received a reply, Mawson seems to have decided to claim land as often as he could, so long as it did not unduly disturb his scientific program. When land was sighted from the aircraft on 11 February, Campbell dropped a flag from on high to claim it for the empire, while Mawson broke out champagne and cigars at supper to celebrate their success. Continuing their westward voyage, a further stretch of coastline was sighted two days later, which Mawson was also determined to claim.
Faced with an ice barrier with rocky islets at sea level, he decided to raise the flag as best he could. Approaching the ice barrier in their motor launch at 66° 58’ E, the swell made it too dangerous to attempt a landing. So the launch was edged carefully towards one of the islets, where Mawson read the required proclamation and touched the rocky shore with his oar. He then placed the proclamation in a copper cylinder and threw it amongst the boulders onshore. He tossed a wooden plate with a copper inscription after it, only to see it bounce back off the rocks into the sea. A flag and pole were also hurled at the shore but they too fell back into the surging sea.30
Although Hurley photographed their efforts, it was not the sort of ceremony envisaged in Mawson’s official instructions, and he could hardly claim to have raised the flag on the territory he was purporting to claim for the empire. So a few hours later, he again set off in the Discovery’s launch, this time heading towards a rocky red monolith about 300 metres high, which seemed to promise a landing site. It was on a stretch of the coast that Mawson had named Mac. Robertson Land the previous year, but he had been unable then to land upon it. Now, Campbell leaped into the shallow water with the launch’s rope, and Mawson, Hurley and several others followed in quick succession. They were not alone, since a place that allowed landing by humans was invariably also suited to penguins and seals. A cacophony of nesting penguins was arrayed up the slopes, while a variety of other birds circled above and a mass of somnolent seals lolled on the narrow, rocky beaches.
Wasting no time, they ‘erected flag and repeated taking possession’, this time in the customary way, as Mawson later scribbled in his diary. While Hurley captured the scene for posterity, and as Mawson and Campbell collected samples of seaweed and rocks, others made a ‘haul of old and young birds – Antarctic Petrel, Snow Petrels, fulmar’. And so, wrote Campbell, ‘we established our first valid claim to the newly named “MacRobertson Land” ’, with the monolith being named after Prime Minister Scullin. That evening at supper, more cigars were brought out to celebrate their latest territorial acquisition.31
A week later, Mawson reached the end of his westward voyage at 61° E. He had almost skirted his way around the entire sector of the Antarctic that Australia was anxious to annex, and for the last ten days he had repeated the voyage he had made the previous year, this time closer to the coast. After reaching the eastern edge of Enderby Land on 18 February 1931, it was time to head for home, but not before Mawson went ashore one more time. The cautious Mackenzie was nervous about taking the Discovery too close to the shore, which was protected by a rampart of rocky islets and promised the danger of hidden shoals. Mawson was more concerned by the possibility that the launch might break down during the ten- kilometre trip to the shore and that the Discovery might be prevented by a change in the weather from picking them up.
Refusing at first to go closer, the captain only relented when he realised how far the ship still was from the shore; he then carefully nudged his charge into the bay. After using the launch to explore one of the islands – during which time a small Weddell seal was killed for its meat and skin, and a number of Emperor and Adélie penguins were similarly dispatched – Mawson stepped onto the continent for what would be the final time in his life so that he could complete the claiming of what Australians had come to call the ‘Commonwealth Sector’. Campbell recorded in his diary how they again ‘raised the Flag and went through the usual formalities of possession and opened a bottle of Champagne, poured a little on the ground and had a toast all round. We then had a half hour to spare whilst Hurley climbed up one of the rocky hills to take some photographs.’32 It is not clear whether Mawson thought that pouring champagne on the ground would add some symbolic significance to the ceremony.
As the Discovery headed north, with its sails full and its funnel belching black smoke, Mawson looked wistfully upon the icy shore and rocky mountains that were disappearing astern. This voyage had been very different to his earlier expeditions. There had been no sledging journeys into the unknown, where Mawson and his companions could be tested to the limit of human endurance, just the regular routine of scientific investigation offshore, interspersed with occasional fleeting visits to the land. It was not much to excite a depressed public hungry for uplifting tales of heroism.
In a wireless message for the press as the Discovery headed for Hobart, Mawson listed the achievements of his latest voyage as being mostly scientific. Only at the end did he disclose that on ‘several occasions during the cruise the flag was flown on these friendly lands’, with it being done ‘with special ceremony at Cape Denison, Scullin Monolith and Cape Bruce’.33 Some of the names bestowed by Mawson on geographic features recognised prominent British and Australian politicians, as well as the members of the BANZARE expedition itself. Leo Amery, the British politician who had initiated the Antarctic land grab back in 1919, was acknowledged by having a prominent cape named after him – as thanks for his ‘assistance and help in connection with the organisation and despatch’ of the expedition.34 Only time would tell whether the claiming, naming and mapping, along with the two voyages themselves, would be recognised by other nations as being adequate activities to establish a valid title to the massive wedge of territory – comprising forty-two per cent of the entire continent – that Mawson had claimed during his two voyages.
The British government and its representative in Oslo, Charles Wingfield, had been keeping abreast of the activities of both Mawson and the Norwegians, but were unsure how best to keep the Norwegians at bay. They thought that the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ they had reached with the Norwegian government would see the activities of its explorers restricted to areas that Britain was not interested in claiming. But the Norwegian whalers had continued to explore and sometimes claim areas that lay within the Australian Sector, leaving the British in a bind.
Wingfield advised London in March 1931 that it would be counterproductive to protest ‘against mere acts of exploration carried out in the course of a private whaling expedition’. Instead, he recommended, Oslo should be formally advised of Mawson’s work and how he had been authorised to confirm ‘by definite acts of annexation’ the British claims to all the territory between the Ross Dependency and Enderby Land, with the exception of Adélie Land. To pre-empt the Norwegians’ objections to Mawson claiming such an extensive territory by merely the raising of flags, they should be told that this had been merely the ‘climax’ of Mawson’s explorations. Wingfield advised that this would be the best way of reminding the Norwegians that ‘none of this sector is open to annexation by any other power’. But the British government scotched the idea, since Mawson had done so little to strengthen Britain’s existing claims. This did not matter, wrote Wingfield, since the Norwegian whalers were not returning to the Antarctic during the coming season, and the Norvegia expeditions, and ‘the constant possibility involved of the “occupation” of land by them’, had also come to an end for the time being.35
To try to get wider recognition of his work, Mawson planned to publish the scientific results in multiple volumes. But the expedition was in debt and he had to appeal to the British government for assistance. The interdepartmental Polar Committee in London agreed that publication should occur as soon as possible, although it doubted ‘whether the publication of the records could have any material effect on strengthening the Australian claim in the Antarctic’. And the British government declined to provide any money of its own. The cash-strapped Australian government was hardly better placed to help. Finally, it agreed in 1935 to provide £1000 for five years to publish just 500 copies of the scientific series.36 The New South Wales government would later provide further funding, in return for Mawson giving its institutions most of the expedition’s records and specimens.
These funding problems meant that more than forty years would go by before Mawson’s final volume was published. Moreover, the reports would be read only by a few of his fellow scientists. As the Polar Committee observed, their publication was something that had to be done, mainly for prestige purposes, but it could not be expected to convince other nations or an international tribunal of the validity of Britain’s territorial claim. Nor would these volumes give the people of the British Empire a sense of ownership over those parts of the Antarctic that Mawson had claimed.
The burden of popularising the expedition’s achievements fell to Hurley. His film Siege of the South promised to tell ‘in story, sound and song an epic of man’s glorious struggle with nature in the frozen south’. The poster for the government-sponsored film showed the sun rising over the ice barrier as six men hauled a small boat ashore through the rocks and broken ice. Territorial acquisition rather than science was the prevailing theme, with the poster proclaiming: ‘British courage wins a continent for the empire.’
The film itself continued this theme, with the ‘friendly’ penguins being depicted as willing participants in their dispossession. The script has Mawson and his party arriving at Cape Denison, watched by the ‘citizens of King George V Land’, who ‘greet us with squawks of welcome’. Then they were received by the penguin ‘Mayor and his councillors [who were] waiting to confer on us the freedom of the land’. Subsequent scenes have shots of landings further westward, when they are seen approaching ‘the wilderness of rock and ice upon which no human foot has ever trod’ and later landing ‘on the foreshore of a well-sheltered boat harbour that has waited since creation for man’s coming’.
Mawson then ‘hurries off to find a site on which to raise the flag’, and ‘the ceremony of taking possession is performed’. As the men pull away in their launch:
… the sight of our flag fluttering from the cairn fills us with satisfaction, and it is with gratification we realize that the expedition has added to the chart over 800 miles of new Antarctic coast line, and collected such a wealth of scientific data as to make the record of the B.A.N.Z.A.R.E. Expedition pre-eminent in polar history.
The curtain closes with the reading of a ‘congratulatory telegram from the king’ and an ‘orchestral playing of God Save the King’.37 With no mention of Riiser-Larsen, or of any other explorers and whalers who had seen parts of the same coastline, audiences were left with the firm impression that an Australian claim was irrefutable.
It was an impression that the Australian government was keen to promote. In July 1931, Prime Minister Scullin told the new British dominions secretary, Jimmy Thomas, that Mawson had now ‘discovered or revisited’ most of the sector between 160° E and 45° E, and that ‘British sovereignty has been formally proclaimed on five occasions extending over the whole area’, except for Adélie Land. No other country had a stronger claim to the sector, argued Scullin, since any discoveries by other nations had occurred so long ago or, in the case of Norway, had been seen off by Mawson.
In fact, as the Australian polar explorer Phillip Law would later concede, Mawson had been preceded in several cases by the Norwegians in his discovery of new land, and had not been very assiduous in mapping the coastline along which the Discovery had sailed. Wealth was to be won from the Antarctic in the surrounding seas, and it was these Mawson was most interested in investigating. Often he had kept far out so sea, using the ship’s depth sounder to trace the line of the continental shelf and its nets to haul in krill, rather than staying closer to shore to trace the coastline. As a result, large parts of the coastline remained a hypothetical dotted line after he had completed his work.
Law complained that Mawson’s mapping results were ‘extremely disappointing’ and compared poorly with the ‘detailed mapping carried out a few years later by the Norwegians’.38 This was not just a matter of practical assistance with navigation. There was an unspoken competition between nations with territorial ambitions in the Antarctic, with each trying to have their national names dominate the landscape.
The Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty had long had a virtual monopoly on the publication of maritime charts and books of navigation advice – known as Pilots – for different parts of the world. This monopoly reflected the worldwide supremacy of Britain’s navy, merchant marine and empire. But it was not until the late 1920s that the Admiralty decided to publish a Pilot especially for the Antarctic, to advise mariners about the challenges of sailing in Antarctic seas. Until then, only part of the Antarctic had been covered and published in the South America Pilot.
The new publication raised immediate problems for the British authorities, who wanted it to be the standard reference work for mariners of all nations. Officials knew that protests would emerge if it used the Antarctic Pilot to assert British sovereignty over the disputed regions of the Antarctic, or if it privileged British names over the names of other nations. While Mawson’s first voyage was being planned, Richard Casey became so concerned that the publication of the Antarctic Pilot would provoke a rush of exploration and rival claims that he argued strongly for it to be delayed until Mawson had completed his voyages and Britain had annexed the Australian quadrant. If Britain were to refuse, then Casey urged ‘that all mention of sovereignty over the areas and all historical references should be scrupulously avoided’.
In fact, the Admiralty had been so careful to avoid offence that it had acknowledged French sovereignty over Adélie Land and other places while making no mention of British sovereignty over ‘certain territories and islands which were indisputably British’. To Casey’s relief, the British officials agreed to publish the first Antarctic Pilot in 1930, and that no reference would be made to ‘sovereignty, administration or discovery’. Only when Mawson had completed his work and the Australian claim had been secured would a revised Antarctic Pilot be issued with all the disputatious references included.39
Yet the 1930 edition could not avoid controversy altogether, since any choice of names had implications for sovereignty. Its use of the British name ‘Graham Land’ for the Antarctic Peninsula, which was part of the British claim to the Falkland Islands Dependencies, thereby strengthened that claim, while at the same time diminishing the American claim, which was based upon the discoveries of early sealers such as Nathaniel Palmer. While the Antarctic Pilot noted that most of the Antarctic coastline remained ‘very little explored, and largely unknown’, it included a brief history of discoveries in the Antarctic, and it was generally the British finds that were privileged. American geographers, in particular, would have been dismayed to see that there was no mention by name of Palmer or other American explorers of the early nineteenth century.40
The publication of the Antarctic Pilot could not be delayed for long if Britain was to retain its position as mapmaker for the world’s mariners. Norwegian whalers had already started to make maps of their own when they found that British ones were not sufficiently comprehensive or accurate for the use of their fleets, which were beginning to work in areas of the Antarctic where British explorers had not ventured. The Whalers’ Mutual Insurance Association of Norway compiled their own maps, which were edited by the staff of Lars Christensen’s Whaling Museum in Sandefjord.41 These maps were not only useful but were also the only sure way of ensuring that Norwegian names and discoveries were adequately acknowledged. As Christensen complained in his account of Riiser-Larsen’s voyage in the Norvegia, Mawson had sailed along the coastline in the wake of the Norvegia and had given British names to geographic features that Riiser-Larsen had named just days or weeks earlier. Christensen was particularly chagrined by Mawson’s claimed discovery of ‘Mac. Robertson Land’, part of which had been discovered earlier by Riiser-Larsen and named ‘Lars Christensen Land’. In an attempt to defend the Norwegian names, and the ‘great and real interests’ they represented, Christensen produced a map of all the Antarctic coastline between 20° W and 100° E.42
The Norwegian maps were not sufficient to prevent Lars Christensen Land from being included in the vast sector annexed by Australia in 1933. Although Christensen could not convince his government to resist the British and Australian takeover of territory that Norwegians had been first to discover, he could at least take solace that some Norwegian names would be perpetuated on British as well as Norwegian maps. ‘In the long run,’ wrote Christensen, ‘it is of far greater importance than may appear at first sight,’ for it acknowledged the priority of Norwegian discovery. The Norwegians would continue to ‘cling closely to these Norwegian names on the chart, where, indeed, they have every right to stand’.43 Although he did not say so, Christensen may well have surmised that the presence of the names, along with the activities of Norwegian whalers, might one day lead to Norway’s sovereignty being recognised by an international court.
In fact, some of the Norwegian names had been placed on the maps by Mawson, who acknowledged the work of Riiser-Larsen by naming a tall mountain after him and an ice-covered dome after Lars Christensen. During his 1911 expedition, Mawson had made the mistake of naming a large section of coastline in honour of the American Charles Wilkes. He had also stretched the limits of Adélie Land far beyond the 240 kilometres of coastline that Dumont d’Urville had actually seen. Mawson’s gentlemanly genuflection towards his predecessors had annoyed British officials, complicating their attempts to confine – or dismiss altogether – the potential territorial claims of other nations.
During his 1929–31 voyages, which had been driven by political rather than scientific objectives, Mawson had been more conscious of the implications of his naming. He made amends for his early actions by using only British names for the new lands that he claimed to have discovered. Whereas the ill-defined Wilkes Land and Adélie Land had formerly sprawled across a large part of the Australian quadrant, they were now strictly confined, with Mawson adding ‘BANZARE Land’, ‘Sabrina Land’, ‘Princess Elizabeth Land’ and ‘Mac. Robertson Land’. He also stretched the limits of Enderby Land. On British and Australian maps, at least, the sector that Australia wanted to annex was now dominated by British names.44
With several rival maps of the Antarctic seeking to be regarded as the standard work, calls began to emerge for the naming of geographic features to be done according to agreed international principles. When Mawson’s report of his expeditions was read to a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in March 1932, the British geographer and historian Hugh Robert Mill criticised the tendency of explorers to scatter as many names as possible on the landscape so as to crowd out the names of their rivals. He suggested that explorers should have to submit names to an international scientific body, which would lay out general principles on the naming of places and adjudicate any disputes. He was particularly concerned that names should ‘fall pleasantly on the ear like Enderby Land, Mount Erebus and Cape Goodenough’, which were all good English names and ‘not like certain cacophonous ejaculations which have been cast forth during some recent explorations’.45 Of course, names that fell pleasantly on an English ear might well jar when heard by a Norwegian. Clearly, there was no easy answer to the problem of deciding on internationally acceptable names in the Antarctic, particularly as the outcome could be crucial in deciding wider questions of sovereignty. Even Mill, who had purported to be nonpartisan, could not help but be Anglo-centric in his comments.
The expeditions of Byrd and Mawson, and the activities of the whalers, saw hundreds of names applied to maps of the Antarctic; sometimes there was more than one name for the same geographic feature. In other places, names were applied to features of no consequence, simply in order to have as many names as possible of a certain nationality, or to have as many expedition members and supporters as possible memorialised. When the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, Arthur Hinks, took up Mill’s suggestion and proposed general principles to guide cartographers and explorers in their naming of places, national considerations still came to the fore.
A memorandum by Hinks was discussed by the British government’s Polar Committee in October 1933, with the Admiralty’s hydrographer, Captain Edgell, complaining to his colleagues about the large number of names Byrd had used on a map of his expedition’s work that was published by the American Geographical Society. The names were either on territory already claimed by Britain – the Ross Dependency – or in the area to the east of the Ross Dependency, which Britain wanted to claim. Rather than accepting the names, when Edgell compiled a new Admiralty chart he omitted about seventy-five per cent of the American names, in order to ensure there were opportunities for British names to be applied in those areas by subsequent explorers.
Hinks suggested that the British position might also be strengthened by a stipulation that the final decision on naming should rest not with the explorer but with the ‘administrative authority over the areas concerned’. In other words, Britain would have the authority to decide on names throughout the two-thirds of the continent that it had annexed. Explorers were also to be told that they should avoid using names that were not British. Moreover, names announced by radio from the Antarctic – as Byrd had done – would not be accepted. It was publication that was important to the British, preferably in a respectable geographical journal rather than a mere newspaper.46 Despite these attempts at rational resolution, there would be decades of dispute about names and naming between the rival territorial claimants.
While Norway had refrained from formally claiming the territories its whalers had discovered and named, Britain had no qualms about pressing ahead with its long-term ambition of controlling most of the continent. In February 1933, Britain added a huge swathe of territory to its existing Antarctic holdings when the king issued an order in council that annexed the sector that lay between 45° E and 160° E, other than Adélie Land. The administration of the sector was vested in the Australian government on behalf of the British Empire.
A few months later, legislation was introduced in the Australian parliament to create the ‘Australian Antarctic Territory’. In opening the debate on 26 May, Attorney-General John Latham of the United Australia Party provided members of parliament with maps of the territory, on which were marked the major geographic features, some of which had names that the Norwegians had given them. The government was conscious of the exploration work that had been done by Riiser-Larsen and other Norwegians, and of the protests that were likely to come from Oslo when the territory explored and claimed by their whalers was snatched away by Australia. Keeping some of the Norwegian names – thereby acknowledging ‘the association of these intrepid Norwegian sailors with this area’ – was a means of appeasing Norwegian anger while at the same time declaring that the discovery of the sector was largely due to Australian enterprise.
Albert Green, a Labor representative for the rich goldmining district of Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia, offered cross-party support, agreeing that ‘the land has come to us, not by right of conquest, but by right of discovery’. Richard Casey was there to lend his support, having returned from London and been elected to parliament. Having been closely involved in organising support for both Wilkins and Mawson, he now declared that the takeover of the sector was not a sudden land grab but ‘the culminating point of twenty years of continuous and concerted effort on the part of Australians to consolidate their interests in the Antarctic’. At the same time, he was careful to assure the Norwegians that their interests would not suffer because of the British annexation.47 In reality, Australia was out to undermine the Norwegian dominance of the whaling industry.
Albert Green was one of several MPs who argued that the takeover of the territory would encourage Australians to re-engage with the whaling industry. It would ‘develop in them that bold and adventurous maritime spirit which has for so many centuries characterized the people of Great Britain’. Latham was more conscious of Norwegian sensitivities and consequently more circumspect about lauding the riches to be gained from whaling. Although he acknowledged its ‘considerable actual and potential economic importance’, he concentrated mainly on the possibility of gold and other mineral discoveries, as well as the value of seasonal weather forecasts that Antarctic weather stations might provide for Australia.
Latham also spoke of the need to bring the unbridled killing of whales under control before their stocks were ‘totally destroyed’. He pointed to the massive increase in the whale slaughter: in the summer of 1919–20 some 11,369 whales had been killed, while in the summer of 1930–31 more than 40,000 whales were slaughtered; the price of whale oil had plummeted from £80 to just £13 a ton. With forty-three factory ships, six shore stations, 232 whale-catchers and ten transport ships operating that year, the frenzied killing of whales had to be curbed so the industry could become sustainable. Although an international whaling convention had been agreed to by the League of Nations in 1931, it was not yet in force and would in any case need interested nations to enforce its provisions.48
There were only a few voices raised in opposition. The maverick Labor MP Dr William Maloney feared that Asian nations, some of which had already described Australia as ‘a vacant land’, would be emboldened to make an even ‘stronger claim to this country if we add to our territory an area equal to that of Western Australia’. Rather than Australia administering the sector, Maloney suggested that the League of Nations should take control so that the people of Asia would have no justification to accuse Australia of ‘greed for additional territory’. This would have been a good way of avoiding future territorial disputes, but the claimant nations in the Antarctic, let alone the Australian parliament, were not yet ready to consider such a suggestion. When the bill reached the Senate, one senator questioned how the mere fact of Australian administration could prevent the extermination of whales. Instead, he predicted, the annexation would complicate Australia’s relations with other nations, particularly the United States and Norway.
Despite these prescient arguments, Latham’s promise that the territorial takeover would not cost Australia a penny – at least in the short term – was sufficient to convince the parliament of its merits.49 Australia, which already had territory in New Guinea, now had an empire that stretched from the equator to the South Pole, although it would take another three years before the creation of the Australian Antarctic Territory was formally promulgated on 24 August 1936.50 As some had warned, its creation only intensified the rivalry in the Antarctic.
Although Britain and Norway had implicitly agreed to claim separate sectors, Christensen still wanted to control the entire coastline that he and his whalers had explored. There was a pressing financial imperative for him to do so. As he openly admitted, all his actions had been ‘based on one special motive: we were out to get whales’. And with international moves to regulate the killing of whales, Christensen asserted his ‘right to carry on whaling’, particularly in those areas that his ships had explored, which included the newly created Australian Antarctic Territory.
He complained that the Australian move ‘supersedes those natural rights which we have won for ourselves through the whaling industry’. While it was ‘perfectly natural’ for Australia and New Zealand to desire the ownership of the Antarctic coastline that lay closest to their shores, Norway was ‘more closely bound up with it’, both in a commercial and a practical sense. With Lars Christensen Land having been ‘entirely engulfed’ by the Australian Antarctic Territory, Christensen bemoaned the fact that there was ‘not much left to us of all our discoveries’. By this, he meant not just his own discoveries but the discoveries of his fellow countrymen, going back to Roald Amundsen, Henrik Bull and Carl Larsen.
Rather than accepting just the sector to which Britain wanted to restrict Norway, Christensen called on the Norwegian government to claim all of what he called ‘the Norwegian mainland’, which included the sector from 50° E to 15° W (from Coats Land to Enderby Land), the sector from 60° E to 75° E (Lars Christensen Land/Mac. Robertson Land) and the sector near Peter I Land from 80° W to 100° W (Ellsworth Land). Together, these sectors comprised more than one-third of the continent.51
The competition between Mawson and Christensen, and between their respective countries, was a precursor to a much more intensive struggle for supremacy in the Antarctic. The whalers had swamped the world’s whale oil market in 1931, causing whaling companies to keep their fleets at home and to permanently close some of their shore stations. But they returned to the Antarctic as the glut of whale oil was gradually run down and prices began to recover.
This time, it was not just the Norwegians and British who were turning their attention southward. As international relations deteriorated during the 1930s and the threat of another world war loomed large, Germany and Japan began to look to the Antarctic to secure vital supplies of animal fats for food, and glycerine for explosives. The United States government also began to take a much closer interest, mainly due to the strategic importance of the Drake Passage, which provided a vital maritime link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The British dream of having the Antarctic and its riches all to itself was becoming more distant than ever, as the competition for control of the region took a new and more dangerous turn.