On 11 March 1957, Admiral Richard Byrd breathed his last. After repeatedly risking his life on perilous expeditions to the poles, the sixty-eight-year-old explorer died in his sleep in the bedroom of his Boston home. Byrd’s work in the Antarctic was finished.
His last visit was in the summer of 1955–56, when he had sailed south as the notional leader of the American preparations for the IGY. Although Admiral George Dufek had occupied the larger cabin on the massive icebreaker USS Glacier, it was Byrd whom the newsreel cameramen wanted to film as he arrived at Little America V. His presence had helped to give legitimacy to the American effort, and to ensure public and congressional support for its considerable budget. Aged and ailing, Byrd boarded an aircraft on the ice runway in January 1956 for what would be his last, symbolic flight over the South Pole. Because of his frailty, a naval doctor accompanied him everywhere, with strict instructions not to let the old explorer die on his last expedition.
Once back in the United States, Byrd’s final achievements were to get his young acolyte Paul Siple appointed as leader of the South Pole base, which Byrd had suggested be called the ‘Amundsen-Scott Station’. He also ensured that his rival Finn Ronne was excluded from Antarctic decision-making. With his life ebbing away, Byrd’s well-connected friends arranged for him to be awarded the Medal of Freedom, which he received in full dress uniform in the upstairs study of his home.1 Two weeks later, the long-time ringmaster of America’s Antarctic effort was dead. But the circus continued regardless.
From the mid-1950s, there was a rush of expeditions to the Antarctic, as nations sought to secure a place at the territorial carve-up before other IGY participants began arriving. The competition was most intense on the Antarctic Peninsula and its nearby island chains, where Britain, Argentina and Chile had now a combined total of twenty-one bases, while Australia and France beefed up their efforts in the Australian Sector to pre-empt any new arrivals.
They were too late. Like that of the British in the 1920s, the territorial ambitions of the United States and Russia were continental in extent, and the Cold War rivals would devote whatever resources were necessary to achieve them. Unlike the British, though, they did not want to assert sovereignty over the continent, which they knew would unleash howls of opposition from friends and foes alike. They were content to achieve their ambitions by other means.
American officials had largely abandoned the idea of claiming particular territory, in favour of securing free rein to explore and exploit the entire continent without having any recognised legal title. They would begin by establishing three strategically located bases. With Byrd’s old site at the Bay of Whales now unsuitable for ships, the successor to his four Little America settlements was located some kilometres away at Kainan Bay, on the eastern edge of the Ross Sea. Little America V would not be the largest base, which was established instead on Ross Island in McMurdo Sound, as a logistical centre from which to service the American bases across the continent. The third of the preparatory bases would be at the South Pole itself.
In the American view, the key to controlling the continent was the South Pole. Whoever occupied it might claim to be in implicit possession of all Antarctica. As explorers from Shackleton to Byrd had shown, the pole had a symbolic significance in the public mind that no other place on the continent could match. And dangerous journeys by dog sledge or motorised transport were no longer needed to get there. Aircraft had proved capable of lifting huge amounts of material during the Berlin blockade, and the recent creation of a massive American airbase in Greenland had shown how they could operate from snow runways. The Antarctic icecap proved similarly suitable, with jet packs added for take-off in the rarefied atmosphere.
It was just such an aircraft that was used by Admiral Dufek when he flew to the South Pole in a modified DC-3 on 31 October 1956. The first thing he did upon landing in the bitterly cold conditions was to create a hole in the ice for a bamboo flagpole. Whereas Byrd had dropped the flags of UN members onto the ice when he flew over the South Pole during Operation Highjump in February 1947, Dufek raised only the Stars and Stripes during the few minutes that his aircraft spent on the ice, its engines roaring to ward off the cold. The admiral lingered just long enough to insert into the flagpole a letter ‘verifying that he was there’, while radar deflectors were set up as a guide for the many planes that would come after him to establish a base for eighteen scientists and navy personnel, led by Siple.2
It took nearly a year of preparation before Dufek could make his flight. With bases at McMurdo Sound, Little America V and now the South Pole, America would go on to establish another four around the continent. One was at Gould Bay on the Weddell Sea, where Finn Ronne was finally able to achieve his desire of leading a last expedition to the Antarctic. Due to Byrd’s opposition, it seemed that Ronne would have to lead a private expedition using a Norwegian whaling ship offered by Lars Christensen. However, the Defense Department brokered a compromise between Byrd and Ronne that allowed Ronne to lead an official American expedition under the aegis of the IGY.
In a meeting with General Graves Erskine and Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Anderson in May 1955, Ronne stressed the importance of beating the British and Argentinians into Gould Bay. As a former marine general, Erskine did not see the urgency, noting that if we ‘wanted a permanent foothold in the Antarctic, we would probably claim it anywhere’, regardless of objections from other nations. He suggested Ronne abandon his plan to accept Christensen’s help and instead use a US navy ship, with Ronne going back on active service. In the event, the British and Argentinians did establish their bases on the Weddell Sea before Ronne arrived on a US icebreaker in January 1957 to establish Ellsworth Base on the Gould Bay ice shelf.3
The base completed the pattern of American sites across the continent. Combined with the size of the American effort and its $250-million budget, this made the United States the pre-eminent Antarctic power. Any doubts that Americans may have harboured about their rights in the Antarctic were assuaged by news stories that linked the American exploration and settlement to their earlier westward expansion across North America. The New York Times correspondent Walter Sullivan made the most explicit historical connections, which would only help to engender a sense of American possession. In a report about an eleven-man tractor-driven expedition to establish Byrd station in Marie Byrd Land, he wrote of the ‘new type of pioneer’, who ‘moves across the great white prairies of this continent’. They were the ‘modern equivalent of a covered wagon train’, wrote Sullivan, ‘constantly on guard against sudden danger – not from Indians, but from the death traps called crevasses’.
One of these crevasses had swallowed a tractor, killing its unsuspecting driver, Max Kiel, making him a casualty in the battle for Antarctica. Dufek told a memorial service that Kiel ‘gave his life for science’. In this battle, the Americans were the conquerors and the penguins were sometimes depicted as the vanquished enemy. In January 1957, Sullivan described how ‘a long see-saw struggle’ led to sailors seizing ‘a four-acre beachhead at Cape Hallett from an army of 150,000 penguins’. By January 1959, seventeen Americans had lost their lives during the ongoing battle to master the continent. Dufek consoled himself with the thought that ‘it is always [thus] in the opening of a new frontier’.4
Not to be outdone by the Americans, the Russians established a massive logistics base of their own on the coast of the Australian Antarctic Territory, from which other bases could be established by air and by land. To counter in the public mind the American base at the South Pole, the Russians placed one of their inland bases at the so-called ‘Pole of Inaccessibility’. This was the point on the continent that was furthest from any coastline, and therefore the location of what might be called the centre of the continent. Yet the remorseless movement of the ice sheet ensured that the Russian base began to move inexorably from its starting point as soon as it was established, as had happened to the American base at the South Pole. While the Russians could aspire to match the Americans in the scale of their scientific and logistical effort, the New Zealand base on Ross Island, with its handful of personnel, could never hope to equal the hive of activity at the nearby McMurdo base. There, hundreds of Americans were living and working in a blizzard-prone pastiche of a small American town, complete with a cinema and chapel.
New Zealand had set up its small base on Ross Island in a vain attempt to retrieve the territorial title that they had long ago lost to the Americans. As the New Zealanders discovered, it was too little, too late. Although the United States required New Zealand’s cooperation to supply its bases by way of Christchurch, it would never acknowledge New Zealand’s sovereignty over the Ross Dependency. This was brought home to New Zealand officials when Dufek and Gould casually mentioned, when visiting Wellington, the possibility of constructing an airstrip on land at Marble Point, across from the McMurdo base, rather than rely on the landing strip that had been bulldozed on the bay ice. There was no question of requesting permission from New Zealand to take over that strategic site, which had the potential to be developed into a major airfield.
The New Zealand officials were flummoxed, since the expensive development suggested the Americans were intending to remain permanently in the western part of the Ross Dependency. New Zealand was in a bind. A protest might prompt the United States to protect its McMurdo investment by annexing the area. But if New Zealand failed to object, it would weaken its title to the whole dependency.5 Not knowing what to do, New Zealand did nothing, waiting to see whether the Americans would proceed with their plans.
In the meantime, an American aircraft made the first commercial flight to Antarctica. The four-engine propeller-driven Pan American Stratocruiser was chartered by the US Navy to take technicians and men of the constructions corps from San Francisco. After calling at Christchurch, it touched down in a flurry of snow on the ice runway at McMurdo on 15 October 1957. The sight of two female flight attendants stepping onto the ice where Scott and Shackleton had struggled for their lives was a truly modern moment. They were promptly taken on a dog-sledge race to the McMurdo mess hall, where they enjoyed a cup of coffee with men who had been starved of female company.
The flight proved the potential of Antarctica for tourism, once appropriate facilities were put in place. Indeed, a few weeks later, a group of six American congressmen, accompanied by Gould, landed at McMurdo and lauded Antarctica’s potential for tourism, predicting that within five years the arrival of commercial jet aircraft would make McMurdo ‘a winter sports center similar to Norway and Switzerland’. On a flight to Little America V, Dufek and Gould made sure the congressmen looked down upon Marble Point, where an ice-free airport could be developed for such thrill-seeking tourists. Gould had urged Dufek to impress them with the strategic importance of ‘Marble Point as the only place yet known where an airstrip could be built’. Gould would later praise Dufek for doing ‘a superb job of indoctrinating the Congressmen’. However, before any of these developments could happen, the congressmen conceded to journalists, ‘questions of political sovereignty would have to be resolved’.6
The Pan American flight and its possible implications posed difficult legal and political problems for New Zealand. With the flight having left from Christchurch for the Ross Dependency, the token administrator of the dependency, Captain Harold Ruegg, warned Wellington that it ‘raised problems of jurisdiction which need careful investigation’. New Zealand raised no objections to American military flights, but a commercial flight was a different matter, wrote Ruegg. In fact, the New Zealand government had already patched up the problem by informing Washington that it would ‘regard the aircraft as being to all intents and purposes a military aircraft’.7 That awkward solution provided a way around the immediate imbroglio.
New Zealand was ambivalent about the issue. While it would infringe their sovereignty, an American tourist development at McMurdo would probably use Christchurch as a transit point, with international tourists likely to spend money touring New Zealand as well. Meanwhile, a New Zealand cabinet minister flew over America’s South Pole base in a US Army Globemaster, which dropped supplies of fuel and food to the scientists below. The politician took the opportunity to add something to the blossoming array of parachuted stores, dropping what he believed would be ‘the first N.Z. flag at the South Pole’.8 In fact, a New Zealand flag had been among the UN member flags that Byrd had dropped in February 1947. The latest flag was a futile attempt to assert a sovereignty that, in practice, no longer existed.
Australia faced an equally serious challenge to its sovereignty, with three Russian bases and one American base scheduled for establishment in its territory for the IGY. The prospect of the Russian arrival, in particular, had prompted the Australian government to expand its own presence on the continent. It had taken nearly a decade to get Mawson Base established in 1954. It was located in the western part of the Australian territory, at about 63° E, to ward off the Norwegians, who had a stronger claim to possession of that region. Australia’s Antarctic chief Phillip Law later recalled how the ‘spirit of the day’ was ‘all concerned with planting flags and declaring sovereignty over new areas and beating the Russians and Americans and others to these things’.9 He had convinced the government to establish Mawson, on the understanding it was just for the duration of the IGY. But the imminent arrival of the Russians ensured that Mawson would remain much longer on territory that Australia regarded as its own, but that the United States persisted in calling ‘Wilkes Land’.
As the Russian ships approached the Antarctic coast in January 1956, looking for a suitable site for their main base, the Australians expanded their own presence by establishing a base on the coast near the Vestfold Hills, at about 78° E. Dufek had sent the Glacier on a survey of the same coastline, during which several stops were made to allow the American flag to be hoisted onshore. The Americans landed on a group of rocky islets on 18 March 1956, only to find that the Russians had preceded them by nine days and left a note recording their visit. The Russians, in turn, had been preceded by Law nearly two months before, with Law leaving a note of his own, which declared, to whomsoever should read it, ‘Welcome to Australian Antarctic Territory! The first landing in this place was made from the ship Kista Dan.’10 In reinforcing Australia’s claim to the territory, Law was aware that precedence could be crucial if the matter was ever referred to an international court.
The Russians finally settled on a site on the coast at about 93° E and began unloading men and material. The base was named ‘Mirny’, to commemorate the name of Bellingshausen’s ship and thereby connect the present Soviet activity with the discoveries of the old Russian empire. In Russian, mirny meant ‘peaceful’, which fitted well with current Soviet foreign policy. The coast on which Mirny was located was named by the Russians as ‘Pravda Coast’, after the Communist Party newspaper, while the main street of the ‘settlement’ was named after Lenin. It had a line of houses, along with a hospital, a laundry, a bathhouse, a canteen and even a pigsty.
The Russians were still unloading their ships when Law arrived in the Kista Dan on 30 January 1956. He met with the Russian scientific leader, Mikhail Somov, and presented him with a recently published map of the Australian Sector. It was done ostensibly in a spirit of cooperation but with the unspoken intention of making clear to Somov that he was on territory claimed by Australia and that its principal geographic features had already been named. Later, when the main Russian expedition ship called at Adelaide on its way back to Russia, Law flew from Melbourne to join with Mawson in presenting its personnel with the reports of Mawson’s 1929–31 voyages that had been published to date, and to give a lecture to the Russians on the work of the various Australian expeditions from 1911 onwards. Of course, none of this political theatre deflected the Soviet Union from exploring the Australian Sector, surveying its coastline and naming its features. Law privately conceded that such work provided Russia with ‘a strong claim to certain areas of territory’, should they ever wish to exercise it.11
The United States was also trying to limit the rights that the Russians might be able to assert. Byrd was in the Antarctic when the Russians arrived to set up Mirny. In a carefully calculated move of his own, he sent a message of welcome to Somov, offering American cooperation. At the same time, Byrd informed him that American aircraft had flown in the vicinity of the two sites where the Russians planned to establish their inland bases and had found them suitable. Byrd wanted to show the Russians that the Americans had seen the sites first, which might ‘some day play a role in the complex problem of deciding claims to the Antarctic’.
In fact, the routes of the American flights suggested they were hundreds of kilometres away from the prospective Russian bases. Byrd had planned to fly over the Pole of Inaccessibility to pre-empt the Russians but had been forced by bad weather to fly over the South Pole instead. The flights were all part of a rushed photo-reconnaissance of as much of the continent as the Americans could manage, before the Russians arrived with their own aerial mapping plans. Such was the urgency that Dufek ordered the American aircraft to keep flying from the ice runway at McMurdo despite signs of melting; there was a possibility that the runway, and any aircraft on it, might simply float off into the Ross Sea.12
Both Russia and America wanted to have free rein over the entire continent, and both regarded their own explorers as the discoverers of Antarctica. Both took symbolic possession of the continent by establishing bases – at the South Pole and the Pole of Inaccessibility respectively. While the Americans claimed to have preceded the Russians to their inland bases, the Russians did likewise with the Wilkes Base, near the Windmill Islands at about 111° E, some 800 kilometres from Mirny. When three American naval ships arrived to build the base in January 1957, they discovered a cairn left the previous November by Russian explorers from Mirny. The Russians had landed there by aircraft to explore and map the surrounding area; they left a vodka bottle with a message claiming to have ‘discovered’ the region. Determined not to be outdone, the Americans added a note to the bottle, which pointed out that the bay had been discovered by American fliers during Operation Highjump in 1947, and that American surveyors had landed there the following year to establish ground control points. A copy of the resulting map, which had been published just prior to the arrival of the Russians, was added to the vodka bottle, which was duly returned to the cairn.13 And so the circus continued into the IGY, which was meant to be marked by scientific cooperation rather than territorial rivalry.
The rush of base-building was matched by a flood of philatelic issues, as nations continued to use stamps to assert their sovereignty. Many also established post offices at their new bases to demonstrate their administration of the area. Such was the public interest that the US Navy took hundreds of thousands of philatelic covers to Antarctica in late 1955, only to find that the sailors manning the several post offices could not process the four tons of mail before the ships left for home. The letters remained in the Antarctic over winter, with sailors processing them as time allowed.14
Most Antarctic stamps were shameless examples of political propaganda, whether it was a Norwegian stamp displaying a map of Antarctica with Queen Maud Land prominently marked, or New Zealand stamps showing a map of the Ross Dependency and the British explorers whose work underpinned New Zealand sovereignty. Others were more subtle, such as the French stamp in 1956 that showed the newly named ‘Terres Australes et Antarctiques Françaises’ and their abundant penguins and sea elephants. It combined an assertion of French sovereignty with the implicit suggestion that its control would conserve the otherwise threatened wildlife.15
Australian External Affairs minister Richard Casey took a close interest in such assertions of sovereignty. In June 1956, he photographed the relevant portion of the globe so that a map could be drawn showing the relationship between Australia and its Antarctic territory. Originally done to accompany a newspaper article, Casey had the map reduced in size for use on a stamp. The space between Australia and Antarctica was foreshortened to give a misleading impression of the distance between the two continents. Casey thought it ‘would have some educational value within Australia – and also overseas’. When concerns were raised about the map’s suitability as a stamp, Casey stressed its ‘considerable political advantage’, noting that there ‘is going to be a good deal of politics connected with the Antarctic in the next few years – and we rather badly need some publicity of the sort that such a stamp would provide’.
The pressure worked. A stamp was designed to Casey’s specifications, including both a map and a scene showing the Australian flag being flown by Law in the Vestfold Hills in 1954. The stamps were issued in early 1957 for overseas airmail letters, since it was ‘more politically valuable … to have this carried on letters going to other countries’. Casey later confided to a colleague that it had all been done ‘for what might be called propaganda purposes’. Cheaper versions of the stamp would later be issued for circulation within Australia.16
Amid the continuing uncertainty about the Soviet presence, and the territorial implications of the IGY activity, Law pushed for greater Australian activity. He predicted that there could be a quick carve-up of the continent in the wake of the IGY, with the United States making ‘extensive territorial claims which will cut right across the sector principle’. This could provoke the Soviet Union into calling for the continent to come under the control of the United Nations. Law suggested that Australia’s best hope lay with the United States making a territorial claim, followed by a process of ‘horse-trading’ with Australia, during which Australia could concede ‘vast spaces which appear as important concessions to our opponents but which have little real value’. In such a situation, Australia needed to know which parts were most valuable to retain. For this, more research needed to be quickly done.17
The men at Mawson Base had done almost all they could to explore the immediate area. They had just one small Beaver plane that had gone to the limit of its 640-kilometre range from the base. Any further exploration would require a larger aircraft and additional ground transport. But Casey preferred to increase activity at the small Davis Base near the Vestfold Hills, and considered establishing another base even further east, to the immediate south of Australia, from where a Russian submarine or missile base might otherwise threaten Australia. Spreading the Australian presence further along the coastline would also be the best means of reinforcing Australian sovereignty over the whole territory.18
Despite Casey’s view, Law continued to call for an expansion of activity at Mawson, along with the possible establishment of another base in Oates Land, at the eastern extremity of the Australian territory, thousands of kilometres from Mawson. This area, argued Law, was ‘one of the few remaining parts of Australian Antarctic Territory about which we have no information’. Along with Mawson, he had been scanning Norwegian and American aerial photographs to find the most suitable sites for bases, so that Australia could secure them before its rivals did. He was particularly interested in rocky outcrops near safe harbours, so as to avoid the problems of building a base amidst accumulating snow on shifting ice.
Law thought he had discerned a suitable site in Oates Land, but it would require a second ship to supply it, which would have serious budgetary implications. That, in turn, would limit what might be done on land. An economical solution was possible if the United States, once the IGY had ended, handed over its small base in the Windmill Islands, which was almost directly south of Perth. If the United States offered it to Australia, Casey was advised by his officials, Australia should accept it. The officials argued that it was better for ‘political reasons’ to have ‘several small stations’ strung along the coastline of Australia’s territory.19 Yet it would take more than several bases to ensure Australia’s possession.
Securing the effective possession of a place by occupation was only part of the process. Law was concerned that Australia was not doing enough to convince the world that it was in rightful possession of the territory. He complained to a friend in May 1957 that ‘no-one on the official side seems very interested in really publicizing our work’, although he took some solace from the issue of the Antarctic stamps and the forthcoming production of a book ‘which should help to inform other countries of our efforts’. It was not sufficient. Law tried to get America’s Polar Record to give greater coverage to Australian activities, urging the Department of External Affairs to take additional steps to ‘more effectively demonstrate that we consider our Antarctic possessions an integral part of Australia’. Among other things, he wanted more stamps, a booklet for schools, greater detail about the territory in the Commonwealth Year Book, the commissioning of an official history, the appointment of an administrator for the territory and the issuing of regulations for mining licenses in the Antarctic.20 Law was frustrated further when the navy refused to deploy the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne for a summer of photographic flights, so that Australia could claim to know its territory better than others.21 Knowing a place was a necessary part of being recognised as its rightful possessor.
The IGY provided an ideal opportunity for nations to have their maps and names accepted by the many scientific parties heading to the Antarctic. The American Geographical Society had provided maps of the Antarctic for Byrd’s first expedition in 1928. Now the society’s cartographer, William Briesemeister, revised the outdated map for the use of IGY expeditions. All those Anglo-American discussions between Brian Roberts and Harold Saunders proved their worth, as Briesemeister was able to refer to the resulting 1953 British gazetteer of names and the publications of the US Board on Geographic Names. Before actually placing particular names on the map, Briesemeister had them checked again by the US board, with the American recommendations being generally ‘adopted throughout’.22 The board then published its own gazetteer of Antarctic names in 1956, which listed every placename in Antarctica, noting who discovered and named it and whether any other names had been used.23 Briesemeister’s revised map was published in 1958. He incorporated the most recent discoveries and names of the Argentinians and Australians so that his would be the most up-to-date map available for IGY parties.24 It might then become the standard map, with the approved American names being accepted by other nations.
Australia had other ideas. It had aspired to have its 1939 map become the standard map and wanted to update it with the latest discoveries and names. However, the arrival of the Russians and the rising influence of scientists during the IGY complicated matters. Scientists from ten of the twelve IGY nations had met in The Hague in February 1958 under the auspices of the International Council of Scientific Unions, where they agreed to establish a Special Committee on Antarctic Research – later renamed as the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) – which would propose and coordinate scientific research in the Antarctic. Later that year, a SCAR conference in Moscow heard a Russian delegate announce that the Soviet Union was planning to map the entire continent. When the Australian delegate asked for the plan to be deferred, the Russians insisted that they would map one-third of the continent over the next few years, assuring the meeting that it was a ‘purely scientific question and no attempt would be made to mark boundaries on the map’. Australia and other claimant nations were not reassured.25
While SCAR was proposing to coordinate mapping in the Antarctic, Australia was determined to use maps and naming to support its territorial claim. In December 1958, Law confided to a meeting of the Executive Planning Committee, chaired by Casey, that he had ‘warned both U.K. and U.S. authorities … of the problems and difficulties that would arise if SCAR entered into mapping’. Casey agreed, noting that ‘if other countries were permitted to do mapping in our Territory we gave them a great advantage’. He was particularly concerned about the Russians producing a superior map of Australia’s territory. It was beyond Australia’s resources to compete, and Casey welcomed any cooperation from the Americans so that Australia could produce a map just of ‘the coastline and a certain distance inland from it’.
His more pugnacious colleague William Wentworth wanted the mapping to encompass the expanse of the polar icecap as well, noting that ‘vast open spaces’ looked ‘impressive’ when laid out on a map. But Australian cartographer Bruce Lambert advised that even the mapping of the coastline and immediate hinterland would take seven to ten years to complete. As a possible solution to Australia’s conundrum, Wentworth suggested that it could establish an Antarctic Mapping Centre as an international service, thereby circumventing both the SCAR and the Russian initiatives.26
If there was going to be an international map of Antarctica, Casey wanted it to have all the Australian names that Mawson had bestowed during his expeditions. Otherwise, the map would be dominated by the discoveries and names of the contemporaneous Norwegians and the more recent American and Russian explorers. Casey was already concerned about a recent American map that was ‘most ungenerous’ about Australian discoveries. Mawson agreed that the American map was ‘ingeniously contrived … to greatly exaggerate the U.S.A.’s contribution’, which had only involved ‘cursory inspections from the air of the vast interior’.27
In September 1958, Law asked Mawson for the photos and charts from his 1929 voyage so that Law could align features with the names that Mawson had given them. The request came too late. The seventy-six-year-old Mawson died of a stroke on 14 October 1958, leaving many of the results from his voyages unpublished and his papers in a state of some confusion. His death sparked a rush by Casey and Law to have the final volumes published, particularly the geographical volume.28 As Law explained after lunching with Mawson’s widow, Australia’s territorial claim was based largely on Mawson’s voyages, which made it ‘most important’ that the maps ‘should be accurately drawn as soon as possible’. Casey reinforced the urgency, telling Lady Mawson that the Russians had been ‘producing their own maps and putting their own names to features which they claim to have discovered’. Australia needed to provide ‘incontrovertible evidence of Australian prior discovery if we are fully to protect our sovereignty’.29
Australian cartographers also had to clarify what Mawson had seen and named so that the current crop of Australian explorers would not overlay his discoveries with their own. There would be no easy resolution. The records of his voyages were less than ideal, and there continued to be dithering among Australian officials and politicians. It was not helped by Law looking elsewhere for a job, as he applied unsuccessfully to be vice-chancellor at different universities. He was unsure whether there would be much future for his Antarctic division and he was ‘extremely discouraged’ by his long-running battle to have his scientific responsibilities, and those of his division, recognised by the bureaucrats in Canberra.30
By April 1959, Australia’s Executive Planning Committee met in Melbourne to hear Casey, Lambert and the distracted Law discuss the vexed question of mapping. Lambert urged that any mapping ‘must be done in 1959 and 1960’, with Casey agreeing that ‘politically, the best efforts possible would have to be made in mapping’. That would require more effort than Australia was capable of mounting. By leaving the inland icecap to the Russians, Australia was able to concentrate on small-scale mapping of coastal areas. However, surveyors mapping the crevasse-ridden coast would have to be flown in to different areas with dogs and sledges.31
Meanwhile, Australia faced opposition to the idea of an International Antarctic Mapping Centre being established in Canberra. Neither Britain nor the United States wanted an international centre making maps that might endanger their own discoveries and names. The most they would concede was that Australia could provide a secretariat for the SCAR working group on cartography, which was meant to establish standards and exchange information between the Antarctic Mapping Centres in the various SCAR countries. It would be part of the secretariat’s task to maintain a map of the Antarctic on a scale of 1:10,000,000, which could include only a handful of names. The Australian Antarctic Mapping Centre and the associated secretariat would have an initial staff of just three, with Casey hoping vainly that it might one day develop into the desired international centre.32
Australia was far from alone in its rush to map and name as much of its territory as it could. At the urging of Brian Roberts, Britain had embarked on a two-year aerial survey of the Falkland Islands Dependencies. It was designed to produce the most accurate and comprehensive map of the territory claimed by Britain, Argentina and Chile, the control of which was also desired by the United States.
Apart from mapping, creating more bases, issuing more stamps and supporting an enhanced scientific program, Britain was going to capture the attention of the world with an expedition that combined scientific endeavour with the first dramatic crossing of the continent. Going by way of the South Pole, it would be reminiscent of the feats of Scott and Shackleton, and it would provide an economical way for Britain to compete with the United States and the Soviet Union on the Antarctic stage.
The plan involved establishing a base at Vahsel Bay on the Weddell Sea in late 1955, an advance base about 440 kilometres inland, and another base on Ross Island in January 1957. It was planned that Fuchs would take seven assorted motorised vehicles, led by two dog teams, across the continent, while Hillary would strike out from New Zealand’s Ross Island base to establish depots along a route towards the South Pole. Hillary was meant to stop short of the South Pole, in order to allow Fuchs to have the glory of being the first person since Scott to have reached the South Pole over land. However, the plan had not taken Hillary’s ambition into account, or the problems that Fuchs would encounter with his tracked vehicles.
After leaving his Vahsel Bay base in October 1957, Fuchs was forced to abandon three of his vehicles as he encountered a succession of crevasses and ice ridges. Setting off from Ross Island, Hillary had an easier time laying his depots on the polar plateau, the last of which was about 800 kilometres from the pole. Rather than waiting for Fuchs, Hillary kept going, expecting that they would meet before he reached the pole.
Looking on from afar, the press began to depict the expedition as a race ‘to the bottom of the world’. London’s Daily Mail added to the frenzy by flying one of its reporters to the South Pole to await Fuchs’ arrival. The expedition committee in London deplored the sensationalism, reminding the world that it was ‘undertaking a serious scientific programme’, while the New Zealand committee declared that there was ‘no question of a race for the Pole’. But the conqueror of Everest was not going to be denied a second triumph. With the world watching, Hillary pushed all the way to the pole, reaching it on 4 January 1958.33 Once again, a British explorer had been trumped in a race to the South Pole.
Concerned by the delays to Fuchs’ party, Hillary then suggested to the organising committee that Fuchs be flown out when he reached the pole; he could return the following year to complete the journey and its program of seismic readings. However, Fuchs, who finally reached the pole on 19 January, insisted on persevering all the way to the Ross Sea. He was determined to complete Shackleton’s ill-fated plan to cross the continent, and the London committee gave him its full support. After all, the whole point of the expedition was for Britain to counter the weight of America’s Antarctic effort with an expedition that captured world attention and emphasised the long history of British involvement with the continent.
The leaking to the press of the cables from Hillary and Fuchs certainly grabbed public attention, while Fuchs’ eventual arrival at Ross Island – after a ninety-nine-day journey – was more of an anticlimax. Yet he and the rest of the British team were still given a hero’s welcome when they arrived back in London. For a relatively small amount of money, the British and New Zealanders had reinforced their tenuous territorial claims with a feat that harkened back to past glories.34 But it was hardly sufficient to secure their title to territories that were being beset by expeditions from so many other countries.
It was the imminent arrival of these expeditions, and the fear of Russian bases remaining in Antarctica after the conclusion of the IGY, that prompted the United States and the seven claimant nations to put proposals for internationalisation back onto the diplomatic table. In February 1956, the staunchly anti-communist Secretary of State John Foster Dulles met in Washington with ambassadors from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to discuss ways of ‘countering Soviet penetration’ of the Antarctic. While conceding that the United States had potential territorial conflicts with the four Commonwealth countries, Dulles agreed on the need ‘to keep the Antarctic in friendly hands.’ He was confident that any differences between them should ‘not prevent … the reaching of a common position in regard to the Soviet’.35
That optimistic view soon dissipated when the Soviets arrived and established Mirny in 1955. By June 1956, an official of the Australian Department of External Affairs conceded that it was ‘too late now to exclude the Soviet Union completely from the Antarctic’ and that Moscow might very well assert territorial claims based upon its past discoveries and ‘the very substantial scientific work it is now doing’. It was more important to prevent any future arrivals from making claims, and for Australia to support a settlement that would give part of the continent ‘to every one of the present claimants, including the Soviet Union’.36
With Russian bases on Australian territory, and with the threat of India taking the Antarctic question to the United Nations General Assembly, Australia sought to develop a scheme for an international regime that would open the Antarctic to other nations for scientific purposes while preserving Australia’s sovereignty. Australian diplomats recommended that international recognition of Australian sovereignty should be extracted as the ‘price’ of agreeing to a system of international control for Antarctica. Giving other nations ‘rights of exploration, scientific research and commercial exploitation’ and demilitarising the continent could provide sufficient inducement for them to agree to such a regime. The changing reality on the ice had finally forced some Australian officials to accept the idea of inter-nationalisation, albeit as the least worst option. One even suggested that Australia could relinquish its sovereignty altogether if there was ‘a system of international control which would thereby ensure our security, rights of scientific research and commercial exploitation’.37 However, the Australian government still saw the Russian presence as a strategic threat.
When Casey had talks with State Department officials in November 1956, he warned darkly of his concern that Russian research in the Southern Ocean was gathering information for a submarine base that ‘would threaten Australia and command the whole South Pacific and Indian oceans’. In order to thwart such a threat, Casey argued that the United States should make a claim to Marie Byrd Land and engage in ‘largely notional’ activities, as Australia was doing in its territory. By not making a claim, and by refusing to recognise the Australian claim, the United States was making it easier for Russia to also refuse to recognise the Australian claim, which thereby allowed its bases to remain in the Australian territory after the end of the IGY. However, the Americans did not credit the Australian fears, and they were not going to limit their continental aspirations for the sake of assuaging them.38
Ever since the war, Australia had been forthright about its sovereignty and adamantly opposed to internationalisation. Yet it had been weak on the implementation of practical measures to reinforce its sovereignty. By mid-1957, Australia was being forced to adjust its territorial ambitions to the physical realities on the ground. When Casey went to Britain and the United States in July, he found that the British, New Zealanders and Americans were all moving toward ‘some form of international arrangement’ that would attempt to exclude the Russians. According to an Australian diplomat, James Plimsoll, Australia also had to move in that direction if it wanted to influence the outcome of the present developments.
Plimsoll had suggested as early as 1953 that Australia should support an international authority in the Antarctic that would include the Soviet Union, provided that the Russians agreed to demilitarise their bases and allow them to be inspected. Now he urged the importance of reaching agreement before minerals were discovered and countries such as China, Japan and India made Antarctic claims of their own. His advice was supported by a major reassessment of Australian policy by the Department of External Affairs, which cautiously suggested to Casey that the government consider ‘some international regime under which, preferably with our sovereignty preserved, the Antarctic could be regarded by international consent as a demilitarized zone and made subject to a system of international inspection’. Most importantly, it argued that the ‘retention of sovereignty … is not essential’ for the protection of Australia’s ‘political and strategic interests’.39
Casey refused to accept the departmental advice. Nearly thirty years of his official and political life had been spent supporting the exploration and claiming of the Australian Antarctic Territory, and the former First World War officer was loath to signal a retreat. But a decision could not be deferred. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Defence Secretary Lord Carrington were due to meet with Australian ministers in Canberra, and the Antarctic was high on the agenda.40
The confusion that beset the Australian and British governments was patently clear when Macmillan and Menzies met in Canberra on 31 January 1958. While Australia was anxious to retain its sovereignty and wary of any international regime, Britain was ‘looking for the best way of avoiding trouble in the Antarctic’. Macmillan confided to Menzies and Casey that Britain wanted a solution to its ‘difficulties’ with Argentina and Chile, and acknowledged the ‘impossibility of … trying to sustain a claim [to the Falkland Islands Dependencies] when no one in the United Kingdom would support the use of force for that purpose’. As for the Russians, Macmillan was resigned to their continuing presence and thought the best solution was to devise ‘an arrangement under which they would make less trouble’.
In contrast, Menzies feared that an international agreement would detract from Australian sovereignty and might provoke the Russians to claim part of the Australian territory. Moreover, while demilitarisation was ‘a good objective’, it was not sufficiently ‘precise and real’. Casey tried to impress upon Macmillan the importance of the Antarctic to Australia, both for weather forecasting and for defence. He did not see any hurry for an international regime, nor ‘any reason for Australia to give up the attributes of sovereignty’.41
There was just as much confusion in Washington. While the State Department wanted the Russians to attend the prospective Antarctic conference, the Defense Department was implacably opposed. With the seven claimant nations also pushing or pulling in different directions, forging an agreement that was acceptable to all parties would be a herculean task. The responsibility for negotiating an Antarctic treaty was given to Paul Daniels, a State Department official who had worked as a diplomat in several Latin American countries before his retirement in 1953. This experience would have recommended him for the job, since Argentina and Chile were likely to prove particularly difficult to convince of the treaty’s merits. It was up to Daniels to find a way through the labyrinth of competing interests and fierce rivalries. His first task was to keep congressmen from talking about America’s potential territorial claims, so as not to alarm other claimants. He also had to get the State and Defense departments to agree on a common approach to the question of Russia’s participation.42
Daniels and State Department legal adviser Loftus Becker went to the Pentagon on 30 January 1958 in an attempt to resolve their differences. While the US Navy’s judge advocate, Admiral Chester Ward, wanted to force the Russians out of the Antarctic by means of a blockade and not ‘worry so much about starting a third World War over Antarctica’, Daniels counselled a more cautious approach that recognised the new reality: the Russians were likely to remain and there was ‘no practical way to get rid of them’. He argued that the question had now become one of ‘how best to control their continued presence’, and suggested that ‘it might be easier to control the Russians if they were in a regime than if they were out of one’.
As for the question of the United States annexing part of the Antarctic, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted America to make a claim ‘throughout all parts of Antarctica, including areas presently claimed [by other countries], wherever the US has a basis for a claim’, while the State Department preferred to ‘reserve rights throughout the entire continent and to propose an international regime in which the legal status quo would be frozen’. The fall-back position of the State Department was to make a claim only in the unclaimed area and to reserve its rights elsewhere, while pushing for an international regime.43
Although the meeting at the Pentagon ended without any back-down by the Defense Department, Daniels pressed ahead with his efforts to get support for an Antarctic conference that would be limited to the twelve IGY nations. Such a conference would be attended by the seven claimant nations – Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Norway and France – along with the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, South Africa and Belgium. Just six days after the meeting with Ward, Daniels sought the endorsement of the Operations Coordinating Board, which had been established by President Eisenhower to implement decisions of the National Security Council. The board met weekly at the State Department and included representatives from the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA and the United States Information Agency, along with security officials from the White House. Although the Defense representative noted that the Joint Chiefs were ‘reluctant to agree to inclusion of the USSR in the administration of Antarctica’, the meeting gave its general concurrence to Daniels’ proposals. In the game of the Cold War, the board saw the ‘great value’ that the United States might gain by taking the ‘initiative to form an international administration for the benefit of all nations’. Daniels was allowed to continue his talks with Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and to begin ‘broad discussions with other nations’.44
Convincing various departments in Washington to agree on the future of Antarctica was hard enough. Convincing the claimant nations was even harder. When Daniels attempted to get Britain, Australia and New Zealand to agree on the terms of an approach to the other four claimant powers, the Australian government proved particularly difficult. Whereas the United States wanted to range over all the Antarctic and exploit any resources it discovered, the Australian government wanted to retain the exclusive right to exploit any resources in its territory and opposed the idea of an international authority regulating such development. Australia also wanted to be able to reinforce its territorial title after a treaty had been signed, rather than agree to a ‘standstill’ condition in the treaty so far as its title was concerned. It was paranoid about the Russian presence in its territory and wanted any treaty to somehow keep the Russians out.
Weeks of discussion, and a constant flow of cables to and from the four nation’s respective capitals, were unable to resolve their differences. Although Britain wanted to reach a unified approach, the United States and New Zealand wanted to move on regardless and approach the other claimants. They were concerned about Russia leading an initiative of its own, perhaps by joining with India and other non-aligned nations, to bring the Antarctic under the purview of the United Nations.45
In early March 1958, the Australian government came under pressure from the United States and Britain to modify its position so that agreement could be reached. Macmillan convinced Menzies to allow the four-power talks to resume in Washington, with Menzies authorising the Australian delegation ‘to consider some modification of positions’. At the same time, Dulles took advantage of a conference in the Philippines to meet with Casey. Over lunch in Manila, he urged agreement on a treaty while there was still time. According to Dulles, the Antarctic was likely to become of ‘great significance’ during the next half-century, and this could be the ‘last opportunity to reach some international agreement before vested interests grew up that would make agreement impossible’.
Dulles was resigned to the presence of the Russians in the Antarctic and seized of the importance of reaching agreement with them. First he had to break down the resistance of the Australians and force them to face the reality of their position. There was no point talking about national sovereignty in the Antarctic, argued Dulles, since both the United States and Russia were in a position to make their own claims of sovereignty in the Australian territory. Indeed, he continued, if an agreement could not be reached, the United States ‘would certainly make heavy claims’ that would challenge Australia’s sovereignty. He also warned Casey that international law did not accept the so-called ‘sector principle’, which underpinned the Australian claim. Nor did international law necessarily support Australia’s claim just because the Australians had been occupying the territory a few years longer than the Americans or Russians.46
Although Australia was now on notice that its political position had become untenable, Casey refused to concede the new Antarctic reality. He still argued that any post-IGY arrangement should cover just scientific cooperation and demilitarisation. However, the Australian opposition was being whittled down by pressure from Washington and London, and by the threat to Australian sovereignty that was sure to come from any involvement of the non-aligned nations at the United Nations. Casey confided to the South African high commissioner at the end of March that he ‘trembled to think what would happen’ if the Antarctic question ‘were to be thrown into the ring at the United Nations’.47
So Australia reluctantly supported the note that the State Department sent to the eleven other IGY nations in April, which asked for their views on international scientific cooperation, demilitarisation and the freezing of claims as part of a treaty. The talks that had been held in Washington for several months between the State Department and diplomats from Britain, Australia and New Zealand had been kept strictly secret. The world knew only that the three Commonwealth countries had been talking amongst themselves, not that this had been done on the initiative of the United States.48
In issuing its invitation, Washington made clear that it ‘has had, and … continues to have, direct and substantial rights and interests in Antarctica’. Indeed, over the past 150 years, many parts of the Antarctic had been ‘discovered, sighted, explored, and claimed on behalf of the United States by nationals of the United States and by expeditions carrying the flag of the United States’. Although substantial rights and claims arose from these activities, the United States believed that ‘the interests of mankind would best be served … if the countries which have a direct interest in Antarctica were to join together in the conclusion of a treaty’. In other words, the United States was not a Johnny-come-lately. It had as much sovereignty to lose as the seven claimant nations.
When Eisenhower announced the conference on 3 May, it was all about ensuring that the ‘vast uninhabited wastes of Antarctica shall be used only for peaceful purposes’ and not ‘become an object of political conflict’. The American aim, he declared, was to have the continent ‘open to all nations to conduct scientific or other peaceful activities there’.49 They were laudable objectives, although they concealed a darker American ambition to have unfettered access to the entire continent so that any of its hidden resources might be exploited without regard to the rights of the supposedly sovereign powers.
The State Department had done sufficient groundwork to know that ten of the invitations would receive a positive response. But it could not be certain of the Soviet reaction, and there was some confusion in Washington as to what it should do in the event of the Russians refusing to attend.50 In fact, the Russians readily agreed to attend the conference and to participate in the secret preparatory talks that would decide some of the contentious issues in advance. However, the Russians did not want the talks or the conference to deal with the issue of territorial claims, which Moscow wanted to leave for another conference that additional countries could attend. The Soviet Union wanted the talks to be restricted to questions of procedure rather than of substance, and for the conference to be restricted to the questions of scientific cooperation and peaceful development.
While the Australians continued to be hesitant about the idea of the treaty ‘freezing’ their territorial claim and demanded ‘very definite advantages’ in return, the French were opposed altogether to anything that might conceivably infringe on what they regarded as their sovereignty over Adélie Land. Paris was concerned that other nations might ‘cause irreversible damage’ to the French claim if they were allowed to establish bases in Adélie Land during the operation of the treaty, which would cause a ‘new status quo [to be] superimposed at some future date on the former status quo’. Chile also thought it was ‘highly dangerous’ for other nations to become signatories to the treaty in later years, since that might lead to the new nations becoming a majority and changing the treaty to ‘strike out the claims clause’.51
The deep divisions between the twelve nations saw the planned date for the conference pushed back from 8 September to 23 October 1958. On 14 August, the Soviet representative again argued for the discussion not to concern the question of territorial claims, and for other nations who might want to do scientific research in the future to be invited to the conference, so they would not feel that the twelve IGY nations were attempting to ‘monopolize Antarctic scientific activities’. Presumably, the Soviet Union had in mind its Eastern European allies, which might then operate as a voting bloc at the conference. There was no way that the other participants were going to agree to this. Daniels sought a way through this morass with a discussion paper on ‘freezing the legal status quo’, which effectively put the question aside so as ‘not to complicate problems in the Antarctic but to simplify them’. This caused problems with the Russians, who felt that the ‘freezing of claims’ would mean the de jure recognition of such claims, which it opposed.
As the talks dragged on without resolution, Daniels held secret ‘breakout’ talks at the Australian and Chilean embassies without the Russian, French, Belgian, Norwegian or South African representatives. The meetings were meant to break down some of the differences and present a more united front at the joint meetings. At one of these meetings, Daniels proposed that they no longer refer to the ‘freezing of claims’ and talk instead about their intention to ‘preserve the existing legal status quo’, without actually defining it. While the different talks continued, the Russians proposed to the SCAR meeting in Moscow that the IGY be extended for another year, perhaps so that some of its allies could engage in Antarctic research and earn a seat at the treaty conference table.52
The Soviet delegation at the SCAR meeting announced plans to establish two new bases in the Antarctic, and its intention to ‘carry out trans-continental explorations’. This was an interesting development, since it indicated that the international scientific community was emerging as an independent Antarctic participant that might rival the role of governments. Confirmation of this was seen when Casey suggested to an Australian SCAR delegate, Professor Keith Bullen, that he should keep in touch with the Department of External Affairs, only to be told very firmly by Bullen that he attended SCAR meetings as a scientist rather than as a representative of the Australian government.53
In Washington, Daniels was frustrated at not knowing much of what had occurred at the Moscow SCAR meeting and asked the various diplomats to question their scientists. He was also angry at not knowing whether the IGY would be extended for another year, telling his fellow diplomats that he ‘deplored the fact that these matters were being decided by scientists and that very little information seemed to filter through to Governments about what they were doing’. When the SCAR meeting was held in Canberra in 1959, Daniels asked the American Ambassador to ‘report whatever information it can properly obtain … and any conclusions reached’, noting that ‘its activities are of great interest to this Government’. The Chileans were similarly suspicious of SCAR and wanted the treaty parties to create an alternative scientific organisation that had representatives from ‘all governments with a scientific interest in Antarctica’. The New Zealand government was much more sanguine, suggesting that SCAR might even ‘be given certain coordinating functions’, which could have the beneficial effect of making ‘the Antarctic treaty itself more acceptable’ to world opinion.54
While the diplomatic whispering continued in the carpeted corridors of Washington, Law predicted that the eventual signing of a treaty would see ‘international territorial competition … replaced largely by scientific competition’, as the United States and the Soviet Union competed to ‘demonstrate their respective scientific and technological excellence for purposes of prestige and propaganda’. He suggested that the Russian announcement of two additional bases would force the United States to maintain a high level of scientific activity; it would probably also cause France, Japan, Norway and Belgium to remain in the Antarctic after 1959. ‘Never again will Antarctica be deserted,’ declared Law.
Indeed, he predicted a time when the Antarctic would see the ‘establishment of centres of population in which both men and women lead reasonably normal lives’. Now was the time, Law argued, ‘to tackle the long-term projects which will ensure that we are still in the van of Antarctic progress’.55 In contrast, other officials hoped that the signing of a treaty might allow Australia to cut back its activity, since ‘there would be no … need to “occupy” the Australian Antarctic Territory in the legal sense’.56 Similar arguments occurred among officials of other claimant nations; they would not be resolved until the precise nature of the treaty was known.
By October 1958, there was still no treaty conference in sight. At the regular meetings of the twelve nations, the divisions over substantive issues were as deep as ever. Even when they held secret meetings between just some representatives, it still remained difficult to reach agreement. On the issue of allowing non-IGY nations to sign the treaty at a later time, the United States feared that its influence might be diminished by new members, while other nations were concerned that the Americas would simply establish a presence on the continent anyway. On the issue of demilitarisation, Australia argued for the military to be excluded altogether from the Antarctic, while the United States, Chile and Argentina wanted their armed forces to continue organising logistics. The Chileans regarded any demilitarisation clause as an attack upon their sovereignty, since they saw their Antarctic territory as an integral ‘part of the metropolitan territory’ and not an overseas dependency. The Americans also wanted the demilitarisation clause to operate only during peacetime, so that it could still establish military bases on the Antarctic Peninsula during wartime. The representatives could not even agree on the area to be covered by the treaty. They discussed whether it should include the surrounding seas, and where the boundary was to be set – at 60° S or at the ‘Antarctic Convergence’, the area where the cold Antarctic waters met the warmer waters further north.
There had been some urgency to reach agreement and set a date for the conference, as it was feared that the United Nations might intervene and cause the claimant nations to lose all that they were trying to protect. When that threat diminished in late September, after India withdrew its call for United Nations intervention, the sense of urgency dissipated. The conference date was postponed again to an indeterminate time in 1959.57
By the end of March 1959, after forty formal meetings and many more informal ones, there was still no prospect of a conference being called. The delegates had been averse to holding a conference until agreement had been reached on the substantive matters and a successful conference outcome was assured. However, such was the frustration with the interminable discussions that Australia proposed to Daniels that a conference be called anyway, even though it would end in failure. Once it was out of the way, it would be possible to ‘reach real agreement after the exclusion of the USSR’.58 But the whole point was to have the Russians sign the treaty, which would decrease the chances of conflict. So more meetings were held, in the hope that an informal understanding might still be reached. No one wanted to gather for a conference that would founder because of intractable differences, yet that is almost what happened when the conference finally began in Washington on 15 October 1959.
As had been expected, the Argentine and Chilean delegations were particularly sensitive about any clauses in the treaty relating to questions of sovereignty. Any suggestion that either country’s sovereignty was liable to be infringed provoked a passionate response from its people and politicians. As one Argentine petition read, its ‘national territory is one and indivisible, and never will there be an Argentine, worthy of the name, who will give up one single centimeter of the area of his fatherland’. The Chileans likewise maintained that the ‘national patrimony … has to be maintained intact.’59 Two concerns were that other nations might have the right to inspect Chile’s bases and to undertake scientific research in its territory. The French were similarly reluctant to agree to anything that might have the slightest impact on their sovereignty in the Antarctic. France had lost Vietnam after a long war and was struggling to retain its grip on Algeria. It would not lightly give up its hold on the penguins of Adélie Land.
These impasses were only overcome by a series of painstaking informal meetings that finally brought agreement on the precise wording for a treaty. Although it was signed by the conference delegates on 1 December 1959, it would not come into force until it had been formally ratified by their respective governments.60
On the vexed issue of sovereignty and territorial claims, the Antarctic Treaty ostensibly ‘froze’ the status quo. The signatories agreed that there would be no renunciation of the rights and claims that had already been asserted, and that no further claims, or extensions of existing ones, could be made. The claimants were reassured by a provision stipulating that activities carried out while the treaty was in force could not be used to assert or support a claim. Other reassuring provisions ensured the demilitarisation of the Antarctic, the inspection of each other’s bases and the sharing of scientific knowledge. The treaty also allowed other nations to become signatories if they embarked on significant research in the Antarctic. Of course, the delay in holding the conference meant that all the activities by nations during the IGY did lend support to their claims, as did subsequent activities until the treaty finally came into force on 23 June 1961.
Australia might have been reassured by the terms of the treaty and have felt secure about its sovereignty, but the United States and the Soviet Union now had bases in Australian territory, and both had done more than Australia to explore that part of the Antarctic. Both those nations continued their mantras of not recognising the claims of other nations while reserving their own rights in the Antarctic.
Significantly, although the Soviet Union had previously argued that its rights were based on the discoveries of Bellingshausen, it now declared that they were based on the ‘discoveries and explorations of Russian navigators and scientists’.61 The Russians were clearly aware that all their recent activity had immeasurably strengthened the rights that Bellingshausen had created by his circumnavigation of the continent and that had long since disappeared through Russia’s failure to follow them up.
The rights of the United States, based upon the activities of the sealers in the early nineteenth century and the later official expedition of Charles Wilkes, had similarly eroded. Now American and Russian scientists and explorers had created new rights, based upon all their activities for the IGY. More recent entrants, such as Japan and Belgium, had also arrived in the Antarctic to shore up the rights they had established decades earlier. Despite optimistic comments about the treaty, the future of the continent remained very much in contention.