With his ship wreathed in ice, Captain James Cook came tanta-lisingly close to Antarctica without ever seeing it. In Cook’s view, there was nothing tantalising about a continent that was beset by blizzards and defended by ramparts of ice. Such a forbidding land could never be an asset to England’s burgeoning empire. Less than two centuries later, Antarctica had become permanently occupied, and there was a sometimes fierce contest for its possession. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 was supposed to end that rivalry and transform the continent into a place of peaceful cooperation. The treaty certainly fostered cooperation but it could not end the territorial struggle. Moreover, there were new participants who wanted to assert their own rights to the Antarctic. The control of the continent became more contested than ever before.
When the diplomats and foreign ministers completed their handshaking and back-slapping at the end of the tortuous treaty conference in Washington, there was an awkward two-year hiatus before all twelve countries ratified it. Britain was the first to do so. The British had been concerned that their early ratification would alarm the Argentinians and Chileans, who might presume that Britain had the most to gain from the treaty and that they, therefore, had the most to lose. But the British were also concerned that the South Americans would regard a quick ratification by the Soviet Union as an even greater cause for alarm, so much so that it might turn them against the treaty altogether.1 So Britain went ahead and ratified it on 31 May 1960, just as the US Senate was about to hold hearings on the issue.
Although America had taken the initiative in calling the conference, there were some in Congress who feared the treaty’s consequences. Opponents of ratification included Senator Harry Byrd and Senator Thomas Dodd; the latter complained the treaty would ‘spread the disease of communism even to the penguins’.2
Senator Clair Engle, a Democrat from California, was just as trenchant in his opposition. In a statement to the Committee on Foreign Relations on 14 June 1960, he attacked the Eisenhower administration for neglecting to make any territorial claims, despite the fact that America had ‘the legal right to territorial sovereignty over a large portion of Antarctica’. Engle told his fellow senators that the United States ‘shouldn’t just sit down with the best hand in the poker game and just throw in our hands’. He lauded Antarctica’s potential as ‘a long-range missile base’, as a repository for nuclear waste and as a testing ground for nuclear explosions, which might also ‘open up harbors or melt the icecap’.
Engle was supported by Senator Ernest Gruening, the former Interior Department official who had been involved with the United States Antarctic Service expedition in 1939. Gruening claimed that the United States had explored eighty per cent of the Antarctic and been responsible for ‘practically all the mapping that has been done there’. He feared that ratification would ‘foreclose the assertion of the rights we have and can claim’ in this ‘treasure house’. A New York congressman, John Pillion, chimed in with a call for the Russians to be told that their continued presence ‘constitutes a trespass.’ He argued that their scientific activities were a diversion ‘from the strategic problem – who shall own the Antarctic?’3
Anxious that the ratification not be derailed, the State Department sent the chair of the Antarctic Treaty conference, Herman Phleger, who was also a former State Department legal adviser, to laud the treaty’s benefits. By allowing for inspection of Soviet bases, Phleger argued that it would provide ‘a valuable source of practical experience’ for the ongoing talks with Russia about ‘nuclear testing, surprise attack, and general disarmament’. It also provided a precedent for dealing with sovereignty in outer space. At the time, the Soviet Union seemed likely to beat America to the moon. If the United States tried to ‘claim all of Antarctica’ simply on the basis of having ‘discovered it and … flown over it’, said Phleger, Russia might do likewise with the moon.
Moreover, trying to claim all of the Antarctic would upset America’s friends and allies. On the other hand, if it restricted itself to the unclaimed portion, the United States would have just twenty per cent of the continent. It would be far better, argued Phleger, for the United States to annex nothing and retain ‘the claim which we have maintained to date, that we have a right in all of Antarctica’.4 Two months later, Congress agreed on ratification, making the United States the fifth nation to do so. It was closely followed by Norway, France, New Zealand and Russia. The last three to ratify were Australia, Argentina and Chile, which all did so on 23 June 1961.
For the United States, the signing of the treaty ended the indecision about whether to make a territorial claim. Now American officials could maintain their long-held position of not recognising the claims of other nations while reserving their own rights, which extended ‘throughout Antarctica’. In a secret statement of American objectives, the State Department noted in February 1962 that scientific knowledge had become the primary resource to be exploited in the Antarctic, which meant that American policy should pursue a ‘long-term program of scientific observations and studies’. And the United States had to occupy a ‘position of leadership’ so that it could enhance its ‘ability to “have things our own way”’. This meant seeing off the competition from the Soviet Union.
It also meant maintaining permanent occupation of the McMurdo, Byrd and South Pole bases, with the last being important for scientific studies and ‘for its value … to United States prestige in Antarctic affairs’. The State Department also suggested the establishment of a base in Ellsworth Land and another on what it called the ‘Palmer Peninsula’, both places where the United States might mount claims based upon historical discovery.5 Ellsworth Base was established in January 1963, with the buildings being flown in from McMurdo, while Palmer Base was established in 1968.6
Whereas more fortunate nations were able to secure positions on rock to build their bases, others were forced to abandon and rebuild bases that were built on ice. Britain’s Halley Base, built on an ice shelf flowing into the Weddell Sea, faced a particular challenge. With more than a metre of snow accumulating every year, the first Halley Base soon disappeared below the surface. Having been established in 1956, the base was nearly twenty metres below the surface and moving inexorably towards the sea by the time it was abandoned in 1967. In its last years, scientists had to use long ladders to descend down an ice shaft to reach their buried accommodation building, which was slowly being crushed by the pressure of the ice.
With the warmth of the building melting the surrounding ice, the living conditions for Halley’s twenty-one inhabitants were abominable: ‘Walls buckled and crumbled, melt water poured through the roof. Drainage gutters flanked the walls. Plastic sheets hung between the ceilings and bits of string were hung about to direct drips into buckets.’ Its replacement lasted just six years, while two successive replacements lasted ten and nine years respectively. The fifth incarnation of Halley Base was built in 1992, with its buildings about five metres above the ice on supports that could be jacked up each year to keep clear of the accumulating snow.7 Even that was not sufficient to ensure the survival of the buildings. In the summer of 2011–12 a new set of buildings was erected, which had jackable supports on skis so that they could be kept clear of the snow and relocated as necessary.
The cost of constantly rebuilding the base was justified by its strategic location, at the eastern edge of Britain’s Antarctic territory and set between an American and an Argentine base. The scientific results from the base also more than justified the expense. Among the observations begun when the base was established in 1956 was the measurement of ozone in the upper atmosphere. By the late 1970s, the readings showed alarming changes in the ozone levels each spring. Scientists could not be certain whether it was caused by a faulty instrument or reflected a real and worrying transformation of the stratosphere, particularly when an orbiting satellite taking ozone measurements from above failed to discern any changes. A new instrument installed at Halley in 1982 confirmed the scientists’ worst fears, with the readings being backed up by news that the satellite had been set to ignore measurements that seemed too extreme.
Unfortunately, the ozone depletion was extreme, with the ozone layer so thin each spring that it constituted a virtual hole that encompassed an area as big as the Antarctic. The gas used in the world’s fridges, air conditioners and aerosols had risen to the upper atmosphere, where the sun had converted it to chlorine, which broke down the ozone. The discovery of the ‘hole’ came just in time, and governments began to coordinate the withdrawal of the gas from use so that the ozone depletion could be halted and the layer allowed to recover. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate, since the depleted ozone permitted the entry of ultraviolet radiation that was dangerous to humans and devastating to plants.8
Australia’s two bases were better placed. Although it had considered closing one after the signing of the treaty, Australia soon realised that the territorial rivalry would not end.9 Instead of reducing its activity, Australia took over America’s Wilkes base in the Windmill Islands, partly from a fear that otherwise the Russians would do so.10 As the Australian cabinet was advised in November 1960, its Antarctic territory ‘will remain internationally disputed territory’, and all its activities ‘will need to be governed by our territorial and international interests’.11
That was also true of other nations, as Australia discovered during the takeover of Wilkes Base. The State Department told Australian officials that it wanted to give the impression the handover was being done in a spirit of ‘cooperation, goodwill, etc.’ and not as ‘an American withdrawal or “give away”’.12 However, Australia’s Antarctic chief Phillip Law was determined that Australia should be seen as the dominant power in its own territory.
Although a few Americans would remain at the well-equipped base after the handover, and an American would be second in charge, Law was adamant that it would be an Australian base and not a joint one. Arriving at Wilkes on board the chartered Danish icebreaker Magga Dan on 24 January 1959, Law was immediately embroiled in questions of sovereignty when he incorrectly flew the Australian flag above the Stars and Stripes on the vessel’s foremast. The position of the American flag was questioned by an American scientist on board, so it was taken down altogether.13 From there, matters only worsened.
When the American relief ship USS Staten Island arrived on 2 February, Law suggested that the American flag flying above the base should be hauled down at the end of the changeover ceremony. Although he had no specific instructions from Canberra, it seemed the obvious procedure since it was ‘going to be purely an Australian station’. When the captain of the Staten Island demurred, Law suggested that both flags could be ‘rigged before the ceremony and left up throughout this period, so that the question of raising or lowering would not arise’.
When it was time for the Magga Dan to depart, Law had still not received clear instructions from Canberra. So the frustrated director ordered that both flags should remain flying for the following twelve months. The veteran British explorer Sir Raymond Priestley was a guest on the Staten Island and complained later about Law’s ‘arrogance’. In his defence, Law maintained that relations with the Americans had been ‘excellent’ throughout, and particularly so during the changeover party, when Australian champagne was drunk and Law entertained the Americans with his accordion. Law would later recall that the flag incident made him realise ‘how ruthless the Americans were’. Despite Law’s wish to have it as a purely Australian base, it was marked on American maps as a joint facility and the two national flags remained flying until the small American contingent withdrew two years later.14
Law got his revenge in 1968, when a new Australian base was built three miles away to replace the American buildings. He ensured that the name Wilkes would not be perpetuated, noting how the naming of the base had led people to assume wrongly that the American explorer had discovered that part of Antarctica. The Americans had recently reinforced that impression by carrying out ‘saturation naming’ in the immediate area to ensure that all geographic features had American names, ‘whether explored by the Americans or not’. Law now wanted an Australian name for the new base so that the ‘brief chapter … of American activities … could be closed and a clean page of purely Australian activity … could be started’. Australia should take the ‘opportunity to put an Australian name on the map’, declared Law, in the same way that the South Africans had renamed the base they had taken over from the Norwegians. It would show the world that ‘Australian activities in this region far outweigh … anything done by the Americans’.15 Law won out and the base was renamed ‘Casey’.
The Argentinians were similarly forthright when the United States handed over Ellsworth Base on the Weddell Sea in 1959. The Americans wanted Ellsworth, like Wilkes, to be listed as a joint facility. However, since it was located in Argentine Antarctica, the American scientists complained that they were compelled to use Argentine call signs for their amateur radio equipment and were ‘treated as employees of the Argentine Antarctic Institute’. This prompted the State Department to make clear to Buenos Aires that it ‘expected the joint character of the scientific program at Ellsworth to be beyond question’. But Argentina refused to do anything that might detract from its sovereignty.
Both countries were in a bind. The United States wanted the joint facility as an economical way of maintaining its presence in that part of the continent, while the Argentinians wanted the token American presence to deter the Russians and to act as an implicit recognition of Argentina’s claim. In the event, the Antarctic ice solved the problem by slowly submerging the buildings, forcing Ellsworth Base to close in 1962 before it was completely swallowed.16
Just prior to the treaty discussions, Argentina had expanded its presence to eight bases. It also had twenty-eight refugios, which usually comprised one or two huts capable of temporarily housing about four men. The annual supply voyages maintained the huts and replenished their emergency supplies of food and fuel. They were there to provide accommodation for scientists in the summer and to act as way-stations for exploration parties or as refuges for parties seeking to escape the Antarctic’s sudden blizzards. However, their primary purpose, as an American observer noted, was to ‘provide evidence of possession, “occupation”, “administration”, and exploration, to bolster Argentina’s position vis-à-vis sovereignty claims’. Some were also gradually enlarged, with the erection of additional buildings, the construction of wharves and the provision of facilities that made them suited to permanent occupation.17 All this was done as part of Argentina’s long-term strategy of gradually increasing its grip on the territory.
As well as increasing its presence, Argentina continued to perform symbolic acts designed to uphold its sovereignty. In August 1973, the incoming president of Argentina, Raúl Lastiri, bundled all his cabinet members and armed forces commanders into the presidential jet and flew them to the Marambio Base on Seymour Island, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, from where he made a broadcast to the nation, declaring that his presence, albeit for three hours, ‘reaffirms our national sovereignty over these southern regions’.18
Just as potent was the birth of Emilio Palma at the nearby Esperanza Base at Hope Bay in January 1978, making him the first person to be born on the continent. His father was the base’s army commander, whose heavily pregnant wife had been flown in to give birth on the continent. The Hope Bay base was where Argentine troops had fired shots at a British landing party in 1952, and which had as its motto ‘Permanencia, un acto de sacrifice’ (Permanence, an act of sacrifice). The birth was a powerful symbolic action by Argentina, and several more would follow in later years.
It was just part of the political theatre being played out at Esperanza Base, which was designed to have the characteristics of an Argentine hamlet. Personnel were encouraged to bring their families; a school was established the same year that Emilio was born, and a radio station started transmission the following year. It was not until 1984 that a Chilean child was born in the Antarctic, and then it was at their base on King George Island rather than on the Antarctic mainland. It helped to reinforce the Chilean claim to the island, which was densely packed with competing bases. The Chilean settlement was complete with a school, gym and supermarket, while the Russians would later build a Russian Orthodox church as part of their base on the island.19
With a claim to nearly half the continent, the Australians tried to outdo their rivals by securing the few areas of exposed rock, leaving any rival bases to be buried by windswept snow. Law was particularly anxious to find any rocky areas in Oates Land, at the eastern end of Australia’s territory. But each attempt since 1947 had been thwarted by the thickness of the ice or the inclemency of the weather. Law was aware that American DC-3s had flown along the coastline in 1946–47, but their photographs were useless for mapping as they had made no landings to obtain astrofixes.20
The plucky Australian finally reached Oates Land in 1959, during the latter part of the Magga Dan’s voyage, when he was able to make two flights in a small Auster floatplane during which he photographed the area’s main coastal features with a heavy camera held out of the aircraft’s open window. At the end of the first flight, neither Law nor his pilot could see the ship. They faced the prospect of crash-landing the float plane on the ice. Fortunately, they were guided back by sailors on the deck with binoculars, with the pilot being forced to land in the forty metres of ice-free sea opened up at the stern of the slow-moving ship.
While Law was aloft, a ground party went ashore to climb to the summit of a coastal peak, where they left a pickle jar in a cairn of rocks, complete with an Australian flag and an account of their visit. An Australian flag was left flying from the peak. Unknown to Law, however, the Russians had been there the year before and had made an aerial survey by helicopter from which the first maps of Oates Land had been produced.21
The 1960s were frustrating years for Law. He lost his only influential ally in the Australian government. Richard Casey resigned as External Affairs minister in February 1960, after returning from the Antarctic Treaty conference in Washington and being appointed to the British House of Lords. In February 1965, Law proposed freeing the division from the shackles of the Department of External Affairs and creating a semi-governmental Antarctic Institute. His proposals were repeatedly rejected. Prime Minister Menzies had little interest in the Antarctic, and Law complained that requests for ‘explicit directions as to the fundamental objectives of Australia’s efforts in Antarctica’ were never answered.22
Blocked at every turn, the embittered Law resigned as director in March 1966. As confirmation of the government’s lack of interest, no permanent replacement was appointed until 1970. Despite Law’s departure, the Department of External Affairs still pushed for the division to undertake pure research, warning that Australia’s title would be put at risk if the Russians were seen as ‘doing the only worthwhile work in Australian Antarctic Territory’.23 In 1968, the division was shifted from External Affairs to the Department of Supply, and moved again in 1972 to the Department of Science. The latter change could have presaged a transformation but instead saw the minister for science, Bill Morrison, a former diplomat, stipulate that scientific activity should be of practical benefit to the Australian people. He also relocated the division from Melbourne to Hobart.
Law was outraged. He had continued to be involved in Antarctic affairs as a member of the government’s placenames committee, and now launched a public attack on Morrison’s proposal, arguing that Australia was not in Antarctica for ‘scientific reasons’ but to ‘maintain a position of vantage in an area in which … national territorial aspirations are still clouded in uncertainty’.24 For Law, science was just something to keep personnel busy at Australian bases, and scientists were attracted there because ‘all the easy things are still there waiting just to be skimmed off’. Law recalled how he appointed biologists ‘because with the seals and penguins lying round, obviously you had to do something’.25
It might have been expected that the Antarctic Treaty would neutralise mapping as a means of reinforcing sovereignty but this continued in new guises. Nations no longer competed to compile a standard map of Antarctica on which their names and discoveries would be privileged, but the scientists at the SCAR meeting in Moscow in 1958 had decided that they would establish a working group on cartography. With Australian cartographer Bruce Lambert as chairman, it would not do mapping of its own. Rather, the working group would coordinate the mapping activities of member nations; a standard map might then emerge. Each of the SCAR nations had an Antarctic mapping centre, and these used the SCAR working group to exchange copies of their maps and charts. To ensure that their own discoveries and names would be prominently displayed on any joint map, nations used their Antarctic mapping centres to scatter national names on their individual maps, in the hope they would be adopted by other centres. Several countries also published Antarctic gazetteers with the same aim in mind.26
New Zealand believed that mapping was the key to protecting its title to the Ross Dependency and maintaining a high level of public support for the country’s Antarctic program. As one official argued in July 1960, ‘the mapping of territory betokens occupation and substantial national interest’, while any diminution of the mapping program ‘would be construed publically and politically as partial withdrawal from Antarctica’. Ironically, the program was organised in cooperation with the Americans at McMurdo, despite the fact that the United States was New Zealand’s main rival for control of the Ross Dependency. The United States undertook the aerial surveys of areas that New Zealand ground parties were mapping; each country then used the other’s data to compile its own maps.27 It seemed the sort of cooperation that the Antarctic Treaty was intended to promote.
However, it was not cooperation between equals. New Zealand was heavily dependent on the United States for logistical support, and when that support was withdrawn in 1965, when the United States closed its joint base with New Zealand at Cape Hallett, the New Zealand activity at Cape Hallett came to an abrupt end. The New Zealand scientists were left in the lurch. Rather than having so many permanent bases, the United States planned to have some temporary bases that could be abandoned before they had to be rebuilt. If New Zealand’s scientists objected to the closure of Hallett, they were threatened with having the US logistical support withdrawn for their activities elsewhere. The New Zealanders were described by one senior American official as being ‘too nationalistic’ and tending ‘to introduce politics into the Antarctic’, as if it had ever been a politics-free zone.28
Prior to the Antarctic Treaty, Australia had made urgent efforts to gather the geographic results of Mawson’s voyages in 1929–31, which comprised the legal basis for its subsequent annexation of the Australian Antarctic Territory. The government wanted the maps and journal entries to prove that Mawson had preceded other explorers. However, even Australian officials had doubts about some of Mawson’s supposed discoveries, particularly his claim to have discovered Princess Elizabeth Land in late December 1929, when it was clear that Mawson’s ship had been too far from the coast for him to have seen it.
One of Mawson’s friends, the geographer A. Grenfell Price, was given the task of writing the geographical volume. He accepted all Mawson’s claims, while disparaging the work of the Norwegians. His assessment was challenged by the Antarctic Division’s cartographer, Graeme McKinnon, who proposed that Price should suggest that Mawson had been misled by a mirage when he claimed to have seen the coast. Price conceded that Mawson had ‘wanted to secure Princess Elizabeth Land on the grounds of discovery and we have to report his claim’, but was relieved that ‘we can escape in a mirage’.29
Meanwhile, Australian surveyors gradually charted more than 6000 kilometres of the Australian Antarctic Territory coastline and mapped its mountain ranges and glaciers. Law later recalled that it was ‘a bit of a race against time because we were racing the Russians on this’. Although the Russians redid much of the Australian work in the Prince Charles Mountains area, Law was not concerned since the Australian names for the most significant features were firmly in place. They included the region’s tallest mountain, the 3355 metre Mount Menzies.30
The Soviets were more anxious about catching up with the Americans. They began as soon as they landed at Mirny in 1956, using air-survey cameras to photograph much of East Antarctica. During that first year, they claimed to have ‘discovered and named 186 new geographical objects’. By 1978, Soviet scientists were able to declare that they had named about 800 features and placed them on maps. Like the United States, Britain and Australia, Russia aspired to have its maps – complete with Russian names – accepted by other nations as the standard maps of particular regions and the continent as a whole. To this end, Moscow produced an atlas of the Antarctic in 1969, becoming the first nation to have done so.
That same year, the United States published a gazetteer of Antarctic placenames, which was greeted warmly in Moscow because it had 700 Soviet names listed among the total of 10,000 names. This was cited as evidence that ‘Soviet scientists … have taken a leading role in the study of the icy continent and the Southern Ocean’, with the names being chosen to ‘commemorate important events in the history of our motherland or honor the memory of our leading scientists, writers, polar explorers and members of Soviet Antarctic expeditions who perished on the icy continent’. They included such names as the ‘Russian Mountains’ and the ‘Soviet Plateau’.31
The maps and names helped create a sense of Russian possession in those areas of the Antarctic where Soviet scientists had been particularly active. That sense of possession was enhanced by the work of Russian historians, who had researched the voyage of Bellingshausen and found evidence that showed him to be the discoverer of Antarctica. These documents had been published in 1951 and were used to support the legitimacy of Russia’s presence on the continent. The original documents were also translated and widely disseminated overseas, including at Soviet exhibitions in London and Paris.
Although the documentary evidence was incomplete, the British and American evidence concerning the voyages of Bransfield and Palmer was even more so, and Russia’s claims about Bellingshausen were gradually accepted by many Antarctic historians. In 1962, the US Navy published maps showing early voyages to Antarctica, which credited Bellingshausen as being the first to sight the continent. A British article also gave credit to Bellingshausen, which prompted Vladimir Lebedev to hail the ‘new spirit of cooperation and goodwill in the solution of controversial points in the history of Antarctica’. SCAR seemed to provide a way of sorting through the competing claims and reaching a considered judgement – or so Lebedev hoped.32
In fact, the history of the continent’s discovery remains a contested space. In his history of Antarctica, first published in 1986, American writer Stephen Pyne has Bellingshausen ‘probably sighting the continent in the vicinity of Queen Maud Land’ and later having ‘possibly spied the mainland’ in the vicinity of the Antarctic Peninsula. No dates are given, nor any precedence acknowledged. Palmer fares little better. Pyne has the American sealer being dispatched ‘on a voyage from the South Shetlands to the Antarctic Peninsula’, but again no dates are given, nor is any confirmation that he saw or reached the peninsula. Bransfield fares worst of all, with Pyne merely noting that the English naval officer ‘hastily organized an expedition … to the islands in order to claim them for Britain’. Bransfield then drops out of the history, with no indication that he led the expedition or saw the continent. Pyne bestows more credit to the American sealer John Davis for making ‘the first documented landing on the continent’, and to the American Charles Wilkes for having ‘first proclaimed an “Antarctic continent”’.33
In a more recent publication, British author David McGonigal conceded that Bellingshausen had ‘probably seen the icy fringe of Antarctica’, but it was the British naval officer Bransfield who had ‘sighted rocky mountains’; Bellingshausen had merely ‘glimpsed ice’. As for Palmer, any sighting he made was ten months after Bransfield.34 American journalist Walter Sullivan was right when he predicted in 1957 that it was ‘likely that the question of who discovered Antarctica may never be settled’. The answer to the question did not matter, argued Sullivan, since the ‘ultimate disposition’ of Antarctica will be decided instead by evidence of ‘occupation’. And in this the United States was clearly pre-eminent.35
The most contested space in terms of naming was the Antarctic Peninsula, which was known variously as the Palmer Peninsula, Graham Land, O’Higgins Land and San Martin Land. The Soviet Union suggested that the neutral name ‘Antarctic Peninsula’ should be adopted but it was rebuffed by Britain and the United States.36 Roberts and Saunders had delayed discussing this issue for nearly two decades and concentrated on settling the names of lesser features. In August 1961, Roberts went to Washington to try to reach agreement with Saunders and the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names. Roberts suggested that ‘Trinity Peninsula’ be the name for the entire peninsula, while ‘Graham Land’ should become the name for the northern portion and ‘Palmer Land’ for the southern portion. The Americans responded by suggesting ‘Antarctic Peninsula’, with ‘Graham Land’ and ‘Palmer Land’ as its subdivisions. But this was not acceptable to the British. It was not until 1964 that the two finally agreed to the original American suggestion.37 Of course, that did not satisfy Argentina and Chile, which continued to use their own names.
Naming and mapping were not the only ways for nations to preserve their historical association with the Antarctic. Another means was through the restoration and preservation of historic sites, which reminded the world of a nation’s activity there. Even as the Treaty Conference was about to assemble in Washington, the New Zealanders were moving to protect the huts of the early British explorers in the Ross Dependency and affix commemorative plaques to their exteriors. Borchgrevink’s hut at Cape Adare had been relatively protected from human interference because of its isolation, but the huts of Scott and Shackleton on Ross Island were vulnerable to souvenir hunters from the nearby American base at McMurdo.38 In fact, the proximity of the American base saw Scott’s hut ‘surrounded by stores, boxes, crates, old machinery etc.’ and a fuel line passing within a metre of it. The New Zealanders had to appeal to the United States for help to ensure that the hut and the nearby commemorative cross were protected.39
With its continent-wide ambitions, Washington wanted to downplay such historical associations because of their links with sovereignty. When the question was discussed at the first consultative meeting of treaty powers in Canberra in 1961, Britain tried unsuccessfully to get agreement on the preservation of historic sites, such as ‘huts, memorials, commemorative cairns and emblems of sovereignty’. All such relics provided evidence of exploration and occupation, which ensured that the issue was vigorously discussed by the various delegations The American delegates worried that it might ‘stir up sensitivities related to the claims of sovereignty’.40
At the fifth consultative meeting of treaty powers, held in Paris in 1968, it was finally agreed that they would all compile a list of historic monuments and sites that needed to be protected. Brian Roberts was taken aback by the resulting Chilean list, which, according to Roberts, included some places that no longer existed and others where no location was specified. It also included inhabited bases and refuge huts, which gave the Chilean list ‘a distinctly political flavor’. Among the ‘monuments’ was ‘a Red Wooden Cross and electric light fittings’ and a statue of the Virgin near the Chilean base on Greenwich Island. It was not only the British who were upset by the list, with the Argentinians threatening to submit an even longer list of their own. In order to reduce the scope for controversy, Britain suggested that items proposed as monuments would be accepted simply on the nomination of the proposing nation.41
This caused nations to compete in compiling long lists, with little regard to the intrinsic historical significance of the items. Once they were listed, such monuments had to be preserved and protected for all time, wherever they were located. When the Argentinians listed the flagpole erected in 1965 by the first Argentinian expedition to arrive overland at the South Pole, the Americans were required to keep the flagpole in place as a reminder of the Argentinian achievement. Being kept in situ was everything. Thus, the Australian government refused suggestions in 1992 that Mawson’s hut at Commonwealth Bay should be removed to Australia, arguing that it would ‘detract from its symbolism as a link with our Antarctic past’.42
Another way of commemorating history was through stamps, which continued to be used to assert ownership. Australia planned to issue four stamps in 1959, one of which would celebrate the supposed achievement of Mawson and Edgeworth David in being the first to reach the South Magnetic Pole, while three others would show contemporary activities connected to maps of the Australian Antarctic Territory. The issue of the stamps was delayed for a time in early 1959, after Casey feared it might be regarded as provocative while the treaty talks were continuing in Washington.
It was delayed again in October because it coincided with the holding of the conference. Australia did not want to upset other countries with stamps that made such a blatant assertion of sovereignty when they were discussing the freezing of sovereignty. As soon as the conference concluded, Casey called on the post office to issue the stamps prior to the departure of the next Australian expedition in December. He denied that the designs were provocative and noted that France and Norway had recently issued stamps of their own.43 And so it went on, despite calls by the Universal Postal Union to avoid using stamps to support contentious territorial claims and use them instead to strengthen the ‘bonds of international friendship’.44
The establishment of post offices at Antarctic bases was also used to reinforce territorial claims. Australia continued to do this at its three Antarctic bases, which all had post offices. However, Russia’s Mirny base was located in Australia’s territory and also had a post office from which mail was posted with Russian stamps and Mirny postmarks. When such mail was given to Australian officials for onward transmission, it was treated as ‘having been posted on board ship while on the high seas’. Australia thereby avoided giving any recognition to the operation of a foreign post office in Australian territory.45
Such informal arrangements had also worked well in New Zealand’s Ross Dependency, where a New Zealand base was adjacent to the much larger McMurdo base of the United States. The US Navy’s post office at McMurdo agreed to sell New Zealand stamps and covers to American personnel, while the New Zealanders accepted mail with US stamps affixed.
Britain was in the most difficult position, as it was contesting the Antarctic Peninsula with Chile and Argentina. It wanted to use the first consultative meeting of treaty powers, scheduled for Canberra in 1961, to agree on which post offices ‘should be recognized as legally operating’. It also wanted nations not to use ‘controversial stamps or slogans’. Deciding on which post offices were ‘legal’ was an anathema to the United States, which declared that it would ‘operate post offices wherever we please in Antarctica’. Britain could hardly complain. It had been first to use stamps and post offices to buttress its sovereignty. They would remain a popular way for nations to promote their territorial claims.46
While stamps allowed nations to broadcast their claims to the world, their public-relations task took an unexpected turn when tourists began visiting. In December 1956, a Chilean aircraft took the first ever group of sixty-six tourists on a scenic flight over Chilean-occupied parts of the Antarctica Peninsula. Two years later, tourists were enlisted by Argentina to reinforce its claim to the same peninsula. In the summer of 1957–58, the Argentine navy transport ship Ara Les Eclaireurs sailed from Buenos Aires with about a hundred tourists; it would make two voyages to resupply Argentina’s bases on the peninsula, the South Shetlands and South Orkneys.
Amongst the penguins and the seals and the icebergs, the tourists were shown the extent of Argentina’s occupation. At Deception Island, where a British ship was at anchor, the two captains ‘exchanged the usual formal notes, each welcoming the other to its “territorial waters” in the Antarctic’. The presence of tourists in the Falkland Islands Dependencies, and the propaganda use that was being made of them by Argentina, provoked a strong response from Britain, which reminded the world of its sovereignty over Deception Island. Not to be outdone, the Argentine government replied that it had been ‘a tourist voyage … to a zone considered by Argentina to be under Argentina’s exclusive sovereignty’. Undaunted, both Chilean and Argentine vessels returned in early 1959 with two further shiploads of tourists.47
The development of tourism took a new form in January 1966, when the New York-based travel company of Lars-Eric Lindblad chartered the Argentine naval ship Lapataia to take fifty-eight American tourists on a cruise from Ushuaia to the South Shetlands and Hope Bay. The group included an eighty-six-year-old woman from Washington. ‘To have the Antarctic fall upon such evil days!’ expostulated the American explorer Richard Black. Lindblad reported by radio how the ship had anchored off Argentina’s Groussac Station, where the tourists were able to go ashore to visit the nearby penguin rookery. They had ‘a wonderful time’, said Lindblad, ‘picking up penguins, photographing them and had tobogganing parties on the snow covered hills’.
As a result of the tourist initiative, Lindblad was proposed for membership of the New York Explorers’ Club, which had been established in the early 1900s as a meeting place and sponsor for explorers. Now it was suggested that the ‘future of the Club could well be tied in to scientific tourism or exploring trips for the non-professional explorers and their wives, as well as the professionals’. The explorer Finn Ronne led the Lindblad tour, which was pitched to those who were prepared to participate in a scientific program; they were given a list of books to read before departure. While it was suggested that these tourists bring warm underwear and a big woollen scarf, the men were also advised to pack a dark suit and the women ‘a couple of nice cocktail dresses’.48 As they frolicked among the penguins, and later sipped cocktails in the ship’s bar, the elderly woman from Washington and her companions were inadvertently stirring up questions of sovereignty that were supposed to have been resolved by the Antarctic Treaty.
The visit of the American tourists to an Argentine base located in a territory claimed by both Argentina and Britain raised all sorts of jurisdictional problems that had not been contemplated when the Antarctic Treaty had been signed just a few years before. Although New Zealand was concerned that it raised ‘in an acute form the vexed questions of sovereignty … and criminal jurisdiction’, there was some confidence in Wellington that the ‘costs and practical difficulties are so great’ that there was not likely to be ‘anything but a small trickle of tourists in the foreseeable future’.
Rather than trying to tackle the jurisdictional problems head-on, the treaty powers instead drew up a voluntary code of conduct for tourists and tour companies.49 The diplomats needed to hurry. Just two years later, Lindblad extended his operations from the Antarctic Peninsula to McMurdo Sound. Tourists were drawn to the area by its association with Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton, and by the haunting presence of their historic huts.
This time, Lindblad chartered the Danish ship Magga Dan, leaving from Lyttelton near Christchurch for the long voyage across the Southern Ocean.50 It was much longer than going from South America to the Antarctic Peninsula, and the seas could be as rough as those of the Drake Passage. It would be quicker if tourists could be flown to McMurdo and meet with a waiting ship, which might also serve as a floating hotel. There had been a proposal by Qantas in 1963 to do just that but it had come to nothing. It required the assistance of the American authorities who controlled the McMurdo landing strip, and that was not forthcoming.51 Instead, Air New Zealand and Qantas began flights over the Ross Sea and McMurdo Sound in 1977. The flights came to an abrupt end when an Air New Zealand DC-10 crashed into Mount Erebus on Ross Island on 28 November 1979, killing all 257 people on board. Qantas would not resume its Antarctic flights until 1994.
The tragedy on Mount Erebus caused a serious disruption to the scientific programs conducted at the nearby New Zealand and American bases. Less serious disruptions occurred elsewhere, whenever a tourist ship disgorged its passengers at a scientific base. By 1987, America’s National Science Foundation was concerned that its bases were facing an ‘avalanche of tourism’ that was getting ‘totally out of hand’, with nearly 3000 tourists expected during the coming summer season. Small scientific bases might see a shipload of tourists suddenly arrive and swarm across vulnerable landscapes and penguin rookeries.
The head of polar programs at the National Science Foundation, Dr Peter Wilkniss, was concerned that the treaty was not coping with this new threat to the Antarctic, where tourists were outnumbering scientists and other official inhabitants. He told a New Zealand journalist that it marked ‘the dawn of the commercial age in Antarctica’. With several thousand tourists visiting the Antarctic Peninsula each summer, it became known as the ‘Antarctic Riviera’. When a single cruise ship brought about 1000 people to the peninsula in the summer of 1987–88, the United States informed Argentina that they would not be permitted to visit America’s Palmer Base.52 Of course, with no recognised sovereignty in the Antarctic, the tourist ships could go where they pleased. Scientists had to rely on the voluntary cooperation of the tour companies, which also cooperated with each other so that two ships would not arrive together and dispel the sense of wilderness.53 In 2011, the largest cruise ships were banned from Antarctic waters by the International Maritime Organization.
One tour company decided to put the absence of sovereignty to the test. In November 1987, an old DC-4 aircraft lumbered into view across the windswept and slightly corrugated field of ice near the base of the majestic, 4897 metre-high Mount Vinson, the highest mountain in the Antarctic. The landing place lay in territory contested by Chile and Britain. After an historic eleven-hour flight by the propeller-driven aircraft, British pilot Giles Kershaw managed to set down safely and unload supplies for the first commercial base ever established in the Antarctic. Run by a Canadian company, the Antarctic Airways flight was a direct challenge to those governments who purported to possess the territory, as well as to the other Antarctic Treaty signatories who supposedly administered the continent.
Effectively, the bluff of the signatories had been called. Since no sovereignty was recognised in the Antarctic, people could establish commercial operations without reference to any government. In this case, the site was chosen so that the DC-4 could bring passengers all the way from Argentina, who would then be offloaded into eight-seater, ski-fitted Beaver aircraft for onward transport to the South Pole or elsewhere. Some of the early passengers were adventurers intent on mountaineering or skiing, others were tourists keen to visit the South Pole, while others were scientists wanting to travel to one of the nearby bases on the Weddell Sea coast. The owners of the venture said they wanted to make access to Antarctica ‘available to private individuals at an affordable cost’.54
Antarctic Airways put the continent on the agenda of thrill-seeking adventurers who wanted to climb the highest mountain on each continent, to ski unassisted to the South Pole or simply to fly to the South Pole for the briefest of stopovers. These were mainly personal quests. Rather than attempting to assert sovereignty, they were implicitly challenging the sovereignty of Antarctic nations, and perhaps suggesting that the continent belonged to all nations. By 1998, more than 400 mountaineers had climbed Mount Vinson, courtesy of Antarctic Airways.55
In January 2004 a team of eight Palestinians and Israelis climbed a mountain on the Antarctic Peninsula that they promptly named the ‘Mountain of Palestinian–Israeli Friendship’.56 In 1992, four American women planned to traverse the continent via the South Pole but had to be content to end their trek there. British adventurer Ranulph Fiennes and companion Michael Stroud went further that same year, making an unassisted trek across the continent to McMurdo via the South Pole; they fell just short of Ross Island and had to be airlifted out. Fiennes tried again in 1996 and was forced to retire with kidney stones, while his Norwegian rival Børge Ousland completed the crossing alone and unassisted. A British father-and-son team had the curious distinction of becoming the first diabetics to reach the South Pole by skis and sledges, with the father also being the oldest person to have done so. An American woman took her two children and a British couple on foot to the South Pole in December 2004. Another group ignored opposition from the Chilean and US governments and took nearly two months to ski to the South Pole from the Patriot Hills, beginning each day’s trek with a reading from Scott’s diary.57
Some adventurers came to grief and had to be rescued. Some were beyond rescue, like the nature photographer frozen to death while photographing penguins in a blizzard, and the three skydivers whose parachutes failed to open when they dropped in on the South Pole.58 Another couple sailed to the Antarctic and allowed their small boat to be locked in for the winter, declaring in a book of their experiences that ‘Antarctica belongs to no-one’.59 That sentiment was also expressed by a group of adventurers in 1986 who encountered hostility from scientists at McMurdo when they sought to follow in the footsteps of Scott. One riposted that they had given ‘two fingers to anybody who thought they owned the place’.60
Although some of the treaty nations viewed adventure tourism with alarm, and most scientists did not welcome the burden of hosting mass tourist parties or the prospect of rescuing them in the field, some countries saw it as an opportunity to show the world that they were the sovereign power in a particular territory. When a chartered Argentine ship took American tourists to the Antarctic Peninsula, it provided a chance for Argentina to show off its bases and tell outsiders about its possession of the place.
There was also a very real economic benefit. Ever since 1956, New Zealand had been profiting by having American flights and ships call there on their way to the McMurdo base. Now it watched enviously as Australia and Chile, where three cruise ships were based, developed plans for Antarctic tourism. In September 1988, the director of the New Zealand Tourist and Publicity Department, Neil Plimmer, recommended that New Zealand should ‘share in the benefits of Antarctic tourism’ by consolidating ‘Christchurch’s claim as an Antarctic gateway’. Plimmer noted that tourism had become the world’s biggest industry. Moreover, tourism, rather than minerals, seemed likely to become the greatest producer of wealth in the Antarctic, which he described as ‘the earth’s last major tourism frontier’. By encouraging tourism in the Ross Dependency, New Zealand would enjoy economic benefits and raise the ‘international profile of the New Zealand claim to the territory’.61 Another New Zealand official was so attracted by the potential of tourism that he argued it should be regarded as equal to science when deciding priorities in the Antarctic.62
One way of using tourism to reinforce New Zealand’s sovereignty was to upgrade the Antarctic exhibits at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, which would show New Zealanders – and international tourists transiting through Christchurch – the history of the country’s involvement with the Ross Dependency. It was part of making Christchurch ‘the “Capital” of Antarctica’, with America’s National Science Foundation having its Antarctic headquarters there, along with the New Zealand Antarctic Division.
While aircraft could make direct flights from Christchurch to the landing strip at McMurdo, the harbour facilities at nearby Lyttelton would be developed to accommodate cruise ships leaving for the Ross Dependency. Plimmer had accompanied New Zealand’s deputy prime minister on a visit to McMurdo over the summer, where New Zealand and American bases sat in uneasy proximity to each other. It was clear to Plimmer that ‘control is being consolidated around sites of national activity’. He was concerned that tourists might get the wrong impression by seeing the American flag flying over McMurdo, which gave the ‘appearance of practical national control … over it and its immediate environs’. The Americans had also placed buildings and a flagpole on Marble Point, on the continental coast across from the McMurdo base, which they used as a refuelling station for helicopters heading to inland field stations.
Marble Point had been identified as an ideal site for a sealed runway, but they had never developed it. Instead, they had ‘effectively “claimed” Marble Point’, noted Plimmer, thereby denying it as a base and airfield site to any of America’s territorial rivals. They had also denied it to New Zealand as an airfield for tourists. With this example in mind, Plimmer urged his government to locate future scientific activities in locations that had a ‘high tourism potential’, by which it could ‘claim’ the sites for their ‘future potential’. He suggested that one such place could be Cape Roberts, which soon after became the site for a New Zealand tide gauge. Plimmer also wanted further restoration work done on the Scott and Shackleton huts, in order to ‘reinforce the New Zealand connection and also to establish that New Zealand tourism is adopting a strongly conservationist approach to Antarctic tourism’.63
Whether or not he realised it, Plimmer was proposing a new way of looking at sovereignty in the Antarctic. Although New Zealand still asserted its sovereignty over the Ross Dependency, he was suggesting that sovereignty over places such as the American McMurdo base and its surrounds had effectively been assumed by the United States. As a result, New Zealand would have to look elsewhere to establish a wharf and airfield facilities.
A planner with the Tourist and Publicity Department, Jeff Robertson, took up Plimmer’s arguments, noting the importance of occupying sites with tourism potential and thereby achieving ‘effective sovereignty’ over them. But he warned that there were likely to be conflicts with ‘scientific agencies, which have had sole possession of the Antarctic for thirty years’ and whose first inclination was to restrict tourists by ‘rationing Base visits, closing sites or wildlife areas, [and] denying the use of facilities’.64
It was not just the scientific community that was developing a sense of possession in the Antarctic. Environmental groups were making demands of their own about what activities should be permitted there. They became particularly alarmed about the possible environmental hazards posed by tourism following the sinking of the Argentine naval ship Bahia Paraiso on 28 January 1989. A new territorial rivalry seemed to be emerging, not between nations but between the scientific community and environmental groups and the Antarctic tourist industry and their customers.
The Bahia Paraiso came to grief off the Antarctic Peninsula, as it was entering Arthur Harbor on Anvers Island with a party of eighty-one tourists. They had been planning to visit America’s Palmer Base, but their vessel shuddered to a halt on a reef, which gashed a hole in the ship’s side. An estimated 600,000 litres of diesel fuel poured into the icy waters, sending a slick over many square kilometres of sea, which would destroy much of the marine life and many of the birds and mammals that lived off it. Although the ship sank and was never recovered, the 234 passengers and crew managed to escape and find shelter at Palmer Base, where the scientists had the burden of hosting them until they could be collected by other cruise ships.
The sinking prompted environmental groups to call for tougher rules to manage the increase in Antarctic tourism, just as tourism companies were planning more inventive ways to bring ever greater numbers to the continent. There was already a forty-person hotel at a Chilean base on the peninsula, while other tourists were flown in from South America to a landing strip, from where they took helicopter rides to nearby wildlife colonies. Tourists were also flown from South America to join cruise ships on the peninsula, thereby avoiding the often stormy voyage across the Drake Passage. Environmentalists called for the Antarctic to be regarded as an ‘area where wilderness values were paramount’.65
The call was a timely one. In May 1989 an Australian businessman was planning to build a five-storey hotel next to a runway capable of landing jumbo jets. It was estimated that the development, if approved, would attract an additional 16,000 tourists to the Antarctic each year. But it never went ahead.66 There was increasing concern about the particular environmental hazards of human activity in polar areas. While the United States had established a nuclear power station at McMurdo and Britain had considered detonating a hydrogen bomb on the Antarctic Peninsula to scare away the Argentinians, there was a heightened environmental sensibility by the 1980s. The sinking of the Bahia Paraiso had helped to foster that sensibility. But it was the grounding on an Alaskan reef two months later of the mammoth oil tanker Exxon Valdez that really alerted the world to the dangers of oil spills in remote polar regions. Thousands of square miles of sea and 1300 miles of coastline were covered by oil, causing an unprecedented environmental disaster. The consequent clean-up cost billions of dollars and caused problems of its own. Translated to the more isolated and colder Antarctic, the damage and cost would have been much greater.
The Exxon Valdez disaster could not have come at a worse time for those who wanted to explore for minerals and oil in the Antarctic. With no sovereignty being recognised in the Antarctic, it was potentially open to any mining company to explore for minerals and exploit what was found. At the same time, undertaking geological surveys was a useful way for governments to protect their territorial titles.
In 1957, New Zealand had conducted a geological survey of the Ross Dependency to reinforce its sovereignty and give it the right to exploit any mineral resources that were found. The government had been urged on by the nation’s Antarctic Society, which argued that a survey would ‘firmly establish our right to exploit it when the time comes. This is urgent. If we do not do it someone else will.’67 Although nothing valuable was found, companies wanted to join in the exploration. In 1969, one company asked the New Zealand government whether there were any ‘legal obstacles’ to exploring in the Ross Dependency, while another sought ‘exclusive rights to explore, prospect and develop a large area of the Ross Dependency for petroleum, coal and all other minerals’. New Zealand wanted to raise the issue at the next consultative meeting of treaty nations in 1970, but was opposed by Australia and Argentina because of the difficult sovereignty questions.68 Only Japan expressed enthusiasm to discuss the issue.69
The mining issue was put on the agenda for discussion in Wellington in 1972; it was feared that the discovery of oil or mineral deposits would spell the end of the treaty. As one delegate observed, once ‘a big mineral discovery is made – then it will be every man for himself’.70 Although no agreement was reached, several treaty nations wanted exploration to be permitted. The oil crisis of October 1973 gave added force to their arguments, as did the discovery that same year of gas reserves off Antarctica by an American deep-sea drilling rig, the Glomar Challenger, and the discovery by British Petroleum of potential oil reserves south of the Falkland Islands.71 With a huge oil and gas deposit being developed on the North Alaskan coast, some 400 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, there were calls from non-treaty nations, led by Sri Lanka, for the internationalisation of the Antarctic under the control of the United Nations so that all could share in the possible harvest. With the Antarctic oil reserves believed to be much larger than those of Alaska, several developing nations argued that the Antarctic should be regarded as the common heritage of mankind, as the world’s oceans were.72
While Australia, Argentina and Chile argued that only territorial claimants should benefit from any mineral resources, the United States, Russia and Japan also wanted to exploit the Antarctic. With the United States enjoying a technological advantage in deep-sea oil drilling, it was keen to proceed quickly to an agreement. Other countries wanted to delay, in some cases to allow them time to catch up with the Americans.73 In 1975, New Zealand’s Labour government proposed a permanent moratorium on mining and the creation of a world park, but it failed to get support from other treaty nations. The subsequent National Party government reversed that position when it came to power in 1977.
For its part, New Zealand wanted to benefit ‘to the maximum extent’ from any deposits found in the Ross Dependency, but it was prepared to share the profits with non-treaty nations. New Zealand expanded its search for such deposits, conscious that its rights would be all the stronger for doing so. At the same time, the prospect of finding oil or minerals made the New Zealand government amenable to conceding part of its supposed sovereignty.74 It wanted to avoid a rush by oil companies to the Antarctic that would see New Zealand at the back of the pack.
But the oil companies were already there. America’s Glomar Challenger had found indications of oil in the Ross Sea, the Japanese research ship Hakurei Maru was based in McMurdo to investigate the undersea resources, and the Germans were on their way.75 With two oil companies on the State Department’s Antarctic Advisory Committee, the ‘prospect of enormous commercial payoffs … is a genie that’s out of the bottle’, observed one State Department official. The question had become ‘whether the Antarctic continent will remain a laboratory for scientific research or be exploited by rivals for vast natural resources’.76
New Zealand tried to stall for time, arguing that an environmental regime should be put in place before exploration began. It tried to stifle the enthusiasm by downplaying the riches that might be won, while at the same time stressing the need to protect the environment.77 In stalling for time, New Zealand was anxious to improve its chances of securing those riches for itself. As diplomat Chris Beeby noted in 1982, New Zealand had ‘exercised sovereignty over the Ross Dependency for nearly sixty years’ and contributed to science and the protection of the environment for more than twenty-five years. As a result, argued Beeby, ‘New Zealand is entitled to expect a fair share of any benefits that may flow from mining on the continent.’78
Beeby was well-placed to promote New Zealand’s interests when the treaty nations made him chair of a consultative conference tasked in 1982 with finding a way to balance exploitation with protection of the environment and the preservation of sovereignty. The informal discussions began with a twelve-day meeting in Wellington in January 1983, after which Beeby was optimistic that the delegates were aware of the ‘political urgency’ of reaching agreement in the face of pressure from developing countries.79 Indeed, a meeting of non-aligned countries in Delhi just two months later agreed that the exploitation of Antarctic resources should be ‘for the benefit of all mankind’.80
It was not just developing nations whose interest in the Antarctic was sparked by the prospect of finding minerals or oil. While China and India signed the Antarctic Treaty in 1983, Germany, Italy, Spain, Finland and Sweden were among the developed countries who signed in the early 1980s. Swedish diplomat Bo Johnson explained his country’s accession to the treaty by noting that the ‘need for resources, and more resources, is the theme of the day’; Sweden planned to ‘reconnect’ with its ‘scientific tradition in the Antarctic area’ so that it could share in the ‘possible future exploitation of Antarctic resources’.81 Although these various moves put the treaty nations on notice, it would take six years of difficult discussions before agreement would be reached.
In June 1988, the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities was finally adopted. Seemingly designed to protect the Antarctic environment, it was really intended to establish procedures for the exploration and exploitation of oil and mineral deposits. Before it could come into effect, however, the convention required ratification by the various governments involved. After the years of negotiation, this was assumed to be almost automatic.
But environmental groups and their supporters now had a sense of ownership over the Antarctic, and they used their influence to pressure their respective governments against ratification. Events moved in their favour. Just six days after the ratification measure was introduced into the British House of Lords, the Exxon Valdez struck the Alaskan reef, adding to the earlier concern over the Bahia Paraiso. Opposition to the minerals convention spread as quickly as the tanker’s oil slick. In the United States, Senator Al Gore called for mining to be banned in the Antarctic and the continent to be declared ‘a global ecological commons’.
The New Zealand government back-pedaled as fast as it could. While still supporting the minerals convention, it also wanted the creation of what it called an ‘Antarctic Park’. Then it back-pedaled further and said it would not ratify the convention, and would instead push for a moratorium on mining, while leaving open the option of one day supporting the convention. The Australian government of Bob Hawke went further, announcing in May 1989 that it would not ratify the minerals convention.82 Hawke went to Paris to meet with the French prime minister, Michel Rocard, with both leaders agreeing to oppose the convention. In the face of this, the convention could not come into force.83
While the treaty nations had been moving inexorably towards an agreement on mining, environmental groups were just as surely moving to thwart them. More than 200 such groups, from Greenpeace to the World Wildlife Fund, joined together to form the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC). It was led by the American environmentalist Jim Barnes, who campaigned against the minerals regime and called for Antarctica to be made a world park.84
Greenpeace became an Antarctic actor in its own right in 1987, when it established a small base at Cape Evans on Ross Island, where Scott had erected his hut in 1911. It was part of the campaign to have the Antarctic declared a world park, which would be ‘dedicated to international scientific research, in which wilderness values are paramount’. The organisation intended to remain at Cape Evans ‘to provide a continuous presence against possible minerals exploitation’.85 Greenpeace also used the inspection provisions in the Antarctic Treaty to inspect other bases and to educate base personnel on their environmental responsibilities.
It did not have to look far to find problems, as the Americans and New Zealanders were dumping their sewerage and rubbish in the sea. The Americans had also disposed of radioactive waste in the ice. In January 1989, Greenpeace members went to the French base in Adélie Land, where an international landing strip was being built on the site of a penguin rookery in contravention of the agreed measures for the protection of Antarctic wildlife. The airstrip would enable a greater number of personnel to remain during the summer season for a longer period of time. Greenpeace brought the French transgression to world attention by camping on the half-formed runway, which highlighted the irony of a base being expanded partly to study the adjacent wildlife, only to adversely impact their habitat.86 Several years later, France finally abandoned its half-completed project. The signing of the Madrid Protocol on Environmental Protection in October 1991 gave Antarctica a mining-free reprieve of fifty years, prompting Greenpeace to pack up its base at Cape Evans.
A similar tussle erupted over the exploitation of Antarctica’s living resources, which comprised everything from whales, seals and penguins to fish, squid and krill. Some fared better than others. Penguins had never been exploited much in Antarctica, other than as food for explorers and their dogs or as exhibits for distant zoos and museums. Whales and seals had been heavily killed, almost to the point of extinction in the case of some species. Fish, squid and krill had been neglected until recent times, when overexploitation of other oceans led some nations to focus on the abundant resources in the Southern Ocean.
Krill, in particular, had been targeted by the Soviet Union since 1961. One Soviet writer listed the ‘more efficient utilization of biological resources’ as one of the main aims of the Soviet presence in Antarctica.87 Japan and several other countries joined the Soviet Union in experimenting with krill harvesting and processing. By the mid-1970s, the total catch only amounted to about 20,000 tons.88 These small creatures provided food for whales, seals and penguins, and it was believed that the sharp decline in whale numbers had resulted in a consequent explosion in krill stocks. Estimates varied widely, but the potential annual catch of krill on a sustainable basis was said to be about 100 million tons, which was more than twice the annual catch of marine life in the world’s oceans. Similar potential was believed to exist with deep-sea Antarctic squid.89
By the early 1970s, the treaty nations had begun discussing ways of conserving such ‘biological resources’, which was code for exploiting them in a sustainable way, all the while trying to deflect the criticism they received from the increasingly influential environmental movement. When a conference was held in London in February 1972 to discuss the conservation of seals in the Antarctic, many of the American delegates were environmentalists. Yet the conference still approved the killing of some 200,000 seals on the Antarctic sea ice; those on the ice shelves remained safe from exploitation. The plan sparked outrage among conservationists, although there was no great interest by any parties to harvest seals.90 There was much more interest in the size of fish and krill stocks, and in what a sustainable fishing level might be. Further scientific investigation would be required before agreement could be reached on their exploitation, which meant that treaty nations shifted more of their attention offshore so that they might eventually share in the harvest. They were also impelled to do so in order to retain their influence in the Antarctic and to bolster their territorial rights and claims, which, under the UN Law of the Sea Convention, could now extend 320 kilometres offshore. By 1982, the treaty powers had agreed to a convention to preserve marine resources in Antarctic waters and to ascertain the sustainable levels of their exploitation.91
For fifty years, the Antarctic Treaty has preserved peace on the continent and served as an example of cooperation. The risk of territorial rivalries erupting into armed conflict has been averted by the spirit of amity that it promotes. Even when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, the conflict did not spread to the Antarctic. Beneath the surface, however, the rivalries have continued, with the competition being complicated by the addition of new and powerful participants, such as China. The prospect of oil and mineral deposits has attracted the attention of many resource-starved nations.
At the same time, scientists have sought to control the continent so that its relatively pristine state is retained for their investigations. They have been joined by environmentalists, who want the Antarctic to be a ‘world park’ and have been prepared to set up their own base to promote their aim. Adventurers have ignored questions of sovereignty, flying in to test their limits in the icy wilderness. The largest group by far has been the tourists, who want to share in the continent’s magic and mystery but inevitably diminish it by their presence.
For centuries, the Antarctic defied man’s approach. Now its dangers and its terrors have been largely conquered. Only its future remains unknown.