From ancient times, the defeat of a territory’s inhabitants usually invested the victor with the right to occupy that territory. But how was that to operate in the Antarctic where there were no people who could be demeaned and dispossessed? There were just the penguins to play the part of indigenous people in the imagination of explorers. Whether being fed to dogs, strangled for science or collected for zoos, the fate of the hapless creatures was used to confirm the victory of the human interlopers and often their ownership of the penguin’s territory.
That ownership was reinforced by engendering a sense that the territory had been conquered. Explorers frequently described their expeditions in terms of conquest, as they launched ‘assaults’ on the South Pole and fought ‘battles’ with the penguins. There was an implicit suggestion that the dispossession of the penguins somehow justified the takeover of the territory, although it was more often nature itself that was regarded as the foe that had to be defeated.
Being able to defend a conquered territory is a necessary precondition for a nation to have its ownership recognised. This caused problems in the Antarctic, where the British in particular struggled to defend their claim to the Falkland Islands Dependencies from incursions by both Argentina and Chile. Shows of force by the various sides were insufficient to expel one rival or another. Other claimants were similarly unsuccessful in defending their supposed sovereignty.
As a result, when permanent bases began to be established from the 1940s onwards, there were cases where several nations contested the same territory. Some tried to assert their superiority over their rivals by describing them as insufficiently committed to scientific inquiry, as the British did of the Argentinians and the Chileans; or by suggesting that their scientific activities were merely a cover for other, more nefarious activities, as the Americans, Australians and others did of the Russians; or by alleging that their rivals were insufficiently protective of the wildlife, as the British did of the Norwegians, Japanese and others. It was a way of saying that their own presence, and therefore their right to the territory, was superior to that of their rivals.
In other times and places, foundation stories were developed to justify the occupation of a particular place and the displacement of the pre-existing people. Although the Antarctic had no preexisting people, foundation stories were used to justify the occupation of particular places. Russia justified its belated involvement by pointing to Bellingshausen as the explorer who first sighted the Antarctic; nations such as Britain and France pointed to the discoveries of their explorers; the United States pointed to the voyages of early sealers such as Nathaniel Palmer, along with the discoveries of Charles Wilkes and his naming of the continent.
Such foundation stories were used to create and reinforce the moral claim that nations need to justify their occupation, both to their own citizens and the world at large.
The preservation of historic huts and other sites added an important physical dimension to the foundation stories, which is why claimant nations were adamant about the preservation of the sites when other nations began to establish bases on the continent. For example, the Russians might have more bases in the Australian Antarctic Territory, and have carried out more scientific research there, but Australia could take some comfort from the existence of Mawson’s carefully preserved hut at Commonwealth Bay. Whatever the Russians might do, the hut was a potent reminder that the Australian involvement with the territory had preceded that of the Russians by several decades.
In other parts of the world, conquerors of a new territory would usually buttress their claim by tilling its soil, fencing fields, building houses and otherwise developing its resources. That did not seem possible in the Antarctic, although some nations tried to do so. The whaling industry operated in Antarctic seas, but never managed to have shore stations on the continent. There was talk of harvesting penguins as food for a fur-farming enterprise, but it never came to anything. Science was the only industry that was ongoing on the continent itself.
The nature of the Antarctic environment seemed to preclude doing much more in the way of asserting effective proprietorship. For decades it was believed that the permanent inhabitation of the Antarctic was impossible, although Borchgrevink’s British expedition had wintered over at Cape Adare in 1899 and Argentina had been in permanent occupation of Laurie Island since 1904. The prevailing view about Antarctica’s suitability for settlement began to change following Byrd’s establishment of Little America and its successor ‘villages’, which suggested that permanent settlements might be possible on the continent itself.
By the 1970s, Argentina and Chile had women give birth at their Antarctic bases, although the families did not remain in Antarctica. They also tried to give their bases the appearance of being normal villages. The Argentinians and Chileans were particularly keen to do this, since they maintained that their Antarctic territories were an integral part of their homelands. Their bases consequently projected an impression of normality, sometimes coming complete with a bank, post office, hospital, church, school, radio station and even a bar and a simple supermarket.
The American McMurdo base was the largest in Antarctica and also resembled a small town, with laid-out streets, a cinema and a chapel. But the inhabitants of all the bases were temporary sojourners who invariably left when their tour of duty was done.
It is unlikely that any nation will ever have sufficient people in Antarctica to put their territorial claims beyond challenge. The seven claimant nations – Britain, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, France, Chile and Argentina – had certainly not managed to do so by the time of the International Geophysical Year in 1957, when their claims had received little international recognition. And they have not done so since. Now those claims are being challenged by the presence of many more nations, as well as by environmental groups such as Greenpeace, scientific groups such as SCAR and tourist and resource companies. Antarctica’s ownership will be difficult to resolve.
The desire to achieve exclusive possession of territory in the Antarctic led to its tentative settlement and the intensive exploration of its mostly empty wastes. While governments sought to claim the Antarctic, the search by scientists for the continent’s many secrets will continue for as long as there is knowledge, strategic advantage or possible profits to be won. In recent decades, some of the knowledge is being sought for what it might tell us about our likely climate in the coming century. Captain Cook could not have imagined that insights into the future of life on Earth might be found locked in the ice of the Antarctic, or that its ownership would continue to be a matter of international contention more than two centuries after his landmark voyage.