interpretive systems within which information about them was incorporated broke down. The world ocean could not be assimilated by a simple elaboration of piloting skills and portolan charts developed for the Mediterranean and the Baltic-North seas. There were problems of scale that could not be solved through a simple enlargement but that demanded new principles of organization. Because of the voyages, the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy, the summa of ancient geographic wisdom, would be superseded instead of merely revised, much as the De Revolutionibus of Nicolaus Copernicus would replace, not merely redesign, the inherited lore contained in Ptolemy’s companion cosmology, the Almagest.
In many ways, Antarctica conformed to this pattern. The myth of a great southern land and sea, the fabled terra australis—an inheritance from Hellenistic lore—was among the last of the Cíbolas, El Dorados, and Brasils to dissolve beneath the harsh gaze of exploration. The Greek passion for symmetry demanded that the globe contain an immense land mass south of the torrid zone (the equator) to balance the vast known lands to the north. For centuries, while cartographers invented new techniques of projection and radically redrew the known outline of the world’s coastlines, incorporating a New World unimagined by the ancients, mappae mundi contained the hypothetical Southern Continent. The discovery of the Straits of Magellan and even the Drake Passage did not destroy this tradition. Magellan saw land to both sides, and his strait could be envisioned as a New World equivalent to the Dardanelles. Drake did not see land to the south, but that fact, when accepted, only shrank the dimensions of the imagined continent. Meanwhile, intermittent landfalls on large masses in the Pacific announced what might be peninsulas from the terra australis.
Here the voyages of Cook assume their importance. Systematically, Cook investigated the remaining coastlines of the Pacific. The reputed outliers from the Southern Continent were, in reality, the islands of New Zealand and Australia—whose great size earned it the old name. The Northwest Passage did not exist. The Southern Continent, if it existed, was in a forbidding region of polar ice, wholly uninhabitable. During Cook’s second voyage (1772–1775), on which he enjoyed favorable pack-ice conditions, he circumnavigated the Southern Ocean, crossed the Antarctic Circle, and penetrated to latitude 71 degrees 10 minutes South, near the Amundsen Sea. Though he found abundant marine riches—his popular account, A Voyage towards the South Pole (1777), started a veritable rush of whalers and fur sealers to the subpolar area—he fatally wounded the vision of a flourishing civilization near the pole. Cook did not make landfall or even see the coast, though he “firmly believed” that some land existed farther south which was responsible for the ice. Instead he had to content himself with threading his two ships through the decaying perimeter of the pack and around enormous “ice islands.” In exploration, as in other dimensions of natural history, the pack ice defined the effective perimeter—the littoral—of the continent. Interestingly, Cook’s greatest geographic discoveries did not reveal new lands so much as they defined the dimensions of known coastlines and erased whole continents of a hypothetical geography. Cook summarized:
I have now made the circuit of the Southern Ocean in a high Latitude, and traversed it in such a manner as to leave not the least room for the Possibility of there being a continent, unless near the Pole and out of the reach of Navigation…. Thus I flatter myself that the intention of the Voyage has in every respect been fully Answered, the Southern Hemisphere sufficiently explored and a final end put to the searching after a Southern Continent, which has at times ingrossed the attention of some of the Maritime Powers for near two Centuries past and the Geographers of all ages.6
Cook thus became the great practitioner of “negative discovery,” and it is appropriate that the scene of his grandest triumph should be the Antarctic—the “country of Refusal,” as poet Katha Pollitt describes it, where “No was final.”7
Even the indomitable Cook, however, backed away, sensibly enough, from deeper penetrations into The Ice. “The risk one runs in exploreing a coast in these unknown and Icy Seas, is so very great, that I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored.”8 Should anyone have “the resolution and perseverance to find … beyond where I have been,” he concluded, “I shall not envy him the honour of the discovery, but I will be bold to say, that the world will not be benefited by it.”9 The challenge was not merely technological but intellectual. There were no means to enter The Ice and no purpose to justify the attempt.
It was recognized even in the eighteenth century that Cook’s remarkable voyages were special, that they combined new skills with new purposes of exploration. Yet they were not isolated phenomena. Cook was only the highest expression of the era; other circumnavigators sailed the unknown seas, and scientific inquiry had begun to move inland from the coast. New lands were discovered and old ones resurveyed in the spirit and with the intellectual apparatus of the Enlightenment. Especially in the Antarctic, where the true coastline had not yet been visited, there was ample room for both amateur and professional. Cook’s travels became an exemplar and stimulant for further voyages of discovery, and his published reports inspired a good deal of political and economic rivalry for the lands and resources he had observed.
But the North Pacific was more promising than the Southern Ocean; the northwest coast of North America was already an active arena for imperial ambitions, and its sea otters and fur seals were more accessible than the seals and whales of Antarctica. Not until 1819 did interest in Antarctica awaken—promoted in part by the accidental discovery of the South Shetland Islands by William Smith, a British merchant captain blown off course by a storm, and in part by the systematic voyages of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who had been sent by Czar Alexander I on “an extended voyage of discovery” in the ships Vostok and Mirnyi. “Every effort will be made to approach as closely as possible to the South Pole,” read Bellingshausen’s instructions, “searching for as yet unknown land, and only abandoning the undertaking in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”10 The South Shetlands were fecund with fur seals, and after confirmation of the find by Capt. James Sheffield, an American sealer, word of their commercial possibilities spread rapidly. Within a year scores of sealers had swarmed around the islands, and the senior British officer at Valparaiso, Capt. Edward Bransfield, hastily organized an expedition (which included Smith) to the islands in order to claim them for Britain.
The rapid exhaustion of seals led to a search for other rookeries in the region, principally by British and American sealers. Capt. Benjamin Pendleton, overseeing a flotilla of five ships (1820–1821), dispatched Capt. Nathaniel Palmer of the Hero on a voyage from the South Shetlands to the Antarctic Peninsula (Palmer Land) across the Bransfield Strait. At one point Palmer visited Bellingshausen aboard his ship. Capts. John Davis and Christopher Burdick (1820–1821) also crossed the strait and made the first documented landing on the mainland. The Lord Melville unwillingly spent the first Antarctic winter. The next year, Pendleton and Palmer returned with eight ships, explored King George, Clarence, and Elephant islands, and, in the company of George Powell, a British sealing captain, discovered the South Orkney Islands. Pendleton later brought three ships south for a combination of sealing and scientific exploration (1829–1831); the accounts of the expedition’s naturalist, James Eights, inaugurate the scientific assimilation of Antarctica. Palmer’s exploits were publicized by his mentor, Edmund Fanning. Although others probably saw land at the same time (the place was swarming with sealers), they lacked the desire or talent for publicity that came to Palmer.
Meanwhile, Capt. Benjamin Morrell (1822–1823) entered the Weddell Sea on the east side of the peninsula. A book he wrote about his voyages, while perhaps inaccurate, roused considerable popular interest in the south polar regions—not the first or last time that literature would prove as powerful an incentive to Antarctic exploration as science. Nonetheless, a scientific expedition under Capt. Henry Foster of the Royal Navy visited the South Shetlands (1828–1831) to take gravity measurements, part of a series of global geodetic experiments, and Capt. James Weddell inaugurated the long involvement of the merchant firm Samuel Enderby and Sons in the economic and exploration history of Antarctica.
Enderby
