How late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expeditions mapped the world's coldest continent
For most of the nineteenth century, the vast landmass surrounding the South Pole remained little more than a blank space on world maps. Whalers and sealers had skirted its icy fringes, and in the early 1840s the British naval officer James Clark Ross had charted sections of its coastline, discovering the towering ice barrier that now bears his name. Yet for another fifty years nobody set foot on the continental interior. The turning point came in 1895, when the Sixth International Geographical Congress convened in London and passed a resolution declaring that the exploration of the Antarctic regions was the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken. Over the next twenty-seven years, seventeen major expeditions from ten countries sailed south, a period historians later termed the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
The first expedition to experience the full severity of an Antarctic winter did so by accident rather than design. In March 1898, the Belgian research vessel Belgica, commanded by Adrien de Gerlache, pushed too far into the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea late in the season and became locked fast. For thirteen months the ship drifted with the ice, and for more than two months during the polar night the sun never rose above the horizon. Unprepared for such an ordeal, the crew suffered terribly from scurvy and psychological depression until the ship's physician, Frederick Cook, and the mate, Roald Amundsen, persuaded the men to eat fresh seal and penguin meat, which restored their health and provided vital lessons for later voyages.
One year after the Belgica broke free, a British-financed expedition led by the Anglo-Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink deliberately wintered ashore for the first time, erecting prefabricated wooden huts at Cape Adare. Borchgrevink demonstrated that explorers could survive on the continent itself and used dogs to sledge onto the Ross Ice Shelf. His success paved the way for Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery Expedition of 1901 to 1904, which established a base at McMurdo Sound. Alongside extensive biological and geological surveys, Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Edward Wilson marched south across the Ross Ice Shelf to latitude 82 degrees south, proving that a route towards the plateau existed, even though snow blindness and vitamin deficiency forced them to turn back.
In 1907 Shackleton returned at the head of the Nimrod Expedition with the explicit goal of reaching the geographic South Pole. Distrustful of sledge dogs after the difficulties encountered on the Discovery voyage, Shackleton relied mainly on Manchurian ponies to haul supplies across the barrier, supplemented by an experimental motor car that quickly proved useless on soft snow. After ascending the Beardmore Glacier onto the polar plateau, Shackleton and three companions marched to within ninety-seven geographical miles of the Pole in January 1909. Realising that their remaining rations of pemmican and biscuit would not suffice for both the final dash and the return journey, Shackleton made the celebrated decision to turn back, bringing his entire party home alive.
The prize finally fell in the southern summer of 1911–1912, when two rival teams converged on the Pole. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, operating from the Bay of Whales, treated the journey purely as a high-speed skiing and dog-sledging operation. Wearing loose-fitting garments of reindeer skin modelled on Inuit clothing, his five-man party reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911 and returned to their ship without losing a single man. Scott's larger British expedition, which combined scientific research with a bid for the Pole, used motor sledges, ponies and dogs in the early stages before hauling their heavy sledges by hand up the glacier and across the plateau. Scott and four companions reached the Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find Amundsen's tent waiting for them; weak from frostbite, exhaustion and inadequate rations, all five perished on the return march.
Despite the public fascination with the race to the Pole, the enduring legacy of the Heroic Age lay in its scientific output. Even on Scott's fatal journey, his party refused to abandon thirty-five pounds of geological specimens collected on the Beardmore Glacier, which included fossil leaves of the ancient plant Glossopteris—evidence that Antarctica had once enjoyed a temperate climate and been joined to other southern continents. Meanwhile, Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition pioneered the use of wireless radio to transmit daily meteorological readings from Cape Denison to Australia, while mapping hundreds of miles of previously unknown coastline.
The era drew to a close after the First World War. Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 failed in its aim of crossing the continent after his ship Endurance was crushed in the Weddell Sea, yet his open-boat voyage to South Georgia became one of history's greatest survival stories. When Shackleton died of a heart attack at South Georgia in 1922 on a subsequent voyage, the Heroic Age effectively ended. The explorers who followed in the late 1920s and 1930s brought long-range aircraft, tracked vehicles and reliable radio communications, replacing the gruelling age of man-hauling and dog teams with the mechanical era of polar science.