History of Antarctic Explorers (Royal Museums Greenwich)
Reaching the South Pole (Library of Congress)
Race to the End of the Earth (American Museum of Natural History)
Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-1916 (Scott Polar Research Institute)
The Stunning Survival Story of Ernest Shackleton and his Endurance Crew (History)
Many nations were involved in the discovery and early exploration of Antarctica. About 650 CE, however, long before European geographers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were to conjecture about Terra Australis Incognita, a mythical land to the far south, Rarotongan oral tradition tells of Ui-te-Rangiora, who sailed south of Aotearoa (New Zealand) to a frozen region. Tamarereti, a Polynesian explorer, also saw the icy south, according to oral tradition.
European explorers first approached Antarctica in 1520, when Portuguese navigator and explorer Ferdinand Magellan rounded South America during his journey to circumnavigate the world. In the 18th century, British naval officer James Cook and others explored the sub-Antarctic region; Cook circumnavigated the globe in high southern latitudes between 1772 and 1775, proving that Terra Australis, if it existed at all, lay somewhere beyond the ice packs that he discovered between about 60° and 70° S. Who first saw the continent is controversial. Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, a Baltic German officer in the Imperial Russian Navy; Edward Bransfield, an officer in the Royal Navy; and Nathaniel Palmer, an American sealing captain, all may have sighted Antarctica in 1820. Bellingshausen sighted a landlike mass of ice, possibly the shelf edge of continental ice, on January 27; Bransfield caught sight of land on January 30 that the British later considered to be a mainland part of the Antarctic Peninsula; and on November 18 Palmer unequivocally saw the mainland-peninsula side of Orleans Strait. Continue reading from Encyclopedia Britannica
The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration is the term used to describe the 25-year period from 1897 to 1922, during which there was an international focus on the scientific and geographical exploration of the South Polar regions.
In total, 16 major expeditions were launched from 8 different countries during this era. Each expedition took place before advances in transport and communication had revolutionised the work of exploration. As a result, they were all feats of endurance with limited resources. The "heroic" label acknowledged the adversities faced by these pioneers, 17 of whom did not survive the experience. Continue reading from City of Plymouth, UK
In 1914, with the prize of the Pole having been claimed, Shackleton embarked on a new challenge–to cross the entire continent on foot, from the Weddell to the Ross Sea. Leaving the island of South Georgia in December, his ship Endurance battled her way through pack ice toward the continent. But while deep in the pack of the Weddell Sea, the ship was trapped and slowly crushed by the ice.
Shackleton and his men became castaways in one of the most hostile environments on earth. The expedition was a failure–yet the unimaginable saga of survival that followed ensured that it was for this, the failed Endurance expedition, that Shackleton is ultimately most remembered. Continue reading from The American Museum of Natural History
