Although the Antarctic ice pack and some offshore islands had been
sighted and even landed upon briefly as early as the 1820s, it was not
until an eccentric Anglo-Norwegian explorer, Carsten F. Borchgrevink,
went ashore in 1895 that a human being set foot on the Antarctic
continent. Borchgrevink, snubbed by the British establishment, had
stolen a march on several planned competing expeditions from Germany and
Scandinavia. Borchgrevink returned to Antarctica in 1899 with a party
that was the first to winter over on the continent. Regrettably, bad
weather and unscalable mountains limited their forays inland.
Borchgrevink's survival was proof that with adequate supplies, the
Antarctic winter was survivable, and that with a better geographic
position, the enormous unknown of the continent could be investigated.
Borchgrevink galvanized the British geographical authorities who had
come to consider polar exploration their exclusive province. Led by Sir
Clements Markham of the Royal Geographic Society, the British keenly
felt his blow to their national pride delivered by an explorer they
regarded as an arrogant upstart. The RGS pushed forward with its plans,
and a tragic competition to be the first to reach the South Pole was set
in motion between the British and the Scandinavians. This work is an
account of the first tentative human gropings in Antarctica,
concentrating on the coalescing of official and popular attitudes that
later resulted in the polar races of Robert Falcon Scott and Roald
Amundsen, which dominate the story of the "Heroic Era" of Antarctic
exploration, from 1901 to 1922. T. H. Baughman is chair of the History
Department at Benedictine College. He is the author of Pilgrims on the
Ice: Robert Falcon Scott's First Antarctic Expedition (Nebraska 1999).
