Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ended. But he was not destined to be able to recollect adversity in
tranquillity. His terrible wound eventually got the better of him. He
died seven months later, at the age of thirty-three. Perhaps it was as
well. He was spared the prospect of seeing the egalitarian revolution
collapse and be replaced by the tyranny of Napoleon Bonaparte.
That tyranny rose and fell. It left in its wake a dynamic and
turbulent Europe: a continent of rapid commercial expansion, chan-
ging social aspirations and sporadic political upheaval. Much that
was true of the old world was also true of the new, Certainly, on
both sides of the Atlantic scientists and scientifically-minded cap-
tains vied with each other in taking up the interrupted task of ex-
ploration. Scarcely had the Napoleonic Wars ceased before expedi-
tions were being fitted out to the Pacific and the North-West Passage.
But, within a few years, mariners turned their attention to that ter-
ritory which Cook had declared unexplorable - Antarctica.
The impetus for this area of enterprise was, as usual, commer-
cial. It was the quest for whale oil and seal skins which drew men to
the inhospitable seas on the edge of the pack ice. At the same time
that Marchand was making his unsuccessful voyage (1790-1792),
an American captain, Daniel Greene, completed a circumnavigation
during which he visited South Georgia to hunt seals and did a lucrat-
ive trade in them at Canton. Over the next thirty years US, British and
Australian captains were increasingly active in pillaging the natural
resources of this remote region.
But it was not trade which drew Baron Thaddeus von Belling-
shausen to the Antarctic, to stake a small but significant claim for
Russia in the process of polar exploration. Not until 1803 did the em-
pire of the tsars take an interest in long-distance navigation. By that
time their colonisation of the northern landmass had extended to
Kamchatka, on the Pacific coast. Overland communication was diffi-
cult and the only satisfactory way of supplying the new settlements
was by ship, which, whether eastabout or westabout, involved a
