Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels
(ACAP)isTH-CENTURY BRITAIN •
Chapter 2
Acts of discovery are never politically innocent. Even in the uninhabited Antarctic,
Argentina, Britain, Russia, and the United States continue to stake their claims as
discoverers. The UK-based Antarctic Place Names Committee reminds interested parties
that, 'The naming of places in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic goes back to 1775 when
Capt. James Cook, RN, discovered South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.' So
Britain, it is expected, should be considered
primus inter pares
when it comes to the
discovery of the Antarctic.
States press their interests by publicizing discovery 'firsts', preserving historical huts,
mobilizing memories of past explorers and their deeds, promoting contemporary tourism,
and maintaining memorials (such as Lenin's bust at the Russian-based Pole of
Inaccessibility research station, and the Richard Byrd bust at the American McMurdo
station). Antarctic discovery and exploration are profoundly gendered, racialized,
nationalized, and civilized. European and North American white men are lionized while
women perform a distinctly subservient service through place names and/or providing
'Antarctic babies' for particular nationalist regimes. Non-white men are written out of the
script. How many people know, for example, that the Maori Te Atu (who changed his name
to John Sacs) travelled with the US Exploring Expedition in the early 1840s? For centuries,
moreover, Maori believed that a white land lay to the south of contemporary New Zealand.
Initial European exploration and discovery
In the 16th and 17th centuries, European explorers and geographers were ruminating over
the possible existence of a
Terra Australis
, a concept postulated as necessary since classical
antiquity. European voyages around Africa demonstrated that this southerly territory was
not attached to the African continent. Likewise, the voyages of Ferdinand Magellan in the
1520s, Sir Francis Drake, and the Dutch explorers Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten in
the second half of the 16th century proved that it was not connected to the southern tip of
South America. If there was another continent to be discovered, then it must reside
somewhere in the poorly mapped Southern Ocean.
Although the English merchant Antonio de la Roche first discovered the island of South
Georgia in 1675, the first landing was not actually made until 1775, when Captain James
