Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
6
16, 1840, at approximately 164° 30′ E, 64° 11′ S, but none recorded it in the log until Jan-
uary 19, thus setting up an acrimonious set of claims and counterclaims between Wilkes
and Dumont d'Urville regarding who had seen and done what first. This argument was
exacerbated by an earlier incident when Porpoise, one of the Exploring Expedition's ships,
passed Astrolabe, Dumont d'Urville's ship, in a fog and neither one trimmed sails to slow
down for the other. Wilkes managed to stay his course close to the coast, sighting land
ice at a number of locations before reaching a large ice tongue (Shackleton Ice Tongue) at
about 100° E. From there he sailed back to Hobart, having followed the coast for seven-
teen hundred miles.
By the end of the austral summer of 1839-1840 the outline of Antarctica had taken
on much of the shape that we know today (see Fig. 1.2). The bow-shaped coastline of East
Antarctica was known to lie close to the Antarctic Circle from 164° E to the Prime Me-
ridian, thanks to the voyages of Bellingshausen, Briscoe, Kemp, Dumont d'Urville, and
Wilkes. Most sightings were of fast ice, but in the few places that outcrops of rocks were
seen, all were of low elevation and low relief. In contrast, towering peaks rising out of ice-
choked straits characterized the distal end of the Antarctic Peninsula projecting toward
South America at approximately the 60° W meridian. To the east of the peninsula, Wed-
dell had shown that the ocean reached as far south as 74° S, considerably farther than the
coastline to the east of the Prime. The longest remaining segment of unknown coast was
from Alexander Island to 165° E, Wilkes's starting point. Cook's farthest south had been
along longitude 106° W, to 71° 10′ S, but floating ice was all that anyone had recorded in
that quadrant of Antarctica.
Such was the map of the southern continent as one of the greatest players in Antarctic
exploration was about to enter the game. With the endorsement of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science, the government organized an expedition for the study
of magnetism at high southerly latitudes and the exploration of new lands in the Antarc-
tic. The command could not have been given to a more capable captain than James Clark
Ross, a veteran of Arctic voyages for twenty years. Skilled in operating magnetic instru-
mentation, Ross had been the first person to reach the Magnetic North Pole. He joined
the Royal Navy at the age of eleven and rose through the ranks, mentored both by his
uncle John Ross, who was involved in expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage,
and by Edward Parry, another giant of Arctic exploration.
In the early 1830s the Rosses were stuck in Prince Regent Inlet in northern Canada,
beached on the Boothia Peninsula, with their ship Victory in the ice just oVshore. By the
end of their saga, they had wintered over four years, and they were rescued on the high
seas by a chance encounter with a whaling ship, after dragging their small life boats over
hundreds of miles of rough sea ice.
In the spring of 1831, between the second and third winters (when their situation was
grim but not yet desperate), James Clark Ross had set out with an Eskimo sledging party
to explore the region, having learned Inuit during his expedition with Parry. Equipped
with the instrument (a clinometer) to measure the dip of magnetic lines, Ross worked
his way along the western shore of the Boothia Peninsula, and on June 1, 1831, measured
a magnetic inclination of exactly 90°, thereby locating the Magnetic North Pole.
If the Antarctic pack ice could be penetrated, the prize for Ross would be also to
