Discovering the unknown continent - Antarctica: Global Science from a Frozen Continent - page 5

first time in the Antarctic region, were valuable additions to existing knowledge.
He may also have been the first to sight the Antarctic continent, if the edge of the

continental ice shelf that he reported on 28 January 1820 is considered as part
of the continent. Interestingly, Bellinghausen speculated that the South Sandwich
Islands and South Georgia might lie on a submarine mountain chain, a prescient
recognition of what we now know as the Scotia Ridge.
In 1828 the Royal Navy sent HMS Chanticleer down the Atlantic to the
South Shetland Islands to make gravity measurements, using a pendulum as well
as magnetic and meteorological observations. The ship reached Deception Island in
1829 and stayed there 2 months, allowing the surgeon, William Webster, to make
extensive natural history collections, including the

first algae to be brought back

from the Antarctic.
There were other expeditions during this early period of the nineteenth century.
The first to be conceived was the United States Exploring Expedition led by

Lieutenant Charles Wilkes. It took a long time to persuade Congress of the value
of the expedition, not least because one of its chief supporters was an enthusiast for
the hypothesis. Finally leaving in 1838, the expedition was equipped

with four inadequate vessels and failed to attract the necessary scienti

' hollow earth '

c expertise,
with only one of the scientists that did sail (Titian Ramsay Peale) actually involved
in the Antarctic legs of the cruise. Wilkes and the of cers made meteorological

and magnetic measurements whilst Peale collected some biological specimens.
When Wilkes returned after an acrimonious voyage he was court-martialled for
a range of petty offences largely dreamed up by his of cers. He was acquitted and

later rose to be an admiral in the US Navy. He put great energy into publishing the
scienti c results, very few of which were Antarctic. However, it was this expedition

that collected and described the keystone marine species Euphausia superba ,or
Antarctic krill as it is commonly known, and the main food of birds, seals and
whales.
Meanwhile the French were much better organised with an expedition led by
Captain Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d Urville proposed the

expedition in January 1837 and sailed in September of the same year in the two
corvettes Astrolabe and Zélée . A gifted linguist and scholar Dumont d

' Urville. Dumont d '

Urville had
already circumnavigated the world twice and was desperate to continue his studies
in Paci

'

c ethnology. He certainly had no plans for investigating the polar regions
but the King insisted he sail towards the South Pole, apparently for the glory of
France. Since the British, Russians and Americans were busy searching for the
southern continent France could not be left behind. He initially tried to follow
Weddell s tracks but it was a bad ice year and he could not get far south so sailed

west to the South Orkney Islands where the ships became trapped in the pack ice for
a terrifying period of 5 days. Finally breaking free, he sailed south-west to the South

'