Discovering the unknown continent - Antarctica: Global Science from a Frozen Continent - page 7

Figure 1.5 Commemoration of James Clark Ross in a

stamp for British Antarctic Territory.

naturalists of whom the most outstanding proved
to be Joseph Dalton Hooker, later to be Director
of Kew Gardens. The scienti

c equipment he was
provided with was exceptional and a library of
scienti c topics was carried. The Admiralty

provided him with a precise range of tasks focused
on magnetism and exploration, whilst the Royal
Society s instructions occupied a small book

dealing with every possible science opportunity
they could think of. Provided with two vessels,
Erebus and Terror , whose design had already been
tested in the Arctic, Ross ensured that the
provisioning was adequate to stop scurvy breaking
out. This was one of the most successful early
Antarctic expeditions, making major advances in
a wide range of

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fields. Certainly one of the most important was the provision of

de nitive charts of magnetic declination, dip and intensity replacing those developed

by Wilkes and Dumont d ' Urville. His discovery of the enormous Ross Ice Shelf and

its identi cation as the source of tabular icebergs was an important step forward in

glaciology and it was this expedition which discovered the Ross seal, deep in the pack
ice. Ross was the first to make deep-sea soundings but with inadequate equipment

some of his data proved to be erroneous. However, Hooker s Flora Antarctica ,

which encompassed all the plants he found both in the Antarctic and on the sub-
Antarctic islands, remains a major reference work to this day. The Flora
contains a detailed section on phytoplankton which probably constitutes the

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s oceans and the starting point
for what is nowadays a major branch of oceanography. Surprisingly, neither Ross
nor Hooker were keen advocates for further visits to the region and interest in
magnetism had dwindled so, except for the Transit of Venus Expeditions by the
UK, France and Germany to the sub-Antarctic islands, there was little of

first recognition of their true signi cance in the world '

cial

interest in the south for almost 50 years.
Matthew Maury, now thought of as the father of oceanography, was appointed
Director of the US Naval Observatory in 1844. His compilations of data on winds
and currents proved invaluable to shipping all over the world and his textbook
The Physical Geography of the Sea , published in 1855, showed his recognition
that the high southern latitudes held a crucial key to the weather of the southern