Page 7 - The Call of Antarctica: Exploring and Protecting Earth's Coldest Continent

HEADING SOUTH

A legend says that a chief of the Māori people, the Indigenous
inhabitants of New Zealand, first saw Antarctica on a sea voyage in
the seventh century CE. In 1772 the British government sent naval
captain James Cook to search for the land that was shown on so
many old maps: Terra Australis Incognita. With his ships Resolution
and Adventure, Cook was the first to cross the Antarctic Circle, an
imaginary line around Earth that encloses most of Antarctica. In
1773 he came within 75 miles (120 km) of the continent, but ice and
bitter cold forced him to turn around before seeing it. Even so, Cook
concluded that the southern continent, if it existed, would likely
be covered in ice. He said it would be far too cold for farming and
human settlement.
In the early 1800s, more Europeans sailed through the Southern
Ocean. Rather than explorers, they were whale and seal hunters.
They found the animals they hunted living around the islands of the
Antarctic Peninsula. They hunted whales for their valuable blubber and
baleen, a hornlike substance found in whale jaws, and seals for their
valuable skins.
In 1819 the Russian government sent Captain Fabian Gottlieb von
Bellingshausen on a voyage around the world. With his ships the Vostok
and Mirny, he reported a location that was within 20 miles (32 km)
of the Antarctic Peninsula on January 28, 1820. Only a few days
later, British sea captain Edward Bransfield also visited the Antarctic
Peninsula. Later that year, on November 18, twenty-one-year-old
Nathaniel Brown Palmer, captain of the American sealing sloop Hero,
recorded sighting the peninsula.
Expeditions kept coming. Scotsman James Weddell was a
commercial sealer, explorer, and captain in the British Royal Navy.
In 1823 he discovered the Weddell Sea, which borders the Antarctic
Peninsula. The sea and Weddell seals are named after him.
In 1838, wanting to keep up with its European rivals, the United

UNKNOWN SOUTHERN LAND 13