Page 8 - The Call of Antarctica: Exploring and Protecting Earth's Coldest Continent

States sent a military expedition to Antarctica. Naval officer Charles
Wilkes sailed with a fleet of six ships on a voyage that lasted two years.
His sighting of the extensive coast far to the south of Australia proved
that Antarctica was a vast continent.
Jules Sébastien César Dumont d’Urville’s expedition in 1840
was sponsored by the French government. D’Urville’s ships were
the Astrolabe and the smaller Zélée. He spotted the East Antarctic
coastline, but pack ice blocked his way to the land. His voyage was
further hampered when much of his crew got sick with scurvy, a
disease caused by a lack of vitamin C in the diet. D’Urville left his
mark on Antarctica by naming Adélie penguins and a region called
Adélie Land for his wife.
James Clark Ross led a British expedition with two warships in
1839. He discovered a large gulf he named the Ross Sea and was the
first to see the ice barrier, a great wall of ice that blocked further
progress to the southern part of the sea. It was later named the Ross
Ice Shelf in his honor. His expedition was also the first to see a
region called Victoria Land, named for Britain’s queen at the time.
While on the newly discovered Ross Island, a blacksmith aboard
the Erebus, one of Ross’s ships, spotted a volcano. He called it a
“splendid Burning Mountain.” Ross later named the volcano Mount
Erebus after the ship. In addition to these geographic discoveries,
Ross observed the local wildlife. He saw how penguins use pebbles to
build their nests and watched them regurgitate food into their chicks’
mouths to feed them.
In these days before photography, most sea expeditions carried an
artist to document landscapes, life on the ships, and the plants and
animals discovered during expeditions. John Davis, an officer on Ross’s
other ship Terror, was the artist of the expedition. He made paintings
of Mount Erebus, the Ross Ice Shelf, and other scenes.
Carl Anton Larsen led the first Norwegian expedition to Antarctica
from 1892 to 1894. This expedition brought back the first fossils from

14 THE CALL OF ANTARCTICA