A Brief History of Antarctic Exploration and Discovery
1520
Magellan and his sailors become the first people to circumnavigate the Earth as they sailed from Europe to the South Atlantic Ocean, round Cape Horn, across the Pacific and Indian oceans, then back via the Cape of Good Hope and Atlantic. Francis Drake, sixty years after Magellan’s circumnavigation makes the first recorded penetration into the southern seas.
1675
A London merchant, Antonio de la Roché, attempted to round Cape Horn and sighted an Antarctic island to the south of latitude 54°.
1699
The astronomer Edmond Halley was sent south by the Admiralty to seek for `South unknown lands’ and conduct a survey of magnetic variation. He penetrated almost as far as South Georgia.
1772 – 75
James Cook (1728 -79) was the widest-ranging explorer who ever lived. He circumnavigated the globe three times and discovered more territory than anyone else in history.
Unbeknown to James Cook, he circumnavigated the Antarctic continent. During this voyage he discovered the South Sandwich Islands and South Georgia Island. Cook was not taken by these spectacular islands…
`Lands doomed by Nature to perpetual frigidness, never to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays, whose horrible and savage aspect I have no words to describe, Such are the lands we have discovered, what then may we expect those to be, which lie still further to the south? For we may reasonably suppose that we have seen the best, as lying most to the North. If anyone should have resolution and perseverance to clear up this point by proceeding farther than I have done, I shall not envy him the honour of the discovery; but I will be bold to say, that the world will not be benefitted by it’. Cook was wrong, of course.
It was Cook’s reports of huge populations of fur seals which led directly to the next era of exploration in the Antarctic. During the next 50 years the British and Americans between them took a million and a quarter fur seals.
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