It was during this cruise that the twenty-one-year-old Nathaniel Palmer, captain of the forty-seven-foot tender Hero, temporarily left the company of the Stonington fleet and headed south in search of new sealing grounds. Not far below the South Shetlands he found a peninsula of rugged land. Surrounded by icebergs and swimming schools of penguins, he followed the coastline south until dense fog – so thick that he could not see the lookout on the forecastle – forced him to turn back. In the early morning hours of February 6, the fog lifted, revealing a surprising sight. On either side of the tiny tender were two Russian exploring ships under the command of Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen.
The admiral was astounded at the tiny size of the American craft, just a third of the length of his own ship. “It was with great difficulty that I could make the old admiral believe I had come from U States in so small a vessel,” Palmer later remembered. Through an interpreter, Bellingshausen told Palmer that previous to being blanketed in fog, he had assumed that he was the first to discover the lands that lay before them. But here was a vessel from America with a captain that was no more than a boy who told of lands even farther to the south. According to one account of the exchange, Bellingshausen told Palmer that “we must surrender the palm to you Americans,” adding that he would name the new discovery Palmer’s Land in the charts published by his government.
Not until the following century would it be established beyond question that the narrow panhandle of land Palmer had followed south was part of the Antarctic Continent. In the nineteenth century, the general assumption was that what we now call the Antarctic Peninsula was a group of islands just like the South Shetlands above it. There were at least two American sealers, however, who thought differently. In February 1821, Captain John Davis from New Haven and Captain Christopher Burdick from Nantucket independently recorded in their logbooks their suspicions that what they saw to the south was something bigger than an island. On February 15, Burdick wrote, “Land from the South to ESE, which I suppose to be a continent.” Eight days earlier, Davis had even gone to the trouble of rowing to shore, and his log provides the earliest documented evidence of a landing on Antarctica. But sealers were more interested in finding seals than in publicizing their navigational accomplishments. Davis’s and Burdick’s voyages would go unheralded until the 1950s, when their logbooks finally came to the attention of scholars in New Haven and Nantucket.
By the mid-1820s, the South Shetlands had been stripped of seals, and commercial interest in the region waned. The question of whether a continent or a group of islands existed to the south would be left unresolved for decades to come. In the meantime, the sails of American whalemen and bêche-de-mer traders continued to whiten the waters of the Great South Sea. As the need for reliable charts grew stronger, communities up and down the Atlantic seaboard began to insist that it was time for the U.S. government to catch up to the achievements of its mariners. In 1828 the citizens of Nantucket drafted a memorial to the U.S. Congress: “Your petitioners consider it a matter of earnest importance that those seas should be explored; that they should be surveyed in an accurate and authentic manner, and the position of new islands, and reefs, and shoals, definitely ascertained.”
In the tradition of Cook, it was time America launched an exploring expedition of its own.
CHAPTER 2 The Deplorable Expedition
WITH THE THREE VOYAGES of James Cook, Great Britain had set the pattern for future global exploration: two sturdy and seaworthy ships led by a captain with extensive surveying experience. By 1804, the exploratory efforts of the world’s leading maritime power were coordinated by one man – John Barrow, the second secretary of the Admiralty. Safely ensconced in his office at Whitehall, where he remained insulated from the disruptions of political change, Barrow was free to send out a seemingly continuous stream of wondrously equipped expeditions. Barrow would remain at the Admiralty for the next forty-four years, and over that span of time he would dispatch voyages to just about every corner of the world in a deliberate campaign to extend the bounds of British scientific knowledge and influence.
The United States, on the other hand, was starting from scratch. Government-sponsored exploration in America began with Lewis and Clark in 1803. Although the expedition succeeded in alerting the American people to the promise of the West, no provision was made to do anything with its results. The journals would remain unpublished for more than a decade; the botanical collection eventually ended up in England, while other specimens and artifacts were scattered among scientific societies throughout America. From an institutional and policy point of view, it was as if the expedition had never happened.
In the years after the War of 1812, there were too many distractions to allow a young, raw-boned nation like the United States to focus on a project as esoteric as a voyage of discovery in the name of science. There were roads, canals, and railroads to be built, while the obvious sponsor of an expedition – the U.S. Navy – was as conservative an institution as the country possessed. Not founded until 1794, the young navy was reluctant to implement any kind of reform – whether it involved corporal punishment, education, or technology. Even though the United States owed its very existence to the discoveries of Columbus and others, its navy would show a curious and at times infuriating scorn for the concept of exploration.
In 1825 it appeared as if the newly elected president, John Quincy Adams, might goad the nation to action. In his inaugural address he proposed that the United States embark on an innovative program to further the cause of education and science. In addition to a national university and an observatory (which he poetically referred to as a “light-house in the sky”), he advocated a voyage of discovery to explore the Pacific Northwest. Congress, unfortunately, refused to fund any of Adams’s proposals. If America was ever to follow in the wake of Cook, the impetus would have to come from somewhere beyond the nation’s capital.
In 1818, John Cleves Symmes was a thirty-eight-year-old retired army captain living with his wife and ten children in the frontier town of St. Louis. He was a trading agent with the Fox Indians, but his mind was not on his work. Instead, his dreamy blue eyes were often lost in abstraction as he pondered his own theory of the world, a theory that put him at odds with such scientific luminaries as Sir Isaac Newton. But what the largely self-educated Symmes lacked in intellectual credentials, he more than made up for in audacity and pluck.
Symmes had read somewhere that arctic species such as reindeer and foxes migrated north each winter and returned south in the spring, unaccountably well fed and healthy despite having wintered in what most considered an uninhabitable region of frigid temperatures. Where did these creatures go? After many years of contemplation, Symmes announced his answer in a single-page circular dated April 10, 1818: “TO ALL THE WORLD! I declare the earth is hollow …, containing a number of solid concentrick spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.”
Symmes was, by no means, the first to invest the unknown portions of the globe with miraculous properties in the name of science. As late as the midpoint of the eighteenth century, French and English geographers had speculated that an immense and temperate continent known as Terra Australis Incognita (The Unknown Southern Land) must exist in the high southern latitudes so as to offset the landmasses to the north and thereby “balance” the earth. But in 1774, when Cook voyaged beyond the Antarctic Circle and found only icebergs and whales, the figment of Terra Australis Incognita appeared to have vanished forever.
Symmes believed that beyond the region of ice surrounding each of the poles lay a mild and navigable sea that flowed into a large portal leading to the interior of the earth. He claimed that the crew of a ship sailing to the edge, or “verge,” of one of these holes would not even be aware that they had begun to sail down into the earth. On either side of the central hole would be successive layers of land, flourishing with wildlife and, perhaps, people. Because of the earth’s tilt, this miraculous new