In the eyes of the British establishment, though, a faint but disparaging air of scepticism hung over these foreign voyages, relegating them to the margins and even the mythology of Antarctic exploration. In 1823 James Weddell had extended Cook’s farthest south by more than a degree into the sea named after him, but for all the inroads made by commercial skippers like Balleny, Biscoe and Weddell himself, it was left to another Royal Navy officer, Sir James Ross, to take the next decisive step in the process begun by Cook. Sailing in two old bomb vessels, Erebus and Terror, slow but strong, and strengthened in the bows against southern conditions, Ross crossed the Antarctic Circle in longitude 171°E on New Year’s Day 1841, and smashed his way into the heavy pack. Up until this point any captain faced with pack could do nothing but skirt it, but after five days buffeting a path through the ice, Ross ‘burst forth to the south in an open sea’, and on 8 January 1841 discovered the glorious mountainous country of Victoria Land.
In two journeys to this great open sea, Ross laid down with some accuracy the coastline and high mountain ranges of Victoria Land from Cape North in latitude 71° to Wood Bay in latitude 74°, and less definitely to McMurdo Bay in 77½°. In that same latitude and slightly to the east he discovered the two volcanoes named after his ships, and to the east of them, the ice wall of the Great Barrier now named in his honour. ‘After all the experiences and adventure in the Southern Seas,’ Scott himself later wrote of Ross’s achievements, ‘few things could have looked more hopeless than an attack upon that great ice-bound region which lay within the Antarctic Circle; yet out of this desolate prospect Ross wrested an open sea, a vast mountain region, a smoking volcano, and a hundred problems of great interest to the geographer; in this unique region he carried out scientific research in every possible department, and yet by unremitted labour succeeded in collecting material which until quite lately has constituted almost the exclusive source of our knowledge of magnetic conditions in the higher southern latitudes. It might be said that it was James Cook who defined the Antarctic Region, and James Ross who discovered it.’
More than a generation later, however, the problem for the geographers was still how to interpret the accumulated knowledge of a century of piecemeal discovery since the pioneering journeys of Cook in the 1770s. In 1874 Challenger under the command of George Nares had shown by dredgings and soundings that there must be continental land within the Antarctic Circle, but with still only a little over one-tenth of the Circle broached neither Challenger nor the subsequent Southern Cross and Belgica expeditions did much to clarify the problem of its extent.
The Belgica, under the command of Adrien de Gerlache, sailed from Antwerp in 1897 for the south with the intention of landing a small party at Cape Adare on Antarctica’s South Victoria Land. Before the ship got anywhere remotely near her target winter had set in, and Belgica’s resentful crew were condemned to the first Antarctic winter spent within the Circle, frozen helpless in the pack of the Bellinghausen Sea, at the mercy of the currents and the ice, ravaged by scurvy and tottering on the brink of madness as they brooded on the thought of a dead shipmate, his feet weighted to take him to the bottom, swaying backwards and forwards on the ocean bed hundreds of fathoms beneath their captive hull.
If Carsten Borchgrevink had been a British naval officer, it is possible that the Southern Cross expedition might have done more to dispel the ignorance and fear that was Belgica’s chief legacy to Antarctic knowledge than it actually did, but a Norwegian seaman/ schoolmaster was never going to be taken seriously. In 1894 Borch-grevink had become the first man to set foot on Victoria Land from aboard a small Norwegian whaler. Five years later, with the backing of the publisher Sir George Newnes, and in the teeth of the hostility and contempt of Clements Markham and a geographical establishment outraged to see British money financing a foreign adventurer, he took down the first expedition to over-winter on Antarctica.
Borchgrevink was ‘in many respects … not a good leader’, as the physicist on Southern Cross and on Scott’s first expedition, Louis Bernacchi, charitably put it, but whatever his faults he has never received the credit that he is due. The site of the expedition’s hut on the shore edge at Cape Adare effectively rules out any of the serious geographical exploration so beloved of Markham, but for a ‘small pioneering expedition without influence or backing’, the work carried out by Southern Cross across a range of scientific disciplines from magnetism to marine biology, penguins to atmospheric circulation and Antarctica’s cyclonic winds, ‘stands unchallenged’.
The Southern Cross and Belgica expeditions were the first expeditions of a ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration that is often dated back to the day in 1893 when, at a lecture at the RGS, Professor John Murray of Challenger fame called for an expedition to resolve the outstanding geographical questions still posed in the south. ‘All honour,’ he declared, ‘to those who venture into the far north, or far south, with slender resource and bring back with them a burden of new observations. A dash to the South Pole is not what I now advocate, nor is it what British science desires. It demands rather a steady, continuous, laborious, and systematic exploration of the whole southern region.’
If Markham was in need of an ally, he could not have found a more influential one; but between Murray’s plea and his ambition lay a fundamental difference that was to bedevil the whole future of British Antarctic exploration. In his lecture Murray had argued for two largely civilian parties to be landed at widely separate points, but to Markham any scheme that relegated the role of the navy to little more than a glorified ferry service and robbed her officers of an opportunity to test their courage defeated the whole point of polar exploration.
And here in miniature is the history of the next twenty years, the clash of visions between the scientific establishment, determined to fund an expedition in its own image, and a Clements Markham equally bent on reliving the naval glories of the Franklin era. In terms of argument there ought never to have been a contest, but in Markham, Murray and all the other scientists of the Royal Society who followed him to the slaughter were up against a natural street-fighter prepared to bully, beg, lie and do anything else required to get his way. In letters, speeches, articles, memoranda, conferences and lectures – lectures to the Royal United Services Institute, to the Imperial Institute, on the role of the colonies, the role of the navy – the same vision was pushed with an energy
astonishing in a man of seventy. Over the next six years meetings both within and without the RGS would generate violent outbursts of temper, and yet whenever it came to the point, it was inevitably Markham who would stand his ground, Markham whose vision, energy and sheer persistence could grind his opponents into acquiescence, submission or – better still – resignation.
It was the same, too, when it came to prising funds out of a government reluctant to commit money or naval personnel at a time when British isolationism was looking particularly exposed. When he first approached the government the response was no more encouraging than it had been a decade earlier, but Markham was not a man to be deflected from a sense of Britain’s destiny by international embarrassments like the Jameson Raid or tensions with the United States over Venezuela, and the following year another approach extracted a more sympathetic response. ‘Referring to the communications which have passed between the First Lord of the Admiralty and yourself,’ he was told in that de haut en bas tone so typical of Admiralty communications, ‘… I am commanded by my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to state that they have taken the matter into careful consideration, and while they regret to be unable to take any direct part in the organising of such an expedition, at the same time they regard the enterprise as one which is important in the interests of science. Although the present exigencies of the Naval Service prevent them from lending officers, as they would necessarily be out of reach for a protracted period in case of being required for the active duties of the Fleet, Their Lordships will watch the results with great interest and will be prepared to aid in the outfit of an Expedition by the loan of instruments, further they would be happy to place at the disposal of those chosen to conduct an Expedition any