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English | November 13, 2024 | ASIN: B0DN25G1CC | 70 pages | EPUB | 4.21 Mb
After earlier explorers led to the opening of the New World
, many 19th century figures approached the polar region with an eye to traversing it. Most notable among them was British explorer Sir James Clark Ross, who took the Erebus and the HMS Terror to the southernmost coastlines of the planet. Ross is probably the first explorer to realize that Antarctica was a continent and not just a large chain of islands, and he discovered the section of the shelf that was to become the Victoria Barrier. Asian nations also took part in Antarctic exploration when Nobu Shirase of Japan mounted his 1911 expedition, while Sir Edgeworth David, a Welsh-Australian, was the first person to successfully reach the summit of Mt. Erebus. Richard Evelyn Byrd is believed to be the first pilot to cross the Antarctic continent, and even well past the era of great polar expeditions, British figures such as Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest, made several expeditions to the South Pole.
Nevertheless, the golden age of polar exploration of the Northern and Southern continents did not reach its zenith until the turn of the 20th century, and national rivalries abounded between the major seafaring nations of the world. Where past explorers made glancing journeys to Antarctica, the superior technology of the coal engine, various new survival materials, and even the motorcar opened new possibilities for more daring treks. Backed by governments, banking organizations, and great newspapers, a small group of restless adventurers assaulted the polar continents with the intent of reaching and marking the exact locations of Earth's northern and southernmost points.
More than any other country, Britain staked its national pride on being the first to reach the poles, as they would on penetrating the deep jungles of the Amazon and scaling the highest peaks of the Himalayas. Preservation of the British personality as an intrepid internationalist required such victories, but in the case of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, the empire fell short of the mark. In 1909, American Robert Edwin Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole, an accomplishment that was met with some degree of skepticism. To complicate matters, fellow American Frederick Cook swore that he had reached the spot almost a year earlier. In the competing accounts, both stories were taken with a grain of salt based on several years of analysis. Thus, Britain made its first and finest statement for actually reaching the South Pole in the first years of the 20th century, even as the dangers of the Antarctic, including scurvy, dehydration, and hypothermia, were well known to all major explorers. They also understood that even the most incidental detail of an expedition going amiss could spell doom for all parties involved.
Some of the explorers who were involved became household names around the world, including British explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton and Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. However, one name above all others has become associated with this period: Robert Falcon Scott. Widely referred to as "Scott of the Antarctic", Captain Scott became an icon of tenacity in the face of incredible adversity, and his final expedition to the South Pole lives on as an example of the nobility of the human spirit, even in the face of utter disaster. A monument to Scott's persistence still stands at Observation Point, inscribed with the last line of Tennyson's "Ulysses": "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".
