by Derek Wilson
Perhaps the reason for the public’s apathy was its preoccupation with the brave voyages of Parry and Franklin in their search for the North-West Passage. Another decade was to elapse before any more scientific expeditions were launched towards the Antarctic. But then everything happened with a rush. Within the space of two years, no fewer than three national projects were mounted – one French, one British and one American. Jules Sébastien César Dumont D’Urville was a scholar-captain in the tradition of Bougainville. In addition to his native tongue, he had mastered four European languages, as well as Greek and Hebrew, and was a keen student of botany and entomology. Early in his career he established a unique place in history. During the course of a Mediterranean hydrographic survey he called at the Greek island of Melos. There a local peasant showed him an old statue he had recently dug up. To most naval captains one piece of Greek marble looked much the same as another but D’Urville recognised the quality of this item and rushed to Constantinople to make an excited report to the French consul. The result was that the world’s most famous statue, the Venus de Milo, was obtained for France. In the 1820s he took part in two important voyages of exploration: a circumnavigation (1822–5) and an extensive Pacific expedition (1826–9) during which he discovered more evidence concerning the fate of La Perouse. (D’Urville had an immense admiration for the unfortunate explorer, and even renamed his ship, Coquille, as L’Astrolabe in La Pérouse’s honour.) Soon after his return, the 1830 revolution deposed Charles X and D’Urville was chosen by the ex-monarch to convey him into exile in England.
But the new regime of Louis-Philippe, the ‘citizen king’, had important work for the captain to do. In 1836 news reached Europe that the United States was planning an Antarctic survey. D’Urville, not wanting France to be left behind in the work of exploration offered to lead an expedition. He was, however, still under something of a cloud with the new regime and the idea met firm opposition. But Louis-Philippe liked the scheme and, therefore, D’Urville sailed in September 1837, with L’Astrolabe and La Zélée. He took the, now little-used, Magellan’s Strait and made a careful survey of it before striking south-eastwards. He reached impenetrable pack ice in 63°29′, followed it eastwards for three hundred miles but failed to find a way through. D’Urville turned round to see whether there might not be a channel to westward. His search was rewarded, not with an opening in the ice, but a landfall. He touched on a part of the polar continent and shrewdly gave it the name Louis-Philippe Land. Unfortunately, his crews were now suffering so much from disease and cold that he was compelled to head for warmer climes.
In Chile D’Urville refitted the ships while his sick men recuperated. The rest of 1838 and the whole of 1839 were spent on a Pacific cruise. He visited Fiji, the Pulau Islands and Borneo, then headed south once more. In December Astrolabe and Zélée arrived in Hobart, Tasmania, ready for another assault on the Antarctic at a point almost 1800 from the coast D’Urville had already discovered. On 1 January 1840 the expedition set sail towards ‘the country doomed by nature’. This time D’Urville was able to reach farther south. On 19 January he was, once more, confronted by a land barrier in 66°30′. Two days later he landed a boatload of men who returned with samples of earth and rock. This time he was able to explore the territory he called Adélie Coast (after his wife) for about two hundred miles. Then, just at the point where the ice cliffs turned sharply southwards, D’Urville was again obliged by the state of his crews to abandon his attempt to get closer to the pole than any predecessor (James Weddell had reached 74°15′ in 1823). He returned home via Hobart and the Cape, a disappointed man. Yet his had been a brave and important foray into earth’s most inhospitable environment and he had marked two stretches of coast on the virtually empty charts of the Antarctic.
In January 1840, while the French were exploring far to the south of Australia, an American convoy was working in the same area. The Great United States Exploring Expedition was one of the most ill-managed scientific ventures that ever set sail. For twenty years scholars and patriots had been urging the government in Washington to bestir themselves to stop their nation falling further and further behind in the march of scientific research. It took persistent argument and lobbying to get a circumnavigation project off the ground and right up to the moment the ships sailed preparations were bedevilled by political and naval opposition. As a result, the scientists were ill-equipped for their work and their relationship with the officers had not been adequately defined. All this would not, perhaps, have mattered greatly if a competent, wise and sensitive leader had been selected for the expedition. Unfortunately, the man chosen was Lieutenant Charles Wilkes.
The word ‘chosen’ is not strictly accurate. The post had been offered to several experienced captains, each of whom, in turn, had declined it. Wilkes had been considered because his name was put forward by friends in high places and because the organisers of the expedition were becoming desperate. Giving the command of a six-ship squadron to such a junior officer was quite unprecedented in the annals of the US Navy. Of forty lieutenants currently on the active list only two had less sea experience than Wilkes. It was true that the thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker was unique among his colleagues in having a genuine interest in science but the appointment of someone so apparently ill-suited could only foster jealousy and mistrust among the other officers of the expedition.
But it was the effect upon Wilkes himself of shouldering a too-great responsibility which proved most damaging to the whole venture. Charles was the son of a successful, east-coast businessman and had grown accustomed as a child to getting his own way. Early obsessed with dreams of travel and discovery, he had refused to enter the family business, choosing instead the merchant marine and transferring later to the US Navy. He mastered the sciences of geography and hydrography and, in 1830, was given the superintendency of the department of instruments and charts. Wilkes was thrusting and ambitious. He took every opportunity to commend himself to superiors and to wield his family contacts to good effect. In 1838, having gained the prize he had so long sought, the young officer was at pains to impress his authority on the expedition and to reap from it the maximum personal glory. Wilkes liked to compare himself with Cook. In reality he was closer in spirit to Bligh and Queeg.
Wilkes drove himself hard – too hard. He never seemed to take more than five hours’ sleep and was always around checking, finding fault, giving orders, countermanding orders. He was authoritarian to the point of barbarity and suspicious to the point of paranoia. He was indecisive in crisis and often wrong in matters of routine ship management. Yet, in the way of men whose shoes are too big, he could not take advice. Any contradiction smacked to him of insubordination and incipient mutiny. Officers constantly felt the lash of his tongue and men the cut of the cat. Incidents like the following were commonplace: one night Wilkes, shouting from the deck of the Vincennes, ordered the schooner Flying Fish to heave-to. The captain, Robert Pinkney, could not hear the command above the howl of the wind and came in closer to clarify his instructions:
Wilkes repeated the order and Pinkney, knowing that to heave-to in this position would result in collision, waited for the opportunity to comply. Wilkes shouted a third time, ‘Why don’t you heave-to Sir, heave-to immediately.’ Pinkney did so and the schooner shot up into the wind across the Vincennes’ bows, just clearing the latter’s flying jib boom, and clearing it, not through the prompt action of Wilkes, who did not act at all, it was noted, but of Lieutenant Underwood in stopping the way of the Vincennes. Bustling forward and stamping the deck, Wilkes sang out through the trumpet,
‘What do you mean, what do you mean by such conduct as this. I never saw the like of it in my life.’
‘I hove to in obedience to your orders,’ replied Pinkney.
‘God damn it Sir,’ the commander shouted, fairly dancing in his fury, ‘I never ordered you to heave-to under my bows.’8
Little wonder that the only common bond between officers, civilians and crewmen was their d
islike of their skipper. During the cruise one hundred and twenty-four sailors deserted, a fact which obliged Wilkes to fill the gaps with a motley collection of harbour riff-raff – yet another cause of friction.
The uncomfortable voyage began in August 1838 and lasted three years and ten months. The arguments and recriminations to which it gave rise were to go on much longer. Antarctic survey was only one aspect of the expedition’s work but it loomed large in Wilkes’s mind. He was determined to cap any achievement of his French and English rivals. For another of this turbulent man’s attributes was acute xenophobia.
Like D’Urville, he sailed to the south of the Horn and reached the pack ice surrounding the northernmost spur of the Antarctic continent, known as Graham Land. But he was able to achieve little and retreated for the time being to concentrate on other aspects of the expedition’s work. There were courtesy calls to be made in various South American ports and scientific investigation in the Tuamotu and Samoan islands. By the end of 1839 the convoy had reached Sydney and Wilkes was ready for a fresh onslaught on the Antarctic. His questionable activities over the next few weeks put his name firmly upon the polar map and stirred up unpleasant controversy.
Wilkes went with four ships – the Vincennes, Porpoise, Peacock and Flying Fish – and took much the same course as D’Urville (though without sighting his rival). He tried to keep his southbound convoy together, a stratagem which only resulted in all the ships travelling at the speed of the slowest, while the brief polar sailing season slipped agonisingly by. Day after day, Wilkes fretted and fumed if one of the vessels was lost sight of. He distributed a code of signals to be used in foggy conditions. An officer on the Flying Fish noted cynically in his journal, ‘as we have neither bells, gong, or horn they had as well been left out’.9 Throughout the squadron opinion was united on the reason for the commander’s solicitousness: Wilkes did not want the credit for such discoveries as might be made to go to any of his subordinates. The other captains were, therefore, far from dismayed when the convoy was scattered by a combination of wind and fog.
The vessels all reached the ice barrier in about 65°S on what D’Urville had named Adélie Coast and each travelled along it hoping to find a way through into clear water. Wilkes, in the Vincennes, surveyed some 1,600 miles of the permanent ice limit between 150°E and 97°E. Yet ‘surveyed’ is not a wholly appropriate word. Sighting conditions changed from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. Calm weather and clear visibility could give way with little warning to fog or storms which forced the Vincennes away from the ice-edge. There were times when the lookouts saw what was unmistakably land. These stretches of coast were marked on the chart. But so were others. Wilkes later confessed that the procedure he and his officers followed was that of ‘laying down the land, not only where we had actually determined it to exist, but in those places also in which every appearance denoted its existence’.10 He had come to believe (correctly as it transpired) that the ‘icy barrier’ marked the edge of a great polar continent. Intent on claiming this great discovery for the USA, he allowed himself to be deceived by the mirage-like effects of clouds and ice-formations. He even deduced the proximity of land from discoloration of water or the presence of basking seals or walruses. He thus marred an important piece of geographical detection by producing a chart showing several stretches of coastline, some of which were simply wrong. Moreover, he omitted from his map some of the discoveries of earlier explorers who were not American.
Wilkes was under orders from his government to keep the results of his expedition secret until he had made his official report. However, he could not resist the temptation to put one over on his rivals. On his return to New Zealand in April 1840, he left a letter and a tracing of his Antarctic chart which was relayed to Hobart for Captain Ross, the commander of the British expedition due to explore the polar region the following season. It was, as Wilkes insisted, a gesture of friendship and assistance from one explorer to another. But it was also designed to confirm the American claim to the discoveries made. As we shall see, this gesture was to have serious repercussions. For the moment, we must record that Wilkes next visited Fiji and Hawaii and made an accurate survey of the western coast of North America. He paid particular attention to the Oregon territory, sovereignty of which was currently in dispute between Britain and the USA. Wilkes then re-crossed the Pacific, returning to New York via the Philippines, Sulu and the Cape. He completed his circumnavigation in June 1842.
When Wilkes arrived home the British expedition still had over a year to complete what was the most thorough Antarctic survey so far attempted. Its leader, Captain James Clark Ross, was a seasoned polar explorer, having been on several expeditions within the Arctic Circle. He had, in fact, established the position of the north magnetic pole in 1831. Therefore, when the Admiralty determined, in 1839, to send two ships in search of the south magnetic pole, Ross was the obvious choice as commander. He had at his disposal two stout vessels, especially strengthened for work in icy seas: the Erebus (370 tons) and the Terror (340 tons).
Ross set sail on 30 September 1839 and took the now-established ‘British’ route, via St Helena and Cape Town. He called in at the remote Crozet and Kerguelen islands and remained some time at the latter to carry out a survey of its coastline. After leaving their anchorage the ships were subjected to the full force of the Roaring Forties. They were separated by gales. Then, on 30 July, disaster struck the Erebus.
Mr Roberts, the boatswain, whilst engaged about the rigging, fell overboard and was drowned. The life-buoy was instantly let go, and two boats lowered down; they reached the spot where we saw him sink only a few seconds too late! The gloom which the loss of one of our small party, at the outset of our voyage, occasioned, was for a time merged in feelings of painful anxiety, and afterwards of heartfelt gratitude, for the merciful preservation of the whole crew of one of the boats, who, in their humane endeavours to save the life of our unfortunate shipmate, very nearly sacrificed their own. Mr Oakley, mate, and Mr Abernethy, the gunner, had returned to the ship with one boat, when the other, still at a considerable distance from us, was struck by a sea, which washed four of the crew out of her. Mr Abernethy immediately again pushed off from the ship, and succeeded in saving them from their perilous situation, completely benumbed and stupefied with the cold. The boats were, with much difficulty, owing to the sea that was running, hoisted up, and not until after one of them had been again swamped alongside.11
The two ships were reunited in Tasmania and it was at Hobart that Ross received news of the French and American expeditions. The information was both disturbing and comforting. Ross was piqued that his rivals had both chosen the route that he had proposed. On the other hand, by following it D’Urville and Wilkes had met an impenetrable barrier around 66°S. Ross, therefore, decided to travel further east before making his ascent towards the pole. It was his best decision of the entire voyage. He sailed towards New Zealand, then turned south along the 170°E line of longitude. On 10 January he broke through the pack ice into open water and found himself able to proceed unhindered until he crossed the 78° parallel. But reaching a more southerly point on the globe than any other human beings had yet attained was not the only excitement Ross and his colleagues experienced. For day after day, except when it was obscured by bad weather, they had a clear view of a coastline to the west, running almost due south. They observed mountains and a smouldering volcano (named Mount Erebus). They called the whole stretch of coast Victoria Land. The expanse of water, which was to become the main access for later polar explorers, was appropriately called (though not by its discoverer) Ross Sea. At last they came upon the frozen bastion which guards the pole against any water-borne assault: a continuous ice cliff two to three hundred feet high.
Ross gazed day after day at that formidable bastion and wondered, as sixty years later his fellow countryman, Ernest Shackleton, was to wonder, what lay beyond.
We have sailed from your farthest
West, that is bounded by
fire* and snow
We have pierced to your farthest East,
till stopped by the hard-set floe.
We have steamed by your wave-worn caverns;
dim, blue, mysterious halls.
We have risen above your surface,
we have sounded along your walls.
And above that rolling surface
we have strained our eyes to see
But league upon league of whiteness
was all that there seemed to be.
Ah, what is the secret you’re keeping
to the southward beyond our ken?
This year shall your icy fastness
resound with the voices of men?
Shall we learn that you come from the mountains?
Shall we call you a frozen sea?
Shall we sail to the North and leave you,
still a Secret, forever to be?12
Ross now looked for a safe place to spend the winter. He hoped that by establishing a base close to the magnetic pole he could lead an overland expedition to it and thus achieve the unique distinction ‘of being permitted to plant the flag of my country on both the magnetic poles of our globe’.13 However, the thickening pack ice demonstrated that this would be an extremely hazardous enterprise. The ships, therefore, retraced their route, keeping as close as possible to Victoria Land to fill in gaps in the chart they had made on their outward journey. It was now late February and the brief polar summer was fading. Snow storms were frequent. The temperature fell steadily. The ice-floes were solidifying. Several times Erebus and Terror came close to being trapped. And there was another apparent hazard:
. . . we made all sail to the N.E., on account of the wind having increased to a gale from E.S.E., placing our ships in a very critical situation; for on the chart which Lieutenant Wilkes was so good as to send me . . . is laid down a range of mountainous land extending about sixty miles in a S.W. and N.E. direction; its centre being in lat. 65° 40′, and long. 165°E., with the eastern extreme of the barrier in 167½°E., and thus presenting a formidable lee shore in our present position. We were therefore in a state of considerable anxiety and uncertainty for some hours as to whether the ships could weather the land and barrier.14
