Almost two centuries passed until the British Captain James Cook appeared to be successful at last.
In the three Antarctic summers 1773, 1774 and 1775 Cook circumnavigated the last unknown continent of the world. He was the first to cross the southern polar circle and sail along the border of the pack ice. Despite intensive search he found no through channel. His ships (the Resolution about 30 metres long, the Adventure even less) time and again found themselves amongst icebergs. In gigantic fields of drifting ice, captain and crew experienced the most dangerous situations. Cook was an excellent navigator. Also, he had spent a long time preparing the expedition. He led it excellently and lost only four men.
The practical outcome of these two journeys was meager, however. Cook announced to the Admiralty that there was no further continent in the southern oceans. He did not exclude, however, the possibility that an ice continent stretched around the South Pole. If this were true, the land were inaccessible and worthless on account of the ice. This view held for 120 years.
The 1,200-kilometre peninsula develops like a finger. This part of the continent reaches furthest in the direction of South America to the north. From its tip to Cape Horn the distance is only 1,200 kilometres. In 1819 the British merchant ship Williams was driven so far south when rounding Cape Horn, that her captain, William Smith, believed he had sighted land.
This claim had to be investigated and in 1820 the British brig Andromache, with Smith on board was sent to the South. He sighted land as before. Nevertheless today he has to share the fame with Captain N.B. Palmer (USA) and with Baron von Bellingshausen (USSR), who saw the Antarctic peninsula through their telescopes at the same time. Although it remains debatable who was the first man to see the continent, all three are today immortalized in Antarctica - in the form of geographical designations.
It was clear, at any rate, that the Antarctic was totally an ice continent. The dream of a fruitful southland was ultimately destroyed. The land down there, whether a single continent or an ice covered group of islands, was inaccessible, extremely cold, hostile to life and uninhabited. From then on, only one group of people was to interest itself in Antarctica - whalers and seal hunters. They had wreaked so much havoc amongst the animal population of the northern hemisphere that they urgently needed fresh fields. From now on the explorers took a back seat.
One of these whalers, James Weddell, an excellent Captain, who kept his crew in good humour with three glasses of rum a day, broke through the girdle of pack ice in 1824 and found open water behind it. By great good fortune he had sailed south during one of the warmest Antarctic summers. He discovered the sea today named after him and reached the most southerly point on earth to date.
The years 1838-42 saw the first American Antarctic expedition under Charles Wilkes on its way south. It was not to be particularly successful, Wilkes losing four of his six ships. He sighted the eponymous Wilkes Land.
On his first voyage to the Pacific he had discovered New Zealand in 1769 and Australia in 1770.
Was thereby the question revealed, the legendary southern continent located? The British Admiralty wanted an answer. Once and for all. Again they commissioned Cook. He was to search systematically the stretches of the South Atlantic and South Pacific. The captain knew what awaited him in this region, the 'Roaring Forties'. Powerful westerly winds blow there. Carefully Cook fitted out his ships Resolution and Adventure. This voyage was to last more than three years.
