The British advanced more professionally, fitting out two ice ships, Erebus and Terror. Specialists provided them with double decks and stern walls. The external planks were shod with copper and the interior was divided up by watertight bulkheads. The commodore was James Ross, an experienced Arctic captain. He knew his way about in ice and in 1831 had discovered the magnetic North Pole. Now he was to find the magnetic South Pole, the approximate position of which the German mathematician Gauss had already calculated.
Ross navigated his way along the limit of the pack ice. Then he found a through passage and sailed into an enormous bay which is called Ross Sea after him. The British reached the Antarctic mainland at Cape Adare. On trying to push further south, a gigantic wall of ice over 50 metres high barred the way. Ross had come up against the biggest shelf ice-field in the world, known today as Ross Shelf Ice. It is a drift ice-pack as big as France and Belgium combined and it lies further south than the Weddell Sea. Further penetration was, on account of the drift ice, impossible. However, the thirst for knowledge was for the time being quenched: the whalers picked up rich harvests.
At the end of the nineteenth century, interest in Antarctica took up again. A young generation of explorers set about the last white patches on the map of the world. Everything unknown was to be conquered. The spirit of the industrial age could brook no terra incognita.
On 24 January 1895, modern man set foot on the soil of Antarctica for the first time, i.e. the Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink (1864-1934). Whether South American Indians had been there already remains controversial: arrow heads found later on the peninsula would suggest this.
In 1898 a ship overwintered in the Antarctic for the first time. Her captain, Adrien de Gerlache, was Belgian and his ship was called Belgica. The expedition set out much too late and was badly equipped. Probably the Belgicabecame involuntarily trapped in the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea. From 2 March 1898 to 14 March 1899 the ship drifted with the pack ice. Anxiety, panic and illnesses spread. That ship and crew survived the Antarctic winter, the expedition had to thank two of the members: Frederick Cook and Roald Amundsen. Both were yet to cause a stir. The American ship's doctor, Dr. Cook, later was to claim, against Robert Peary, to be the first to have reached the North Pole (1908). The Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, chief petty officer on the Belgica and a pupil of Fridtjof Nansen, was at twenty-six already an experienced adventurer and was to become the most successful ice traveler of all time.
What the Belgica had been obliged to suffer, Borchgrevink voluntarily took on a year later, his expedition deliberately overwintering in the Antarctic. This was an experiment that brought important findings. Subsequently, Borchgrevink traveled with dog sledges over the Ross Shelf Ice to the Murray Glacier. Two Finns cared for the dogs which had been introduced into Antarctica as draught animals for the first time. They reached latitude 78°50' south, the most southerly point man had yet achieved.
Three scientific expeditions followed in the next few years. From 1902 to 1904 a German expedition, under the leadership of Erich von Drygalski, explored the Atlantic coastline of Antarctica (Kaiser Wilhelm II Land); a Swedish one, under Otto Nordenskjöld, devoted itself to the Antarctic peninsula; and a Scottish one under William Bruce was active in the Weddell Sea and in Coats Land. At the same time, there began the Antarctic career of the man who, more than all others, was to become the 'hero of the ice continent'.
British-born, Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) came from a lower middle-class background. His father was a brewer, his mother adored her sons. In 1881 Robert, just thirteen years old, entered Royal Navy academy as a cadet. He got through his studies and took up the customary career as an offices, and served in the Pacific and Caribbean. He was thirty-one years old and held the rank of lieutenant when he met Clements R. Markham, the doyen of Antarctic research and then President of the Royal Geographic Society. Markham was looking for a leader for his Antarctic expedition, while Scott was seeking an opportunity to shine and make his career.
