Needstrat: Discovering the Antarctic

On 28 January 1820 Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen discovers the mainland of Antarctica. He and Mikhail Lazarev and the rest of the crew are on board two Russian sloops Vostok (east) and Mirny (Peaceful). The exact date for the discovery differs between different sources. The Russian State Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic in St. Petersburg where he sailed from, dates it to 28 January.

Some claim that the English Edward Bransfield was the first, but he seems to have sighted land on 30 January. The disagreement probably has to do with bad weather, lack of clarity if they saw islands or mainland, and nationalistic fever. In November the same year an American, Nathaniel Palmer saw Antarctica.

Up until 1820 nobody, in Europe at least, really knew what was down there. So the discoveries this year were important events, clarifying that land actually existed and the position of it. Another mystery solved in the great human search for knowledge and wisdom.

http://www.saint-petersburg.com/german/fabian-gottlieb-thaddeus-von-bellingshausen/

Sloops Vostok and Mirny

Fabian von Bellingshausen

Background

Long before, in the year 650 a Maori legend speaks of a canoe commanded by Ui-te-Rangoira who sailed as far as the frozen ocean. Nobody, in Europe at least, really knew what was down there. Philosophers argued that there had to be a land mass on the South Pole to balance the land masses on the Northern Hemisphere. So many believed a huge continent named Terra Australis existed.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/OrteliusWorldMap1570.jpg

A 1564 world map by Ortelius with the imagined links between Terra Australis and South America and Indonesia.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Captainjamescookportrait.jpg

James Cook c. 1775.

To find Terra Australis was quite a different thing, the climate was challenging to say the least, and the risks great. The British explorer James Cook got the task to discover it in 1769 on his first circumnavigation of the earth. He chartered all of New Zealand and the southeast coast of Australia with great dangers. In 1772 he set out again, and came as far south as 70° S and made the first west–east circumnavigation in high latitudes. If there was a land mass, he concluded, it would be a frozen one south of 70° S. Other explorers and seal- and whalehunters followed during the next decades.

Fabian von Bellingshausen was born in a Baltic German family in Estonia. He entered the Russian Navy at the age of ten and participated in the first Russian circumnavigation of the world. He studied Cook and considered him a mentor. In 1819 Tsar Alexander I authorized an expedition to the South, and von Bellingshausen got the command. He succeeded in the goal and returned to Krohnstadt in the Baltic Sea and got promoted. Honouring him, several geographic places have been named after him as Bellingshausen Island and Bellingshausen Sea.