In Search of Terra Incognita

The risk one runs in exploring these unknown and Icy Seas is so very great, that I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored. ~ British Captain James Cook

- Masha Nordbye

The Drake Passage

Two hundred years ago, in 1820, Russian Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen became the first explorer to set eyes upon Antarctica.

This came nearly fifty years after Captain Cook, in 1773, made maritime history by being the first to cross the Antarctic Circle, aboard the HMS Resolution.

Prior to Bellingshausen’s sighting, existence of a southern continent (the last on Earth to be discovered) was still a mythic speculation. The ancient Greeks had been the first to posit that there must be a landmass at the bottom of the Earth, in order to balance the northern continents. The North was called Arktos, the Greek word for “bear,” named after the constellation only visible in the northern sky. Thus, Greek philosophers simply surmised that a comparable Antarktikos was essential for earth’s equilibrium.

This Terra Incognita long captured explorers’ imaginations, and many set out for distant southern waters in hope of finding the elusive continent. In 1520, when sailing through the straight at the bottom of South America that now bears his name, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan thought that the land sighted to his south could be it.* But it would take another three centuries to discover Antarctica, lying less than 800 miles away.

* The Tierra del Fuego archipelago lies south of the Strait of Magellan. In 1578, the English privateer Sir Francis Drake was blown by a storm out of the strait farther south into unknown waters (now known as the Drake Passage) that implied an ocean existed below the South American continent.