Through the first Antarctic night, 1898-1899

by Frederick Albert Cook

Cape Cloos.

After a stay of seven days, which was our first camping experience in the antarctic, and the first in the history of south polar exploration, we gladly betook ourselves to the good old bark, which had returned from a cruise southward. During our absence the Belgica, under Lecointe’s direction, had been on an exploring cruise to the south. The effort was brilliantly successful, for Lecointe reported the discovery of several islands, upon one of which Racovitza had discovered the metropolis of Belgica Strait, a city of forty thousand penguins, and beyond these islands there was what promised to be an unobstructed highway into the Pacific. To examine this and the extension of the waters before us was our next mission; but Lecointe was not yet satisfied that the wide bay opposite our encampment (Wilhelmina Bay), did not extend through Dancoland to the Atlantic. During the night of February 6th we steamed across the Strait, and early on the following morning we were off Cape Murray. Keeping close to the shores we followed the great wall of ice which lined the shore-line from Cape Murray to Cape Reclus. At noon we rounded Cape Reclus, a long tongue of land-ice with a saddle-shaped mountain in the center, and entered a canal-like body of water, with the high ice-walls of Dancoland on the east and the shore lines of Nansen and Brooklyn Islands on the west. This was certainly a fairy-like scene; but a heavy fog settled down over us, blocking out, for a time, the savage peaks which pierced the heavy spread of snow and reared their towering heights far into the dull skies. In this fog the water had the colour and the glimmer of polished silver, while the walls of ice rising from the shore-lines stood out in great lines of ultramarine blue. We continued our search along the mainland, and in the evening we found ourselves opposite Sophie Rocks, which we had seen from the other side. The body of water through which we sailed on this day has been given the name “Chenal de la Plata,” in honour of the capital of the Argentine Republic.

A scene which I photographed at midnight on February 7th pictures this land in a faithful manner. The sun was just under the land-ice, painting the sky in orange and the land in gold, while gliding northward behind a great crested peak 4,000 feet in height. To each side of this black peak were rugged edges of stratified rocks which had once been under the sea, but were now raised to an elevation of two thousand feet, and buried under a sheet of ice of more than a thousand feet in thickness.

Ascending Icy Mountains.

An Encampment.

On the morning of February 8th we had completed a rough survey of the mainland eastward, and a running survey of the eastern banks of the Liege and Brabant Islands. We did not follow the channels leading northward and westward, nor did we prolong our examination of the lands in that direction beyond the banks of Belgica Strait. We steamed around Cape Anna, and then headed for a remarkable cliff, at the base of which we made our fourteenth debarkment. The day was a delight. The sun showered its full wealth of rays on the sloping snows with such force that the reflected beams made the air and the water perfectly dazzling. It was a photographic day. As the ship steamed rapidly along, spreading out one panorama after another of a new world, the noise of the camera was as regular and successive as the tap of a stock ticker. Not less than three hundred photographs were taken on this day. Surely, in the hundred miles of land which we discovered on this memorable day there were no landmarks which were not on our plates. Everybody was on deck with pencil and paper, some making nautical and geographical notes, others geological and topographical notes, and all recording the strange other-world scenic effects. Even the sailors, the cabin-boy, and the cooks were out with paper and note-books, taking long looks and then bending over their paper.

The landscape was not materially different from what it had been along the scores of miles which we had discovered during the days previous, but the clearness of the atmosphere made it possible to see to the limit of every point of the horizon. There were on this day many notable sights, but I shall mention only two. Early in the afternoon we saw on the northern side of the channel a great red cliff of granite. Its bare face was only about one thousand feet high, but, with its snow-covered base and its icy crest, it stood up boldly to an altitude of three thousand feet against the clouds, which now came from the south-west. A little farther south the channel was divided into two arms by an island, with a bold round rock as a headland (Cape Eivind Astrup). We took the western arm. This passage was not more than from two to five miles in width, and its length was about forty miles. We entered it at four o’clock, and steamed for six hours in a silvery fjord, whose walls of ice and rock rose over us to a height of from three to four thousand feet. At ten o’clock we saw the black sky of the Pacific and the terminating banks of the newly discovered Strait.

Here, within sight of the Pacific, was a large bay (Borgen Bay) surrounded by mountains (Osterrieth Mountains) fully three thousand feet high and covered with snow to their summits. In this bay we rested for the night.