About 1835 general interest was aroused in Antarctic problems, and three expeditions were prepared in England, France, and America to make magnetic observations, and to explore as far as possible the southern continent, now at length defined within reasonable limits. The French expedition, under Dumont d’Urville, was the first to start in 1838, but achieved little beyond the exploration of some land south of the South Shetland Islands, which was called Louis Philippe Land. After wintering in Tasmania, however, d’Urville decided on making a great effort to reach the south magnetic pole, and though he failed in this, he found a mountainous land which he named Adélie Land. The American expedition under Charles Wilkes did not meet with any great success, hampered as it was by quarrels among the officers and by unseaworthy ships; but land was several times sighted at a distance, and on Wilkes’s return controversy arose as to whether the honour of the discovery of this southern continent belonged to the French or the American expedition.
The British expedition under Sir James Ross was the last to arrive on the scene (in 1841); but it had the advantage of the others, in that it had been specially equipped for Antarctic exploration; Ross’s ships could brave dangers from which Wilkes and d’Urville had been compelled to turn aside. He forced his way through the pack, and found a range of high mountains trending southwards, which he called Victoria Land. Following the land he came to the twin volcanoes, named Erebus and Terror after his two ships, and was stopped at length by the great ice barrier, running eastwards. During this remarkable journey Ross reached latitude 78° 4´ S., the highest yet attained. He made two further journeys, neither so successful as the first, though in 1842 he sighted the land which was rediscovered, and named King Edward Land, in the following century. After this no attempt worthy of mention was made on the south polar region for thirty years. The Challenger expedition in 1874 was not concerned with the attempt to penetrate very far south (Chapter XIV.). The voyage in Antarctic waters, however, was important from the information obtained as to the depth of the southern ocean and other results which helped to prove the existence of a considerable mass of land in the Antarctic region. This information was supplemented by the observations of two of the international circumpolar stations (to which reference has been made), which were established in Tierra del Fuego and South Georgia in 1882; but it was not until many years later that scientific interest was widely aroused in the problem of the Antarctic continent, and from 1874 to 1898 the only people to cross the Antarctic circle were sealers and whalers; but in 1895 C. E. Borchgrevink landed from one of these vessels for the first time on southern continental land near Cape Adare.
In 1898 three expeditions started south. The first, a Belgian undertaking on board the Belgica, explored the coast to the north of Graham Land, and brought back valuable collections; the second, from Germany on the Valdivia, re-discovered Bouvet Island, whose position had long been lost; the third, from England, under Borchgrevink on the Southern Cross, landed the first party to winter in the Antarctic, reached Mount Terror, and sailed along the Great Ice Barrier, reaching latitude 78° S. In 1901 the problem was attacked for the first time by means of land-exploration; a well-equipped expedition leaving England in that year under Captain R. F. Scott voyaged along the ice-barrier, and found and named King Edward Land, first seen by Ross. Scott then proved Mount Erebus and Mount Terror to be on an island, and wintered on shore. In the following southern summer Scott, with Wilson and Shackleton, pushed southward and reached the latitude of 82° 17´, where the Great Ice Barrier reaches the foot of the lofty plateau on which the south pole is placed. Other parties traversed the ice-barrier in various directions, and much valuable scientific work was done in geology, biology, meteorology, magnetism, and glaciation. While Scott was in the Antarctic to the south of New Zealand, a German expedition, under E. von Drygalski, on board the Gauss, was working to the west of him, and had discovered and named Kaiser Wilhelm II. Land. Two private expeditions were also in the Antarctic at the same time, and the large number of synchronous meteorological and magnetic observations thus taken formed a valuable contribution to the knowledge of the southern continent. In 1903 a voyage was made by W. S. Bruce on the Scotia, which is important for the exploration of an entirely unknown sea lying between the tracks of Weddell and of Ross; the latitude of 74° 1´ was reached. Though the land could not be attained, its existence was proved by occasional glimpses and by the dredging up of continental rocks, and the name of Coats Land was given to it. In 1904 J. B. Charcot, a French scientist, cruised along Graham Land and found a new line of coast, which he named Loubet Land. Thus between 1902 and 1904 new land had been discovered in all the four quarters of the Antarctic circle—King Edward Land by Scott, Kaiser Wilhelm Land by Drygalski, Coats Land by Bruce, and Loubet Land by Charcot.
Lieutenant (afterwards Sir) E. H. Shackleton, who had accompanied Scott, led an expedition to the south in 1908–9, which landed at the foot of Mount Erebus. That mountain was ascended by Professor T. W. E. David, who also, with Dr. D. Mawson, reached the south magnetic pole in 72° 25´ S., 155° 16´ E. Shackleton himself led the famous march which brought him to 88° 23´ S., 162° E., a great advance towards the south pole itself, which might actually have been attained but for the lack of food. The scientific results of the expedition were of high value, and revealed the desirability of prosecuting researches in the same field; and in 1910 Scott led a second expedition, with a larger scientific staff than had ever been taken before, the main party of which was landed at Cape Evans, McMurdo Sound. Of two other parties, one was landed on the west side of the sound; another, which worked at first from Cape Adare, was subsequently transferred to Terra Nova Bay, Victoria Land. A considerable area was thus covered on this part of the Antarctic coast, while Scott’s march upon the pole was designed to follow Shackleton’s route. The splendour of success was outshone by the splendour of disaster: Scott and four companions, having reached the pole, died bravely on the return journey, overcome by adverse conditions. The work of the expedition as a whole, taking that of the other parties into account, was a brilliant scientific triumph.
The honour of first reaching the pole, however, fell to a Norwegian explorer, Captain Roald Amundsen, who, leading a small but admirably equipped expedition, succeeded in his endeavour at the end of 1911, and he and Scott thus left the way open to research on the Antarctic land-mass unhampered for the future by the natural desire to reach a certain point upon it. In the same year expeditions (not specifically concerned with the attainment of that point) were led south by the German Lieutenant Filchner, whose immediate goal was Coats Land, in the “Weddell” (or South American) quadrant, and by Dr. Mawson, whose objective was Adélie Land, on the opposite flank of the continent, while various projects are also under the consideration of other voyagers, British and American. There is room for the work of all these and more—the Antarctic region is now known as a vast land-area fringed by deep seas separating it from the other continental masses. Amundsen’s observations would seem to prove it a single homogeneous mass, and not to be divided into two, or to consist in part of an archipelago. It still remains to investigate the nature of any geological relation between it and the other continents, to study the extension and physiography of the great mountain ranges which are known, and their relation to the polar plateau, and to deal with the many other problems such as are suggested by observations already made on the climate, the ice conditions, and the distribution of flora and fauna—notably, in the last connection, the problem of the resemblances which have been observed between Antarctic and Arctic forms of life.
Chapter XIV.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER; EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS OF GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE
As during a long period in the history of geography it was usual to limit the connotation of the term, so, when a wider connotation came to be recognized, there naturally followed the creation of certain clearly-defined departments of study under distinguishing titles. The whole structure of geography rests upon two great pillars—upon exploration and upon measurement. With the main lines of exploration we have dealt in preceding chapters, and we have carried that part of our history which deals with precise measurement down to the close of the eighteenth century and the institution of the ordnance survey of Great Britain (Chapter X.). The early part of the sixteenth century witnessed the birth of accurate land-measurement; the early part of the nineteenth its re-birth as a function of organized state-administration. The Indian trigonometrical survey, with which the names of Col. W. Lambton and afterwards Sir George Everest are associated, was begun in 1800; a famous survey of Switzerland, coupled with the name of Gen. H. Dufour, was undertaken in 1809, one of Austria-Hungary in 1816, one of France in 1817; what is now the territory of the German Empire was already fairly represented on local maps when a general survey was undertaken in 1878. Indeed, all European countries may be said to be completely surveyed except certain of the Balkan States, though Russia is much behind in this respect. It must not be forgotten that the processes of close survey are slow: the primary triangulation of Great Britain was only completed in 1858, though the filling-in of details of course proceeded concurrently. And the survey never stands still; there is always revisional work to do.
As concerns the British Empire, it has been an unrealized ideal that a territory should be surveyed as soon as possible after occupation, and it was not until 1905 that the defects and lack of system in the mapping of British territories generally were sufficiently widely realized to cause the creation of a Colonial Survey Committee as a central advisory and supervisory body.
Geodetic survey steadily advanced during the nineteenth century, from the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel in East Prussia in 1838—of the highest importance owing to the systematic accuracy of the observations and their calculation (on the principle of “least squares”)—down to the institution of the International Geodetic Association (Erdmessung), which had its origin in a proposal of the Prussian General, J. J. Baeyer, in 1862, and has headquarters near Potsdam, over twenty European, American, and Asiatic countries being represented in it. The accuracy of instruments has been carried far above the standard of those referred to in an earlier chapter. As an illustration we have only to trace the mechanical methods of measuring a baseline or other distance on the surface, from that of counting the revolutions of a wheel, up to that of employing rods of metal or other substance, or chains—methods associated with the endeavour to compensate for or overcome even the slight contraction or expansion of a rod, due to variation of temperature, which might vitiate the results, culminating in the discovery (in France in 1896) of invar, an alloy for practical purposes invariable, when applied to the measurement of baselines by means of such apparatus as that of E. Jäderin of Stockholm.