The ‘heroic age’ was a term coined by the Rev. J. Gordon Hayes in his book The conquest of the South Pole published in 1932. It began from the late 19th Century and was triggered, in part, by a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) titled ‘The Renewal of Antarctic Exploration’ by Dr. John Murray. Another one of the main spurs to the renewed interest in the Antarctic was the 1895 Sixth International Geographical Congress which declared exploration of the Antarctic Continent to be the greatest piece of geographical exploration yet to be fully undertaken. The RGS President Sir Clements Markham hosted the Congress at the Society. The period ended with the Shackleton-Rowett expedition of 1921.
Slowly Antarctica was explored with the coastline gradually being mapped, piece by piece, with a developing programme of science undertaken into the continent and its surrounding seas. Crucially, from this time onwards the focus was on scientific discovery. You can read more about the timeline of Antarctic discovery from the Discovering Antarctica website.
Roald Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer. In 1911 he was the first man to reach the South Pole. Amundsen’s party reached the pole five weeks before a British expedition led by naval officer captain Robert Scott. Scott and the other four members of his team died on their return journey from the pole. When their bodies were recovered the sledges still carried 16 kilograms of geological specimens that were subsequently used to prove that Antarctica had once been part of the super continent Gondwana.
Amundsen was famous for exploration of the Arctic and for successfully sailing Canada’s Northwest Passage in the ship Gjøa with six men in 1903. After hearing news that the Americans Robert Peary and Fredrick Cook had reached the north pole Amundsen turned his sights on the South Pole. Amundsen managed the 800-mile journey with meticulous planning, skiing expertise and the killing of his sled dogs for meat. He named the surrounding area King Haakon VII’s plateau, in honour of his monarch. Before embarking on the return journey, Amundsen left a letter at the pole for his fellow Antarctic explorer captain Robert Scott, who was later found frozen to death with it still in his possession.
You can read more about Amundsen at National Geographic.
The Endurance is the name of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship in his 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The aim of the voyage was to cross from the Weddell Sea (a completely unexplored region of Antarctica), via the South Pole, to the Ross Sea.
At the start of his expedition World War I broke out and he offered the Endurance and her crew to the war effort. He received a one-word telegram from the Admiralty in August of 1914 instructing the party to ‘Proceed’.
The Endurance undertook her voyage to Antarctica, but was trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea. Ice closed in around the Endurance on 18 January 1915 with the ship breaking up and sinking through the ice on 21 November 1915. During this time the Endurance had drifted 1186 miles since first becoming stuck and the nearest land was almost 350 miles away. Shackleton’s crew sailed to Elephant Island where they set up camp.
It had been 14 months since the Endurance became frozen in sea ice, and 5 months since it sank until Shackleton’s crew of 28 men reached Elephant Island. From there a brave group set out in a small lifeboat salvaged from the Endurance called the ‘James Caird’. Frank Worsley navigated through 800 miles of dangerous high winds, storms and squalls in the Southern Ocean using only the sun and the stars to land, remarkably, back on the isolated Atlantic island of South Georgia.
Raymond Priestley, a geologist who had been a member of Shackleton and Scott’s earlier expeditions to Antarctica described these three explorers with the following words ‘for scientific discovery, give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when you are seeing no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton’.
Visit Endurance and History at the Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 website for more information.
Visit the Royal Geographical Society website and find the WSE Shackleton expedition timeline pdf.
Between 1955 and 1958 a Commonwealth sponsored expedition was undertaken to cross Antarctica for the first time, led by Sir Edmund Hillary who, with Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit of Everest only two years earlier.
This expedition was the first successful overland crossing of the Antarctic continent, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea via the South Pole. It was also the first expedition in over 46 years to reach the South Pole, preceded only by Amundsen's expedition and Scott's fateful expedition in 1911 and 1912.
You can read more about this expedition from the Scott Polar Research Institute.
The Agulhas II set sail under the command of Captain Knowledge Bengu from Cape Town, South Africa, in 2019. The expedition was led by voyage leader Dr. John Shears and Professor Julian Dowdeswell of the Scott Polar Research Institute.
Over time the Weddell Sea has increased in importance due to a growing need to understand global warming and the effect on Antarctic ice shelves. Prior to the expedition, the Weddell Sea ice shelves Larson A and B collapsed, releasing A68, a giant iceberg four times the size of London. The Weddell Sea expedition had two aims to undertake scientific research into one of the most remote, and least studied, places on our planet and to search for the wreck of Shackleton’s Endurance. Much of this scientific research was completed, however the final resting place of the Endurance remains uncharted.
You can read more about Weddell Sea Expedition on the Royal Geographical Society website.