page_title: New South Greenland
section_title: Opinions and theories
hierarchical_section_title: New South Greenland / Opinions and theories
caption_attribution_description: English: Fata Morgana seen on Norwegian coast: Just the hardly visible crest is on real position. Deutsch: Fata Morgana an der norwegischen Küste: Nur der im Nebel schwach erkennbare Bergrücken ist an realer Position.
context_page_description: New South Greenland, which is also known as Morrell's Land, was an appearance of land recorded by the American captain Benjamin Morrell. Morrel reported the sighting on the schooner Wasp in March 1823, during a seal hunting and exploration voyage in the Weddell Sea area of Antarctica. He provided precise coordinates and a description of a coastline. Morrel claimed to have sailed along the coastline for more than 300 miles. The Weddel Sea is in the Antarctic. Because of icebergs, it was difficult to navigate, and few people did. The sighting was never investigated properly, at the time. Expeditions to Antarctica in the early 20th century proved that there was no land at the positions recorded by Morrell.
  At the time of Morrell's voyage the Weddel Sea had not been named and its geography and coastline was almost entirely unknown. This made the sighting plausible at the start. Morrell made obvious errors when he told about the new sighting. He also had the reputation of liking to invent new stories. These two aspects made many people sceptical about the sighting.
context_section_description: According to W.J. Mills, Morrell had the reputation among his contemporaries as "the biggest liar in the Southern Ocean". Mills calls the westward journey from Morrell's  claimed farthest east position "impossible ... unbelievably fast, quite apart from lying south of the coastline for much of the way". In search of an explanation Mills suggests that since Morrell's account was written nine years after the voyage he may not have had access to the ship's log, and hence may "have felt constrained to invent details that appeared plausible" in order to sustain his narrative.  This would explain the profusion of positional and date errors.
  Hugh Robert Mill, writing in 1905 before the non-existence of New South Greenland had been proved conclusively, refers to the sheer absurdity of some of the incidents described in Morrell's account, and concludes that because of Morrell's blunders, and his habit of incorporating the experiences of others into his story, all his claims must be treated as not proven. Nevertheless he concedes that "a man may be ignorant, boastful and obscure, and yet have done a solid piece of work". Canadian geographer Paul Simpson-Housley adopts a more sympathetic approach. Although dubious about much of Morrell's account, Simpson-Housley suggests that the speeds claimed for the western journey, though fast, are not impossible.  He believes that the claimed farthest south in the Weddell Sea, queried by Mill,   is entirely plausible, given that James Weddell had sailed four degrees further south just a month earlier.
  Another inclined to defend Morrell's integrity is the writer Rupert Gould, who included a lengthy essay on New South Greenland in his collection Enigmas, published in 1929. The assumption that the New South Greenland sighting was simply invented by Morrell is dismissed, primarily on the grounds of the very little weight given to the discovery in Morrell's 500-page account. Gould writes: "If Morrell wished to gain an undeserved reputation as an Antarctic explorer, one would think he could have gone a better way about it than to bury his pièces justificatives, after he had forged them, in an undistinguished  corner of so bulky a book." In the relatively few pages devoted to the Antarctic, Morrell's account of his discovery is brief and entirely matter-of-fact, crediting it to Captain Johnson two years earlier rather than to himself.
  Gould also discusses the possibility that what Morrell sighted was indeed the eastern coast of Graham Land, the so-called "Foyn Coast", despite its being 14° further west from position of the New South Greenland sighting. In support, Gould asserts that the peninsula's eastern coast corresponds very closely with the stretch of coastline described by Morrell. This theory supposes that Morrell miscalculated the ship's position, perhaps because he lacked the chronometer necessary for proper navigational observation. In his account Morrell writes that he was "destitute of the various nautical and mathematical instruments", but other parts of his narrative make it clear that the occasional dead reckoning calculation was the exception to the norm. In any circumstances a longitudinal error of 14° is very large, and the additional distance of about 350 miles (560 km) to the Foyn coast seems too great to have been covered within the ten-day voyage from the South Sandwich Islands, where the ship's position is recorded accurately. Even so, Gould maintains that a "balance of evidence" shows that what Morrell saw was the Foyn coast.
  Filchner's view that the supposed sighting of New South Greenland could be explained by a mirage is echoed by Simpson-Housley. He suggests that Morrell and his crew saw a superior mirage. One form of superior mirage, sometimes described as a Fata Morgana, distorts distant flat coastlines or ice edges both vertically and horizontally, so they can appear to have tall cliffs and other features such as high mountain peaks and valleys. In his expedition account South, Shackleton gives a description of a Fata Morgana observed on 20 August 1915, coincidentally a
caption: An example of a Fata Morgana, a form of superior mirage, which distorts ice or distant coastlines so they might appear as islands with tall cliffs.
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