page_title: New South Greenland
section_title: Sighting of land
hierarchical_section_title: New South Greenland / Voyage of the Wasp, 1822–23 / Sighting of land
caption_attribution_description: English: Engraving of Captain Benjamin Morrell 1795–1839
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: At 2 pm next day, 15 March, as Wasp cruised north-east in the sea that would later bear Weddell's name, Morrell records: "land was seen from the masthead, bearing west, distance 3 leagues" (about nine miles, 14 km). His account continues: "At half past 4 pm we were close on with the body of land to which Captain Johnson had given the name of New South Greenland". Robert Johnson, a former captain of the Wasp, had made an exploratory voyage along the western coast of the Antarctic peninsula in 1821. Johnson had called it "New South Greenland". Morrell casually referred to Johnston's description. This indicates that Morrell assumed that the land he was seeing was in fact the east coast of the pensinsula. At the time he wrote this, his position was about 14 degrees east of that pensinsula. The geographical features of the pensinsula were not known at the time of Morrell's voyage.  Morrell describes seal hunting activities continuing along this coast during the remainder of the day. On the following morning  sealing resumed as the ship moved slowly southward, and continued until Morrell called a halt "because of shortage of water and season far advanced". Mountains of snow, he observed, could be seen about 75 miles (120 km) further south.
  Morrell turned north from a position he calculated as 67°52'S, 48°11W. Three days later, on 19 March, the ship passed what he took to be the northern cape of the land, at 62°41'S, 47°21'W. "This land abounds with oceanic birds of every description", wrote Morrell.  He also records seeing 3,000 sea elephants. At 10 o'clock Wasp "bade farewell to the cheerless shores of New South Greenland"; there is no further mention of it in the long voyage account. Wasp sailed for Tierra del Fuego, then through the Magellan Strait into the Pacific Ocean, reaching  Valparaiso, Chile, on 26 July 1823.
  From the first navigations of the Southern Ocean in the 16th century, lands which subsequently proved to be nonexistent had  from time to time been reported in these waters. Polar historian Robert Headland of the Scott Polar Research Institute has suggested various reasons for these false sightings, ranging from "too much rum" to deliberate hoaxes designed to lure rival ships away from good sealing grounds. Some  may have been of large ice masses that were carrying rocks and other glacial debris—dirty ice can appear convincingly similar to land. It is also possible that some of these lands existed, but later became submerged after volcanic eruptions. Other sightings may have been of actual land, wrongly located through observational errors due to chronometer failure, bad weather or simple incompetence.
caption: Captain Benjamin Morrell, who claimed to have sighted New South Greenland.
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