page_title: History of Antarctica
section_title: Early exploration
hierarchical_section_title: History of Antarctica / Early exploration / Early exploration
caption_attribution_description: Polar Regions southern exploration map
context_page_description: The history of Antarctica emerges from early Western theories of a vast continent, known as Terra Australis, believed to exist in the far south of the globe. The term Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the Arctic Circle, was coined by Marinus of Tyre in the 2nd century AD.
  The rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn in the 15th and 16th centuries proved that Terra Australis Incognita, if it existed, was a continent in its own right. In 1773 James Cook and his crew crossed the Antarctic Circle for the first time but although they discovered nearby islands, they did not catch sight of Antarctica itself. It is believed he was as close as 240 km from the mainland.
  On 27 January 1820, a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev discovered an ice shelf at Princess Martha Coast that later became known as the Fimbul Ice Shelf. Bellingshausen and Lazarev became the first explorers to see and officially discover the land of the continent of Antarctica.
context_section_description: The first landing on the Antarctic mainland is thought to have been made by the American Captain John Davis, a sealer, who claimed to have set foot there on 7 February 1821, though this is not accepted by all historians.
  In November 1820, Nathaniel Palmer, an American sealer looking for seal breeding grounds, using maps made by the Loper whaling family, sighted what is now known as the Antarctic Peninsula, located between 55 and 80 degrees west. In 1823, James Weddell, a British sealer, sailed into what is now known as the Weddell Sea. Until the twentieth century, most expeditions were for commercial purpose, to look for the prospects of seal and whale hunting. A piece of wood, from the South Shetland Islands, was the first fossil ever recorded from Antarctica, obtained during a private United States expedition during 1829–31, commanded by Captain Benjamin Pendleton.
  Charles Wilkes, as commander of a United States Navy expedition in 1840, discovered what is now known as Wilkes Land, a section of the continent around 120 degrees East.
  After the North Magnetic Pole was located in 1831, explorers and scientists began looking for the South Magnetic Pole. One of the explorers, James Clark Ross, a British naval officer, identified its approximate location, but was unable to reach it on his 4 year-expedition from 1839 to 1843. Commanding the British ships Erebus and Terror, he braved the pack ice and approached what is now known as the Ross Ice Shelf, a massive floating ice shelf over 100 feet (30 m) high.  His expedition sailed eastward along the southern Antarctic coast discovering mountains which were since named after his ships: Mount Erebus, the most active volcano on Antarctica, and Mount Terror.
  The first documented landing on the mainland of East Antarctica was at Victoria Land by the American sealer Mercator Cooper on 26 January 1853.
  These explorers, despite their impressive contributions to South Polar exploration, were unable to penetrate the interior of the continent and, rather, formed a broken line of discovered lands along the coastline of Antarctica. Following the expedition South by the ships Erebus and Terror under James Clark Ross (January, 1841), he suggested that there were no scientific discoveries, or 'problems', worth exploration in the far South. What followed is what historian H.R. Mill called 'the age of averted interest' and in the following twenty years after Ross' return, there was a general lull internationally in Antarctic exploration.
caption: Map of exploration routes, 1911.
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