Southern Cross Reaches Farthest South in Antarctica

Carsten Borchgrevink's team reached 78 degrees 50 minutes South on January 16, 1900. First humans to stand on the Ross Ice Barrier. First to winter on Antarctica. First to use dogs and sledges there. Nobody cared. The British press mocked him because he was Norwegian, not British, and he'd funded the trip with a tabloid publisher's money. Scott and Shackleton got the glory a decade later doing exactly what Borchgrevink had already done. His maps guided them. His techniques kept them alive. He died broke in 1934. The Antarctic Treaty now lists him as the continent's first scientific explorer. Borchgrevink's Southern Cross Expedition of 1898-1900 was the first expedition to spend a complete winter on the Antarctic continent, enduring months of darkness, subzero temperatures, and psychological isolation that tested the limits of human endurance. His team of ten men, plus a journalist and seventy-five sled dogs, established a base at Cape Adare on the Ross Sea coast. During the winter, zoologist Nicolai Hanson died of an intestinal condition, becoming the first person buried on the Antarctic continent. When spring returned, Borchgrevink sailed south to the Ross Ice Barrier, landed on its surface for the first time in history, and traveled by dog sled to a new farthest south record. The expedition collected geological and biological specimens, took magnetic observations, and proved that humans could survive an Antarctic winter with proper planning. Yet Borchgrevink received little recognition in Britain, where the Royal Geographical Society viewed him as an interloper who had jumped ahead of the British Antarctic Expedition they were planning for Robert Falcon Scott. His Norwegian nationality and his sponsorship by the publisher George Newnes, rather than the RGS, marked him as an outsider. Scott's Discovery Expedition of 1901-1904 used Borchgrevink's charts and benefited from his experience but rarely acknowledged the debt.