Southern Cross Expedition

The Southern Cross Expedition, otherwise known as the British Antarctic Expedition, 1898–1900, was the first British venture of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, and the forerunner of the more celebrated journeys of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton. The brainchild of the Anglo-Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink, it was the first expedition to over-winter on the Antarctic mainland, the first to visit the Great Ice Barrier—later known as the Ross Ice Shelf—since Sir James Clark Ross's groundbreaking expedition of 1839 to 1843, and the first to effect a landing on the Barrier's surface. It also pioneered the use of dogs and sledges in Antarctic travel.

The expedition was privately financed by the British magazine publisher Sir George Newnes. Borchgrevink's party sailed in the Southern Cross, and spent the southern winter of 1899 at Cape Adare, the northwest extremity of the Ross Sea coastline. Here they carried out an extensive programme of scientific observations, although opportunities for inland exploration were restricted by the mountainous and glaciated terrain surrounding the base. In January 1900, the party left Cape Adare in Southern Cross to explore the Ross Sea, following the route taken by Ross 60 years earlier. They reached the Great Ice Barrier, where a team of three made the first sledge journey on the Barrier surface, during which a new Farthest South record latitude was established at 78° 50′S.

On its return to Britain the expedition was coolly received by London's geographical establishment exemplified by the Royal Geographical Society, which resented the pre-emption of the pioneering Antarctic role they envisaged for the Discovery Expedition. There were also questions about Borchgrevink's leadership qualities, and criticism of the limited extent of scientific results. Thus, despite the number of significant "firsts", Borchgrevink was never accorded the heroic status of Scott or Shackleton, and his expedition was soon forgotten in the dramas which surrounded these and other Heroic Age explorers. However, Roald Amundsen, conqueror of the South Pole in 1911, acknowledged that Borchgrevink's expedition had removed the greatest obstacles to Antarctic travel, and had opened the way for all the expeditions that followed.

Born in Oslo in 1864 to a Norwegian father and an English mother, Carsten Borchgrevink emigrated to Australia in 1888, where he worked as a land surveyor in the interior before accepting a provincial schoolteaching appointment in New South Wales. Having a taste for adventure, in 1894 he joined a commercial whaling expedition, led by Henryk Bull, which penetrated Antarctic waters and reached Cape Adare, the western portal to the Ross Sea. A party including Bull and Borchgrevink briefly landed there, and claimed to be the first men to set foot on the Antarctic continent—although the English-born American sealer John Davis believed he had landed on the Antarctic Peninsula in 1821. Bull's party also visited Possession Island in the Ross Sea, leaving a message in a tin box as proof of their journey. Borchgrevink was convinced that the Cape Adare location, with its huge penguin rookery providing a ready supply of fresh food and blubber, could serve as a base at which a future expedition could overwinter and subsequently explore the Antarctic interior.

After his return from Cape Adare, Borchgrevink spent much of the following years in Britain and Australia, seeking financial backing for an Antarctic expedition. Despite a well-received address to the 1895 Sixth International Geographical Congress in London, in which he professed his willingness to lead such a venture, he was initially unsuccessful. The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) was preparing its own plans for a large-scale National Antarctic Expedition (which eventually became the Discovery Expedition 1901–04) and was in search of funds; Borchgrevink was regarded by RGS president Sir Clements Markham as a foreign interloper and a rival for funding. Borchgrevink persuaded the publisher Sir George Newnes (whose business rival Alfred Harmsworth was backing the RGS venture) to meet the full cost of his expedition, some £40,000. This gift infuriated Markham and the RGS, since Newnes's donation, had it come their way would, he said have been enough "to get the National Expedition on its legs".

Newnes stipulated that Borchgrevink's expedition should sail under the British flag, and be styled the "British Antarctic Expedition". Borchgrevink readily agreed to these conditions, even though only two of the entire expedition party were British. This annoyed Markham all the more, and he subsequently rebuked the RGS librarian Hugh Robert Mill for attending the Southern Cross Expedition launch. Mill had toasted the success of the expedition, calling it "a reproach to human enterprise" that there were parts of the earth that man had never attempted to reach. He hoped that this reproach would be lifted through "the munificence of Sir George Newnes and the courage of Mr Borchgrevink".

Borchgrevink's original expedition objectives included the development of commercial opportunities, as well as scientific and geographical discovery. However, his plans to exploit the extensive guano deposits that he had observed during his 1894–95 voyage were not pursued. Research would be carried out across a range of disciplines, and Borchgrevink hoped that the scientific results would be complemented by spectacular geographical discoveries and journeys, even perhaps an attempt on the geographical South Pole itself; he was unaware at this stage that the site of the base at Cape Adare would not allow access to the hinterland of Antarctica.

For his expedition's ship, Borchgrevink purchased in 1897 a steam whaler, Pollux, that had been built in 1886 in Arendal on the south east coast of Norway, to the design of renowned shipbuilder Colin Archer. Archer had designed and built Fridtjof Nansen's ship, Fram, which in 1896 had returned unscathed from its long drift in the northern polar ocean during Nansen's Fram expedition. Pollux, which Borchgrevink renamed Southern Cross, was barque-rigged, 520 gross register tons, and 146 feet (45 m) overall length.