Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42

The admiral was astounded at the tiny size of the American craft, just a third of the length of his own ship. “It was with great difficulty that I could make the old admiral believe I had come from U States in so small a vessel,” Palmer later remembered. Through an interpreter, Bellingshausen told Palmer that previous to being blanketed in fog, he had assumed that he was the first to discover the lands that lay before them. But here was a vessel from America with a captain that was no more than a boy who told of lands even farther to the south. According to one account of the exchange, Bellingshausen told Palmer that “we must surrender the palm to you Americans,” adding that he would name the new discovery Palmer’s Land in the charts published by his government.

Not until the following century would it be established beyond question that the narrow panhandle of land Palmer had followed south was part of the Antarctic Continent. In the nineteenth century, the general assumption was that what we now call the Antarctic Peninsula was a group of islands just like the South Shetlands above it. There were at least two American sealers, however, who thought differently. In February 1821, Captain John Davis from New Haven and Captain Christopher Burdick from Nantucket independently recorded in their logbooks their suspicions that what they saw to the south was something bigger than an island. On February 15, Burdick wrote, “Land from the South to ESE, which I suppose to be a continent.” Eight days earlier, Davis had even gone to the trouble of rowing to shore, and his log provides the earliest documented evidence of a landing on Antarctica. But sealers were more interested in finding seals than in publicizing their navigational accomplishments. Davis’s and Burdick’s voyages would go unheralded until the 1950s, when their logbooks finally came to the attention of scholars in New Haven and Nantucket.

By the mid-1820s, the South Shetlands had been stripped of seals, and commercial interest in the region waned. The question of whether a continent or a group of islands existed to the south would be left unresolved for decades to come. In the meantime, the sails of American whalemen and bêche-de-mer traders continued to whiten the waters of the Great South Sea. As the need for reliable charts grew stronger, communities up and down the Atlantic seaboard began to insist that it was time for the U.S. government to catch up to the achievements of its mariners. In 1828 the citizens of Nantucket drafted a memorial to the U.S. Congress: “Your petitioners consider it a matter of earnest importance that those seas should be explored; that they should be surveyed in an accurate and authentic manner, and the position of new islands, and reefs, and shoals, definitely ascertained.”

In the tradition of Cook, it was time America launched an exploring expedition of its own.