Carsten Borchgrevink - Whaling Voyage

Whaling Voyage

The expedition that Borchgrevink joined was organised by Henryk Bull, a Norwegian businessman and entrepreneur who, like Borchgrevink, had settled in Australia in the late 1880s. Bull planned to make a sealing and whaling voyage into Antarctic waters. After failing to interest Melbourne's learned societies in a cost-sharing venture of a commercial–scientific nature, he returned to Norway to organise his expedition there. He met Svend Foyn, the 84-year-old "father of modern whaling" and inventor of the harpoon gun. With Foyn's help he acquired the whaler Kap Nor ("North Cape"), which he renamed Antarctic. Bull hired an experienced whaling captain, Leonard Kristensen, and with a crew and a small scientific team left Norway in September 1893. When Borchgrevink learned that Antarctic was due to visit Melbourne in September 1894, he hurried there hoping to find a vacancy. He was fortunate; William Speirs Bruce, later an Antarctic expedition leader in his own right, had intended to join Bull's expedition as a natural scientist but could not reach the ship before it left Norway. This created an opening for Borchgrevink, who met Bull in Melbourne and persuaded him to take him on as a deck-hand and part-time scientist.

During the following months, Antarctic's sealing activities around the sub-Antarctic islands were successful, but whales proved difficult to find. Bull and Kristensen decided to take the ship further south, to areas where the presence of whales had been reported by earlier expeditions. The ship penetrated a belt of pack ice and sailed into the Ross Sea, but whales were still elusive. On 17 January 1895 a landing was made at Possession Island, where Sir James Clark Ross had planted the British flag in 1841. Bull and Borchgrevink left a message in a canister there, as future proof of their presence. On the island Borchgrevink found a lichen, the first plant life discovered south of the Antarctic Circle. On 24 January the ship reached the vicinity of Cape Adare, at the northern extremity of the Victoria Land coastline of the Antarctic mainland. Ross's 1841 expedition been unable to land here, but as Antarctic neared the cape, conditions were calm enough for a boat to be lowered. A party including Bull, Kristensen, Borchgrevink and others then headed for a shingled foreshore below the cape. Exactly who went ashore first became a matter of dispute, with both Kristensen and Borchgrevink contending for the honour along with a 17-year-old New Zealand seaman, Alexander von Tunzelmann, who said that he had "leapt out to hold the boat steady". The party claimed this as the first landing on the Antarctic mainland, although they may have been preceded by the American whaling captain John Davis, on the Antarctic Peninsula in 1821, or by other whaling expeditions.

While ashore at Cape Adare, Borchgrevink collected further specimens of rocks and lichens, the latter of which would prove of great interest to the scientific community, which had doubted the ability of vegetation to survive so far south. He also made a careful study of the foreshore, assessing its potential as a site where a future expedition might land and establish winter quarters. When Antarctic reached Melbourne, Bull and Borchgrevink left the ship. Each hoped to raise funds for a further Antarctic expedition, but their efforts were unsuccessful. An animosity developed between them, possibly because of their differing accounts of the voyage on the Antarctic; each emphasised his own role without fully acknowledging that of the other.