Southern Cross Expedition - Background

Background

Born in Oslo in 1864 to a Norwegian father and an English mother, Carsten Borchgrevink emigrated to Australia in 1888, where he worked on survey teams in the interior before accepting a provincial schoolteaching appointment in New South Wales. In 1894 he joined a commercial expedition, led by Henryk Bull in the whaler Antarctic, 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 American sealer John Davis believed he had landed on the Antarctic Peninsula in 1821. They 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.

Determined that he would lead such an expedition himself, after his return from Cape Adare Borchgrevink spent much of the next three years attempting to gain financial backing in Australia and England. Despite some encouragement from the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), whose International Congress he addressed in 1895, he was initially unsuccessful. The RGS was in fact harbouring plans of its own for a large-scale National Antarctic Expedition and was in search of funds; Borchgrevink was regarded by RGS president Sir Clements Markham as a foreign interloper and a rival for funding. However, Borchgrevink eventually managed to persuade publisher Sir George Newnes (whose business rival Alfred Harmsworth was backing Markham's venture) to meet the full cost of his expedition, some £40,000 (approximately £3,304,000 as of 2013). This gift infuriated Markham and the RGS, since Newnes's donation, had it come their way, would have been enough "to get the National Expedition on its legs".

Newnes made one stipulation: Borchgrevink's expedition must sail under the British flag, and be styled the British Antarctic Expedition. Borchgrevink readily agreed to this, even though only two of the entire expedition party were British. This increased the hostility and contempt of Markham, who chastised RGS librarian Hugh Robert Mill for attending the Southern Cross Expedition launch. There, Mill had toasted the success of the expedition in stirring terms, 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".