Antarctica was discovered on a type ship. Discoverer of Antarctica
January 28, 1820 (January 16, old style) went down in history as the day of the discovery of the sixth continent - Antarctica. The honor of its discovery belongs to the Russian round-the-world naval expedition led by Thaddeus Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev.
At the beginning of the XIX century. ships of the Russian fleet made a number of round-the-world trips. These expeditions have enriched world science with major geographical discoveries, especially in the Pacific Ocean. However, the vast expanses of the Southern Hemisphere still remained a blank spot on the map. The question of the existence of the southern mainland was not clarified either.
In July 1819, after a long and very thorough preparation, the southern polar expedition set off from Kronstadt on a long voyage, consisting of two sloops of war - Vostok and Mirny. The first was commanded by Thaddeus Faddeevich Bellingshausen, the second - by Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev.
The Naval Ministry appointed Captain Bellingshausen as head of the expedition, who already had extensive experience in long-distance sea voyages. The expedition was given the task of penetrating as far south as possible in order to finally resolve the question of the existence of the Southern Continent.
In the major English port of Portsmouth, Bellingshausen stayed for almost a month to replenish provisions, purchase chronometers and various nautical instruments.
In early autumn, with a fair wind, the ships headed across the Atlantic Ocean to the coast of Brazil. From the very first days of the voyage, scientific observations were made, which Bellingshausen and his assistants carefully and in detail recorded in the logbook. After 21 days of navigation, the sloops approached the island of Tenerife.
The ships crossed the equator, and soon approached Brazil and anchored in Rio de Janeiro. Stocking up on provisions and checking the chronometers, the ships left the city, heading south into the unknown regions of the polar ocean.
At the end of December 1819, the sloops approached the island of South Georgia. The ships moved slowly forward, maneuvering very carefully among the floating ice.
Soon Lieutenant Annenkov discovered and described a small island, which was named after him. Bellingshausen on the way forward made several attempts to measure the depth of the ocean, but the lot did not reach the bottom. Then the expedition met the first floating "ice island". The farther to the south, the more often giant ice mountains - icebergs - began to come across on the way.
In early January 1820, sailors discovered an unknown island, completely covered with snow and ice. The next day, two more islands were seen from the ship. They were also put on the map, naming the names of the expedition members (Leskov and Zavadovsky). Zavadovsky Island turned out to be an active volcano with a height of more than 350 meters.
The open group of islands was named in honor of the then naval minister - the Traverse Islands.
On ships that made long voyages, people usually suffered from a lack of fresh fresh water. During this voyage, Russian sailors invented a way to obtain fresh water from the ice of icebergs.
Moving further south, the ships soon again met a small group of unknown rocky islands, which they called the Candlemas Islands. Then the expedition approached the Sandwich Islands discovered by the English explorer James Cook. It turned out that Cook took the archipelago for one large island. The Russian sailors corrected this mistake on the map.
Bellingshausen called the entire group of open islands the South Sandwich Islands.
At the end of January 1820, the sailors saw thick broken ice stretching to the horizon. It was decided to go around it, turning sharply to the north. Again the sloops passed the South Sandwich Islands.
The ships of the expedition crossed the Antarctic Circle and on January 28, 1820 reached 69 degrees 25 minutes south latitude. In the foggy haze of an overcast day, the travelers saw an ice wall blocking the further path to the south. As Lazarev wrote, the sailors "met hardened ice of extraordinary height ... it extended as far as vision could only reach." Moving further to the east and trying to turn south whenever possible, the explorers always encountered an "ice continent". Russian travelers approached less than 3 km to the northeastern ledge of that section of the coast of Antarctica, which 110 years later was seen by Norwegian whalers and named the Princess Martha Coast.
In February 1820, the sloops entered the Indian Ocean. Trying to break through to the south from this side, they approached the coast of Antarctica two more times. But heavy ice conditions forced the ships to move north again and move east along the ice edge.
On March 21, 1820, a severe storm broke out in the Indian Ocean, which lasted several days. The exhausted team, straining all their strength, struggled with the elements.
In mid-April, the sloop "Vostok" anchored in the Australian harbor of the port of Port Jackson (now Sydney). Seven days later, the Mirny sloop came here. Thus ended the first period of research.
During all the winter months, the sloops sailed in the tropical part of the Pacific Ocean, among the islands of Polynesia. Here, the expedition members carried out many important geographical works: they specified the position of the islands and their outlines, determined the height of the mountains, discovered and mapped 15 islands, which were given Russian names.
Returning to Zhaksoi, the sloop crews began to prepare for a new voyage to the polar seas. The preparation took about two months. In mid-November, the expedition again went to sea, keeping to the southeast direction. Continuing to sail south, the sloops crossed 60 degrees south latitude. Finally, on January 22, 1821, fortune smiled on the sailors. A blackening spot appeared on the horizon. The island was named after Peter I.
On January 29, 1821, Bellingshausen wrote: “At 11 o'clock in the morning we saw the shore; its cape, stretching to the north, ended in a high mountain, which was separated by an isthmus from other mountains. Bellingshausen called this land the Alexander I Coast. The land of Alexander I is still insufficiently explored. But its discovery finally convinced Bellingshausen that the Russian expedition approached the still unknown Southern Continent.
On February 10, 1821, when it turned out that the Vostok sloop was leaking, Bellingshausen turned north and arrived in Kronstadt via Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon on August 5, 1821, completing his second circumnavigation.
The expedition members spent 751 days at sea, covered more than 92 thousand kilometers. 29 islands and one coral reef have been discovered. The scientific materials she collected made it possible to form the first idea of Antarctica.
Russian sailors not only discovered a huge continent located around the South Pole, but also carried out the most important research in the field of oceanography. This branch of science was only in its infancy at that time. The discoveries of the expedition turned out to be a major achievement of Russian and world geographical science of that time.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources
On September 20, 1778 (according to the new style), the famous navigator, Admiral Faddey Faddeevich Bellingshausen, was born.
The future discoverer was born on the island of Ezel (modern Saaremaa, Estonia). The proximity of the sea, communication with sailors and fishermen from early childhood instilled in the boy a love for the fleet. At the age of ten he was sent to the Naval Cadet Corps in Kronstadt. After graduating in 1797 with the rank of midshipman, Thaddeus Bellingshausen sailed the Baltic Sea for some time on the ships of the Revel squadron.
In 1803 - 1806 he took part in the first Russian circumnavigation on the ship "Nadezhda" under the command of Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern. This expedition became an excellent school for the young sailor. Upon returning to his homeland, Bellingshausen continued to serve in the Baltic, and from 1810 he was transferred to the Black Sea Fleet, where he commanded the frigates Minerva and Flora. During this time, the researcher did a lot of work to refine the sea charts of the Caucasian coast and made a number of astronomical observations.
In 1819-1821, Captain 2nd Rank Thaddeus Bellingshausen and Lieutenant Mikhail Lazarev led the first Russian Antarctic expedition to the waters of the Southern Ocean on the sloops Vostok and Mirny. The researchers managed to see the coast of Antarctica in January 1820. Bellingshausen spoke cautiously: "Behind the ice fields of small ice and islands, a continent of ice is visible, whose edges are broken off perpendicularly and which continues as far as we see, rising to the south like a coast." In February of the same year, the expedition came very close to the ice massif. This allowed Bellingshausen and Lazarev to conclude that they really had an "ice continent" in front of them.
The expedition also discovered a number of islands in the tropical Pacific. In addition, during the voyage, observations were made of air and ocean temperature, air pressure, ethnographic, zoological and botanical collections were collected. Thaddeus Bellingshausen made the first attempt to classify polar ice and create a theory of ice formation.
The gratitude of the whole world for these discoveries was summarized in 1867 by the German geographer August Peterman: “The name of Bellingshausen can be directly put on a par with the names of Columbus and Magellan, with the names of those people who did not retreat before the difficulties and imaginary impossibilities created by their predecessors, with the names of people who went their own independent way, and therefore were the destroyers of barriers to discoveries, which mark the epochs.
In 1828-1829, Bellingshausen, with the rank of Rear Admiral, took part in the Russo-Turkish War. In 1839, the sailor became the military governor-general of Kronstadt. In 1843 he was promoted to the rank of admiral.
In 1845, Thaddeus Bellingshausen was elected a full member of the newly created Russian Geographical Society.
A sea in the Pacific Ocean, a cape in South Sakhalin and an island in the Tuamotu archipelago are named after Bellingshausen.
The hypothesis of the existence of "Terra australis incognita" ("Unknown Southern Land") was put forward by geographers of the ancient world and was supported by scientists of the Middle Ages. Starting from the XVI century. this land was placed on maps in the region of the South Pole.
The Portuguese B. Dias (1487-88), F. Magellan (1520), the Dutchman A. Tasman (1644), the Englishman D. Cook (1772-75) unsuccessfully searched for her. A large number of travelers who organized expeditions to the South Pole died getting stuck in the ice, unable to withstand the inhuman conditions of being in the snow.
"Inhuman Beginning
Complete lack of heat
It was frustrating at first"
Holding ceilings, p. 38 magazine "Guest from Time"
The reason for the death of the expeditions was not at all their poor preparation. . "Because everyone wanted to be first and lost control of the reality of the situation" With. 41 magazine "Guest from Time"
After vain attempts to find the southern mainland, Cook stated: “... I can safely say that not a single person will ever dare to penetrate further south than I did. The lands that may be in the south will never be explored". Thus, Cook questioned the very possibility of the existence of the Antarctic continent and argued that the area beyond the Antarctic Circle is useless for mankind. Cook's erroneous conclusions significantly slowed down further searches for Antarctica, but Russian navigators managed to refute Cook's statements, discover Antarctica and begin the era of scientific research on a new continent.
Russian scientists-navigators - I.F. Kruzenshtern, G.A. Sarychev, V.M. Golovnin and others, based on scientific data, have repeatedly expressed the idea that Cook's conclusions are erroneous, and argued that the southern mainland exists. It was they who initiated the Russian expedition to search for the southern mainland. The proposal of the naval commanders was approved by Alexander I at the beginning of February 1819. And it immediately became clear that there was very little time left: the sailing was scheduled for the summer of that year. Haste began, and the expedition had to include ships of various types - the sloop "Vostok" (985 tons) and transport, converted into a sloop with a displacement of 884 tons, which received the name "Mirny"; both ships were practically not adapted to sailing in polar latitudes.
The position of the head of the expedition and the captain of the Vostok remained vacant for a long time. Only a month before going to sea, Captain 2nd Rank Faddey Faddeevich Bellingshausen, a participant in the voyage of Krusenstern in 1803-1806, was approved for her. Therefore, all the work on recruiting ship crews (about 190 people), providing them with everything necessary for a long voyage and converting transport into a sloop fell on the shoulders of Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev, the commander of the Mirny. The main task of the expedition was defined by the Marine Ministry as purely scientific: “discoveries in the possible proximity of the Antarctic Pole” with the aim of “acquiring the most complete knowledge about our globe.”
It is not surprising that such a mission became feasible for Russian navigators, the Russian language is the language of the noosphere.
"The South Pole contains the result of all noospheroidal activity" With. 39 "Guest from Time"
“I call this finding a coast because the remoteness of the other end to the south disappeared beyond our vision. This coast is covered with snow, but the scree on the mountains and the steep cliffs had no snow. The sudden change in color on the surface of the sea gives the idea that the coast is extensive, or at least does not consist of the only part that was before our eyes.
Land of Alexander 1 is still insufficiently explored. But its discovery finally convinced Bellingshausen that the Russian expedition approached the still unknown Southern Continent.
Thus, the greatest geographical discovery of the 19th century took place.
The ships traveled about 50,000 miles and spent 751 days sailing, including 535 in the Southern Hemisphere and 527 under sail. For 100 days, the voyage took place south of the Arctic Circle among icebergs and ice. The expedition discovered 29 islands, collected the richest materials. The significance of this scientific feat is evidenced by the fact that in the areas where the Vostok and Mirny courses ran, people again visited only after more than a hundred years.
“... This expedition to the South Pole itself is so complex and voluminous for the state of each participant, a qualitative replacement of brain orientation takes place in them.<…>The expedition to the South Pole was necessary before the expedition to the equator, where the rhythmological signs would appear in all their glory.”
The discovery of Antarctica dates back to 1820.
However, the fact that there is a mainland at the South Pole was guessed before. The ancient Greeks were the first to express the idea of Antarctica. They knew about the Arctic - Arktos is an icy region in the Northern Hemisphere. And they decided that in order to balance the world, there should be a similar cold area in the Southern Hemisphere, the opposite area "Ant - Arktos" - opposite the Arctic.
Assumptions about Antarctica arose among the participants of the Portuguese expedition of 1501-1502., in which the Florentine traveler Amerigo Vespucci took part (his name, thanks to a bizarre coincidence, was subsequently immortalized in the name of the huge continents). But the expedition could not advance further than the island of South Georgia, which lies quite far from the Antarctic continent. “The cold was so strong that none of our flotilla could bear it,” Vespucci testified.
James Cook penetrated the Antarctic waters furthest, debunking the myth of the giant Unknown Southern Land. But even he was forced to confine himself to a mere assumption: “I will not deny that there may be a continent or a significant land near the pole. On the contrary, I am convinced that such a land exists, and it is possible that we have seen part of it. Great cold, a huge number of ice islands and floating ice - all this proves that the land in the south must be ... ". He even wrote a special treatise "Arguments for the existence of land near the South Pole."
Naval Cadet Corps. From early childhood, he dreamed of the open spaces of the sea. “I was born in the middle of the sea,” he wrote, “as a fish cannot live without water, so I cannot I can live without the sea." In 1803-1806. Bellingshausen took part in the first Russian round-the-world voyage on the ship "Nadezhda" under the leadership of Ivan Kruzenshtern.
Was ten years younger Lazarev who made three round-the-world trips in his life. In 1827 he took part in the naval battle of Navarino against the Turks; later, for almost 20 years, he commanded the Black Sea Fleet. Among the students of Lazarev were outstanding Russian naval commanders Vladimir Kornilov, Pavel Nakhimov, Vladimir Istomin.
Fate brought Bellingshausen and Lazarev together in 1819. The Naval Ministry planned an expedition to the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. Two well-equipped ships were to make a difficult journey. One of them, the Vostok sloop, was commanded by Bellingshausen, the other, bearing the name Mirny, was commanded by Lazarev. Many decades later, the first Soviet Antarctic stations would be named after these ships.
July 16, 1819 the expedition set sail. Its goal was formulated briefly: discoveries "in the possible vicinity of the Antarctic Pole." Mariners were ordered to explore South Georgia and Sandwich Land (now the South Sandwich Islands, once discovered by Cook) and "continue their explorations to the remotest latitude that can be reached", using "every diligence and the greatest effort to reach as close to the pole as possible, looking for unknown earth." The instruction was written in a "high calm", but no one knew how it could be implemented in practice. However, luck accompanied the "East" and "Mirny". The island of South Georgia has been described in detail; it was established that Sandwich Land is not one island, but an entire archipelago, and Bellingshausen called the largest island of the archipelago Cook Island. The first prescriptions of the instruction were fulfilled.
Already one could see endless expanses of ice on the horizon; along their edge, the ships continued their journey from west to east. On January 27, 1820, they crossed the Antarctic Circle and the next day came close to the ice barrier of the Antarctic continent. Only more than 100 years later, Norwegian explorers of Antarctica visited these places again: they called them the Princess Martha Coast. On January 28, Bellingshausen wrote in his diary: “Continuing our journey south, at noon at latitude 69 ° 21 "28", longitude 2 ° 14 "50" we met ice, which seemed to us through the falling snow in the form of white clouds. After going another two miles to the southeast, the expedition found itself in "continuous ice"; all around stretched "an ice field dotted with mounds."
Lazarev's ship was in conditions of much better visibility. The captain observed "seasoned (i.e., very powerful, solid) ice of extraordinary height", and "it extended as far as vision could only reach." This ice was part of the Antarctic ice sheet. And January 28, 1820 went down in history as the date of the discovery of the Antarctic continent. Two more times (February 2 and 17) Vostok and Mirny came close to the coast of Antarctica.
The instruction ordered "to search for unknown lands", but even the most determined of its compilers could not foresee such an amazing implementation.
On January 22, 1821, an unknown island appeared to the eyes of travelers. Bellingshausen called it the island of Peter I - "the high name of the culprit of the existence of a navy in the Russian Empire." January 28 - exactly one year has passed since the historic event - in cloudless, sunny weather, the crews of the ships observed a mountainous coast that extended south beyond the limits of visibility.
For the first time, Alexander I Land appeared on geographical maps. Now there is no doubt left: Antarctica is not just a giant ice massif, not a “continent of ice”, as Bellingshausen called it in his report, but a real “earthly” continent.
However, he himself never spoke about the discovery of the mainland. And the point here is not a sense of false modesty: he understood that it was possible to draw final conclusions only by “stepping over the side of the ship”, having carried out research on the shore. Neither the size nor the outlines of the continent F. Bellingshausen could not form even a rough idea. This took many decades.
Completing its "odyssey", the expedition examined in detail the South Shetland Islands, about which it was previously known only that the Englishman W. Smith observed them in 1818. The islands were described and mapped. Many companions of Bellingshausen participated in the Patriotic War of 1812. Therefore, in memory of her battles, individual islands received the corresponding names: Borodino, Maloyaroslavets, Smolensk, Berezina, Leipzig, Waterloo. However, later they were renamed by English sailors, which seems unfair. By the way, on Waterloo (its modern name is King George) in 1968, the northernmost Soviet scientific station in Antarctica, Bellingshausen, was founded.
The voyage of Russian ships lasted 751 days, and its length was almost 100 thousand km (the same amount will be obtained if two and a quarter times go around the Earth along the equator). 29 new islands have been mapped. Thus began the chronicle of the study and development of Antarctica, in which the names of researchers from many countries are inscribed.
I have known since childhood about who discovered America. Of course! It tells the same everywhere and everywhere. :) I think that even a five-year-old child has a rough idea of who Columbus is and what he discovered. But Antarctica is another matter. Frankly, I may seem uneducated, but not so long ago I had no idea who discovered this continent.
Here I would like to talk about who discovered Antarctica and how it happened. :)
basic information
First, I will say a few words about where this continent is located. In fact, I have met people who confuse Antarctica and the Arctic. Do not do it this way. :) Antarctica is in the very south our planet. Approximately in the center of this continent and is indicated South Pole of the Earth.
Off the coast of Antarctica is South ocean. It was not so long ago classified as a separate ocean, only in the 21st century. It used to be possible to say that Antarctica is washed by the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans.
95% of the area of this continent is completely covered tthick layer of ice. Although, since global warming has been observed in recent decades, the ice cover is gradually decreasing.
Who discovered Antarctica
Before the real official discovery of Antarctica, people understood that somewhere in the south there must have been another continent. So:
- More Amerigo Vespucci, after which America was named, moved quite deeply towards the Southern Ocean. However, at some point, he and his team had to turn back because of the extreme cold, which did not allow the sailors to do their job.
- Besides, James Cook visited Antarctic waters before the discovery of this continent. In his notes, he indicated that the probability of having a separate continent in the south is very high. So he thought because of the large number of glaciers that he met on the way.
- And now a moment of pride - Antarctica was discovered by Russian navigators F.F. Bellingshausen and M.P. Lazarev in 1820. The expedition itself began in 1819 and took place on ships "Vostok" and "Mirny". It is interesting that the next time a person visited this continent only after a hundred years!
