An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor Read Free Page B

of Robert Falcon Scott, would launch the first major attempt to conquer the Earth’s last unexplored continent – Antarctica.

    At the time only a handful of people had visited Antarctica, which is the fifth largest continent with a diameter of 2,800 miles and an area of 5,400,000 square miles. It represents about ten per cent of the world’s land mass and is larger than either America or Europe.

    Antarctica is an island continent, totally isolated from the rest of the world’s land masses and separated from civilisation by the violent Southern Ocean. It is 600 miles to South America and over 1,500 miles to Australia. Over 99 per cent of the land mass is permanently covered in ice and about 90 per cent of the world’s fresh water is locked up in the icecaps. Wind speeds have been recorded at close to 200 mph (320 kph) and Antarctica has yielded the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, –129.3 °F (–89.6 °C).

    There are no Eskimos from which to learn the art of survival in Earth’s coldest and most inhospitable environment and there are few indigenous inhabitants, though it is visitedby varieties of penguins, seals and whales. There are very few other living things beyond some algae, lichens and mosses, so all food and equipment has to be transported to the continent and carried along on any journey. Antarctica is also a land of extremes. Despite the ice sheet covering, it rarely snows and for much of the year the continent is either plunged into total darkness for 24 hours a day or bathed in full sunlight.

    People down the ages had believed in the existence of Antarctica, or the Southern Continent, for perhaps 2,000 years before its presence was finally established. Long before its discovery, the ‘unknown southern land’ –
Terra Australis Incognita
– had entered mythology. Greek philosophers claimed that a giant land mass was needed to ‘balance’ the weight of the lands known to exist at the top of the earth. Since the Northern Hemisphere rested beneath Arktos (the Bear), the general belief was that the southern land had to be the opposite – Antarktikos.

    Great sailors like Magellan and Drake flirted with the unknown southern land in the sixteenth century and two intrepid French explorers – Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier and Yves Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec – discovered some neighbouring sub-Antarctic islands in the eighteenth century. But it was Captain James Cook, arguably the greatest explorer of all time, who first crossed the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773, in his vessels,
Resolution
and
Adventure
. Cook never actually saw Antarctica – he sailed to within 75 miles of land – and was doubtful about the value of any exploration in such a frigid and hostile environment.

    The earliest people to see Antarctica travelled on the expedition led by the Russian, Thaddeus von Bellingshausen, which on 27 January 1820 recorded the first known sighting. But Bellingshausen was unsure about his sighting and it was not until January 1831, that sealing captain John Biscoe circumnavigated the continent.

    Sir James Clark Ross penetrated the pack ice which surrounds the continent for the first time in 1841 and sailedalongside the frozen land mass in his ships,
Erebus
and
Terror
. He gave the names of his two ships to two of Antarctica’s most prominent mountains which stand guard over the entrance to the area that was to be frequented by several British expeditions around Ross Island in the Ross Sea.

    An international expedition, led by the Belgian, Adrian de Gerlache, took the ship
Belgica
deep into southern waters between 1897 and 1899. His ship became stuck fast in the ice in the Bellingshausen Sea off the Antarctica Peninsula, which extends like an outstretched finger from the continent up towards the tip of South America.

    Reluctantly and with great trepidation, de Gerlache and his crew were the first humans to spend the winter in the Antarctic, where the sun vanishes for four months. The