Before the Heroes Came: Antarctica in the 1890s

Although the Antarctic ice pack and some offshore islands had been sighted and even landed upon briefly as early as the 1820s, it was not until an eccentric Anglo-Norwegian explorer, Carsten F. Borchgrevink, went ashore in 1895 that a human being set foot on the Antarctic continent. T. H. Baughman provides an account of the first tentative human gropings in Antarctica, concentrating on the coalescing of official and popular attitudes that later resulted in the polar races of Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen. T. H. Baughman is chair of the History Department at Benedictine College. He is the author of Pilgrims on the Ice: Robert Falcon Scott’s First Antarctic Expedition (Nebraska 1999).