The British Empire and the Arctic and Antarctic Exploration

The British contribution to polar exploration was, in its heroic register at least, one of the most distinctive achievements of the British Empire. From Martin Frobisher’s gold-hunting voyages of the 1570s to the discovery of the wreck of the Endurance on the floor of the Weddell Sea in March 2022, British explorers played a central role in opening up the polar regions to European knowledge. The same men who brought back the charts also brought back the stories — of ice-bound ships, of scurvy and starvation, of the long walk back from the South Pole — that became part of the British national self-image. The Antarctic expeditions of the early twentieth century, in particular, produced a body of imperial mythology whose influence on British culture long outlived the empire itself.

The Early British Interest in the Arctic

The British interest in the Arctic dates back to the early modern period, with the search for a Northwest Passage to Asia. The English navigator Martin Frobisher made three voyages to the Arctic in the 1570s, in search of both a passage to Asia and gold. He brought back samples of what he believed to be gold ore, which later proved to be worthless. John Davis’s voyages of the 1580s and 1590s charted much of the Arctic coast of Greenland and Labrador, and Henry Hudson’s 1610–1611 voyage to Hudson Bay — the body of water named after him — ended in the mutiny of his crew and Hudson’s death in an open boat in June 1611.

These early voyages were motivated by a combination of commercial interest, scientific curiosity, and national rivalry. The search for a Northwest Passage was seen as a route to the riches of the East, and the English, French, Dutch, and Danes all competed for the honour of discovering it. The British Admiralty maintained an interest in the question, and the search continued intermittently through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Search for the Northwest Passage

The search for a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was a major objective of British exploration for several centuries. The early Northwest Passage expeditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced a great deal of geographical knowledge but no actual passage. The eighteenth century Northwest Passage expeditions, including those of Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, and John Franklin, gradually established the geography of the Canadian Arctic.

The Northwest Passage was finally traversed by the British explorer Robert McClure in 1850–1854, although McClure’s party had to abandon their ship and travel by sledge to complete the journey. The first complete transit of the passage was made by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906, and the first single-ship transit was made by Henry Larsen in 1944. The opening of the passage, as a practical shipping route, came only with the development of ice-strengthened ships in the twentieth century.

The Franklin Expedition (1845–1847)

The Franklin Expedition of 1845–1847, led by Sir John Franklin, ended in the loss of all 129 crew members and became one of the most famous disasters in the history of British exploration. The expedition, consisting of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, was sent to complete the discovery of the Northwest Passage. The expedition was last seen by Europeans in late July 1845, when it was sighted in Lancaster Sound, and it was trapped in the ice of the Canadian Arctic in 1846.

The disappearance of the Franklin expedition prompted one of the largest search efforts in the history of exploration. The British Admiralty dispatched more than 50 expeditions over the following 12 years, and the Canadian and American governments joined the search. The fate of the expedition was gradually established by the discovery of the graves of some of the crew members on Beechey Island, by the testimony of the Inuit, and by the discovery of a written record — a parchment deposited in a cairn on King William Island — indicating that Franklin had died in June 1847 and that the surviving members of the expedition had abandoned their ships in April 1848. The discovery in 2014 and 2016 of the wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in the Canadian Arctic has provided additional details about the expedition’s fate. The recent work of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, who pointed out that Inuit oral tradition had preserved accounts of the expedition for nearly two centuries, has been a powerful reminder that the Franklin story was not, in the first instance, a British story.

The Race to the South Pole

The race to the South Pole between the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in 1911–1912 is one of the most famous episodes in the history of exploration. Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition 1910–1913, organised by the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society, included a major scientific programme and a polar attempt. Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition, originally aimed at the North Pole, was redirected to the Antarctic when he learned that Robert Peary had claimed the North Pole in April 1909.

Amundsen’s party reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911, and Scott’s party arrived on 17 January 1912, only to find the Norwegian flag. Scott’s party perished on the return journey, and the bodies were found by a search party in November 1912. Scott’s last diary entries, and the “Message to the Public” he wrote shortly before his death — “For God’s sake look after our people” — became part of British national mythology, and the image of Scott and his companions as tragic heroes has shaped British attitudes toward the Antarctic ever since. The recent work of polar historians, of which Anne Savours and Ranulph Fiennes are the most prominent, has been more critical of Scott’s planning — his choice of ponies rather than dog teams, his late start, his use of an inexperienced shore party — but the cultural image of Scott as the plucky British loser has not been displaced.

Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition

Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance expedition of 1914–1917 is one of the most famous stories of survival in the history of exploration. The expedition, originally aimed at the first crossing of the Antarctic continent, set out in August 1914 but was beset by ice in the Weddell Sea in January 1915. The Endurance was crushed by the ice and sank in November 1915, and the 28 men of the expedition camped on the ice until it broke up in April 1916.

Shackleton and his party then made an extraordinary open-boat journey of 800 miles in the James Caird from Elephant Island to South Georgia, followed by a crossing of the unmapped mountains of South Georgia to the whaling station at Stromness. Shackleton returned to rescue the rest of the party, and all 28 men survived. The Endurance expedition is now regarded as one of the greatest feats of endurance in the history of exploration, and the wreck of the Endurance was discovered in March 2022 on the floor of the Weddell Sea at a depth of 3,008 metres, in a condition so well preserved that the wooden nameplate was still readable.

The British Antarctic Territory

The British Antarctic Territory, established in 1962, is the largest and most southerly of the British Overseas Territories. The territory was formed from the former Falkland Islands Dependencies and includes the South Shetland Islands, the South Orkney Islands, and the Antarctic Peninsula. The British claim to the territory is based on the discovery and exploration of the region by British explorers, and it is maintained through the British Antarctic Survey, the principal British polar research institution.

The Antarctic Treaty of 1959, signed by twelve countries including the United Kingdom, suspended all territorial claims to Antarctica and reserved the continent for peaceful scientific purposes. The treaty was a remarkable diplomatic achievement, and it has endured for more than 60 years. The British Antarctic Survey maintains research stations at Halley, Rothera, and Bird Island, and the United Kingdom is one of the most active participants in the international scientific cooperation that the treaty has encouraged. The British Antarctic Territory is, in this respect, a piece of imperial history that has been substantially internationalised in the post-imperial period.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of polar exploration has been transformed, in the last twenty years, by the integration of indigenous perspectives and by the work of environmental historians. The older British tradition, of which the work of A. R. H. Rice and of Ann Savours is representative, treated the polar explorers as heroic figures in a uniquely British tradition. The more recent scholarship, of which the work of Niels Bjoern Pretzmann, the contributors to The Global Exploration of the Arctic (in the volumes edited by the Arctic Centre, University of Groningen), and the work of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami are representative, has insisted on the Inuit contribution to the European exploration of the Arctic and on the way in which the British and American narratives of the polar regions have depended on indigenous knowledge. The “Shackleton revival” of the 2000s, accompanied by the discovery of the Endurance, has produced a substantial popular literature but relatively little new academic work. The current generation of polar historians, including Daniella McCahey, Stephen Haddelsey, and Klaus Dodds, has been more interested in the environmental and political history of the polar regions than in the heroic narrative.

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