The South Shetland Islands 



When in 1775 the renowned Captain James Cook, one of the world's great 

 navigators, after circumnavigating the Antarctic continent without sighting it, 

 wrote that, although such a continent must exist, "the risque one runs in explor- 

 ing a coast, in these unknown and icy seas, is so very great that no man will ever 

 venture further than I have done,"^ he was prophesying a fact which would be 

 true for only slightly more than his own lifetime. 



Cook's discovery of the South Sandwich Islands in latitude 59°25' south and 

 longitude 27°20' west for nearly half a century was the southernmost land seen 

 by man. Neither the great Englishman (nor his colleague. Captain Furneaux) 

 realized that barely 160 miles south and west of his "Southern Thule" was a 

 mountainous, peninsula-like finger beckoning him — the Antarctic Peninsula — 

 and, like a line of sentinels between, were the chain of islands now called the 

 South Shetlands. It remained for another Englishman, Captain William Smith, 

 to discover the South Shetlands on a bleak February day in 1819. Smith was 

 the master of the brig Williams, a merchant vessel of Blyth, England, then 

 engaged in the South American trade between the east and west coast ports. On 

 a voyage from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso, he decided to set a course far south 

 of the usual tracts around Cape Horn in an effort to escape the customary head 

 winds. On February 19, 1819, he sighted rocky, snow-capped peaks where he 

 expected to see nothing but the dangerous icebergs and, he subsequently wrote, 

 "having satisfied ourselves of land hauled to the Westward and made sail on 

 our voyage to Valparaiso."^ 



On arrival at that port Smith reported the discovery to Captain William H. 

 Shirreff, R.N., on board H.M.S. Andromache. With the caution long inherent 

 in the Royal Navy, Captain Shirreff was skeptical of the information. Three 

 months later, on his return voyage. Smith tried to regain his southernmost 

 latitude but was unable to gain his landfall due to field ice. 



After his arrival at Montevideo, Smith told friends of his discovery. He 

 later wrote that several Americans at that port and at Buenos Aires learned 

 of this and offered bribes for the information, "but your memorialist, . . . 

 resisted all the offers from the said Americans, determined again to re-visit the 

 new-discovered land."^ 



Somehow, as such secrets have a habit of doing, the word leaked out and the 

 approximate position of the supposed land was revealed. It may have come 

 from a sailor in a tavern, and subsequently passed on to some American 

 merchant who in turn probably wrote home. This was in June, 1819 and Smith 



[7] 



