British, Norwegian, and French claims are presumed to be 
based on the right of discovery, yet Great Britain made its 
first claim in 1908 — eighty-eight years after the supposed 
discovery of the continent by Bransfield. 
‘There has long been much difference of opinion between 
British and American investigators as to who actually dis- 
covered Antarctica. ‘The British are sure Bransfield made 
the first continental landfall early in 1820. Americans 
have generally believed that this landfall was an island and 
that the first sighting of the continent was made by an 
American sealing captain, Nathaniel Palmer, later in the 
same year. 
In 1952, E. A. Stackpole* called attention to a third can- 
didate whose credentials I consider the best of all. He is 
Christopher Burdick, a Nantucket sealing captain, who 
sighted the continent on February 21, 1821, and recorded 
with clarity and conviction the fact that his landfall was 
part of a continent. The point in dispute between Brans- 
field’s and Palmer’s supporters is in the same area as 
Burdick’s landfall. 
Recently the Russians have proposed another contender 
— Admiral Fabian von Bellingshausen, who in the service 
of Czar Alexander I circumnavigated the continent in 
1820-1821. The charted route of his journey shows that he 
came near enough to the continent to have seen it in the 
African sector, but he makes no record of any landfall then. 
In 1949, the All-Soviet Geographical Congress, after ex- 
amining the data, concluded that von Bellingshausen had 
actually discovered Antarctica in the area of the Palmer 
Peninsula. Others who have examined the data are of the 
unanimous opinion that the discovery in question is an 
island and not the mainland of the continent. 
15 
