Sources

None of the logbooks or officers’ journals of the 1819–1821 Russian Antarctic expedition, commanded by Junior Captain Faddei Faddeyevich Bellingshausen, have yet been found. The discovery of Peter I Island was recorded in two reports from the commander, on Sheet 13 of a 15-sheet track chart of the expedition which he prepared during the voyage home (Belov Reference Belov1963: 32), in his subsequent book (Bellinsgauzen Reference Bellinsgauzen1831), and in narratives penned by four other eye-witnesses.

Discovery

Peter I Island was sighted by the Imperial Russian Navy at 3 p.m. on 21 January 1821. It was the first ever discovery of land to the south of the Antarctic Circle. The local time of day is reliable, because a noon observation had recently been taken on HIMS Vostok, Bellingshausen's ship. The date is also certain, but curious in several respects. The expedition had re-entered the western hemisphere more than a month earlier, but Bellingshausen did not adjust his calendar, to allow for the day gained by circumnavigation, until 15 February 1821. At this point, therefore, dates were being recorded within the expedition in ‘ship's Julian’ format, 11 days behind the Gregorian calendar instead of the usual twelve. One of Vostok's seamen kept an informal diary, one of the few documents created on board to have survived. In it he made the earliest extant reference to the island, although not by name, and noted the date as 10 January 1821 (O.S.) (Kisilëv Reference Kisilëv1819–1821). To complicate matters further, Bellingshausen gave the date as ‘11 January’ in his first report to the Minister of Marine (see below).

The island was discovered from HIMS Vostok, which was some way ahead of her companion, HIMS Mirnyi, at the time, although probably within signalling distance (Fig. 1). Bellingshausen later commented that he made sure of the discovery while his officers were still debating the ‘black patch’ visible through their telescopes. He was not claiming to have been the first person to sight the island. That lucky, but anonymous, lookout was rewarded with five silver thalers (Prussian), about 18 months’ pay. This impression of munificence pales somewhat, when one recalls that the conscript serfs who manned the Imperial Navy were paid only about £800 a year, in today's money, besides their keep. But ‘free’ British seamen fared little better in those days. Furthermore, all Bellingshausen's crew eventually received bonuses which brought their pay to about 250% of the regulation amount.

Fig. 1.

Track of HIMS Vostok in the vicinity of Peter I Island. The annotation ‘Sighted land’, between the noon fixes for ship's dates 10 and 11 January 1821 (O.S.), has been highlighted.

The achievement was celebrated with a ration of punch to all hands, with which to drink the health of Emperor Alexander I, and by firing salutes. The ship's date was a Monday and no special service of thanksgiving was celebrated, perhaps because a church parade had been held the day before. And in any case the expedition's chaplain, Hieromonach Dionisii, was a late arrival on the scene because he was quartered on Mirnyi, so that a fully ceremonial service could not have been conducted.

Vostok spent the night of 21–22 January and most of the following day to the west and northwest of the island, taking observations in clear weather. They were prevented from getting onto the island, as other visitors would be after them, by a belt of solid and doubtless chaotic ice about 14nm (26km) wide. When Mirnyi closed up at 6 p.m. on 22 January (the track chart suggests that Vostok turned back to meet her), Bellingshausen compared his measurements with those taken by her captain, Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev, who later recalled that the expedition's officers had taken more than 600 lunar distances in order to fix the longitude (Lazarev Reference Lazarev1821). The height of the central peak was calculated as between 4390 and 3961ft (1338–1207m). A modern value, from the Australian Antarctic Data Centre (AADC), is 1750m; another source puts it at 1640m (Headland Reference Headland2008). Bellingshausen estimated the length as 17.575km, the width as 7.40km (modern values about 20 × 10km), and the lay of the land as bearing SbE½E and NbW½W. In every dimension he reported the island as smaller than it is. One possible explanation is that the Russians underestimated the distance from which they made their observations.

A week later, on the morning of 28 January and in much the same latitude, the Russians sighted the Alexander I Coast, so named because, obstructed by an even wider expanse of solid ice, they could discern no southern end to it. Its status as an island, which they immediately suspected, was not finally determined until 1936 by the British Graham Land Expedition.

There is no knowing what political conversations Bellingshausen may have had at St Petersburg in the few hours he spent there in June 1819, between arriving from Sevastopol and hurrying off to Kronstadt to take command of his squadron, or at the dinner hosted by the Emperor on the eve of the voyage. But that consideration aside, he appears to have chosen the island's name himself. The salute to Peter the Great may have been intended to celebrate the first land discovered south of the Antarctic Circle, but he never described the discovery that way himself. Despite some 200 years of Russian exploration in the north, and latterly in the central Pacific, the name was still vacant, so to speak, apart from the port of Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, so named in 1740 by Vitus Bering after the two ships of his second expedition. ‘Peter’ next featured in the region in September 1820, when Lieutenant Zakhar Ivanovich Ponafidin, IRN, discovered what is now Torishima Island and briefly proposed calling it St Peter Island (Ivashintsev Reference Ivashintsev1872: 62; Kukanova Reference Kukanova2012). Ponafidin did not return to Kronstadt until two months after Bellingshausen had done so with Peter I Island as a fait accompli, which perhaps explains why his discovery was instead presented to the world as Ponafidin Island (Krusenstern, Reference Krusenstern1824).

A curious feature of the discovery of Peter I Island is that, despite the importance that was rightly attached to it by the commander, and despite the hours that were spent there in good weather, the expedition's artist, Pavel Nikolayevich Mikhailov, left no record of the event (Petrova Reference Petrova2012). His work was carefully collected and preserved, so that anything done at Peter I Island should have survived. He had not run out of materials, because he later took several views of Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon and Copenhagen during the return journey. So perhaps he had the misfortune to be unwell. He did take a rough sketch of the Alexander I Coast a week later (Petrova Reference Petrova2012: 10).

Announcement

Bellingshausen reported the bare fact of the discovery, dating it to 11 January 1821 (O.S.), from Rio de Janeiro on 17 March 1821 (Bellinsgauzen Reference Bellinsgauzen1821a). The dispatch travelled by fast packet boat to London and was probably forwarded by sea to St Petersburg, where it arrived on 4 July. Bellingshausen explained that he was not including any charts, because piracy was rife in the South Atlantic (due to regional political turmoil) and the mails were insecure. He presumably withheld the island's name and coordinates for the same reason. During the voyage home he delineated the island in the track chart and described it both in a table of discoveries, where the coordinates for the centre were given as 68°57ʹ15ʹʹ S, 90°41ʹ5ʹʹ W (Bellinsgauzen Reference Bellinsgauzen1821b), and in his final report, dated from Kronstadt on the day of his arrival, 5 August 1821 (Bellinsgauzen Reference Bellinsgauzen1821c; see also Bulkeley, forthcoming). In his subsequent book he revised the coordinates to 68°57ʹ S, 90°46ʹ W (Bellinsgauzen Reference Bellinsgauzen1831 II: 242). Today, the AADC puts them at 68°48ʹ S, 90°35ʹ W. The Russians had not laboured over those tedious astronomical measurements in vain.

The most likely explanation for Bellingshausen's initial discovery date of 11 January, in the preliminary report from Rio de Janeiro, is that he inadvertently expressed it according to the nautical calendar, in which the new day began at noon, twelve hours ahead of the civil date which changed at midnight. On the track chart, in his final report and in the book he amended it to 10 January, the ship's civil date. In a private letter written two months after returning to Russia Junior Captain Lazarev, as he had by then become, further adjusted it to the true Julian date of 9 January, in short 21 January 1821 (Lazarev Reference Lazarev1821).

As the expedition moved east-by-northeast away from the island, late on 22 January, Bellingshausen considered but rejected the report, from one of his lookouts, of a second, smaller island to the east. He was right to do so, as Debenham later pointed out (Bellingshausen Reference Bellingshausen and Debenham1945 II: 412). However in his letter (above), which has not been carefully analysed until now (Bulkeley forthcoming), Lazarev referred to a ‘small islet’ which, to judge from the expedition's position, was probably the pair of basalt sea stacks which Nils Larsen named the Tvistein Pillars in 1929.

Dissemination

The existence and location of Peter I Island were shown soon after its discovery in Krusenstern's Atlas de l'océan pacifique (Reference Krusenstern1824: Map 1) and then, of course, fleshed out in Bellingshausen's narrative of the voyage. The island was duly incorporated into various repositories of geographical knowledge (Balbi Reference Balbi1842: 933; Dumont d'Urville Reference Dumont d'Urville1842 II: 11; Rosser and Imray Reference Rosser and Imray1870: 197).

Next

The great expeditions of the mid-19th century were followed by the ‘age of averted interest’ and then by the first International Polar Year, but the century ended before anyone clapped eyes on Peter I Island again. (The belief that the Belgica expedition, led by de Gerlache, did so in April 1898 is based on a careless reading of the commander's narrative, as another member of the expedition made clear (Cook Reference Cook1998: 265).) The island had no exploitable resources and lay far off whatever passed for the beaten track in those waters at the time. It seems entirely appropriate, therefore, that the next confirmed sighting, after Bellingshausen, should have been made by the crew of Pourquoi-Pas?, commander Jean-Baptiste Charcot, on 14 January 1910 (Charcot Reference Charcot1911: 288–290). On 2 February 1929, more than a century after it was discovered, Nils Larsen and six other members of the second Norvegia expedition made the first landing on the island and claimed it for Norway. The modern history of Peter I Island had begun.