Before reaching the Antarctic ice-wall, navigating the increasingly tumultuous Southern oceans, explorers encounter the longest, darkest, coldest nights and the most dangerous seas and storms anywhere on Earth. Vasco de Gama, an early 16th century Portuguese explorer of the South Seas wrote how, “The waves rise like mountains in height; ships are heaved up to the clouds, and apparently precipitated by circling whirlpools to the bed of the ocean. The winds are piercing cold, and so boisterous that the pilot’s voice can seldom be heard, whilst a dismal and almost continual darkness adds greatly to the danger.”

In 1773 Captain Cook became the first modern explorer known to have breached the Antarctic Circle and reached the ice barrier. During three voyages, lasting three years and eight days, Captain Cook and crew sailed a total of 60,000 miles along the Antarctic coastline never once finding an inlet or path through or beyond the massive glacial wall! Captain Cook wrote: “The ice extended east and west far beyond the reach of our sight, while the southern half of the horizon was illuminated by rays of light which were reflected from the ice to a considerable height. It was indeed my opinion that this ice extends quite to the pole, or perhaps joins some land to which it has been fixed since creation.”

On October 5th, 1839 another explorer, James Clark Ross began a series of Antarctic voyages lasting a total of 4 years and 5 months. Ross and his crew sailed two heavily armored warships thousands of miles, losing many men from hurricanes and icebergs, looking for an entry point beyond the southern glacial wall. Upon first confronting the massive barrier Captain Ross wrote of the wall, “extending from its eastern extreme point as far as the eye could discern to the eastward. It presented an extraordinary appearance, gradually increasing in height, as we got nearer to it, and proving at length to be a perpendicular cliff of ice, between one hundred and fifty feet and two hundred feet above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and level at the top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward face. We might with equal chance of success try to sail through the cliffs of Dover, as to penetrate such a mass.”

“Yes, but we can circumnavigate the South easily enough,’ is often said by those who don’t know, The British Ship Challenger recently completed the circuit of the Southern region – indirectly, to be sure – but she was three years about it, and traversed nearly 69,000 miles – a stretch long enough to have taken her six times round on the globular hypothesis.” -William Carpenter, “100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe” (78)