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In July 1772 the Resolution, commanded by Captain Cook and Discovery, commanded by Lieutenant Furneaux, set sail from Britan in search of the Great Southern Continent. They reached the Antarctic Circle later in their expedition.
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John Davis, a sealer, was one of the first recorded humans to have claimed to have set foot on the newly discovered continent of Antarctica. The first undisputed landing on Antarctica did not occur for another 74 years when a group of men from a Norwegian ship went ashore to collect geological specimens at Cape Adare.
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On 24 January 1895 a boat was put ashore with six men including Henryk Johan Bull, Leonard Kristensen, Carsten Borchgrevink and Alexander von Tunzelmann at Cape Adare, Antarctica. At the time they believed they were the first men to set foot on Antarctica.
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The British National Antarctic Expedition generally known as the Discovery Expedition, was the one of the first official British exploration of the Antarctic regions. Organized on a large scale under a joint committee of the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society, the new expedition aimed to carry out scientific research and geographical exploration in what was then a largely unexplored continent.
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The Terra Nova Expedition 1910–13, officially the British Antarctic Expedition, was led by Robert Falcon Scott with scientific and geographical objectives. Scott wished to continue the scientific work that he had begun when leading the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic in 1901–04.
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The first expedition to reach the South Pole was led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. He and four others arrived at the pole on 14 December 1911 five weeks ahead of a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott as part of the Terra Nova Expedition.
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During Scott's second venture through Antarctica, his party of five which reached the South Pole on the 17th January 1912, only to find that Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition beat them to it.
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The other two members of their party, Seaman Edgar Evans and Captain Lawrence Oates, have died already: Evans died of injuries sustained in a fall, and Oates died from frostbite which had turned gangrenous and willingly walked away from the tent in a blizzard, in order to improve his companions' chances of survival. His parting words were "I am going outside; I may be some time" which became legendary in literature.
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Ernest Shackleton's Trans-Antarctica expedition of 1914 - 1917 is one of the most incredible adventure stories of all time. The intention was to cross the Antarctic continent from one coast to the other via the South Pole. The expedition managed to survive the loss of their ship in the middle of the Antarctic pack ice at a time when there was no chance of contacting the outside world or being rescued.
