Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen

• 1. Introduction

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  Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen stood on the deck of the sloop Vostok on the 27th of January 1820, and looked out at something no human being had ever confirmed seeing before: the landmass of Antarctica. He had crossed the Antarctic Circle just the day before, the first expedition to do so since James Cook. The coordinates his ships reached that day, 69 degrees 21 minutes 28 seconds south, 2 degrees 14 minutes 50 seconds west, placed them within twenty miles of the Antarctic mainland. What he saw there would be disputed for over a century and a half. Who was this Baltic German admiral sailing under the Russian flag? How did a boy who enrolled in the Imperial Russian Navy at the age of ten end up settling one of geography's greatest arguments? And what did it take to sail around the most forbidding continent on earth, twice, without ever losing sight of your companion ship?

• 2. A Baltic Boy in Russian Service

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  Saaremaa, an Estonian island in the Baltic Sea, was the birthplace of Bellingshausen, and the Bellingshausen family name was first recorded in Lubeck, with Holsteinish origins deep in the family's past. He enrolled as a naval cadet at ten years old, and by eighteen he had graduated from the Kronstadt naval academy. Kronstadt, the great Russian Baltic naval fortress at the approaches to St Petersburg, would become the recurring anchor of his life, from his earliest training to the very end. He rose quickly through the ranks after graduation, eventually reaching the rank of captain. Bellingshausen was, according to the source documents, a great admirer of Cook's voyages. That admiration was not passive. When the opportunity came in 1803 to join the first Russian circumnavigation of the globe, he took it, serving aboard the merchant vessel Nadezhda, under the command of Adam Johann von Krusenstern. He was part of a broader cohort of Baltic German navigators, including Krusenstern and Otto von Kotzebue, who helped Russia build its capacity for deep-ocean naval exploration.

• 3. First Circumnavigation

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  Krusenstern commanded the Nadezhda, the vessel whose name translates to Hope, and Bellingshausen was among its officers when the mission set out in 1803. The mission concluded in 1806. What Bellingshausen brought back from it was not just experience at sea but a publication: a collection of maps of the newly explored areas and islands of the Pacific Ocean. That cartographic work became the credential that distinguished him. It was the skill of charting and documenting, not merely sailing, that would later make him the authorities' choice to lead a far more demanding voyage. After the circumnavigation, he went on to command ships in both the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets. From 1812 to 1816 he commanded the frigate Minerva, and from 1817 to 1819 he commanded the frigate Flora, both in the Black Sea Fleet. During 1812 he visited Macquarie Island, the remote outcrop halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, where he met Richard Siddins, the Australian captain of the ship Campbell Macquarie. That encounter placed Bellingshausen geographically closer to the south polar region than any Russian naval officer had been.

• 4. The Expedition South

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  Emperor Alexander I authorized the southern polar expedition in 1819, and the authorities named Bellingshausen to lead it. Two ships were prepared: the 985-ton sloop-of-war Vostok, which translates to East, and the 530-ton support vessel Mirny, which translates to Peaceful. Mikhail Lazarev, who had already captained his own circumnavigation of the globe, carried out the preparation work and was appointed Bellingshausen's second-in-command and the captain of Mirny. The journey left Kronstadt on the 4th of June 1819. Stopping briefly in England, Bellingshausen met Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, in Portsmouth. Banks had sailed with Captain James Cook fifty years earlier, and he gave the Russians books and charts for their voyage. The expedition departed Portsmouth on the 5th of September 1819. It crossed the Antarctic Circle on the 26th of January 1820, the first voyage to do so since Cook himself. The following day, the 27th of January, they reached those precise southern coordinates and encountered ice-fields that lay within twenty miles of the Antarctic mainland.

• 5. Settling the Discovery Dispute

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  Bellingshausen kept a diary throughout the voyage, and he also filed a report to the Russian Naval Minister on the 21st of July 1821. Both documents, along with supporting records, are held at the Russian State Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic in Saint Petersburg. British polar historian A. G. E. Jones consulted those materials alongside the log-books of the other claimants to the discovery of Antarctica. In his 1982 study Antarctica Observed, Jones concluded that Bellingshausen had reached the continent before Edward Bransfield of the Royal Navy, who arrived on the 30th of January 1820, and before the American Nathaniel Palmer, who did not make his sighting until the 17th of November 1820. The gap between Bellingshausen and Bransfield was three days. The gap between Bellingshausen and Palmer was nearly ten months. During the same voyage, the expedition visited Meretoto, also known as Ship Cove, in New Zealand, and the South Shetland Islands. They discovered and named Peter I Island, Zavodovski Island, Leskov Island, and Visokoi Island. A peninsula of the Antarctic mainland that Bellingshausen named the Alexander Coast has since been designated Alexander Island. Bellingshausen and Lazarev circumnavigated the Antarctic continent twice without ever losing sight of each other, directly countering Cook's assertion that no land could be found in the southern ice fields.

• 6. Admiral and Governor

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  Bellingshausen returned to Kronstadt on the 4th of August 1821 and was promoted to counter admiral, with the rank conferred by Tsar Nicholas I in 1826. He fought in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-1829, serving notably in the siege of Varna. He was promoted to vice admiral in 1830 and continued to serve in the Baltic Fleet through the 1830s. In 1839, he became the military governor of Kronstadt, the main base of the Russian Baltic Fleet. He held that post until his death there in 1852. He was also, as he had been on return from the Antarctic, a writer. In 1831 he published his account of the southern voyage under the title Double Investigation of the Southern Polar Ocean and the Voyage Around the World. The rank of admiral, the highest in the Russian naval hierarchy, came to him in 1843.

• 7. A Name on the Map

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  Geographic features carrying the Bellingshausen name now mark the Antarctic he first confirmed. The Bellingshausen Sea in the Southern Ocean is the most expansive of these honors. Bellingshausen Station, a Russian research base on King George Island, Antarctica, continues his nation's presence in the region he opened. Beyond the ice, his name reaches further still: Bellingshausen Island in the south Atlantic, part of the South Sandwich Islands; Faddey Islands on the north Russian coast, named after his Russian first name; and Motu One, an atoll in the Pacific Society Islands also known as Bellinghausen. A crater on the far side of the Moon bears a version of his name. Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh discovered the minor planet 3659 Bellingshausen in 1969. A memorial stone stands on the ruins of Lahhentaguse manor in Saaremaa, the island where he was born. Monuments stand in Kronstadt near Saint Petersburg, in Mykolaiv in Ukraine, in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and in Montevideo in Uruguay, tracing a line across the hemisphere he helped chart.