A hundred years ago or so, a whaling ship known as the Antarctic came to a halt off the volcanic, wind-battered coast and sent one of their longboats through the through the rough ocean of the Ross Sea to reach the shore. The party with their Captain, Leonard Kristensen, leading them landed and left the very first set of human footprints on the shores of Antarctica. January 24,1895 was the date of their historic landing, and was only one part of their endeavor to hunt whales in unexplored waters. The baptism of Antarctica was in blood. The machinery used in the Industrial Revolution required greasing, therefore scores of whales and penguins were slaughtered for their oil, along with millions of seals, who were killed in order for their fur to be harvested. Many more hundreds of thousands of confused penguins form Macquarie Island were shepherded into large, boiling vats of oil and were subsequently reduced to oils themselves. However, after 100 years of journeys to this Frozen Continent, humans have decided to stop using it to make a quick buck by killing the animals and have chosen to make Antarctica into a preserve of nature and science. There may even be a world park established on this great land. Scientists are discovering incredible new things in Antarctica, including pollutants and threats to our ozone, and new information about the greenhouse effect. Our perspectives on Antarctica have changed rapidly, when you consider our minimal, but violent, presence in the area. It was not until the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year (also known as IGY) that more coastline, islands, and a handful of paths to the South Pole were even investigated. From the very first, the appearance of men on this continent has resulted in a convoluted story of nationalism, aggression, idealism, and unchecked slaughter, with sporadic, cavalier attempts toward scientific research. Whaling heightened during World War I, as the glycerin extracted from the oil of whales was valuable for the making of artillery shells. Whale oil continued to be a commodity after World War II, as the Soviet Union and the United States began to require more of the substance for use as a jet engine lubricant. It was not until the IGY that Antarctica was listed as anything other than "Terra Incongita." This was the term used by medieval mapmakers to describe the continent. At this time the first person to be born in Antarctica has not reached adulthood, and that birth was part of a nationalistic pretension. The mother of Emilio Marcus Palmer was flown to Antarctica to give birth to him in 1978 simply for the purpose of claiming part of Antarctic territory in the name of Argentina. To put this into perspective, this was nine years after the prodigious event when American astronauts planted their nation's flag to symbolize American pre-eminence. A similar exploit took place in 1911 when Roald Amundsen raced to be the first to the South Pole to show nobility to Norway's King Haakon VII. This journey was also made by Robert F. Scott and his team for the British Empire. However, on their journey they stopped to collect rock and fossil samples which had to be transported using man-pulled sleighs. After discovering that despite all their hard work, Amundsen had beaten them to the Pole by an entire month, Scott's party perished in Antarctica due to a combination of bad luck, the pain of hauling massive amounts of rock, and poor diet. This made them the first team of martyrs for the cause of science in Antarctica. America staked their claim to the South Pole when Richard Byrd took a flight over it in 1929 using a Ford Trimotor. The battle to claim the continent continued when the Soviets attempted to justify their interests when the Russian Admiral Thaddeus Bellingshausen passed the Antarctic Peninsula during his voyage in 1821.
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A hundred years ago or so, a whaling ship known as the Antarctic came to a halt off the volcanic, wind-battered coast and sent one of their longboats through the through the rough ocean of the Ross Sea to reach the shore. On January 24, 1895, Captain Leonard Kristensen and the landing party of the "Antarctic" left the first trace of human kind on the frozen continent in their quest to slaughter whales in these, as yet, unclaimed waters.
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