ANTARCTIC EXPLORATIONS

Antarctica: Chronicles of an Unknown Continent Ricardo Capdevila

TO THE END OF THE XIX CENTURY

By the middle of the 18th century, the presence of man in Antarctica has been significantly reduced. As mentioned, some foqueros, such as William H. Smiley from Carmen de Patagones, and his disciple Luis Piedra Buena, carry out hunting seasons. But in the scientific world, concerns are beginning to be generated by the least known of the spaces of the planet. This concern has to take shape in two international geographic congresses held in London (1895) and Berlin (1899).

Out of these academic meetings arises the project of a great scientific expedition to Antarctica. The central idea was to carry out simultaneous observations and measurements in different parts of the continent, to analyze them as a whole and in this way establish the great laws of nature that had influence on the rest of the planet, as well as improve geographical knowledge in attention to the little existing cartography.

THE "BELGIUM" IS PRISONED BY THE ICE

The first expedition inspired by these principles was that of the Belgian Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery, who with BELGIUM, in 1898, mapped the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. After fulfilling this objective, the ship entered the Bellingshausen Sea, where she was trapped by ice. She was a prisoner of the frozen sea, from March of that year, until the same month of the following year.

The hardships experienced by this expedition were overcome by men of real value. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen was part of the crew, a man who a few years later reached the South Pole for the first time in history. During the wintering, the sailor Emile Danco died, probably of a heart condition. Despite difficult circumstances, de Gerlache and his people made scientific observations all the time. With this they enriched the knowledge of Antarctica, and the experience later served those who followed him in the exploration company to make a series of forecasts that would make an eventual wintering less painful.

While other expeditions were being prepared in Europe, the Argentine Republic was preparing to participate in the polar outpost, setting up an observatory in the southern region of the continent, for support and simultaneous work with the other polar stations. The so-called "Observatorio de Isla de los Estados" was actually installed on an island close to it, which has since been called Isla Observatorio. One of the most inhospitable places in the world, with permanent storms of wind, rain and snow. Thus began in 1901 to carry out the systematic meteorological and magnetic measurements that were part of this great international effort to know the new continent.

THE NEW CENTURY: MYSTERIES AND DISCOVERIES. THE FIRST WINTERS

The twentieth century begins. England, France, Germany, Scotland and Sweden embark on the polar project with expeditions, some of a state nature, such as Captain Scott's to the Ross Sea, the most private, the product of the efforts of men who marked pages of glory for the Antarctic history, like the Scotsman Bruce, the Frenchman Charcot and the Swede Nordenskjöld. Each of them deserves a special paragraph, but we will dedicate more space to the Swedish expedition, due to the uniqueness of its chronicle.

BRUCE, THAT SCOTTISH DOCTOR

Professor William Bruce was a man skilled in polar studies and travel. He participated, along with Dr. Donald as a naturalist in Captain Fairweather's Antarctic Whaling Expedition (1892-1893) to the Weddell Sea. With his ship, the SCOTIA, he set out to explore that sea towards the end of 1902. Sea ice conditions did not allow him to advance very far south, as he had proposed. He then went to the South Orkney Islands and there he built a small house and meteorological observatory, where his staff wintered in 1903. Upon his return to Buenos Aires, he offered the facilities to the Argentine government, which accepted the offer and bought them in the sum of $ 5,000.- This operation is the origin of the first permanently occupied by man establishment in Antarctica, the Laurie Island meteorological observatory. The observatory was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Nation, and the observations of this station, uninterrupted since that time, have given greater precision to the meteorological forecasts of the South Atlantic.

From January 22 to February 14, 2004 it was held at the Maritime Museum of Ushuaia the Exhibition "Scotia sailed Love Willie" Perito Moreno and William Bruce, two patriots - one world Scottish Antarctic National Expedition 1902 - 1904 and the Bariloche Documents

ORCADAS STATION. THE FIRST POLICE COMMISSIONER AND A SINGULAR CEMETERY

The year 1906 records a singular event in Antarctic history: for the first time, commissioners for polar lands are appointed. The Argentine Republic planned a series of activities in Antarctica, among which was the installation of a second scientific station on Booth or Wandell Island, for which materials and personnel who embarked with that destination were provided, along with the equipment of relief from the South Orkney Islands, in the AUSTRAL, a ship that had been owned by Dr. Charcot with the name FRANCAIS, and that could not carry out the mission due to an accident and shipwreck when he left in his demand in December of that year. But the government had also designated police authorities for the new southern establishments, as part of its territorialist policy in the sector where the first post office under Hugo Acuña was already operating. Thus, in 1907, Mr. Rankin Angus was the first police chief to record Antarctic history.

In the same that determine the bays Uruguay and Scotland of the island Laurie is, besides the site inhabited by man in Antarctica, a unique cemetery. Ten crosses determine the existence of this cemetery, whose oldest inhabitant is Allan. C. Ramsay, engineer of Dr. Bruce's SCOTIA, who died in early August 1903, during the winter of the Scottish expedition.

In 1905 Otto Diebel passed away. A strong storm surprised him at the top of Mossman Hill where he was making scientific observations. The contracted lung congestion led to his death on September 25. In 1910 John Ellieson, second head of the commission, died of a heart attack. Before leaving Buenos Aires, a heart condition was detected that he concealed from those who assigned him to the observatory. He was only 27 years old. In 1913 the head of the commission H. Wiström died, a victim of peritonitis. On April 30, 1915, the head of the commission, Hartvig B. Wiig, disappeared on a lonely skiing excursion. Fortunato Escobar, one of the first radio telegraphists in Orcadas, described by telegraph the advance of a nephritis that led to his death on October 27, 1928.

The meteorological observer Walter Soto died at the site on October 13, 1959. In the summer of 1997-1998 the head of the commission and two other men boarded a rubber boat that was later found floating in a cove in the southern area. west of the island, with the outboard raised, without the crew.

The singular characteristic of this cemetery is the absence of several dead whose memorial crosses appear next to the dead present. Wiig's body, disappeared in 1915, was never found. The bodies of Wiström, Escobar and Soto have been exhumed and transferred north at the request of their relatives. Of the last three disappeared, no sign has been found, despite a repeated and prolonged search throughout the area. So in the South Orkney Cemetery, more dead are absent than present.

CHARCOT: A FRENCH DOCTOR BETWEEN SCIENCE AND ADVENTURE

The French doctor, Juan Bautista Charcot, with his sailboat the FRANCAIS, set the prow east of the Antarctic Peninsula. There he wintered on Booth Island with his sailboat imprisoned by the ice in a cove. From that location, he made expeditions throughout the area, tested machines with primitive internal combustion engines with poor results, and gathered an important set of geographic information, baptizing different accidents with the names of Argentine personalities, in recognition of the material support that his company received from our country.

Upon his return to Buenos Aires, the government bought his sailboat for use in the Antarctic service. Under the name AUSTRAL, she was assigned to refuel the Orkney Islands observatory, a mission that he was able to accomplish only once. When she left for her second relief, also transporting the elements to install a second permanent observatory on Booth Island, where her former owner had winterized, she sank and ran aground on the Ortiz bank, in the Rio de la Silver, and was shipwrecked.

NORDENSKJÖLD: A YOUNG SWEDISH IN POLAR CONQUEST

Buenos Aires was the main port of call for Antarctic expeditions. Thus arrived, in December 1901, the Swedish expedition of Dr. Otto Nordenskjöld. This expedition of the Swedish scholar, who had already personally carried out studies in Tierra del Fuego in 1895, at the request of his friend the expert Francisco Pascasio Moreno, prepared to winter on the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

It had as a precedent of knowledge in the area, the expedition that the veteran of the polar seas Carl Anton Larsen, carried out in the years 1892 and 1893.

On that occasion, Larsen found and collected the first plant and marine fossils found in Antarctica on Seymour Island (Marambio), now kept in the whaling museum in Sandefjord, Norway. Although the veteran marine was not a scientist, the date of December 2, 1892, must be especially remembered by scientists, since that day, Larsen landed in Seymour and made the momentous discovery of him.

The Swedish expedition aboard the ANTARCTIC set sail from the port of Ushuaia where it filled up fuel and headed south. In the first stage, it recognized the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, ratifying and rectifying the cartography made by De Gerlache's Belgian expedition.

They then sailed through the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula and headed south of the Weddell Sea, in the area formerly known to Larsen, in search of a position as southern as possible to install the wintering cabin, but soon the Sea closed by ice forced them to retreat. The expedition leader then decided to build the wintering house in an apparently sheltered cove on Snow Hill Island (Cerro Nevado).

It was then, February 1902. The house, prefabricated in Sweden, was assembled in a few days, and there were 6 members of the expedition, including the Argentine component, José María Sobral. The ship left for the north to carry out investigations in Tierra del Fuego, Malvinas Island and South Georgia Islands, during the winter time. In charge of these works was Dr. Gunnar Andersson, second head of the scientific expedition.

In December 1902, the ANTARCTIC completed coal in Ushuaia, bowed south, from Tierra del Fuego and headed to the west coast of the peninsula, to complete the survey and sampling of fauna and flora, and then go to the winter cabin. Unfortunately, the access channel to the Weddell Sea (Antarctic Strait) was closed by ice, as far as the eye could see. For this reason, Dr. Andersson decided, together with two volunteers, Lieutenant Duse and the sailor Grunden, to disembark in the vicinity of the place and go on foot to Cerro Nevado.

There they would wait for the ship, which would try to arrive outside the Joinville Islands. If the ship did not achieve the purpose in the agreed time, Andersson and Nordenskjöld and the others would return to the place where they had disembarked to wait to be picked up there, in the place that from that time is called Hope Bay (Hoppet vik).

The ship tried the planned route, but was a prisoner of the ice and after a prolonged fight, destroyed by glacial pressure, it sank to the southwest of Paulet Island. Embarked on icebergs, the castaways wandered to the sound of the winds and currents for 18 days. Finally, being about 10 miles from Paulet Island, they threw the boats into the water with the elements saved from the wreck and after more than 6 hours of rowing, at the limit of buoyancy and forces, they reached the North coast of the island, where an important penguin colony is located, and the only accessible place for tens of kilometers around. There they built a stone hut, in which they prepared to winter.

Meanwhile, Dr. Andersson had failed in his attempt to reach the winter season, because the sea was open south of Esperanza Bay, and he returned to the place where they were landed. After waiting unsuccessfully for the ship's arrival, they built a small stone hut, where, with the few surviving elements left by the ship, they prepared to survive that winter. The three groups were thus isolated, with no news of each other, their fate was delivered upon the arrival of a relief expedition, which, in the best of cases, would arrive at the end of that year, that is, many months later, when the lack of news warned that they had not returned. And meanwhile, winter was coming, with its aftermath of cold, winds and the long polar night.

Seals and penguins replaced the lack of food in all three groups. The former provided meat for food and fat for lighting, fire for cooking and heat to temper the precarious shelter of the huts. The latter, meat and eggs, the latter in scarce quantity, since by the lateness of the season most of the penguins had begun emigrating northward.

The lack of news from the ship and the expedition members, caused - averaging that year - a movement in the country of origin, as well as in Argentina.

The expeditions that were preparing to set sail for Antarctica were trying to advance their preparations to come to the aid of the Swedes. In our country, before a call published in the newspapers by the expert Francisco Pascasio Moreno, the government enlisted an old gunboat, the URUGUAY, and under the command of Lieutenant Irízar, went to sea in October of that year to attempt the difficult undertaking .

In Ushuaia, he waited a few days for the arrival of the FRITHJOF, which under the command of Captain Gylden was sent by the Swedish government, but due to its delay, and the distressing situation in which days could mean lives, Irízar decided to leave for the South .

In the first days of November the gunboat anchored in Penguin Bay, in the southeast of Seymour Island, where he found two winterists camped in the task of gathering penguin eggs for subsistence in a possible third wintering. A chain of auspicious events occurred in the interim. Doctor Nordenskjöld in the month of October had sent an expedition to the north to leave signs of his situation in some extreme point of the peninsula. When crossing Vega Island, in a place that since then has been called Cabo del Feliz Encuentro, he met the three men from Bahía Esperanza, who, with a deplorable appearance covered in soot and with months of beard, product of condensed smoke In the small cabin that housed them in the wintering, they marched towards Cerro Nevado. They were unrecognizable, to such a degree that Nordenskjöld and Jonassen who accompanied him, readied their weapons to shoot at such strange apparitions. Once recognized, together they returned to the winter season.

On the other hand, Captain Larsen in one of the boats saved from the wreck had left Paulet Island towards Esperanza Bay, and when he did not find Dr. Andersson and his people, he headed south, until he arrived, walking on the frozen sea in the last kilometers, to the winter season. This happened the same day the URUGUAY corvette arrived at the scene. Everything ended with happiness. Finally, all aboard the rescue ship, and now, heading north, after rescuing the shipwrecked people who were waiting on Paulet Island, they called at Esperanza Bay to rescue some belongings and the geological collections gathered by Andersson in the forced wintering of the bay. Hope.

The success of the rescue expedition had, naturally, a significant international resonance, especially among scientific and nautical circles, and in the city of Buenos Aires a series of celebrations were organized in tribute to the expedition members and the protagonists of the rescue.

This is how the most significant of the Antarctic expeditions of the early 20th century culminated, characterized by its uneven development, and fundamentally by its achievements from a scientific point of view.

At the same time, at the other end of Antarctica, above the Ross Sea, Captain Robert Falcon Scott was making his first attempt to reach the South Pole. On this occasion he had the wisdom to abandon the attempt when the lack of food and other deficiencies in his logistics, advised him to return. His team was made up of Ernest Shackleton, who in 1915 was to be the protagonist of an epic, perhaps, along with that of Nordenskjöld, Larsen and Andersson, the most significant of those carried out by man in Antarctica in the first half of the century.

In 1904, and upon his return from the polar expedition, Captain Larsen founded in Buenos Aires, and associated with a group of Buenos Aires merchants, a whaling company: Compañía Argentina de Pesca Sociedad Anónima. The company had its legal address in the city of Buenos Aires. The factory was built in Grytviken (Bay of Pots), on the north coast of the island of San Pedro (South Georgia). The veteran of the polar seas was the pioneer of whaling activity in the South Atlantic. At the same site, and to support the new company, the Ministry of Agriculture installed a meteorological observatory. In the following years, other Norwegian companies founded factories on those islands.

The initial years of the 20th century brought with them, and in parallel to the solution of the border problems between Argentina and Chile, the first conversations on the problem of sovereignty in Antarctic lands between these two countries.

THERE IN THE SEA OF ROSS THE RACE FOR THE CONQUEST OF THE SOUTH POLE BEGINS

In the Antarctic antipodes of the peninsula where the activities reported in the previous accounts have been developed, man also made progress in his knowledge of the southern continent. Between 1840 and 1843, James Clark Ross, a British sailor in command of the EREBUS and TERROR ships, made one of the most significant voyages of exploration that brought important advances in the geographical knowledge of the region. Thus he discovered the sea that today bears his name, sighted active volcanoes and ventured into South American Antarctica, surveying the archipelagos of the extreme north of the Antarctic peninsula.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott led an expedition between 1901 and 1904. He built a wintering station on Ross Island, from where he made a series of penetrations into the mainland, providing significant insights into Victoria Land, the Ross Ice Shelf and King Edward's land, even using a captive balloon that soared up to 250 meters for terrain observations. Ernest Shackleton formed in this expedition, who would organize his own expedition between 1907 and 1909, with the precise objective of reaching the South Pole, an endeavor in which he failed only 100 miles from the objective, and it should be noted that the state of health of his men and some logistical shortcomings made him abandon the project.

MAN COMES TO THE SOUTH POLE

In the second decade of the 20th century, a singular event took place in the history of exploration: man reached the South Pole, thus crowning one of the most ambitious objectives in terms of geographical knowledge.

Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian trained since childhood in the frozen lands of his native country, strong, hardened in long journeys through the snows, pilot of the De Gerlache expedition, geodesist, protagonist of crossings in the polar seas of the north.

Robert Falcon Scott, a British naval officer, with a strong personality, bordering on arrogance, as befits Victorian times.

Both courageous and determined in their purposes, but with different approaches in the form and means necessary to face an undertaking of the magnitude of his goal: to conquer the South Pole.

Amundsen, who was preparing his expedition to reach the North Pole, abandons his purpose when he learns that the American Peary had announced to have achieved this goal, and decides to return him to Antarctica, in search of access to the other end of the earth.

His strategy is simple and - as the events have shown - singularly efficient. He does not seek Scott's and Shackleton's already known route to achieve his goal. He goes to another place, Bay of Whales with the FRAM, a vessel with a history of glory, which had been from Fridtjof Nansen and had made the first crossing of the Northwest Passage. FRAM docks on the ice shelf, far south of the Ross Sea, sets up its station and prepares the new route by moving south with deposits during winter.

The means of transport used is the classic and light sleds pulled by dogs. There is a detail that is not sympathetic to our current conception of things, but that was very useful for the result of the expedition: the drag dogs, as they died in the attempt, served as food for their fellow men. And here it is worth a digression. During the second wintering of the Swedish expedition on the island Cerro Nevado, the winters tried dog meat. And the only one who did not dislike the bite was our compatriot José María Sobral. They were the same times and identical needs.

Let's go back to Norwegian now. Mounted -sometimes- on his sleds, the caravan set out for the south. A new and unknown path awaited the expeditionaries.

Amundsen had devised a marching plan that included running a number of kilometers a day, whenever possible, whatever the weather conditions. Even today the precision of his forecast is surprising, since he arrived back at the Bay of Whales station, within the date he had foreseen.

His contribution to geographical science, which in some cases has been tried to undermine, was significant: a totally unknown route, and a logistics contribution for polar expeditions that only 80 or 90 years later has been surpassed by new technologies.

Amundsen arrived and conquered the southernmost place on earth on December 14, 1911.

Captain Scott, whose courage must not be unweighted, reached the same goal a month later, on January 17, 1912. A sum of logistical errors accompanied his way to glory, but the undertaking cost him and his life. companions, who perished of hunger and cold a few kilometers from a food warehouse, exhausted by the same effort that brought them to the southern end of the earth.

Thus man reached the South Pole at the beginning of the 20th century.

ERNEST SHACKLETON, POLAR HERO MODEL

Ernest Shackleton, whom we have already mentioned as a participant in Scott's first expedition, and in another of his own in the Ross Sea area, organized an ambitious project to cross the Antarctic continent via the South Pole, from the Weddell Sea in the American zone, to the Ross Sea, in the Australian sector. A trans-Antarctic project that would only be crowned, several decades later, by another illustrious Englishman, Dr. Vivian Fuchs.

The general program of the project was as follows. A ship would carry the elements to set up a station in the area where Scott and Shackleton had previously built it, on the coast of the Ross Sea. From there they would install deposits in the direction of the Pole. The other group, commanded by Shackleton himself, would penetrate to the Filchner barrier, south of the Weddell Sea, and from there would ascend to the polar plateau, arrive at the Pole and then descend northward into the Ross Sea, resupplying in the tanks previously installed by the other group.

The ENDURANCE, a ship specially designed and built for this expedition, left the port of London on August 1, 1914 under the command of Frank Worsley and landed in Buenos Aires on October 9.

On the 26th of that month, he set sail for his first Antarctic stop, the San Pedro Islands (South Georgia). She then bowed south and went into the Weddell Sea, where, from mid-January, a prisoner of the ice, she would remain until the abandonment and subsequent sinking of her at the end of October 1915.

From that dramatic moment a long and reckless odyssey would begin that would take the shipwrecked to the north of Elephant Island, in the South Shetland Islands, and the expeditionary leader, accompanied by five brave men, to make the most difficult journey in a small boat. dangerous that it is possible to think of the roughest sea in the world, up to San Pedro Island, to seek help from the whaling companies. Only on August 30, 1916, after several unsuccessful attempts, the Chilean ship cutter YELCHO, with Shackleton on board, reached Elephant Island and rescued the members of the British transpolar expedition alive.

IN THE MEANTIME . . .

In Argentina, the popular vote had brought Dr. Hipólito Yrigoyen to the presidency. It was the middle of 1915, when the Office of Hydrography of the Ministry of the Navy released letter No. 31, with the title "Anchorages of Tierra del Fuego." Among the squares that made up this chart, one reproduced the South Orkney Islands, with all the nautical information: it was the fruit of the interrupted work carried out since the beginning of the century by the URUGUAY corvette. Year after year, the old corvette enlisted for the rescue of the Swedish expedition, carried out the relief of the endowments of the southernmost observatory in the world and, in parallel, it enriched the geographical knowledge of the area.

At this time the transformation of the whaling industry also began. The old system of hunting cetaceans on the high seas and taking them to a factory installed on land, was transformed with the construction of huge factory ships, which, by means of "catchers", auxiliary ships armed with harpoon guns, carried out hunting and hunting. they brought the pieces to the mother ship. By means of a plank or ramp located at the stern -back of the ship- the pieces were hoisted on board, where they were dismembered, and then the industrial processes of the different parts were carried out: meat, bones, fat, baleen -the classic whales- storing the finished products in the warehouse for immediate commercialization upon arrival at port. Consequently, the terrestrial factories were, little by little, left inactive.

The First World War, which changed the European political map, did not substantially affect the general activity in Antarctica, at that time led by whaling activity with fixed establishments on land and the progressive entry into the hunting of new factory ships, which they carried out the entire industrial process in navigation.

A long period of inactivity opens. Only our country peacefully and permanently maintained its scientific activities on Laurie Island, providing the meteorological information that it contributed, and contributes to the world meteorological chart. Beginning in 1927, the radio station broadcast its daily report on the parameters in the Antarctic area to the world. The URUGUAY corvette and ships of the Argentine Fishing Company carried out the annual replacement of the only Antarctic scientific station existing at that time.

The most significant scientific Antarctic expeditions of this period were Wilhem Filchner's German expeditions (1911-1912), which reached the ice shelf named after its discoverer, south of the Weddell Sea; the Australian one by Douglas Mawson (1911-1914), discoverer of the land of King George V and who explored the land of Queen Mary in the Antarctic zone corresponding to the Australian quadrant.

THE OLDEST TRASPOLAR FLIGHT PROJECT

In the decade of the 20 aviation reached a significant development. Exploits such as the first transatlantic flight from Spain to Argentina, starring Commander Franco, encourage hopes and projects about the future of the new means of transport. Buenos Aires was not alien to this type of concerns, and thus the engineer Antonio Pauly, of Chilean origin and based in our country since 1919, with the support of the Argentine Geographical Institute, raised it to the consideration of this scientific entity and the National Executive Power an original polar project, which was to have great public significance.

Since its foundation in 1881, the Argentine Geographical Institute permanently promoted Argentine activity in Antarctica, for which it gave unconditional support to the Pauly project. Even the President of the Republic, Dr. Marcelo T. de Alvear promised the material aid necessary for the success of the initiative. Pauly presented a complete and detailed detail of the future expedition, with a study of the development of what was to be the first cross-polar air crossing.

With a system of successive supply tanks and fold-ups, until all the fuel and survival elements settled from the Antarctic Peninsula to the South Pole, and then continuing towards the Ross Sea, using the then modern Dornier Wall airplane for all development of the plan, the engineer Pauly reasonably supported the advanced project, of feasible realization. Unfortunately, on a flight to Rio de Janeiro, the machine that was going to be used in the project suffered an accident, which canceled the possibility of making the first transpolar air flight. It should be noted that in the preliminary study, released in a public conference, Pauly pointed out as fundamental and unique, the meteorological information that, since the beginning of the century, the Argentine scientific station of the South Orkney Islands had recorded and transmitted annually.

The first flights by plane in Antarctica were carried out by the British North American expedition of Hubert Wilkins in two successive expeditions that flew over part of the peninsula and the archipelagos that surround it, carried out between 1928 and 1930.

In the latter part of the 1930s, the American expeditions of Richard Byrd (1928-1930) and the Australian expeditions of Douglas Mawson (1929-1931) are noteworthy for their important contributions to the knowledge of the geography of the continent.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO TOURISM IN ANTARCTICA IN 1933?

In 1933 the transport of the PAMPA navy carried out the usual annual change to the staffing of the scientific station on Laurie Island, in the South Orkney Islands. On board, and bound for Ushuaia, traveled a large group of tourists, including members of the University Club of Buenos Aires, the naval attaché of the US embassy and his family, and also a legendary Argentine journalist, Don Juan José de Soiza Reilly.

Arrived in Ushuaia, the captain of the ship, Don Ángel Rodríguez, invited them to accompany him in his defeat to South Orcadas Island. Except for the naval attaché who considered that the ship was not suitable for trips in polar seas and rejected the invitation, the others accepted the invitation, and thus the first contingent of Antarctic tourists traveled, which Soiza Reilly, commissioned by the magazine Caras y Caretas, published with abundant photographic illustrations in that medium. Twenty-five years had to pass until another navy transport, the LES ECLAIREURS, under the command of Captain Eduardo J. Llosa, began modern tourism cruises to Antarctica, making two crossings from Ushuaia in the months of January and February 1958. .

THE FORTY DECADE: INTEREST IN COLD LANDS GROWS

This era, contemporary with the Second World War, marks a new stage in world Antarctic activity, where Argentina, Chile, England and other countries intensify their Antarctic activity. Conversations begin - which had already existed at the beginning of the century between Argentina and Chile - about territorial possession in the Antarctic continent. An important deployment of the countries interested in the area is formalized with the installation of different permanent stations, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula and the archipelagos that surround it.

PUJATO THE VISIONARY

Hernán Pujato, a career military man and a true visionary of the polar future linked to his country, knew in his time to envision the prospects of a project for those who would take care of it. In 1949 he drew up an ambitious plan to penetrate the continent, as part of the sovereign affirmation of Argentine rights in the far south.

It should be noted that the thought about sovereignty prevailed at the time over the then few pretenders to the polar heritage, a claim that is supported by historical titles and precedents and that is virtually suspended by the validity of the Antarctic Treaty since 1961.

Briefly described, the Pujato project consisted of: 1) the foundation of a polar institute that would concentrate the scientific activity to be developed in a systematic and coordinated way, programming research plans that would integrate into the future activity in the areas that the station developed since 1904 Laurie Island with the advances produced by the new generations of scientists, deepening the knowledge of the continent; 2nd) preparation and implementation of a polar expedition based on the establishment of a permanent base south of the Antarctic Circle; 3º) Establishment of a population with a factory and a naval shipyard in the north of the peninsula, also of a permanent nature; 4th) purchase of an icebreaker ship that will make it possible to reach the south of the Weddell Sea and establish a station in the Filchner ice barrier 1200 kilometers from the South Pole, with a view to the subsequent conquest of that geographical landmark.

It was Pujato himself who carried out most of his project. Thus, in 1951, he hired a private vessel from the company Pérez Companc de transportos patagónicos, which for the symbolic value of one peso chartered the SANTA MICAELA tank landing vessel and transported its people and materials to Margarita Bay, west of the Antarctic Peninsula and south of the Polar Circle to build the General San Martín base. Pujato himself negotiated with the national government for the purchase of the General San Martín icebreaker and on board he transported the elements to found the second base south of the circle, in the Weddell Sea, which he named General Belgrano.

It should be noted that Pujato was the protagonist of the first wintering after the foundation of those bases. And what should especially be noted is that the beginning of the planned expedition to the South Pole in an unknown geographical area such as the southern area of ​​the Weddell Sea was at that time. Pujato, as a pilot of a small Cessna monoplane, carried out a series of discovery flights south from the Belgrano base, in hitherto unexplored regions, providing extensive knowledge of the mountainous formations and general configuration of what was to be in the future route to the South Pole. Some years later, in 1965, his disciple and his subordinate, Jorge Leal, would achieve the visionary's endeavor by arriving at the southernmost tip of the earth.

The Pujato project represented an important step in the scientific knowledge of Antarctica, at the same time that it served to prepare scientific and technical personnel to serve the Antarctic participation of the Argentine Republic, today within the broader framework created by the Antarctic Treaty.