In 2018, for issue seven of Ernest, humanitarian writer and researcher Carol Devine shared her story of remapping Antarctica; shining a light on its female place names and celebrating the vital roles women have played in shaping our knowledge of the frozen continent. Read the full feature below…
Illustrated by Aidan Meighan
“The map is about relativity, defining in relation to other things. It is an artifice, a conceptual construction of the world, whose primary function is to afford us a sense of our place in it.” – Ivy Schroeder, Terra Incognita exhibit: Contemporary Artists’ Maps, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis.
I love Antarctic maps; the shape of them, and how they have transformed over the centuries. This remote continent – the windiest, driest, highest, coldest place on Earth – was first imagined long before it was certain to exist. James Cook’s 1795 map of the southern continents has an empty space where Antarctica was anticipated. He’d said: “There may be a continent or large tract of land near the Pole, I will not deny.”
J. H. Colton’s partially sketched detail of the Southern Polar Regions in 1865 appears like a circle with bites out of it. I equally love NASA’s uber-modern digital satellite maps. You can zoom in to see penguin colonies and the terrifying crack of the Larsen C ice shelf, which broke away last year.
Though I’ve seen the tip of the iceberg of this vast land, I’ve become acquainted with its mountains, valleys and peninsulas through a project I began, unwittingly, in 1995. I was leading the first Antarctic environmental cleanup expedition, a collaboration between a small foundation and the Russian Antarctic Expedition. I was sitting in the base commander’s office at Bellingshausen Station to discuss the Joint Russian-Canadian Ecological Project when my colleague Sergey said, “You are the first women to live here in over 20 years.”
As he spoke I was looking at a map of the continent on his wall. Marguerite Bay. So Marguerite was here before me. Who was she? Who were all the other women behind some of those names? I promised myself I would find out.
Years later I decided to make a map of Antarctica with all the female place names on it; to shine a light on the female presence and contributions to our knowledge of this continent. In telling the unknown or little-known stories of Antarctic women, I would both learn and share history, science, and stories of the barriers women faced and tackled, their explorations, discoveries and more.
The first person recorded to have seen Antarctica was Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, a Russian navigator in 1820. Sealers were also hunting in the area at that time, though we largely don’t know who they were, apart from Nathaniel Palmer.
Women’s early presence in the Antarctic was mapped through their absence. They physically arrived on the continent a century after men, not because of a lack of desire to go, but because they were banned. “Three sporty women” applied to join Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914. Shackleton replied that there were “no vacancies for the opposite sex.” It was the same for women in Argentina, the US and other countries who wanted to go far south. The first recorded woman to sight Antarctica was Norway’s Ingrid Christensen, who sailed with her whaling magnate husband in 1931. Ingrid Christensen Coast in East Antarctica was named after her in 1934.
Maps beautifully and at times wistfully tell the story of humankind, just as ancient ice cores narrate our chequered history. Antarctic maps tell of the human desire for exploration no matter where early travellers hailed from or who their monarch was. Antarctic place names particularly tell us who loved, missed and honoured whom, who arrived when and where and discovered what. Captain James Clark Ross was the first to honour his Queen when he named Victoria Land in West Antarctica, after he beheld the region in 1841.
Other explorers and scientists followed suit and honoured their Queens: Queen Maud Land (1939, Norway), Queen Fabiola Mountains (1960, Belgium), or named places and landforms for their wives: Adèlie Land (1840, France), and daughters: Cassandra Nunatak (1959, US). The first person to reach the South Pole in 1912, Roald Amundsen, paid tribute to his childhood nanny when he named Mount Betty. The US Geological Survey honoured The Office Girls, who supported the Antarctic programs back home, by naming two nunataks after them (nunataks are exposed peaks of mountains not covered by ice).
While many Antarctic place names are tributes to people even today, in the early days they were largely chosen by prominent men. I think of the bosuns and petty officers working in this harsh landscape, who didn’t declare official names but perhaps whispered their wives’, lovers’ and daughters’ names into mountains and valleys. I think of the unnamed women who may have visited in earlier times, perhaps from Chile or Argentina. Where are their mountains?
As the world changed, so did the map. It began to mark the actual appearance of women to the continent. Caroline Mikkelsen, reportedly the first woman to set foot on Antarctica in 1934, was the wife of a Norwegian whaling ship captain. Her namesake is Mount Caroline Mikkelsen.
Jackie Ronne was the first American woman to set foot on the continent, and her husband led the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition (1947-48). The Ronne Ice Shelf is named in her honour.
In 1956, marine biologist Maria Klenova did ship-based research in the Antarctic. She was the first female scientist and Russian woman to work there. Klenova not only studied the marine life but also helped map the first Soviet Antarctic Atlas. Klenova Peak is her namesake.
Geologist Lois Jones fought to visit the continent to collect her own scientific samples despite the US navy admiral refusing women to go “over my dead body.” At long last, Jones was among the first American female scientists to go to Antarctica in 1969. She led the all- female expedition with The Ohio State University. Jones Terrace in the Olympus Mountain Range celebrates her.
Bradshaw Peak on McLay Glacier honours Margaret Bradshaw, an eminent geological scientist from the University of Canterbury. In 1979, she was the first woman to lead a deep field party in the Antarctic.
Otome Point was so named by the Japanese Expedition because the point looks like a woman’s nose. This descriptive place name is a rarity versus honorary or sentimental names.
A learning journey
I am mapping hundreds of these female place names and have asked others to help. The list is growing and the map that illustrates this article shows only a glimpse.
An Argentinean scholar sent me the name Eva Perón Bay, which is formally Mobiloil Inlet. A Bulgarian scientist sent me a list of locations named after women from history, mythology and folklore. The Akaga Glacier in the Antarctic Peninsula is named after sixth century female Bulgar ruler, Akaga. A Turkish scientist told me about Tilav Cirque, honouring Turkish astrophysicist Serap Tilav. Not only was I happy to learn about Tilav, I also learned that cirques are amphitheatre-shaped basins created by glaciers. I’m continually discovering new locations and their back-stories – each map name is like a matryoshka doll.
On my map I mainly include formal names, but also keep informal ones and any that have been renamed or have simply disappeared, such as The Sisters. Among these rocks off Cape Adare, now consumed by the sea, are two named for Gertrude and Rose – sisters mentioned in a British folk song from the early 1900s. In this time of unequivocal climate change, how many other landforms will disappear?
Naming places in the Antarctic follows an official process – not straightforward given its geography and size. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s (SCAR) Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica (CGA) “is the authoritative international gazetteer containing all the Antarctic toponyms published in national gazetteers, plus basic information about those names and the relevant geographic features”.
Some countries insist different places have different names or places have multiple names due to translation or transliteration. These multi-named places are recorded by the Gazetteer. For example, the UK calls the Antarctic Peninsula Graham Land, while Chile calls it Tierra de O’Higgins.
Land of peace
By 2015, 24 countries gave 37,325 geographic names for 19,303 features in Antarctica. National Antarctic Place-Names Committees liaise with each other – there is collaboration and some peaceful disagreement. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 dedicated the continent to peace and science, forbids new territorial claims, and does not recognise territorial disputes.
In 1912, Edwin Swift Balch of the American Geographical Society aptly described the objective of Antarctic place naming: “A proper Antarctic nomenclature must have loyalty to humanity and to science, and not spring from servile obedience to national prejudices and greed. Since the Antarctic regions [...] belong to the human race collectively, it seems self-evident any names invented and applied should be international.”
And so this place at the bottom of the world is our beacon of possibility, and a harbinger. The names remind us of the prolific whaling and sealing that threatened their extinction. They also tell us about our international cooperation, and social and scientific achievements.
So, who was Marguerite? Marguerite Bay was named in 1909 after Marguerite Cléry, French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot’s second wife. His first, Jeanne Hugo, Victor Hugo’s daughter, sought divorce on the grounds of desertion. Marguerite never made it to Antarctica but I found her there.
Today, women make up over a third of the 4,000 temporary field staff working yearly in the Antarctic: scientists, heads of research stations, artists and logistics crew. This map in-the-making honours their contribution, and of the women before them, to our knowledge of this frozen continent. Now, more than ever, this contribution and knowledge is vital for humankind and the planet we call home.