Carsten Borchgrevink

Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink was an Anglo-Norwegian polar explorer. He was the precursor of Sir Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and others associated with the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. From 1898 to 1900, he led the British-financed Southern Cross expedition, which established a new Farthest South record at 78° 50’S. He later settled in Kristiania, Norway, leading a life mainly away from public attention.

About Carsten Borchgrevink in brief

Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink was an Anglo-Norwegian polar explorer and a pioneer of modern Antarctic travel. He was the precursor of Sir Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and others associated with the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. From 1898 to 1900, he led the British-financed Southern Cross expedition, which established a new Farthest South record at 78° 50’S. His pioneering work was subsequently recognised and honoured by several countries, and in 1912, he received a handsome tribute from conqueror of the South Pole. He later settled in Kristiania, Norway, leading a life mainly away from public attention. He died of a heart attack at the age of 80. He is buried in Kristiansand, Norway. He had a son, Peter, who became a well-known author and author-in- residence at the University of Oslo. He also had a daughter, Anne, who went on to become one of the world’s best-known zookeepers. She died of cancer in 1998, aged 89. He has been described as a “pioneer of modern polar exploration” by the Royal Geographical Society, which awarded him its Patron’s Medal in 1930. His son Peter died in 2005, aged 90, and is buried at the same place as his father, in the town of Christiania. His daughter Anne died in 2010, aged 93, and was buried in the same town. She was also buried in Christiania, where she had been a member of the Norwegian whaling expedition that took her to Antarctica in 1894.

He went to Australia in the late 1880s to work with government surveying teams in Queensland and New South Wales before settling in the small town of Bowenfels, where he became a teacher in languages and natural sciences at Cooerwull Academy. He met Svend Foyn, the 84-year-old father of modern whaling, and inventor of the harpoon gun, on a whaling ship called Antarctic. In 1894 he joined an expedition to Antarctica organised by Henryk Bull, a Norwegian businessman and entrepreneur who had settled in Australia. Bull planned to make a sealing and whaling voyage into Antarctic waters; after failing to interest Melbourne’s learned societies in a cost-sharing venture of a commercial–scientific nature, he returned to Norway to organise his expedition there. He hired an experienced whaling captain, Leonard Kristensen, and with a crew and a small scientific team left Norway in September 1893. When he learned that Antarctic was due to visit Melbourne in September 1894, he hurried hoping to find an expedition leader in his own right, but could not reach the ship before it left Norway. This created an opening for Borch grevink, who later became a part-time scientist and deck-hand and a scientist. The following months, Antarctic’s sealing activities around the subantarctic islands were successful, but proved difficult to find whales.

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