Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1955 | Volume 6, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1955 | Volume 6, Issue 4
Man’s long search for a continent at the bottom of the world ended on November 18, 1820, when an American barely out of his teens discovered the world’s seventh and last great land mass.
It was almost an accident that Nathaniel Brown Palmer of Stonington, Connecticut, found the shore that had eluded the best efforts of more seasoned explorers. At the time he did not realize the extent of his finding. Yet on that cold November morning when he sailed his tiny sloop Hero into “a strait . . . literally filled with ice” and saw “the shore every where perpendicular” he stepped suddenly—at the age of 21—into immortality.
Here at last was ultima Thule: the long-sought Terra Australis. From ancient times, men had speculated on its existence. Sightings reported by the Dutch explorer, Gerritsz, and the Frenchmen, Bouvet and Kerguelen, had stimulated curiosity and even some minor exploratory voyages. But three years of extensive searching by Captain James Cook of England had failed to turn up a trace of land. The search for a far southern land was all but abandoned.
Nat Palmer had been born at the sea’s edge, and his father’s shipyard was his first playground. Salt water ran in his veins from the start.
Almost as soon as he could walk, Nat Palmer learned to swim. Not long after, he could handle a sailboat with ease. War with England came in 1812, and hardy New Englanders took to blockade-running—and at the ripe old age of fourteen, Nat abandoned his schoolbooks to sign on one of the blockade-runners as an apprentice. The sea was his school, the forecastle his classroom—and the seasoned mariners who were his teachers taught him well. By the time he was seventeen he had risen to second mate; and the following year he commanded his own vessel, the schooner Galena.
While Nat was working his way up to command, Stonington’s deep-water sailors embarked on one of the period’s richest commercial enterprises. Sea captains passing the coastal islands off southern South America had observed that seals by the hundreds of thousands came north from the icy southern latitudes to breed there. They soon discovered that pelts of prime buck seals had a considerable sale value, both in the States and in far-off ports.
Sealing was not an easy business. It involved working in a cold and dismal climate, it was dangerous, and it was a rather unpleasant operation: the sealer had to club his prey to death with a single blow to the head, skin him and salt down the pelt. Hardy men were needed for such a business. But resourceful captains found they could take 10,000 skins in a single voyage and sell them for $2 apiece, or more.
The rush to capitalize on a new “get-rich-quick” scheme soon made Stonington the capital of the sealing industry. Each summer saw vessel after