Images and other media from the archival collections of Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Frederick A. Cook, Sir George Hubert Wilkins and the Byrd Polar Research Center are featured in this timeline.
Sponsored by Henry VII of England, this would be the beginning of more than 400 years of attempts to navigate a Northwest Passage.
Willoughby's entire party of men died in Lapland.
Sailing though Lancaster Sound into the unexplored Canadian archipelago, the Parry expedition wintered at the Melville Islands. This was the first deliberate Arctic wintering by British naval ships.
Two expeditions, each unaware of the other's existance, made the first sightings of the Antarctic mainland in January 1820.
Franklin was the captain of this British naval expedition that explored the north coast of America east from the Coppermine River to the Hudson Bay.
Though this was the most lavishly equipped Northwest passage expedition in history, it was an epic failure.
Kane participated in two Arctic expeditions. Both were John Franklin rescue missions.
Frederick Albert Cook is born on June 10, 1865 in Hortonville, NY.
At about this time, the focus of Arctic exploration shifts from the discovery of a navigable Northwest Passage to other parts of the Arctic, and ultimately, the attainment of the North Pole.
Led by American Adolphus Greely, the expedition attained farthest north, and 83 degrees 24 minutes. However, imclement weather doomed the expedition in their third winter. Eighteen men died, mostly from famine and scurvy.
The International Polar Year was the brainchild of Karl Weyprecht (1838-1881), who conceived the idea while discovering Franz Josef Land as co-leader of the Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1872-1874.
Richard E. Byrd is born In Winchester, VA, son of Richard Evelyn Byrd and Eleanor Bolling Flood.
Nansen would achieve notariety again in 1895, when he skied and sledged to a farthest north of 86 degrees 13 minutes 6 seconds.
George Wilkins is born at Mt. Bryan East, South Australia, 31 October 1888. George was the youngest of 13 children born to Harry and Louisa Wilkins.
In 1891 Dr. Frederick Albert Cook began his career as an explorer as a member of Peary's first expedition to North Greenland, where he served as Peary's surgeon and as ethnologist.
In 1897, Cook volunteered for the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, and achieved international recognition in his role of surgeon and photographer. He made important scientific discoveries on this expedition, including the effect of eating raw meat in order to cure the ship's crew of scurvy. Cook also served a critical role on this expedition in his efforts to release the frozen Belgica by sawing a canal in the ice.
Andre, along with two companions, landed the balloon far from the Pole, They all died on the little known island of Kvitoya, just east of Svalbard. Nothing was known of their fate until 1930.
Carsten Borchgrevink and the members of the Southern Cross Expedition land at Cape Adare in Victoria Land and erect prefabricated huts.
In 1901, Cook joined the Erik, in a relief expedition for Peary, sponsored by the Peary Arctic Club.
Robert Falcon Scott, Edward Wilson and Ernest Shackleton set off from McMurdo Sound in an attempt to reach the South Pole. Though they were not successful in reaching the pole, they did achieve the furthest south, at 82 degrees.
In 1903 Cook led an expedition to Mount McKinley, which resulted in his circumnavigation of the Denali range. It was 75 years later before this achievment would be repeated.
Taylor Valley is the southern one of the three large Dry Valleys in the Transantarctic Mountains, Victoria Land, located west of McMurdo Sound.
Leading a seven member expedition on the ship Gjoa, Amundsen became the first to lead a ship through the treacherous route. It would take them three years.
In 1906 Cook embarked on his second expedition to Mt. McKinley. It was during this expedition that Cook claimed to have reached the summit, becoming the first person to do so.
In 1907, Cook made his quest to the North Pole, and claimed to have reached the Pole on April 21, 1908. However, drifting ice prohibited his southward return, and he was forced to spend the Polar night in a shelter with his two Eskimo companions. It wasn't until September 1, 1909 that Cook announced his discovery of the North Pole.
Richard E. Byrd entered the US Naval Academy in 1908 and graduated with the class of 1912
Norwegian Roald Amundsen, with four companions and 18 dogs plants the Norwegian flag at the South Pole. It took him 57 days from his base at the Bay of Whales.
"Great God this is an awful place." - Robert Falcon Scott.
In 1908, Wilkins was hired by the Gaumont Company of London as a cinematographer and by the London Daily Chronicle as a reporter. In 1912, the Gaumont Company sent Wilkins to Constantinople to photograph and shoot movies of the Balkan War.
Wilkins was hired by Viljhalmur Stefansson as a photographer. Eventually, he bacame second in command of the expedition, known as the Canadian Arctic Expedition.
In what would become one of the sensational sagas of survival in Antarctic history, Shackleton and his men are forced to abandon their ship "Endurance" when it is crushed in the ice of the Weddell Sea.
Wilkins was an officer in the Australian Flying Corp, and he and fellow Australian Frank Hurley were appointed to document the war in images.
Wilkins returned to polar exploration in 1919 by making his first trip to the Antarctic with the British Imperial Antarctic Expedition
From 1921-1922, Wilkins was chief of the scientific staff and naturalist for the Sir Ernest Shackleton Quest Antarctic Expedition.
In 1917 Dr. Cook was hired by New York Oil to prospect for oil based on his knowledge of geology, and he eventually became president of Texas Eagle Oil Company in Fort Worth. However, in 1920, a slump in the oil business forced the company out of business. It was then that Cook formed the Petroleum Producers Association, which became one of the largest employers in Fort Worth.
In 1923 Cook was accused and indicted of mail fraud in relation to his oil business.
Byrd had been interested in polar exploration since childhood. He got his start in 1925 when he joined the MacMillan Arctic Expedition where he completed the first flights over Ellsmere Island and the interior of Greenland.
Cook was sent to federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1925, where he served five years. During his time in Leavenworth, Cook served as physician in the hospital, as well as editor of the prison newspaper, New Era.
In 1926, Byrd took leave from the Navy to organize a privately financed expedition to the Arctic, which was to be based in Spitzbergen.
The Norge was an Italian built airship. The expedition was the brainchild of Amundsen, the airship's designer and pilot was Umberto Nobile, and the American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth financed the trip.
From 1926-1928, Wilkins was commander of the Wilkins-Detroit Arctic Expeditions sponsored by the Detroit Aviation Society and the Detroit News.
Cheered by the outpouring of public support and admiration, Byrd continued his leave from the Navy and turned his focus on Antarctica.
It was during the Wilkins-Detroit Expedition that Wilkins and Ben Eielson made their historic first trans-Arctic airplane flight from Point Barrow, Alaska to Spitzbergen. This event occurred in April of 1928.
For his accomplishment in his trans-arctic flight, Wilkins was knighted by King George V of England.
Upon his parole, in 1930, Cook went to work on his memoirs in Chicago and led a relatively quiet life.
In 1931, Sir Hubert Wilkins commanded the Nautilus submarine expedition to the Arctic. This was the first submarine to travel under the Arctic pack ice.
The International Meteorological Organization proposed and promoted the Second IPY (1932–1933) as an effort to investigate the global implications of the newly discovered “Jet Stream.” 40 nations participated in the Second IPY, and it heralded advances in meteorology, magnetism, atmospheric science, and in the “mapping” of ionospheric phenomena that advanced radioscience and technology. Forty permanent observation stations were established in the Arctic, creating a step-function expansion in ongoing scientific Arctic research. In Antarctica, the U.S. contribution was the second Byrd Antarctic expedition, which established a winter-long meteorological station approximately 125 miles south of Little America Station on the Ross Ice Shelf at the southern end of Roosevelt Island. This was the first research station inland from Antarctica’s coast. Source: http://classic.ipy.org/development/history.htm
August Howard, the son of a tailor and Russian immigrant, grew up fascinated by Richard Byrd and the romance and adventure of polar exploration and adopted Byrd as his personal hero.
"My decision to return to Antarctica with a second exploring expedition was not so much a spontaneous thought as a maturing compulsion bred by the work of my first expedition."
During the 1930s, Wilkins travelled to the Antarctic four times as second-in-command of the Lincoln Ellsworth Antarctic Flight Expeditions.
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