The famous pirate Sir Francis Drake, for whom the Drake Passage is named, actually sailed all along the Southern Ocean in a circle and even got within about 100 miles of the coast, but he never saw the land.
Nobody's really sure who saw Antarctica first. A young whaler noted seeing a landmass in the distance on a clear day from a place called Neptune's Window on Deception Island, which is 70 miles from the continent of Antarctica. More officially, a Russian expedition says they found the continent in 1820, but it wasn't until 1853 that somebody officially stepped foot on the continent itself. That's really not that long ago!
The golden age of polar exploration was in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with people like the British Robert Cook and Norwegian Roald Amundsen all competing with each other for glory and riches, trying to land various firsts such as the first to the south pole and the first to cross the continent by land. Roald Amundsen used dogs to pull his supplies and beat Robert Cook to the pole by less than a month. Robert Cook used ponies, and while he made it to the South Pole eventually, he ran out of supplies and starved only 11 miles away from safety. Meanwhile, Ernest Shackleton, from England, tried to lead a party across the continent, but his ship got trapped in sea ice before he ever landed, and he spent 17 months surviving on seals and penguins before he was able to escape and find help.
All this is to say that Antarctica is a dangerous place, but we now have the technology to visit in a more comfortable and safe way. And that's what I've done!
