1819-20 British Naval Voyage of Discovery to Antarctic Peninsula aboard the brig Williams commanded by Edward Bransfield

On January 30, 1820, Bransfield saw the north coast of the Trinity Peninsula, the northern point of the Antarctic Peninsula “and thus part of the continent, it represented only the second sighting of Antarctica itself, occurring just three days after Bellingshausen’s first sighting” (Mills, Exploring Polar Frontiers, p. 99).

Nothing is known of reading aboard this expedition but it was charged with the task of hydrographic mapping and at least one chart of his voyage survives, implying the presence of some cartographic materials. For years there was controversy about the expedition, Bransfield’s log was lost and he was in relative obscurity allowing some overly-patriotic American scholars (notably William Herbert Hobbs of the University of Michigan) to argue disingenuously that Palmer was the first to see the continent although Palmer’s sighting occurred ten months later on November 17, 1820. (See A. R. Hicks, “On Some Misrepresentations of Antarctic History,” Geographical Journal 94 4 (October 1939) 309-330.