The 16th of July (the 4th of July according to the old Style), 1819, there unmoored the sloops «Mirniy» and «Vostok». «We saw the manifestation of the universal desire for a happy voyage to us, the spectators we waving their hats and shouting: «Hooray!». We responded having shouted «Hooray!» 5 times. With a hearty feeling of gratitude and, having saluted to the fortress, we added sails», - the Captain Thaddeus Bellingshausen was recalling. Together with Lieutenant Mikhail Lazarev, he went on a voyage in order to find out, is there a continent at the South Pole.
James Cook discouraged explorers from exploring these places in the 18th century. I went around the ocean of the southern hemisphere in high latitudes and rejected the possibility of the existence of the continent, which, if even can be detected, only near the pole in places inaccessible to navigation», - English explorer claimed. The Russian sailors decided to test the words of James Cook half a century later.
Admiral Ivan Krusenstern wrote to the Navy Minister the following: «This expedition should especially have in the subject to verify all the wrong in the southern half of the Great Ocean and to replenish all the shortcomings located in it, except its main goal - to get to know the countries of the South Pole, so that she could be recognized as a final journey in this sea, so to speak».
In summer of 1819 “Mirniy» and «Vostok» briefly moored in the port of English Portsmouth, to replenish the supply of provisions. In the beginning of autumn they headed for the South Atlantic and they anchored in Rio de Janeiro in November – for their short rest before the difficult sailing.
The seafarers managed to see the coast of Antarctica in January of 1820 already. The sloops were thirty kilometers from them. However, poor visibility allowed the researchers not to assert, but only to assume that the continent was ahead. Bellingshausen cautiously expressed himself: «Over the ice fields of shallow ice and islands you can see the continent of ice, which edges are broken perpendicularly and which continues as we see it, rising to the south like the shore».
The artist Ivan Aivazovsky. «Ice mountains in Antarctica»
The expedition had been lasting for 751 days. Despite the severe storms, navigators went around the whole of Antarctica, sketched the animals living there. It was established that Sandwich Land is not one island, but an entire archipelago. They mapped previously unknown islands.
The gratitude of the whole world for these discoveries was generalized in 1867 by the German geographer August Peterman: «The name of Bellingshausen can be directly put on the row with the names of Columbus and Magellan, with the names of those people, they did not retreat before the difficulties and imaginary impossibilities created by their predecessors, with the names of people who went their own way, and therefore were the destroyers of the barriers to the discoveries that epochs are designated».