Thousands of travellers visit Antarctica every year, sailing on the 70 or so vessels that make up the polar fleet. These come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from tiny yachts and expedition cruise ships that carry a hundred or so passengers, all the way up to larger ships that aren’t allowed to land passengers on shore but just make scenic cruises through the ice instead.
But where did all these ships come from? Who first came up with the idea of cruising to the White Continent? In this article, we take a look at the history of Antarctic cruising, and how the polar fleet evolved from its first tentative steps to the state of the art vessels of today.
Early concepts
The desire to visit the world’s remotest continent is nothing new. The first seeds of the polar cruising industry were sown in the 1890s when steam yachts first began taking paying guests up the Norwegian fjords and across the Arctic Circle to Svalbard. In a reflection of the times, many travellers were more interested in shooting a polar bear as a trophy rather than admiring it in its natural habitat.
During this time, Antarctica was mostly a blank space at the bottom of a world map, but come the so-called ‘Heroic Era’ of Antarctic exploration in the early 20th century, the concept of travelling for recreation was mooted by a few adventurous souls. Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole played a small part in this.
In 1910, the British travel company Thomas Cook floated the idea of chartering a ship to visit Scott’s team at their base in McMurdo Sound, proposing a round trip of around 50 days to sail to the Ross Sea and back, calling at New Zealand and Australia’s Subantarctic islands en route – an itinerary not far removed from the Ross Sea cruises of today. Sadly, despite being promoted in the press as having plenty of interested passengers signed up, the cruise never took place – one can only imagine the reaction of Scott and his party had their splendid isolation broken by a ship of Edwardian pleasure cruisers.
The first Antarctic cruises
It took until the late 1950s for the first commercial cruises to Antarctica to set sail. The very first voyage took place in January 1958 on an Argentinian cargo ship called Les Eclaireurs. It took 194 passengers around the South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula as it resupplied the bases at Deception Island, Brown Station and Melchior Bay – all places commonly visited by expedition cruise ships today.
The following year the state-owned shipping company Flota Argentina de Navegación de Ultramar ran two more cruises using the ship Yapeyú. The guests of honour included Finn and Jackie Ronne, who had wintered together on Stonington Island on the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition just after the Second World War 1946-1947. These were real polar celebrity guests – Finn had sledged more than 1100 miles in Antarctica with dog teams mapping the Peninsula, with his wife Jackie an essential part of the scientific support team, becoming the first woman to overwinter in Antarctica in the process.
Enter Lars-Eric Lindblad
Surprisingly, Argentina never followed up on the promise of these early cruises. It took the arrival of a Swedish-American tourism entrepreneur called Lars-Eric Lindblad for Antarctic cruises to really begin to take shape in their modern form. Lindblad reportedly came up with the idea while guiding adventure tourists in Mongolia, when he reportedly looked at an airline map of the world after a few drinks and decided that he would lead a tour to Antarctica: the one place that wasn’t yet on the map.
Lindblad chartered the Argentinian ship Lapataia for the voyage in January 1966 that effectively kickstarted the Antarctic cruise industry. Lapataia was a tiny ship, carrying just 56 passengers, and had to be accompanied for the entire trip by a naval tug for support. Prices in twin berth cabins with bunks ranged between $2800 to $3000, depending on whether or not the cabin had its own bathroom.
In a canny move, Lindblad also hired Finn Ronne as the expedition leader. The cruise is credited for introducing a model of Antarctic cruising that still dominates today’s market. Guests were taken ashore in zodiacs with experts at hand to interpret sites of natural, scientific and historic interest. Education was a major theme as well as adventure, with onboard lectures on a variety of Antarctic subjects. Ronne no doubt also had a great supply of anecdotes with which to entertain guests.
Lindblad operated a handful of successful charters before realising that what he really needed was his own ship. In 1968, he commissioned the MS Lindblad Explorer, the first ice-class vessel to be specifically commissioned for pleasure cruises to Antarctica. Built in Finland for $2.5 million, it carried up to 104 passengers and six zodiacs. It was quickly nicknamed ‘the Little Red Ship.’
The Lindblad Explorer made its maiden voyage in 1969, establishing Ushuaia as the main port of departure for Antarctic cruises in the process. The first two cruises visited the Falkland Islands as well as the Antarctic Peninsula. On its third voyage, it became the first cruise ship to visit South Georgia – just four years after commercial whaling had ended on the island.
Growth of an industry
The success of the Lindblad Explorer meant that other tour operators were keen to follow suit. In the 1970s, it was joined by the second purpose-built expedition cruise ship, the World Discoverer. By the 1980s, four companies were offering expedition cruises to Antarctica, but it would take an unexpected shift in geopolitics for the industry to take its next big step forwards.
1991 saw the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. One unexpected side effect of this was that a handful of icebreaking ships used in the Russian Arctic were left without purpose and in need of someone to pay the bills. They were hastily repurposed into expedition cruise ships. In the same year, the signing of the Environmental Protocol of the Antarctic Treaty prompted the seven tour operators now on the scene to found the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators to encourage the nascent industry to regulate itself and promote best environmental practices for operating in this fragile region.
The Lindblad Explorer was along for much of this ride, enjoying a varied career sailing across the globe as well as in polar waters, changing hands a number of times and becoming the first passenger ship to navigate the North West Passage in Canada. In 2007 it made its final voyage, sailing as simply Explorer and coming to a sad end when it sank in the Bransfield Strait off the Antarctic Peninsula after striking an iceberg. All passengers and crew were quickly rescued without injury by a nearby cruise ship, and its loss remains the only such incident in the history of the polar cruise industry.
The polar fleet today
Sailing to Antarctica today is a vastly different experience from the early days of the Lindblad Explorer. While that ship had only basic cabins with portholes, today’s fleet offers a choice of accommodation with balcony suites and even luxury service. Modern cruise ships have underwater stabilisers to ease their passage in rough seas; the Little Red Ship had none and offered a famously wild ride when the Southern Ocean threw some big weather in its path. Advances in ship architecture such as the X-Bow hull adopted by the newest generation of polar cruise ships, offer an even smoother voyage.
Better yet, the fleet is also starting to move away from polluting marine diesel. The purpose-built luxury icebreaker Le Commandant Charcot runs on a hybrid liquid natural gas/electric engine, and more and more ships are adopting battery technology for their motors. IAATO has pledged that all ships in the polar fleet will track the International Maritime Organisation’s target of at least 50% emissions reductions by 2050 compared with 2008. As part of this climate change strategy, all individual ship operators now provide emissions data to IAATO to be able to better plan emission reduction (Swoop’s founder sits on IAATO’s Climate Change Committee).
On top of this IAATO has created a series of strict guidelines for cruise ships and their passengers while in the region, to reduce the environmental impact of their visits. These include capping the number of people who can visit any landing site to one hundred at any given time, putting a bar on larger cruises landing any passengers at all, and strict rules on wildlife watching and biosecurity to prevent disturbing local ecosystems.
Nearly sixty years on from Lars-Eric Lindblad’s creation of the concept of expedition cruising, the Antarctic polar cruise industry has come a long way. But while the ships are undoubtedly more comfortable and there’s an increased focus on environmental protection, one thing remains the same: the overwhelming experience of being immersed in one of the greatest natural wonders of the world.
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