‘It is not easy’, wrote Captain James Clark Ross, ‘to describe the joy and light-heartedness we all felt …fairly embarked in the enterprise we had all so long desired to commence’. Ross&s description of the emotional texture on board Erebus and Terror as the British Antarctic Expedition sailed from England in 1839 is an excellent example of the general tendency to portray Antarctic exploration as a mutually-agreed-upon adventure. This perspective pervades official exploration accounts and has become deeply embedded in the subsequent histories based on them. In a recent example, Marilyn Landis subtitled her 2001 book Antarctica, ‘400 Years of Adventure’.

This chapter contests the consensus implied in these and many other portrayals of Antarctic expeditions. Far from Ross's empty ‘we all’, there was a sharp class-based divergence in the ways that workers and masters experienced Antarctic exploration. To be sure, this did not mean that there was always unanimity within the ranks of the masters – there were often rifts between expedition leaders, officers and scientists – but in general members of these groups stood to gain personal, political and sometimes financial gain by participating in voyages of exploration. The workers on whose labour they depended, gained considerably less, and were considerably less enamoured with its possibilities. Neither did it mean that there were no enthusiastic Antarctic worker-adventurers.