Between 1775 and 1825, and for a few years beyond, Antarctic exploration was integral to the expansion of capitalist methods of profitmaking into sub-Antarctic and Antarctic waters. In these decades the search for fur delineated and expanded the boundaries of the Antarctic frontier. Predictably, conventional historiography attributes the major discoveries that occurred within this process – the exploration of South Georgia, the discovery and exploration of many other sub-Antarctic islands, the discovery of the South Shetland Islands, Deception Island, and the first continental landings on the Antarctic Peninsula – to the heroism, exploratory drive and skills of the so-frequently memorialized captains of the sealing vessels. Yet, as we have seen in the previous chapter, these discoveries were underpinned by the mostly unacknowledged labour of workers who sailed the ships and who experienced exploration and discovery as work.

Yet the work imperatives on the fur frontier added an additional dimension to the role of the working class in Antarctic exploration. Firstly, and most basically, it was the pace and efficiency of their work that provided the essential momentum that impelled the masters to seek out new sealing grounds and make the famous discoveries that expanded the Antarctic frontier. Not only that: the labour process on which this exploratory momentum was based, was itself grounded in the exploring activities of the sealers themselves. And although their discoveries were not as grandiloquent as those made by their masters, neither were the means at their disposal.