Sealing at the End of the World: Exploring Connections Between Fur Seal Exploitation in Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego

MELISA A. SALERNO; MARÍA JIMENA CRUZ; ANDRÉS ZARANKIN

Kobe

Conferencia; 2021 SCAR SC- HASS Biennial Conference; 2021

Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR)

Commercial sealing became a global industry in the late eighteen century. As a result of the search for new hunting grounds in a competitive scenario, sealers gradually expanded the scope of their activities over the South Seas. In the early nineteenth century, sealers already operated in Patagonia, Malvinas/Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego, the South Shetlands, among others places. For some decades now, historians and archaeologists have expanded the knowledge about the Antarctic sealing industry. Although some works have pointed out the relationships that the Antarctic exploitation could have maintained with that carried out at some other regions, most research has only focused on Antarctica at the expense of its dialogues with other hunting grounds. This is especially true in the case of Tierra del Fuego, the closest South American archipelago to Antarctica. Considering historiographical contributions that confirm that several sealing voyages to the South Shetland Islands included visits to Tierra del Fuego, in this work we will attempt to approach the nature of these connections. In particular, the analysis of unpublished logbooks of some of these voyages will provide relevant clues to explore the complementarities that could have existed between these two regions at the level of the exploitation. However, it will also allow discussing the opportunities that Tierra del Fuego represented for sealers to get supplies, labor force, wintering places, intermediate ports for unloading resources, etc. In view of this information, we hope to start removing Antarctic sealing from the relative isolation where it is sometimes placed.