On this day in 1898 the Southern Cross left London: a Norwegian whaler refitted for ice, roughly ninety dogs, and two prefabricated wooden huts to be bolted together at the far end. Carsten Borchgrevink's plan was to winter on the Antarctic mainland, which nobody had done. The ship reached Cape Adare in February 1899 and ten men stayed behind while she sailed north for the season.
The two youngest of that ten were Per Savio and Ole Must, Sámi from Finnmark, both barely into their twenties. They ran the dogs and, more usefully, they knew snow — how to build in it, travel over it, and stay warm rather than merely alive. Every later British party that praised its own hard-won polar skill was standing on lessons of that kind. Savio and Must were among the first people to overwinter on the Antarctic continent, and they went home again.
What they actually took: spruce huts, sledges, dogs, coal, and the assumption that the wind at Cape Adare would be worse than anyone had budgeted for. It was. The zoologist Nicolai Hanson died there in October 1899 and was buried on the ridge above the camp. The expedition also made the first landing on the Great Ice Barrier, twenty-three years before the huts at Cape Adare had any neighbours.
Inés, the Southern Cross began as the Norwegian whaler Pollux, built in 1886 and rebuilt with a reinforced bow before she sailed. Whalers made good polar ships because they were built to be squeezed and shrug it off — a hull shaped by the ice trade long before anyone thought of Cape Adare.
Inés, the hut at Cape Adare went up beside one of the largest Adélie penguin colonies on the continent, hundreds of thousands of birds in season. By all accounts the penguins carried on entirely unbothered by the ten men, which is about the level of regard I would expect.