Britain's exploration of South Pole was ‘colonial', claims museum

Telegraph

26-04-2025

A Cambridge University museum has claimed Britain's exploration of Antarctica was ' colonial ' – despite only penguins living there.
The university's Polar Museum holds personal artefacts linked to the explorers of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, including Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton.
The museum informs visitors that the daring and often fatal expeditions to the South Pole were 'in the colonial mould', despite the southernmost continent having no human population to conquer or exploit.
Signs pointing out colonial connections were installed as part of a project aimed at 'confronting Cambridge's colonial story'.
The signage for an Antarctic display at the museum reads: 'The colonised Antarctic? At the beginning of the 20th century little was known about Antarctica.
'This set the stage for a number of famous expeditions to reach the South Pole.
'At the same time, these expeditions were in the colonial mould – claiming land, mapping, prospecting for resources, even sending stamps as a sign of ownership.
The label adds: 'The only difference was that there was not an indigenous population in Antarctica.'
The Polar Museum is part of the Scott Polar Research Institute, named for the famed explorer, which is itself part of the university's department of geography.
The signage was installed as part of Cambridge's 'Power and Memory' project to address the university's links to colonialism, empire, and slavery.
As part of this, the Polar Museum undertook work to reveal 'hidden histories' in its collection, to show a different side to Arctic and Antarctic exploration.
Labels direct visitors to the fact that 'the extraction of natural resources has been a primary part of colonial expeditions in the Arctic'.
One sign critiques the word 'encounter', stating that in meetings between explorers and indigenous populations 'colonial expeditions would usually hold the power'.
Other labels draw attention to the contributions of women and black people in the field of polar research.
Cambridge's past controversies
The University of Cambridge's museums have made efforts to confront the subjects of empire and colonialism, and the Fitzwilliam Museum dedicated a recent exhaustion to the history of slavery and its abolition.
A catalogue accompanying the exhibition, titled Rise Up, claimed Stephen Hawking and others benefited from slavery-derived funds given to Cambridge two centuries before the physicist was born.
Cambridge professors and leading historians contested the claims, insisting they were made on the grounds of a misreading of history.
Before this row, the same institution caused controversy when it rehung many of its artworks.
The Fitzwilliam suggested that paintings of the British countryside evoke dark 'nationalist feelings'.
The new signage stated that pictures of 'rolling English hills' can stir feelings of 'pride towards a homeland', but that works by Constable and others have a 'darker side'.