Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen

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A portrait of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen

Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen (also known as Russian: Фаддей Фаддеевич Беллинсгаузен; Faddey Faddeyevich Bellinsgauzen) (September 20, 1778–January 13, 1852) served as a naval officer of the Russian Empire and commanded the second Russian expedition to circumnavigate the globe. During this expedition Bellingshausen became one of three people to first see the continent of Antarctica.

Born to a Baltic German family in Lahetaguse manor (in German: Lahhetagge) in Saaremaa (Ösel) in Estonia - then part of the Russian Empire - von Bellingshausen enlisted as a cadet in the Imperial Russian Navy at the age of ten. After graduating from the Kronstadt naval academy at age eighteen, he rapidly rose to the rank of captain. A great admirer of Cook's voyages, he served from 1803 in the first Russian circumnavigation of the Earth. The vessel Nadezhda ("Hope") was commanded by Krusenstern, completing the mission in 1806. Von Bellingshausen's career continued with the command of various ships in the Baltic and Black Seas.

When Czar Alexander I authorised an expedition to the south polar region in 1819, the authorities selected Bellingshausen to lead it. Leaving Portsmouth on September 5, 1819 with two ships, the 600-ton corvette Vostok and the 530-ton support vessel Mirnyi (captained by Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev), the expedition crossed the Antarctic Circle (the first to do so since Cook) on January 26, 1820. On January 28, 1820 (New Style) the expedition discovered the Antarctic mainland approaching the Antarctic coast at a point with coordinates 69°21′28″S, 2°14′50″W and seeing ice-fields there. The point in question lies within twenty miles of the Antarctic mainland. Bellingshausen's diary, his report to the Russian Naval Minister on 21 July 1821 and other documents, available in the Russian State Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic in Saint Petersburg, Russia, were carefully compared with the log-books of other claimants by the British polar historian A. G. E. Jones in his 1982 study 'Antarctica Observed'. Jones concluded that Bellingshausen, rather than the Royal Navy's Edward Bransfield on 30 January 1820 or the American Nathaniel Palmer on 17 November 1820, was indeed the discoverer of the sought-after Terra Australis. During the voyage Bellingshausen also visited the South Shetland Islands, and discovered and named Peter I, Zavodovski, Leskov and Visokoi Islands, and a peninsula of the Antarctic mainland which he named the Alexander Coast but which has more recently borne the designation of Alexander Island. Bellingshausen Island in the South Sandwich Islands is named after him.

The expedition continued to make discoveries in the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Returning to Kronstadt on 4 August 1821 to no great acclaim, Bellingshausen continued to serve his tsar. He fought in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829 and attained the rank of admiral. He became the military governor of Kronstadt (from 1839) and died there in 1852.