The discovery is linked to Estonia because one of the first men to see Antarctica in 1820, who documented the event, was the Baltic German seafarer Fabian Gottlieb Benjamin von Bellingshausen, who was born in Saaremaa.

Fabian von Bellingshausen (1778–1852), a Baltic German and captain in the Russian Imperial Navy, participated in the first Russian circumnavigation in 1803–06. In 1819 Czar Alexander I dispatched Bellingshausen on a voyage to the Southern Ocean, a dream assignment for Bellingshausen, who had long admired Cook’s voyages. With his flagship Vostok (East), a newly launched corvette with a copper-sheathed hull, and the older, sluggish transport ship Mirnyy (Peaceful) which constantly slowed the expedition, Bellingshausen sailed from Kronstadt, an island off St Petersburg, in July 1819.

The expedition crossed the Antarctic Circle on January 26, 1820, and the next day became the first to sight the Antarctic continent. Through a heavy curtain of falling snow, at 69°21´S, 2°14´W, Bellingshausen saw ‘an icefield covered with small hillocks.’ Not realizing the importance of his discovery, however, he merely noted the weather and position in the ship’s log before continuing. The two ships sailed eastward, pushing further south than anyone before, reaching 69°25´S. Eventually they tacked north to escape the oncoming winter, spending four months in the South Pacific in 1820. Turning south again, they crossed the Antarctic Circle six more times, eventually probing as far as 69°53´S, where they discovered Peter I Øy, the southernmost land known at that time. They also found a second piece of ice-free land south of the Circle, which Bellingshausen called Alexander Coast after the czar. It is now known to be an island joined to the Antarctic Peninsula by an ice shelf.

Returning north through the South Shetlands, Bellingshausen met American sealer Nathaniel Brown Palmer, in Hero, who claimed to know well the coast Bellingshausen had just explored. A legend created by Palmer’s biographer, sealer Edmund Fanning, insists that Bellingshausen was so impressed by Palmer’s claims of knowledge that he named the new territory after Palmer. But the meticulous Bellingshausen never noted this alleged act in his diaries or charts; the story appears to be fantasy.

Despite Bellingshausen’s discoveries – and his duplication of his hero Cook’s circumnavigation of Antarctica – he returned to Russia to find that his countrymen had little interest in his voyage. It took nearly 120 years and the start of the Cold War before his accomplishments were fully appreciated – by a Soviet Union newly anxious to assert its right to authority in the Antarctic.