Chapter 35
An Original Document About the History
of the Antarctic Expedition « Belgica »
Alexandru Marinescu
Abstract The author presents original documents useful to understand the connections between the members of the staff and the projects of the Belgica Expedition in the Antarctic Region (1897–1899).
In 1998 an article was published in Noesis, the journal of the Romanian Academy
for the History of Sciences, dedicated to the correspondence between members of
the staff of the expedition “Belgica”. At that time I thought that the hundreds of
letters and documents scattered among the prestigious European archives of
Anvers, Bruxelles, Krakow, Cluj, Bucharest, and probably elsewhere, deserved to
be gathered in a formal volume, with foreword, notes, short biographies and all that
would make a publication of this type exhaustive. Unfortunately, I could not bring
this project to fruition. Instead I only published the correspondence between Adrien
de Gerlache, the initiator, organizer and leader of the expedition “Belgica”
(1897–1899) and the Romanian Emil Racovitza, the expedition’s naturalist. This
correspondence, mostly dating from the planning phase of the expedition, was
printed by the publishing house “Compania” from Bucharest in the “Journal”
volume, and released on the centenary of the Belgian expedition.
Previously I read countless letters addressed to Emil Racovitza, but until the end
of 1990 I never encountered a letter written by Racovitza, even though I knew that
he replied to his correspondents, annotating on each letter received by him both the
receipt date as well as the reply date. The last day of my visit to the Royal Institute
of Natural Sciences in Bruxelles, during the final hours of my stay while the
luggage was being prepared and I was waiting to depart for the airport, I was
delivered in the laboratory a big box with the “Belgica” documents. These papers
were forgotten for years, probably ignored by everyone, stored in a corner of the
laboratory belonging to the Professor who directed the Museum’s section of
Oceanography.
Full of emotion, I discovered among the documents from the box more than
40 letters authored by Emil Racovitza written to other members of the expedition. I
A. Marinescu (*)
Romanian Committee of History of Science and Technology, Bucharest, Romania
e-mail: juandi@yahoo.fr
© Springer International Publishing AG 2018
C.W. Finkl, C. Makowski (eds.), Diversity in Coastal Marine Sciences, Coastal
Research Library 23, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57577-3_35
593
An Original Document About the History
of the Antarctic Expedition « Belgica »
Alexandru Marinescu
Abstract The author presents original documents useful to understand the connections between the members of the staff and the projects of the Belgica Expedition in the Antarctic Region (1897–1899).
In 1998 an article was published in Noesis, the journal of the Romanian Academy
for the History of Sciences, dedicated to the correspondence between members of
the staff of the expedition “Belgica”. At that time I thought that the hundreds of
letters and documents scattered among the prestigious European archives of
Anvers, Bruxelles, Krakow, Cluj, Bucharest, and probably elsewhere, deserved to
be gathered in a formal volume, with foreword, notes, short biographies and all that
would make a publication of this type exhaustive. Unfortunately, I could not bring
this project to fruition. Instead I only published the correspondence between Adrien
de Gerlache, the initiator, organizer and leader of the expedition “Belgica”
(1897–1899) and the Romanian Emil Racovitza, the expedition’s naturalist. This
correspondence, mostly dating from the planning phase of the expedition, was
printed by the publishing house “Compania” from Bucharest in the “Journal”
volume, and released on the centenary of the Belgian expedition.
Previously I read countless letters addressed to Emil Racovitza, but until the end
of 1990 I never encountered a letter written by Racovitza, even though I knew that
he replied to his correspondents, annotating on each letter received by him both the
receipt date as well as the reply date. The last day of my visit to the Royal Institute
of Natural Sciences in Bruxelles, during the final hours of my stay while the
luggage was being prepared and I was waiting to depart for the airport, I was
delivered in the laboratory a big box with the “Belgica” documents. These papers
were forgotten for years, probably ignored by everyone, stored in a corner of the
laboratory belonging to the Professor who directed the Museum’s section of
Oceanography.
Full of emotion, I discovered among the documents from the box more than
40 letters authored by Emil Racovitza written to other members of the expedition. I
A. Marinescu (*)
Romanian Committee of History of Science and Technology, Bucharest, Romania
e-mail: juandi@yahoo.fr
© Springer International Publishing AG 2018
C.W. Finkl, C. Makowski (eds.), Diversity in Coastal Marine Sciences, Coastal
Research Library 23, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57577-3_35
593