With Antony444's permission, here is a little fanfiction about this TL:
The last continent (Antarctica 1902-1922)
Before the Great War, very few men had ever put a foot on antarctic soil, and none had done so further than a few kilometers inland. A few symbolic flags had been planted on the least hostiles spots around the coasts, French, English, Carolinian, among others, even a Scottish one a long time ago. Nevertheless no state really acted to try and take possession of these inhospitable lands, and no individual was both mad and wealthy enough to risk his life in the confines of this white emptiness. And thus Antarctica sat undisturbed.
But the Great War changed many things. Fortunes were made, which sometimes went from hands to hands and ended within the grasp of peculiar people. Crazy, some would say, out of their minds, lost to reason. Emboldened, would say others, bearers of a vision, slaves to a greater calling. Sometimes, those inheriting these fortunes simply felt guilty about amassing such a wealth in those dreadful times, and searched for any way to ease that guilt, being financing what appeared as the extraordinary feats humanity could attempt, or even taking part themselves in those attempts.
Be it as it may, a new era had opened for the last continent, an era of heroic deeds, an era of frenetic exploration and new discoveries, an era of great challenges, catastrophic failures and resplendent victories. The era of the polar expeditions.
What is known in popular history as the first of those expeditions actually wasn’t an attempt to reach the South Pole. Charles-Baptiste D’Arlevac, duke of Baie Grise in Basse Antipodée was one of those fervently preaching for France to control his whole birth continent. This, alas for Charles-Baptist, wasn’t the view of his government nor of his queen, later empress. He thus, and logically for a man born and nurtured in a family convinced that blood was the answer to all and that nobility was no less (but perhaps even more) than a free ticket for all their wills to be fulfilled by the lesser men, set his eyes on a bigger prize, that is, Antarctica.
Charles-Baptist goal was to land on said continent in November 1906 and spend the next year mapping precisely (more exactly, having his personal cartographer mapping precisely) the coast while circling all over Antarctica. Of course, he planned on leaving an impressive collection of flags all along, thus “conquering” the place for his monarch (and, not exactly secondarily, for his own glory).
Alas, the duke wasn’t exactly the most pleasant of men to interact with (his own self-esteem, some would say ego-centrism, coming between him and any he wouldn’t consider as a “peer”) and there is only so much loyalty that money can buy. He therefore ended up with less-than-stellar specialists among the members of his expedition, and quickly ensured that the others were only there for the pay, not for his project and even less for himself.
Inevitably, the first pothole turned into a dramatic failure, which the unforgiving weather of the Antarctic magnified into an utter catastrophe. Of the fifty-two members of the “year-round” expedition, three survivors managed to be rescued by a passing Irish boat two months after setting foot on the white continent. Charles-Baptist wasn’t among them.
This tragedy could have been a simple footnote in the books of history. However, as France and Spain were distributing the last unclaimed (at least in their views, the natives may have had another opinion on the subject) lands of Africa among themselves, the world started to look ever-shrinking and the ambitious of all nations soon started to see Antarctica as the last place where their appetite for conquest could be satisfied, that is, without taking the risk of a war against a “real” enemy. The South Pole had just became the last remaining trophy for those dreaming of taming new lands.
The next decade and a half saw an unbelievable interest for those “attempts” to reach the pole. In times of peace, the warmongers dreamed of new conquests. In times of war, the lovers of peace dreamed of its vast “unsullied” lands. Numerous expeditions were “launched”.
Many of these were scams, the most famous of them the “Oulianov-Djougachvili expedition” which ended with close to half a million Russians, Poles, Fins and Transylvanians robbed of their economies. The two men secretly fled to the Cape Republic, leaving their junior partner to bear the blunt of the Tsarina and her judges’ wrath. When the Russian secret services finally located the two main culprits, the now-proclaimed Drakan Empire refused to extradite them. The ensuing “special operation” left Vladimir Djougachvili and half a dozen Drakan policemen dead, worsening even more the relations between the two countries. Joseph Oulianov simply went missing, alongside a small fortune in gold and diamonds, never to be officially seen again. Literature, and later cinema, television and other media would offer theory upon theory concerning his final whereabouts.
Most of the sincere attempts at mounting a South Pole expedition would simply never get their undertaker further than their home country, sometimes even no further than their home city. Those who would actually set sails for Antarctica would often backtrack before reaching the white desolation, or perish along the way. From 1908 to 1918, only seven teams actually set foot on Antarctica proper.
Two of them would never move past their base camp, waiting a few month before giving up and coming back home, defeated, but alive. The Danish-Norwegian expedition of 1912 would progress more than a hundred kilometers within the continent, bringing back maps, samples, pictures and stories of places never before seen by man. But they too had to give up the pole. Not to the deadly weather, but to a far more trivial enemy. Botulism. It was later discovered that a small part of the food provisions were not properly checked. Only two cans were actually contaminated. But when Bjergmann, the head of the expedition, discovered one of them on the eve of reaching its no-return point before the winter, not knowing how the supposedly thorough check on the whole food stock let it pass, and, more importantly, what else it let pass, he picked the lives of his men over the glory and headed back.
Three other expeditions ended in tragedy, lost to the cold, illnesses, hunger, accidents, rivalry between members, or any other of those thousands of little setbacks that those unforgiving lands blew out of all proportion. The first bodies were only found nearly half a century later. And after a full century, the remains of the 1917 Spanish expedition would still remain unaccounted for.
In late 1918 the Drakans mounted their own expedition, with a core of Swedish volunteers and led by none other than a nephew of their infamous emperor. After all the bad press of the conquest of Madagascar, now Nelson Island, they wanted a “coup d’éclat” to try and restore their prestige on the world stage. The expedition was well-prepared; it seemed that said imperial nephew had recently stumbled upon an impressive fortune in precious stones and metal, one than none ever claimed back. He also benefited from the state’s (understand: his uncle’s) financial help to make ends meet. All said and done, this expedition was probably the one with the best equipment and crew so far.
It thus was the one which went the farthest.
But it was not enough. After fighting their way against the elements for months and progressing more than a thousand kilometers toward the pole, the Roosevelt-Van Beek expedition suffered the wrath of a storm unmatched by any of those they had endured to this point. After three days and three night of pure chaos and terror, when the wind finally came down, most of the precious equipment was utterly broken, the provisions spilled upon dozens of square kilometers of unforgiving ice. The Drakans and the Swedes had no choice but to turn around and hope to somehow miraculously get back to their coastal camp where some food was stockpiled.
For most of them, the miracle didn’t occur. Of the thirty seven men of the expedition, only two, both Swedes, made it back alive to their rendezvous with the ship that should bring them back to Africa. However, fearing that they would be judged for the failures of the expedition, they took advantage of the neutral flag the ship was operating under (bringing a Drakan ship in what was basically French-Irish waters would have been the kind of bad idea that was so bad it could very well end up being someone’s last bad idea) to transfer on a Spanish fishing boat and disembark in Spanish America, lost forever to the eyes and reach of their former masters.
If the world started pointing fingers at the Drakans’ failure, many would realize how close they had been to success. In some French circles, this realization took the form of a shockwave. The mishaps of an upstart like Charles-Baptiste were quiet funny, but only as long as no one else outside of France and, maybe, her closest allies, did succeed. The possibility of a Drakan, or worse, someone backed by a country with a competent army, like a Russian or a Carolinian, somehow laying a claim on the South Pole was outrageous. Actions had to be taken.
Empress Charlotte however was not very keen on suggesting to Russia and China that France was in the mood for even more conquests… and thus was the biggest threat around. In the eyes of France’s rivals, two tiny islands, especially belonging to a former ally and in the middle of an already French sea could be an acceptable addition to the empire. A brand new continent, no matter if uninhabited, surely wouldn’t. With tensions already running high all around the globe, Charlotte wasn’t ready to start a second Great War, especially if their was a risk of an unholy alliance of Russia and China against her armies. So, even if the new French expedition received some comfortable amounts of funding from the state (for the scientific parts, of course), it officially remained a private one. Both the crown and the empire’s government were also adamant that it did not change their (deliberately kept vague) view on the claims upon Antarctica… at least for now, that is.
This one soon turned into the largest expedition ever sent to Antarctica, with no less than forty scientists of various fields, among them geologists, cartographers, meteorologists, material sciences specialists, biologists and so on. It was also the first expedition to include women in its ranks, chief among them, on the discreet insistence of the empress, the head of the expedition, Odette Delabaie, a mixed Native-European from Cartier. She had been raised to knighthood the previous year by the empress herself for her saving of the d’Argenteuil cartographic expedition. When said expedition shipwrecked on the northern coast of the province, two of the youngest and fittest of its members went for help. One of them ended in Odette’s village. She then took upon herself to organize some of the remaining villagers, mostly women as most of the men had left for a two weeks hunting party, and rescued the stranded expedition. The presence within said expedition of a distant relative of the empress (somewhere around the fiftieth in the succession line) ensured the events quickly reached Charlotte’s ears.
The Delabaie expedition spent no less than six months, in the harsh 1919-1920 Cartier’s winter, training together before setting sail for their objective. Renewing their supplies, exchanging some items for others after their first trials, consolidating their food supplies, and making the long journey to the distant Antarctica ensured they set foot on the continent just as the austral winter was receding. The liberal use of sledges, dogs and, an important novelty in comparison of previous expeditions, skis, led to an incredibly fast pace. On March the 23rd, 1922, the French light cruiser Hirondelle, welcomed aboard the returning expedition. Their first stop would be the Malouines, where was developed a photograph that would soon be known all around the world: all the expedition members, exhausted, but smiling, grouped around the French flag, and, at their feet, a simple wood panel on which was written “Pôle Sud, 16 juin 1921”.