1. Quoted in Walter Chapman, The Loneliest Continent: The Story of Antarctic Discovery (Greenwich 1964), p. 31. Countless writers on Antarctica begin their narratives of Antarctica’s (European) exploration citing Cook’s premature sense of an ending to earth’s southern geography.
2. Books on Antarctica typically open with a gesture to the continent’s earliest speculative conceptualizations by the Egyptian Ptolemy, whose second-century map of the world introduced the area he labeled terra australis incognita. See, for example, P. I. Mitterling, America in the Antarctic to 1840 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1959), p. 4.
3. See Stephen Pyne, “The Extraterrestrial Earth: Antarctica as Analogue for Space Exploration,” Space Policy 23 (2007): 147–149, for a discussion of the limitations of human inhabitation in Antarctica and its repercussions for science policy and cultural development, including resource extraction, in Antarctica. Pyne’s exceptionalism is also discussed in Chapter 2.
4. Throughout the 1990s, routine praise for the Treaty’s ability to negotiate the needs of the most powerful signatories and to control the challenges of upstarts has been somewhat balanced by scholarship discussing persisting problems, including the Treaty’s lack of ability to regulate tourism. See for example, A. Jorgensen-Dahl and W. Ostreng (eds), The Antarctic Treaty System in World Politics Oslo: Fridtjof Nansen Institute, 1991), and Beck (2004): 205–212, for tensions developing between original signatory states and emerging states and global interest, and Dodds (2006): 59–70 for a geopolitical assessment that names the condition of the postcolonial. More recent accounts have been more critical of the ATS, not as a treaty in itself, but as it has materially been able to control or even predict human intervention and change in the region. See for example, Scott (2003): 473.
5. For the neo-foundational reassessments of the role of repressed empire in the American imaginary and of the transnational discussion, see Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan (eds), Cultures of United States Imperialism Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 1993.