27 January: On this day in history

27 January 1663

Birth of George Byng, 1st viscount Torrington. After a successful naval career he was made first lord of the Admiralty under George II. Byng was the father of Admiral John Byng who was controversially shot for neglect of duty in 1757.

27 January 1820: Explorers catch sight of Antarctica for the first time

A Russian expedition ventures far into the frozen south

In January 1820, some eight months after it had sailed from the naval base at Kronstadt, the first Russian Antarctic expedition approached its goal. Its commander, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, a Baltic German nobleman, was an experienced sailor, having served in the first Russian voyage around the earth from 1803–06. But this was a mission unlike any other, sailing in desperately cold and dangerous conditions to find Antarctica. People had long known that a southern pole, surrounded by ice, must exist. But could they get there?

Von Bellingshausen commanded the first ship, the Vostok, while his second-in-command, Mikhail Lazarev, took charge of the Mirny. For safety, the two commanders had pledged never to lose sight of one another’s vessels: a resolution to which they stuck throughout the voyage.

By November, the two ships were in Australia, where they stopped for repairs before heading south-east. On and on they sailed, the weather ever colder, the mist ever thicker, a “long monotonous voyage, amidst unceasing dangers from ice, snow, rain, sleet and fog”, as von Bellingshausen put it. On 21 January, he spotted land, the first ever seen south of the Antarctic Circle: an island, as it turned out, which he named after Peter the Great. To celebrate, he handed out glasses of punch to his men, who gave three cheers. But still they had not seen the great southern continent itself.

For the next few days, von Bellingshausen and Lazarev picked their way carefully along the edge of a great ice sheet, conscious that any mistake could be fatal.

Then, on 27 January, the fog lifted. It was, von Bellingshausen remembered, the “most beautiful day”, icily cold but with clear skies and bright sunshine. And then he saw it: a headland away to the north, which “ended in a high mountain which was separated by an isthmus from another mountain chain extending to the south-west”. This was no little island; this, he told his men triumphantly, was Antarctica itself. He called it Alexander I Land, after the tsar he served. | Written by Dominic Sandbrook

27 January 1832

Birth in Cheshire of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson who, as Lewis Carroll, wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and The Hunting of the Snark.

27 January 1859

The future Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany is born in Potsdam, near Berlin, the eldest child of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia and Princess Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria. It is a difficult birth, leaving him with a withered left arm.

Browse more On this day in history

• Previous: 26 January
• Next: 28 January