Every year, on the month of May, the Chilean Navy traditionally celebrates what is known in the country as the “Month of the Sea”. In 2021, during these festivities the Navy took the opportunity to hold an event that would highlight the origins and historical background of the taking of possession of the Chilean Antarctic territory. This was possible by a fortuitous finding at the Prat Antarctic Naval Base, during a deployment of the Chilean navy ship "Aquiles" in 2016, to the frozen continent.

On the last day of May, during the closing speech the navy authorities took the opportunity to give an account of that remarkable discovery: the Minutes of the taking of possession of the Chilean Antarctic Territory, handwritten in situ by the President of Chile, Gabriel González Videla, in February 1948, at the former Chilean “Soberanía” Base. This document was solemnly handed by the Commander in Chief of the Chilean Navy, Admiral Julio Leiva to the National Historical Museum.

To achieve this event, we had met with high-ranking officials, in the former palace of the Royal Court of Santiago de Chile, which originally used to be the colonial building of our Supreme Court of Justice and later housed various institutions of the Republic, including the First National Congress in 1811. In 1982, this building became the headquarters of the National Historical Museum, an entity whose main objective is to promote the history of Chile as custodianship of historical items.
The Chilean Navy could not have found a more appropriate building and institution to hand over -for its custody to the entire Nation- a previously unknown document which accounts the taking of possession of the Chilean Antarctic territory, proof of a magnificent act of national history.

This handwritten text had remained forgotten among the ice of the South Shetland Islands since 1948 until, in a routine deployment of the "Aquiles" in 2016, this invaluable testimony was found in an old trunk in the premises of the Naval Base. This invaluable document, of legal and political relevance had remained silent in the mists of Antarctic history and now was solemnly being delivered for public knowledge. The unforeseen discovery of this document allowed to expose the truth of the past and broadcast it to Chile´s future generations, as a bridge that overcomes that stormy sea that unites us with the Chilean Antarctic territory.

This historical, legal, and political act of taking possession of a vast territory, like all great acts in the history of mankind, was not fortuitous, nor was it just the product of a rational and planned process that scientifically led us to that magnificent moment. For President González Videla to set foot in the Antarctic Continent, it took much more than researches, explorations, or the building of bases; it meant dodging dangers and enduring bitter cold and solitude never before experienced; moreover it took dreams; yes, dreams and illusions, even reaching the point of delirium, and which are part not only of our country´s history, but also of the history of our America and of the Castilian epic that gave birth to our people and shaped our homeland.

Indeed, when Christopher Columbus died, without having managed to cross the land boundaries of the New World, many other explorers and navigators of the Spanish Golden Age were sailing the Atlantic in search of a passage to the “new sea” as it was then referred to, with the hopes of more and greater discoveries, fame, wealth and glory, intermingling reality and geographical knowledge with feverish ideas, myths, and legends. They were knights-errant of the sea, no longer mounted on horses and steeds, but aboard small ships, and caravels, and the illusion and chivalrous awareness that life as it is, is not enough, that it needs the thrust of fiction to be truly real.

Thus, both the discovery of Chile in the fringes of the New World, as well as its southern geographical identity, began originally with the dreams of Columbus, but were continued with the exploits of many other great men: Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, Diego de Almagro in 1536, Pedro de Valdivia in 1541. All of them had as an inspiring motivation, to explore these new lands and their seas and to map and define their boundaries to promote their scientific, economic, and political-strategic potential.

Antarctica, the most unknown and the only unpopulated land in the entire globe, had been imagined since the beginning of history by the Greeks and Romans, who asserted its existence as a vast diametric land of the Arctic, and it was sketched, or rather, dreamed of, in the first charts calling it Terra Australis Incognita. To this land, which was still completely unknown at the time of the Spanish conquest, the Spanish soldier and poet Alonso de Ercilla, dreaming of Chile and Antarctica, mentioned it in his verses as a powerful southern geographic unit.

Thus, in the secular search for this famous region, the driving force of those and many others men was the dreamlike image that had existed since ancient times in human consciousness, that there must indeed be an Antarctic, that southern land that must necessarily be located to the south, towards the South Pole, since, if the earth was spherical, as Aristotle and Eratosthenes proposed, the laws of symmetry made necessary a large southern continent to balance the mass and continental surface of the already well-known northern hemisphere.

This same grandiose idea was in the mind of one of the greatest explorer and conqueror of America, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, when in 1513, several years before Magellan, managed to discover the inter-oceanic passage in Central America. He had decided to undertake the search for the unknown sea on the other side of America: The South Sea, as he baptized the new Ocean and that is how it was named for at least two centuries before "Pacific" coined by Magellan, was subsequently imposed.
Thus, the vast Pacific Ocean, which for a long time was also referred to as the "The Spanish Lake", burst into history.

Balboa´s feat surprisingly relates to the taking of possession of the Chilean Antarctic Territory which, four centuries later would take form when President Gabriel González Videla set foot on the frozen continent for the first time as president of a sovereign state.

In 1510 Núñez de Balboa founded the first long-standing Hispanic settlement on the continent, to strengthen the presence of Spain in these transoceanic lands, and from there he set course through the swamps and tropical jungles of the present-day Isthmus of Panama, until he finally reached the foothills of a mountain range that rose between the Atlantic and the new unknown sea.
The historiographers say that Balboa, after several days of tiring journey, left his diminished team to rest shortly before reaching the summit and began the last stretch to the peak alone, because he wanted to cherish for himself that historic moment in which the first European would contemplate the other immensurable sea.

As the Spanish historian Antonio Gutiérrez Escudero says in a beautiful metaphor, "Balboa saw how the immense salty plain of the Pacific Ocean stretched out at his feet".

At that glorious moment the legend ended, and the history of an immense ocean began, charting the maps all the way to the coasts of Cipango and Cathay.
After that unspeakable instant, the explorer summoned his team and together with Father Andrés de Vera prayed the Te Deum Laudamus, they carved a cross with arms outstretched towards both oceans, and Núñez de Balboa proceeded to seize that southern sea for the high and mighty sovereigns of Castile and Aragon.

But such a sighting, although already huge in real-life, in the fantasy of the explorer extended even beyond that blue horizon. In Balboa's mind emerged the ancestral consciousness of all that existed at the other end where his eyes could not see and, in a theatrical act, he extended his arm to take possession not only of that sea, but also of all the "lands, shores, ports and southern islands, with all their realms and kingdoms and people.... both at the Arctic and Antarctic poles, on either side of the terrestrial equator, inside or outside the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn...", as recorded in the minutes drawn up in situ by the scribe Andrés de Valderrábano.

The rising empire thus took possession, in an immense act of everything to which the South Sea led to, explicitly including Antarctica, a land still unknown, but symbolically incorporated into the Spanish domain.

Never again was the Antarctica, nor any part of her, been acquired as a holder by another sovereign power, until 1948, when the Republic of Chile, legitimate heir of the Spanish Empire according to uti possidetis iuris, took solemn and physical possession of the Chilean Antarctic Territory, through its President Gabriel González Videla, as evidenced by the document of priceless legal value that the Chilean Navy had now entrusted to the National Historical Museum.

Thus, a fictitious takeover by Vasco Núñez de Balboa made it possible that, more than four hundred years later, Gabriel González Videla took physical possession of that part of Antarctica that was already delimited as Chilean territory since 1940 by President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, encompassed between longitude 53°- and 90°-degrees West.

Centuries of dreams, surveys, sailing explorations and unspeakable sufferings of Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, Chileans and so many others, were determined in that brilliant moment, when the President of Chile completed the secular route initiated in the Isthmus of Panama by sovereignly setting foot on that Terra Australis Ignota.

On that historic day, at the meteorological and radio station "Soberanía", located in the South Shetland Islands, the President of Chile, arriving aboard the logistic navy ship "Presidente Pinto", took possession of the present-day Chilean Antarctic Territory, in the following terms:

With deep emotion as a Chilean citizen and as your president I set foot on this base "Soberanía", reaffirming the secular and indisputable rights of Chile over this part of the Antarctic territory, and we formally proclaim before the peoples of the world, that the presence of the Head of State, members of parliament, the army, the navy, and the air-force, the national press, of the workers' unions and of four Chilean women, worthy representatives of the courage and patriotism of the female soul, this act symbols the irreversible resolution of our homeland to defend with our lives, if necessary, the integrity of our national territory, which extends from Arica to the South Pole.

Soberanía Antarctic Base, on the 17^th of February 1948

Gabriel González
President of Chile

Rosa M. de González

Rosa G. de Claro”

These words, recorded in the visitors' logbook, solemnly safeguarded at the former "Soberanía" base, were followed by explicit actions to which only physical occupation gives the right. Consequently, the President set sail again southward to Puerto Covadonga Bay, on the Antarctic mainland, to take definitive possession of the Antarctic Peninsula, projecting all the way to the South Pole. In that place he inaugurated the O'Higgins Antarctic Base, built earlier that summer, during the first phase of the expedition.

It was a courageous, imposing, and visionary presidential act, because it took place in an adverse international context of growing diplomatic and military tension.

The fact is that, while our ships laid anchored in the Covadonga roadstead, unloading the provisions and supplies necessary for the breakneck construction of the O'Higgins base, Chile was facing serious diplomatic protests from Britain, which demanded to submit the matter to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, urging to dismantle the facilities of the already established Soberanía base. The British government went even further by dispatching the Governor of the Falkland Islands to Deception Island aboard a British cruiser, together with another warship that had been deployed to the area.

Furthermore, the British Admiralty ordered the departure of HMS Nigeria, a nine-thousand-ton cruiser stationed in Simonstown, South Africa to assist the Governor in the protection of the alleged British Antarctic territories. On the other hand, on the 12^th of February, Argentina announced that a naval task force composed of several cruisers, torpedo boats and airplanes would set sail from the naval base of Belgrano.

The President of Chile reacted by refusing to this thread and responding with the act of taking possession at the "Soberanía" Base on Greenwich Island, South Shetland, and the inauguration of the O'Higgins base on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Thus, not only the Antarctic islands, but also the territories on the mainland, from the Continental Peninsula to the South Pole, distinctly and irrevocably constituted the sovereign physical territory of Chile, according to the geographic projection that extends from the lands of Magallanes in accordance with the previous delimitation of Presidente Aguirre Cerda.

That Chilean territory, covered by ice, formerly called Palmer Peninsula, was then renamed "O'Higgins' Land" with the reminiscent name of the father of the nation.

This act has only parallels in our history with the taking of possession of the Strait of Magellan by Commander John Williams Wilson on September 21st, 1843, and with the taking of possession of Easter Island by Lieutenant Commander Policarpo Toro on September 9, 1888.

With the taking of possession of Antarctica in the middle of the 20th century, Chile acquires a coherence and geopolitical relevance of such magnitude that it rounds off the tricontinental character of the country, since our continental territory located in South America and our island territories of Easter Island located in Oceania, would now project themselves not only across the Pacific Ocean, but also towards the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Continent, all the way to the South Pole. Thus, the country conforms a triangle of immense oceanic expansion where Chile and its Navy have decided to act in accordance with International Maritime Law, exercising its rights and obligations in the territorial seas, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones, and its continental shelves, but also in the extensive high seas of the Southern Ocean that these vertices enclose, starting from the South Pole, southern pivot of the entire territory and sea of Chile.

As was to be expected, during the 1950's our nation had to face the expansionism of some European powers and the interests of other nations, as well as persistent attempts to establish a trust fund and further on to internationalize Antarctica within the framework of the United Nations.

As we know, this deep and acute international crisis was diplomatically resolved in 1959 with the Antarctic Treaty which, by easing tensions, established a suspension of territorial claims. This pax Antarctica, consisting of the moratorium or temporary suspension of Antarctic sovereign rights agreed in the treaty, will be effective only as long as the treaty remains in force, notwithstanding to the fact that these vast territories have been intended - in the meantime - exclusively for peaceful use and for scientific research purposes.

For this reason, Chile explicitly stated that it maintained its sovereignty over the Chilean Antarctic Territory, a matter that was especially safeguarded in its Article IV,1, namely:

"Nothing contained in the present Treaty shall be interpreted as: a) As a renunciation by any Contracting Party of previously asserted rights of or claims to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica;...".

It is common knowledge that the growing global restructuration, especially of national and international powers, the reality of climate change and global pollution, will have an impending effect on the substance and validity of the Antarctic Treaty and its complementary conventions. This is because we cannot rule-out an eventual violation of the Antarctic Treaty System by states not party to it, or its own internal weakening by denunciation of any of its member states; or even its modification or termination by its current members, hypotheses that would only reestablish the serious conflict of the "Antarctic Question" that was only possible to mitigate with the entry into force of the Antarctic Treaty two years after, in 1961.

This is what is happening nowadays in the Arctic, where only recently the main powers of the Arctic Council held a conference in Reykjavik that revealed serious differences, framed in a worrisome increase of US and Russian military forces in the area.

The Antarctic Treaty System is not written in stone. Therefore it´s not a closed case and its geopolitical and legal projection in the international arena remains to be seen. Chile, as a gateway to Antarctica, has a significant role to play in the future of the region.

It will be then, when the grand act of the taking of possession of the Chilean Antarctic Territory, will retrieve its immeasurable value as the culmination of the long road to the Terra Australis Ignota, initiated one day in 1513 by Vasco Núñez de Balboa and culminated by Gabriel González Videla in 1948. This act confirmed Chile's secular historical, geographical, and juridical titles of dominion in Antarctica, whose value was dramatically highlighted by the President of Chile when on February 17, 1948, he delivered a captivating speech at the Chilean Soberanía Antarctic Naval Base, stating:

"To all citizens of Chile, which I am sure are awaiting this memorable act, I offer this land of tomorrow, certain that its people will know how to preserve the sovereignty and unity of our territory, from Arica to the South Pole."