The Antarctic continent forms about 10 per cent of the Earth's surface, and in 1900 it comprised half of the rapidly diminishing land on the planet that still remained outside colonial control. By 1920, although the majority of the continent remained unexplored, Antarctica as an entity had become a part of the imperial race. As Chapter 7 shows, this was the result of complex interlocking factors to do with the continuing coevolution of capitalism and colonialism that first generated a renewal of the logic of southern geographic expansion, and subsequently created the rationale by which the continent was incorporated into imperial geopolitics. And although the sledging journeys, the principal form taken by Antarctic exploration in the early twentieth century, were not themselves undertaken with a hidden agenda of colonization, yet they were so intrinsically enmeshed with that process that they were unavoidably construed and interpreted through a colonial lens. The outlook of this generation of Antarctic explorers was fundamentally colonial. That this was the case had an impact on how explorers interpreted their activities and discoveries, as they sought to bleach away the ‘stain of ignorance’ about the world. Their activities represented the worldview of colonial masters whose overriding orientation was to complete and compete with other nations for mastery over the remaining blank spaces of the global map.