Throughout history ‘explorers’ from advanced countries have named place they have ‘discovered’ in lands occupied by native people from time immemorial, with the result that many local place-names have been disregarded and their history forgotten. Antarctica, however, is the one great land region on Earth that was truly ‘discovered’ when the South Shetland Islands were sighted in 1819, so that the place-names that gradually evolved in later exploration enshrine all the history of human endeavour on the continent.