New South Greenland

Because the Weddell Sea area was so little visited and hard to navigate due to ice conditions, the alleged land was never properly investigated before its existence was emphatically disproven during Antarctic expeditions in the early 20th century.

At the time of Morrell's voyage, the geography of the then-unnamed Weddell Sea and its surrounding coasts was almost entirely unknown, making the claimed sighting initially plausible.

In June 1912, the German explorer Wilhelm Filchner searched for but found no traces of land after his ship Deutschland became icebound in the Weddell Sea and drifted into the locality of Morrell's observation.

Morrell may have been honestly mistaken, through miscalculation of his ship's position (the reported coastline does roughly match the shape of the nearest real one, but offset by a large distance) or by misremembering detail when writing the account after nine years.

[1] In 1822, Benjamin Morrell, who had sailed to the South Sandwich Islands the previous year,[2] was appointed commander of the schooner Wasp for a two-year voyage of sealing, trading and exploration in the Antarctic seas and the southern Pacific Ocean.

The polar historian Hugh Robert Mill notes that Morrell's description of this island's physical features fails to mention its most singular characteristic—the permanent ice sheet that covers its surface.

[6][8] After several days of exploration (and, evidently, profitable sealing), Wasp left the Kerguelens on 11 January 1823, sailing south and east to record her furthest eastern position at 64°52'S, 118°27'E on 1 February.

Mills, is that since Morrell's account was written nine years after the voyage he may not have had access to the ship's log, and hence "felt constrained to invent details that appeared plausible", in order to sustain his narrative.

[15] Robert Headland of the Scott Polar Research Institute has suggested various reasons for these false sightings, ranging from "too much rum" to deliberate hoaxes designed to lure rival ships away from good sealing grounds.

[16] At 2 pm on 15 March, as Wasp cruised north-eastwards, Morrell records: "Land was seen from the masthead, bearing west, distance 3 leagues" (about nine miles, 14 km).

At 10 o'clock Wasp "bade farewell to the cheerless shores of New South Greenland",[17] and sailed for Tierra del Fuego, then through the Magellan Strait into the Pacific Ocean, reaching Valparaíso, Chile, on 26 July 1823.

[26] Filchner left the ship on 23 June and, with two companions and sufficient provisions for three weeks, sledged westward across the sea ice in search of Morrell's land.

[26] On 17 August 1915 Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance, trapped in the ice like Deutschland three years earlier, drifted to a point 10 miles west of Morrell's sighting.

Here, a depth sounding recorded 1,676 fathoms (10,060 feet, 3,065 m), leading Shackleton to write: "I decided that Morrell Land must be added to the long list of Antarctic islands and continental coasts that have resolved themselves into icebergs".

[27] Although Filchner's and Shackleton's investigations and observations were accepted as conclusive proof that New South Greenland was a myth,[28] there remained the question of Sir James Ross's reported appearance of land in a position around 65°S, 47°W.

[31] Hugh Robert Mill, writing in 1905 before the non-existence of New South Greenland had been finally established, concluded that because of Morrell's blunders, and his habit of incorporating the experiences of others into his story, all his claims should be treated as unproven.

Gould writes: "If Morrell wished to gain an undeserved reputation as an Antarctic explorer, one would think he could have gone a better way about it than to bury his pièces justificatives, after he had forged them, in an undistinguished corner of so bulky a book.

In his account, Morrell writes that he was "destitute of the various nautical and mathematical instruments",[39] although other parts of his narrative seem to indicate that the occasional dead reckoning calculation was the exception to the norm.

[40] A longitudinal error of 14° is very large, and the additional distance of about 350 miles (560 km) to the Foyn coast seems too great to have been covered within the ten-day voyage from the South Sandwich Islands, where the ship's position is recorded accurately.

[34] One form of superior mirage, sometimes described as a Fata Morgana, distorts distant flat coastlines or ice edges both vertically and horizontally, so they can appear to have tall cliffs and other features such as high mountain peaks and valleys.