In 1907,
Jean-Baptiste Charcot launched a new Antarctic expedition and began work on a new ship,
Pourquoi-Pas (IV), a three-masted
barque designed for polar exploration, equipped with a motor and containing three laboratories and a library. It was built at
Saint-Malo to plans by Francois Gautier in his shipyard. From 1908 to 1910, Charcot set out in
Pourquoi-Pas, wintering at
Petermann Island, on his second
Antarctic polar expedition. He returned to France in 1910 laden with scientific discoveries; he had finished the mapping of
Alexander Island and discovered a new island,
Charcot Land. In 1912,
Pourquoi-Pas became the French Navy's first
school ship. From 1918 to 1925, Charcot took
Pourquoi-Pas on various scientific missions in the North Atlantic, the English Channel, the Mediterranean and the
Faroe Islands, mainly to study underwater
lithology and
geology by means of drag nets, to whose material and use Charcot made major improvements. From 1925 onwards, limited by age, Charcot lost command of the ship (though he remained on board as head of the expedition) for her many voyages around the Arctic glaciers. In 1926, Charcot and
Pourquoi-Pas explored the eastern coast of
Greenland and brought back many fossils and samples of insects and flora. In 1928,
Pourquoi-Pas set out to investigate the disappearance of the large French
seaplane Latham 47 with the Norwegian explorer
Roald Amundsen on board, which had itself been looking for the Italian general
Umberto Nobile, who had set out to cross the North Pole in the dirigible
Italia and not been heard from since. In 1934, Charcot and
Pourquoi-Pas set up an ethnographic mission in Greenland headed by
Paul-Émile Victor, who spent a year in
Angmagssalik living amid the
Eskimo population. In 1935, Charcot and
Pourquoi-Pas returned there to look for Victor and his three companions (Gessain, Pérez et Matter) and began the mapping of these regions. On 16 September that year, the ship managed to reach a small port to escape a
cyclone which ravaged the coasts of Iceland. In September 1936, returning from the mission to Greenland to deliver scientific material to Victor's mission (which had just traversed the
ice sheets in 50 days) and after carrying out a survey mission,
Pourquoi-Pas stopped at
Reykjavík to re-provision with fuel on 13 September. They set out for
Saint-Malo two days later, on 15 September, but on 16 September the ship was caught in a violent cyclonic storm and lost on the reefs of
Álftanes at
Mýrar. 23 of the crew were lost in the wreck and 17 survivors died before rescue came, leaving only one survivor, Eugène Gonidec, master steersman.
Jean-Baptiste Charcot was one of the dead, aged 69.
Pourquoi Pas Point and
Pourquoi Pas Island in Antarctica were later named after it. ==See also==