The 20th of September, 1778 (according to a new style) there was born a famous seafarer, Admiral Thaddeus Faddeevich Bellingshausen.
The future discoverer was born on the island of Ezel (modern Saaremaa, Estonia). The proximity of the sea, communication with sailors and fishermen from early childhood, instilled in the boy a love for the fleet. At ten years he was given to the Naval Cadet Corps in Kronstadt. Having graduated in 1797 in the rank of midshipman, Thaddeus Bellingshausen for a while was walking the Baltic Sea on the ships of the Revel squadron.
In the years of 1803 – 1806 he took part in the first Russian round-the-world voyage on the "Nadezhda" ship under the command of Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenstern. This expedition became an excellent school for a young sailor. On his return to his homeland Bellingshausen continued to serve in the Baltic, and from 1810 he was transferred to the Black Sea Fleet, where he was commanding the frigates "Minerva" and "Flora". During this time, the researcher did a great job of clarifying the sea charts of the Caucasian coast and made a number of astronomical observations.
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In 1819 - 1821, captain of the 2nd rank Thaddeus Bellingshausen and Lieutenant Mikhail Lazarev headed the first Russian Antarctic expedition to the waters of the Southern Ocean on the sloops "Vostok" and "Mirny". The researchers managed to see the Antarctic coasts in January 1820. Bellingshausen spoke cautiously: "Over the ice fields of shallow ice and islands you can see the continent of ice, the edges of which are broken off perpendicularly and which continues as we see it, rising to the south like the shore". In February of the same year, the expedition approached almost the ice massif. This allowed Bellingshausen and Lazarev to draw a conclusion that they had a real "ice continent" before them.
The expedition also opened a number of islands in the tropical part of the Pacific Ocean. In addition, during the voyage, observations were made of the temperature of the air and the ocean, air pressure, there were collected ethnographic, zoological and botanical collections. Thaddeus Bellingshausen made the first attempt to classify polar ice and create an ice formation theory.
Gratitude of the whole world for these discoveries was generalized in 1867 by the German geographer August Peterman: "The name of Bellingshausen can be directly put on the row with the names of Columbus and Magellan, with the names of those people who did not retreat before the difficulties and imaginary impossibilities created by their predecessors, with the names of people who went their own way, and therefore they were the destroyers of barriers to the discoveries that epochs are designated."
Bellinshausen in the rank of Rear Admiral participated in the Russo-Turkish War in the years of 1828 – 1829. In 1839, the sailor became the military governor-general of Kronstadt. In 1843 he was promoted to the rank of admiral.
Thaddeus Bellingshausen was elected as a full member of the newly created Russian Geographical Society in the year of 1845.
The name of Bellingshausen is the sea in the Pacific Ocean, the cape on Southern Sakhalin and the island in the archipelago of Tuamotu.