The Patria was obtained and re-named Belgica for the Belgian Antarctic Expedition led by Commandant Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery of the Belgian Navy. The main aim of the expedition was to find the position of the South Magnetic Pole. The expedition was intended to be summer only, returning before the Antarctic winter began.

   The Belgica left Antwerp on August 16th 1897. She was so overloaded that she could make no more than 6 knots under steam and her decks were barely 2 feet clear of water
   She crossed the Antarctic Circle on the 15th of Feb 1898 off Palmer Land on the Antarctic Peninsula. The men of the Belgica made the first ever land excursions into Antarctica, spending a week ashore in an attempt to travel inland.
   De Gerlache later ventured further south in an attempt to beat the furthest south record held by James Ross 57 years earlier in 1841 at 78° 11' S, but it was too late in the season to be so southerly and by the 3rd of March 1898 the Belgica was trapped in the sea ice in the Bellingshausen Sea by Alexander Island, 71o 30' S 85o15' W.

   Thus albeit involuntarily, the crew were the first ships party to over winter in Antarctica. The unprepared crew had a very difficult time of things, de Gerlache and his captain both succumbed to scurvy with many other of the crew.
   The Norwegian first mate Roald Amundsen (later to be the leader of the first team to reach the South Pole) and American surgeon Frederick Cook (later to be the first man to reach the North Pole) rallied the crew and enforced a diet of fresh seal meat.
   After more than a year trapped in the ice, the crew again supervised by Amundsen and Cook, sawed a channel through the ice over a period of weeks to free the ship which could then return to Belgium.