There was a fair amount of interest in "Antarctica," at least the concept of Antartica throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. It was assumed that a massive southern continent had to exist as a counterweight to the massive Eurasian continent to the North. But this interest largely ended in 1775 when Captain Cook returned after circumnavigating the Antarctic seas. He had crossed the Antarctic circle and had proven that there were no large temperate bodies attached to the "southern" continent. In fact he never even saw Antarctica thus proving how far south and intemperate it must be... if it existed at all. With nothing to settle, British exploration focused on Canada (hoping for a Northwest passage), and mapping out areas like Australia.

There was a later little flurry of exploration activity in the 1820s and 1830s, when the Antarctic peninsula was discovered, along with some of the southern islands. Then there were occasional visits here and there in the 1870s and 1890s. Regular visits didn't really begin until the 20th century when men like Scott and Shackleton were competing with other nations to collect "firsts," like the first visit to the pole and first trans-Antarctic crossing. And they largely weren't studying flora and fauna (not much to find in the interior after all).

It wasn't until the end of the 1920s, when the so called heroic age of Antarctic exploration ended, that people started working on more scientific and systematic studies of the continent.