This is Kyra Sims.

She's a professional French horn player, composer, and performance artist.

She's performed with John Baptiste, Carol King.

She's been on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

But in this clip, Kyra wasn't performing in his studio or on television.

She was on a research vessel at the bottom of the world.

How did Kyra get here? It all started with a hobby that she picked up during lockdown, doing history research online.

I think I was just kind of in a rabbit hole one night and I was wondering, has there ever been a French horn player in Antarctica?

As it turned out, an attempt had been made, kind of.

I started doing all this research and they found this very funny story about this naturalist

named Joseph Banks.

Joseph Banks had made a name for himself traveling the South Pacific with the explorer James Cook,

and they wanted to team up once again to go even further south.

Because this was the 1700s, and they actually didn't know Antarctica existed yet,

they just theorized that maybe there was a landmass down there.

So they're going down there to check it out.

Joseph Banks in the planning stages is like,

I really want to go all out this time.

I want a greenhouse on the ship.

He wanted poets and cooks and two French horn

players. And actually, in my research, I found a receipt for two French horns that he bought.

So he was like, yeah, I got these French horn players. They're cool. Here are their names. They're like

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