We ought, in 1950, to be celebrating the centenary of the end of the Franklin Search: so great was the opportunity which one of the 1850 expeditions narrowly missed. As it is, we have nine years left to wait for that celebration; and a hundred years ago there were nine years left in which men were called upon to risk and sometimes to give their lives in the quest for the missing expedition, and in which the relatives of its members were kept in suspense, hope gradually dulling into resignation. The year. 1850 has instead the lesser distinction of being the first year in which traces of the Franklin Expedition were discovered.

On 4 December 1835, thirty-four Hull shipowners sent to the Admiralty a Memorial statingthat, on 11 October, eleven whaling ships had been left by the Alfred, Hull, closely besetin Davis Strait between lats. 69° N. and 70° N., and longs. 60° W. and65° W., frozen in by the early approach of winter. It was stated that there waslittle prospect of their speedy liberation. The crews numbered upwards of 600 souls. Thevalue of the vessels was estimated at no less than £59,000 excluding the value of oiland whalebone worth £13,500. The ships were as follows:

On 12 February 1948, H.M. Submarine Ambush sailed from Rothesay, Isle of Bute, to carry out a prolonged investigation into the effects of “snorting” in rough weather and conditions of extreme cold.

H.M. Submarine Ambush, built since the end of the war, is a vessel of some 1350 tons surface displacement, 287 ft. long, embodying a large number of the latest developments including “snort” and radar. Apart from scientific measuring instruments, no special features were installed in the ship and her company, five officers and sixty men, was the normal crew with the addition of Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander W. H. Davidson, R.N., as observer for the Royal Naval Physiological Laboratory, and an assistant. No changes were made and no men were specially selected for the mission.

There have been few more controversial figures in the history of exploration than Amerigo Vespucci, and it is therefore necessary to be extremely cautious in deciding whether he did, or did not, discover the island of South Georgia in the year 1501. Humboldt and Mill believed that he might have done so, but thought that, on the whole, his most likely landfall was southern Patagonia or Tierra del Fuego. Matthews, who devoted considerable attention to working out distances and directions, came to the conclusion that Vespucci very probably arrived at South Georgia after leaving the coast of Brazil and sailing south-westwards, while the Australian map of Antarctica, published in Canberra in 1939, and the Antarctic Pilot (London, second edition, 1948) have respectively described this achievement as a probability and as a possibility.

[The South Shetland Islands were first sighted in February 1819 by William Smith, master and part-owner of the brig Williams of Blyth, and resighted in October of that year, when Smith landed and claimed the territory for the British Crown. On his arrival at Valparaiso, he and his ship were taken over by the British naval authorities and sent back in December 1819 with Edward Bransfield, Master, R.N., and a small naval staff to survey the new territory. During their absence on this duty, an account of the discovery by John Miers and a sketchmap signed by “Henry Foster, Midn H.M.S. Creole”, both dated January 1820, were sent home. The former was published in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, Vol. 3, No. 6, 1820, p. 367–80, and the latter is preserved among the original documents of the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty (Press mark S 90/3 Ael).

John Miers (1789–1879) was an English engineer who had gone out to Valparaiso in 1819 at the invitation of Lord Cochrane, then commanding the Chilean Navy, to help in developing that country's mineral resources. He was installing a plant at Conc6n for rolling copper plate for sheathing vessels, and had contracted with Smith for the transport of mining machinery from Valparaiso to Concón in the Williams, when Captain Sheriff, the Senior British Naval Officer at Valparaiso, decided to charter the Williams and to send Bransfield to the Antarctic.

Between 1939 and 1945, plans were afoot in the Union of South Africa for the establishment of meteorological stations on Gough Island in the South Atlantic, and on one of the Prince Edward Islands in the southern Indian Ocean. Shortage of shipping and staff caused these plans to be shelved in 1945. In 1947, Field-Marshal Smuts, who was then Prime Minister of the Union, decided to annex the Prince Edward Islands without delay. These islands, which consist of Marion Island and the smaller Prince Edward Island, are situated in approximately lat. 47° S., long. 38° E., half-way between South Africa and Antarctica, and have always been regarded as British, although no records of any sort of annexation ceremony can be traced.

In December 1947, therefore, the frigate H.M.S.A.S. Transvaal recalled her crew from Christmas leave and sailed south. Bad weather delayed a landing for several days, but eventually, on 29 December 1947, the commanding officer of the Transvaal landed on a rocky beach on the eastern side of Marion Island and hoisted the South African flag.

The discovery of Heard Island (lat. 53°; 10′ S., long. 73°; 35′ E.) has usually been attributed to Capt. John J. Heard of the American barque Oriental, who sighted the island on 25 November 1853 during a voyage from Boston to Melbourne. The relevant passage from Captain Heard's log book has been published by the American Geographical Society. He did not get nearer than twenty miles and mentions only one island, which can definitely be identified with Heard. Satisfactory evidence, however, has been found which shows that Heard Island was first sighted by the British sealer Peter Kemp, Master of the brig Magnet, on 27 November 1833. Kemp's discovery apparently remained unpublished, and his journal has been lost. The only surviving evidence of his voyage is a track chart preserved in the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty.

The conditions of surface and weather in which sledge journeys are carried out, together with distances travelled and altitudes attained, are of great interest to anyone attempting to analyse and compare performances by various travellers.

To obtain the necessary data the investigator must usually turn to the narrative of the journey concerned and extract the data himself, setting them out in some suitable form. Gordon Hayes adopts this procedure with many journeys in his Antarctica (London, 1928), and John Rymill gives an appendix, analysing the main journeys of the British Graham Land Expedition, 1934–37, in Southern Lights (London, 1938). Many other writers have made similar tables, but essential data always appear to be lacking, and there is no standard form to which such analyses can be reduced.