The preservation and conservation of living resources was one of the original stated objectives of the Antarctic Treaty, 1959. The harvesting of animals near bases for food, especially Weddell Seals Leptonychotes weddelli received particular attention at the Fourth Meeting of SCAR, 1960 (Polar Record,1961) and several regulations were suggested including: a permit required before killing, records to be kept of animals killed, and use of alternative food where possible. Annex D, Section (b)i states “… Without detailed biological research it is impossible to assess the permissible annual crop which the various [Weddell] seal colonies would stand, but it is certain that this figure is being seriously exceeded in many areas.”

[Some months ago one of our staff, leafing through the Proceedings of the Fourth National Northern Development Conference held in Edmonton in November 1967, stumbled on a reference to an unknown skit on the First Franklin Expedition in a paper that Richard Glover read to the Conference (Glover, 1967, p 27). Further enquiries produced the manuscript we print here.

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one would grow before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together. (The King of Brobdingnag, in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, 1726.)

The eastern marches of Asia have been the Balkans of the Orient for at least a century, in which Japan, China, and Russia have striven for dominance along the Pacific littoral from Korea to Kamchatka. During and after the Second World War, eastern Siberia remained in a state of comparative truce but, in the last decade, the far reaches of Siberia, Mongolia and northern China have again become the focus of conflict. The recent negotiations between the USSR and Japan for joint commercial ventures in Siberia must be seen against the backdrop of this history, because they represent, in many ways, a continuation of national fears and motives inherited from the past.

If the Treaty of Paris in 1763 secured the Hudson's Bay Company in its monopoly of Rupert's Land, it also, by the Cession of Canada, opened to British enterprise the river-and-lake routes, discovered by the French, from Montreal to the fur-rich country west of Hudson Bay. This instalment of our list covers the years of the Montreal traders' expansion into the North-west, their crossing of the Arctic watershed into the fur trader's Eldorado, the Athabasca district, their organization into the Hudson's Bay Company's formidable rival, the North West Company, and concludes with the climax of their north-westward surge, Alexander Mackenzie's arrival at the Arctic Ocean in 1789. This activity obliged the Hudson's Bay Company to change its policy of waiting for the Indians to bring their furs to posts on Hudson Bay and made them push inland to compete for furs with the pedlars from Montreal. In the meantime, the Moravians had established missions on the coast of Labrador, searches for a North-west Passage were directed away from Hudson Bay to the Pacific coast of North America, the first scientific expedition was sent to Hudson Bay, and the Indians were decimated by smallpox. Toward the end of this instalment, we begin to draw our southern boundary of “northern Canada” both westward and northward and to omit many expeditions and events of peripheral or minor importance, such as activities south of Saskatchewan River, or of regular occurrence, such as annual voyages northward from Churchill.