Among the collections of the Scott Polar Research Institute is the manuscript of the New Georgia Gazette, a newspaper completed on board ship during William Edward Parry's first expedition in search of a North-west Passage, 1819–20. The expedition stimulated much interest at home partly for its achievement in discovering half of the North-west Passage, and for its novelty as the first expedition deliberately to spend a winter in high Arctic latitudes. It is thus no great surprise that, after the expedition's return home, a printed version of the Gazette was published, for it provides a vivid insight into life on board ship during that unprecedented Arctic winter. However, at the back of the original manuscript of the newspaper is a play written during the expedition under the title, The North-west Passage, or voyage finished, which was not included in the publication. The reason for its exclusion is not given, but it cannot have been due entirely to the dissatisfaction of Parry, who was happy enough to refer to it in his narrative of the expedition (Parry, 1824, p 127), or to its lack of success, since it was most favourably reviewed at the time of its performance. Nor was the play ever entirely forgotten. In Jules Verne's novel, Les aventures du Capitaine Halteras (1861, part 2, p 426) Dr Clawbonny comments ‘Parry composa lui-meme pour les fetes de Noel une comedie tout a fait en situation; elle eut un immense succes et était intitulee Le Passage du Nord-Ouest ou la Fin du Voyag’. Paul-Emile Victor (1968, p 223) also mentions the play's existence, but it was only very recently that this full text of the play was rediscovered at the back of the original Gazette.The manuscript of the play is neatly handwritten in an unknown hand and occupies 19 pages measuring about 20×32 cm.

The Arctic Ocean is the home of three major groups of mammals that depend on the sea for survival and show varying degrees of adaptation for maritime life. Most fully adapted are the whales (Cetacea), which never leave the water, and the seals and walruses (Pinnipedia) that feed entirely at sea but emerge onto land or ice for pupping and basking. Less exclusively marine are two species of the order Carnivora—Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus), that seldom live far from the sea because they feed almost entirely upon seals, and Arctic Foxes (Alopex lagopus), some of which move out onto the sea ice during the winter, mainly to scavenge on the remains of seals killed by Polar Bears.

Following Cook's historic circumnavigation (1772–75) of the globe in Antarctic waters and his reports of great numbers of seals on South Georgia, considerable numbers of commercial sealing expeditions had made new discoveries of islands in the vicinity of the Antarctic Peninsula. However, not until 1819 was another government-sponsored exploring and scientific expedition organized to continue the search for the then still-unknown southern continent. This time the expedition was a Russian one, and in command of the two-ship squadron was Thaddeus Bellingshausen, then a lieutenant in the Black Sea Fleet; previously he had sailed around the world in an expedition under Kruzenstern in 1803–06. He also gained much experience in coastal surveying and charting in the Black Sea. The two ships in the squadron were Vostok (985 tonne, 117 men) under Bellingshausen's command, and Mirnyy (884 tonne, 73 men) under Lt Mikhail Lazarev, who had served for several years in the British Navy. Bellingshausen, in the opinion of some, merits equal consideration as a navigator and seaman with Cook (Debenham, 1945, p xi, xiii; Barratt, 1981, p 202). He, himself, had a high admiration for Cook and drew heavily upon Cook's narratives for guidance in sailing the. Southern Ocean. The aim of the expedition, according to a letter by the Minister of Marine to Bellingshausen, was ‘to carry out a voyage of discovery in the high southern latitudes, and to circumnavigate the ice-belt of the southern Polar Circle.’ (Debenham, 1945, p 6). The two ships sailed from Kronshtadt on 14 July 1819f and returned to that port on 5 August 1821 having achieved the aim of the expedition, spending two summer seasons in Antarctic waters and one season exploring the South Pacific islands. They called at Rio de Janeiro on the outward and homeward sailings.

In an earlier article, tracing the development of commercial tourism in the Antarctic (Reich, 1980), I presented the currently available information on the scale and concentration of tourist activities. From this examination the broad conclusion was that over a 24-year period since tourism began, numbers of visitors landing, primarily from ships but also from aircraft, averaged less than 840 a year. Roughly three-quarters of these visits were concentrated on about nine places, all of which were occupied scientific research stations. In this paper an attempt is made, partly based on first-hand experience of a tourist cruise, to gauge the impact of sea-borne tourism. A description of the cruise precedes consideration of tourism in relation to the Antarctic Treaty. Planning issues are raised in certain recommendations on tourism adopted by the Antarctic Treaty nations, and these are examined. There are more questions than answers, partly due to lack of data, but I hope that by drawing attention to these issues further consideration will be given to them.

South Georgia, at present governed as a Dependency of the Falkland Islands, has an interesting history of human activity extending back nearly two centuries. The sealers who visited the island in considerable numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries (Jones, 1973) almost certainly left gangs of men on the island for considerable periods, but not until the 20th century were permanent settlements established there. Published accounts of the initial stages of this colonisation (Matthews, 1931; Christie, 1951) contain various important errors, and give only the simplest outline of an interesting political problem. A more accurate account of some of these events has recently been published (Tonnessen and Johnsen, 1982). Material preserved in the Falkland Islands Government's (FIG) archives at Port Stanley has allowed a detailed account to be built up of this important period of South Georgia's history.

In the heroic age of Antarctic exploration—the first 15 or so years of this century (Hayes 1932)—scientific investigations took second place, at least in the public eye, to geographical exploration and its offshoot, the race to the South Pole. Nevertheless important geological discoveries were made and the basic framework of Antarctic geology was mapped out. This article describes briefly the geological work and the geologists of the expeditions that explored Victoria Land between 1900 and 1912, with a note on the significance of the geological specimens found with the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers in 1912.

Northern Canadian natives wish to continue their traditional lifestyle by hunting, fishing and trapping. These feelings have, for example, been expressed at the recent Lancaster Sound Regional Study workshops by the native residents of Grise Fiord, Resolute, Arctic Bay and Pond Inlet, in spite of pressure by government and industry for the Inuit to take up wage-earning employment. In comparison with the cash benefits of industrial employment the value of the native or traditional economy is often underestimated. Domestically-used meat and materials cannot be valued in a formal or cash economy and tend to be discounted in planning analyses (Usher, 1980).

My short note in an earlier issue of Polar Record [21(133): 394–95 (1983)] outlined events in the Falkland Islands Dependencies arising from the Argentinian attack and occupation of April 1982, with a brief summary of the political exchanges preceding the Argentinian action. This article chronicles some of the events that precipitated the dispute, and the military activities leading to the occupation and subsequent recovery of King Edward Point, the administrative centre and principal station of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) on South Georgia.

‘No scheme of Canadian historiography yet advanced is wholly satisfactory because none as yet takes account of the occurrence of the North’ (Morton, 1970, p 31). Where Canadian historiography has been silent, studies of Canadian federalism have chosen to ignore. The Northwest Territories (NWT) and die Yukon Territory have certainly never been major actors in national political forums, nor have they yet to play a significant role in the political processes surrounding the two major preoccupations of Canadian federalism, namely the economy and national unity.

The Arctic Data Buoy Program described in this article is designed to provide certain fundamental data from an inaccessible region, using automatic devices rather than costly manned stations. The first effort in that direction was the Soviet Drifting Automatic Radiometeorological Stations (DARMS) programme of the 1950s and 1960s (Olenicoff, 1968). These buoys reflected the then state of technology which involved the use of heavy storage batteries and a method of location by high frequency (HF) radio wave triangulation (Figs 1,2; Table 1). Restrictions of that system—high cost, weight, and limited range and accuracy of HF radio wave triangulation— apparently caused the Soviet Union to terminate the programme. At about the same time satellite navigation and data transmission technology, developed in the United States, created a new generation of data buoys. These buoys can accommodate a wide range of sensors, data compression and pre-processing devices and hull designs, for stationary use on land, as moored or drifting ocean data buoys, or on sea ice; they can be installed on land, in the ocean from ships, or by parachute drops from aircraft.

Throughout their history Greenlanders have struggled not against invaders but against a hard and merciless environment. This intimate association with the environment is reflected in a well-developed descriptive language, richer in many respects than Danish. But Greenlanders have a less developed capacity for abstract thought and as a result they find discussion of such national problems as security far removed from the daily debate. In diis article Greenland's development is traced and her strategic position in the North Atlantic is discussed in terms of national interests and international cooperation.

It is one of the quirks of Arctic studies that although the society and culture of the nomadic Lapps (Sámi) have been reasonably thoroughly documented by the field research of anthropologists, the life and social organization of the settled population of the same area has been little studied, and is generally not accessible to the scholarly world outside Fennoscandia. In this article I shall endeavpur to redress this imbalance to some extent, by discussing some aspects of the culture of the Finnish-speaking population of northern Torne Lappmark, paying particular attention to their relations with their reindeer-herding neighbours.

By autumn 1940 the first round of fighting in World War II was over. In northern Europe, German forces occupied Poland, Norway and Denmark. Both sides recognized that further operations demanded naval and air superiority in northern waters. Germany needed free access to the Atlantic Ocean through the North Sea; Britain had to prevent that access, which threatened the lifeline to the United States. More than ever before, it became essential for both sides to have meteorological information from the northern Atlantic Ocean area. Germany's need was especially acute, for the routes for her shipping from ports in Scandinavia traversed enemy-patrolled waters, where foul weather was essential for evasion.

Under a system of treaties introduced after the confederation of Canada in 1867, the natives of the provinces gave up ownership of the land in return for hunting rights, land reserves, yearly payments of ‘treaty money’ and guarantees of medical care and attention. This article examines some of the changes that have affected the people of Oxford House, a Cree village in northern Manitoba, since Treaty Five was negotiated in 1909. Particular reference is made to changes brought about by the cinema, radio and television in the last two decades. Oxford House, a lakeside settlement with current population of 1 300, is described more fully elsewhere (Manitoba 1972).

Between the austral summers of 1975–76 and 1979–80 the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition (ANARE) carried out field programmes in geology, geophysics, surveying and mapping, biology and glaciology in Enderby and Kemp lands, Antarctica (Fig 1). The glaciological research consisted of three closely related major projects: the determination of the mass flux across a section of the ice sheet, approximately along the 2 000 m elevation contour between 53°E and 62°E; an investigation of the dynamics and mass balance of the fast flowing outlet glacier streams between longitudes 48°E and 62°E; and a regional survey of the ice thickness and ice surface elevation over the same sector and up to about 250 km inland from the coast.

This article is based on studies of existing, rather limited, reports on health and disease among the Lapp population, and on my personal experience during 16 years of ‘front-line’ health work (1945–61) in northernmost Sweden. My work in Jukkasjärvi, Norrbotten county, some 300 km north of the Arctic Circle in the heartland of the Lapp world, provided daily contacts with Lapps and their problems; extensive travel and official field visits to camps and settlements helped to give me detailed knowledge of social and health conditions among the Lapp population.

Until long after all other regions of the world had been explored and populated by man, the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere remained unknownand inviolate. Although a great southern continent had been postulated by theancient Greeks, and its existence firmly believed in during the 16th century and by some 18th century geographers, no real evidence for its presence had been forthcoming. However, the great voyages of discovery by James Cook in Endeavour, 1768–71 and Resolution, 1772–75 laid that belief to rest. During his second voyage Cook circumnavigated the globe in high latitudes and made three crossings of the Antarctic Circle but failed to find the supposed continental land mass. Cook came to the conclusion that if a continent existed in still higher latitudes, as we know that it does, it would be perpetually frozen. Nevertheless, the scientific aims of the voyage were achieved. Considerable light was shed on the atmospheric and oceanographic phenomena of the region, based on factual data collected by the, scientists on board Resolution, and Adventure which accompanied it for partof the timeduring 1772–73.