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.

The world's oil magnates have recently turned their eyes to Siberia, Alaska, Arctic Canada, and the Chukchi and North seas and have invested huge sums in exploration for petroleum in lands scarcely touched by modern technology a decade ago.

Throughout the Arctic, serious questions have arisen regarding environmental and cultural by-products of petroleum exploration and development. Perhaps nowhere has there been greater public concern than in Alaska, which has experienced commercial oil production since 1958 near Cook Inlet and which is now working out plans for development of the Prudhoe Bay pool.

The following pages, the beginning of a series, are the first results of a chronological compilation of expeditions and historical events that will eventually embrace the entire Arctic and sub-Arctic area. We began work on the Canadian segment of the Northern Hemisphere in 1968, with financial support from the History Division of the National Museum of Man, a part of the National Museums of Canada in Ottawa. The History Division is allowing this form of preliminary publication of the work it has supported in the expectation of securing corrections and additions to it, thereby enhancing the usefulness and authority of the list in its final form. The Canadian list, when it is published in full, will carry bibliographical references to each expedition and event, an alphabetical roster of persons known to have participated in the expeditions listed, a roster of ships' names, and a regional and topical index.

During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, British Arctic whaling enjoyed a prolonged period of expansion and prosperity. The industry began to grow rapidly after about 1812, and between 1814 and 1817 engaged the largest fleet in its history, an average of nearly 150 ships each year. After 1816, the whalemen embarked on an adventurous programme of geographical expansion, which brought extensive new whaling-grounds within their reach. This enterprise proved highly successful at first, but later brought the industry to the threshold of financial ruin.

The Government of Canada began supplying housing for some of its Eskimo people in the Northwest Territories in 1956. At this date the majority of Eskimos still followed their traditional nomadic way of life and lived in igloos or snow houses during winter, and in skin or canvas tents during summer. Since 1956, the tendency of Eskimo families to settle in the vicinity of trading posts, church missions, and newly established federal schools has increased, and the problem of providing permanent accommodation for them has been aggravated. At first the new townsmen improvised shelters from a combination of tents, packing cases, and scraps of metal, tar paper and lumber. When these inadequate dwellings were used as permanent residences, grave social and public health problems resulted from overcrowding.

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.

Until the early 20th century, exploration of the Arctic Basin was hindered by the lack of vehicles that could traverse ice and water as well as cross leads and pressure ridges. This lack affected not only movements of explorers themselves but also the transport of food, supplies, and the equipment required to sustain life in an inhospitable environment. In 1925, however, an aircraft made the first successful landing on pack ice and ushered in an era of scientific stations on the pack ice itself.

Aviation is playing an increasingly important role in developing the resource potential of northern Canada. It is the most common means of supplying the oil rigs on Melville Island, the mining camps in the Mackenzie Mountains, and the meteorological stations on the pack ice. New technology has increased both capability and capacity. Pipe and drilling equipment can now be flown non-stop from southern Canada to airfields on the Queen Elizabeth Islands; helicopters able to carry two tons then distribute the equipment to well sites. Very rapid and precise land surveying can be conducted using the Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. Recently, a 16 640 km2 region of northern Alberta was surveyed in less than five days.

In the popular science journal Nauka i Zhizn' [Science and Life], No 10,1969, there is an article by N. Bolotnikov on the two Russians who took part in Scott's last expedition, Anton Omel'chenko, stable-man, and Dmitriy “Geroff”, dog-driver, giving information on their lives before and after the expedition. Both these men are spoken of very warmly in Scott's journal. They appear to have been excellent fellows, who not only worked hard and devotedly with their respective charges, but also got along very well with their British messmates, and it is interesting to know a little more about them.

For the last twenty years there has been considerable Soviet interest in the circumnavigation of Antarctica by the Russian naval expedition of 1819–21, led by Captain T. T. Bellingshausen, with Lieut M. P. Lazarev as his second in command, in the sloops Vostok and Mirnyy. It is now reasonably certain that Bellingshausen sighted the Antarctic continent several times, notably on 27 January 1820 (New Style) at a point about lat 69°21′S, long 2°14′W, and was thus the first to see it (Edward Bransfield sighted the north-west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula at about lat 63°50′S, long 60°30′W on 30 January 1820, three days later). Bellingshausen did not claim to have done so however, but his descriptions of what he saw tally very well with what the edge of the continent here is now known to look like. There is one relatively new point. Bellingshausen's first sighting has been moved forward one day, from the 28th to the 27th, because it has been shown that he was keeping ship's time, from mid-day to mid-day, and therefore that what his log called the 28th (his sighting being in the second half of the day) was what the civil calendar would call the 27th (Belov, 1963, p 19–29). All this much is well documented and unlikely to be disputed. The question is, how much importance did he, and his contemporaries, attach to this discovery? And did he realize that he had seen the edge of a continent? Recent Soviet studies have sought to show that he had a very good idea of the importance of what he had seen, and that this idea did get through to his contemporaries. It is here that there is room for argument with the Soviet scholars.