Further progress is reported concerning the preservation of Belgica, currently a wreck in Norwegian waters. A plan is currently being developed for furthering this aim.

That sentence referred, in fact, to the impending transfer of the Arctic islands to Canada in 1879, but it could have applied, just as aptly, to the whole of northern Canada. The first part of it was largely correct; the second part is still a matter for conjecture, debate and experiment.

Most of the Canadian Government's sporadic forays into the north from 1880 onwards were motivated by the reaction of politicians and officials aliens in the Arctic. There was nothing else in the north for a government to be concerned about. The fur trade was important to the Hudson's Bay Company, and it was to become important to many of the Eskimos, but had lost its pre-eminence in a nation where trans-continental railways and millions of immigrants were the priorities of the day. The great age of Arctic exploration was ending: a North West Passage was irrelevant in a world that was planning a Panama Canal. The whalers too would depart from northern waters, and the missionaries and the Hudson Bay factors would left to themselves.

This article reviews the role that ministerial directives played in shaping the constitutional development of the Yukon Territory 1970–85. These were years of dramatic change, with the form of government shifting from autocratic bureaucracy to responsible democracy. The instrument for this change was the ministerial directive, an order from the Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs to the Commissioner, sanctioned by Section 4 of the Yukon Act. The fact that the head of government is the Commissioner, a senior federal public servant, was key to the process.

This note reports on a project concerning the wreck of Belgica, in 22 m of water at Bruvik, Norway. A society has been founded with the aims of protecting the wreck, conducting a feasibility study on the possible raising and preservation of it, and for promoting education concerning the polar regions.

Seals were hunted in the Bay of Bothnia during the 16th century in four areas — inshore open water, fast ice, ice edge, and pack ice — with methods appropriate for each area. Inshore open water sealing involved netting and some seining, exclusively for ringed seals. On fast ice the techniques used were stalking, den-hunting, and breathing hole-hunting, again for ringed seals. Grey and ringed seals were hunted on the ice edge. Provincial tax returns have provided information on methods used by sealers from different parishes in the Bay of Bothnia area. Catching techniques, tools, prey species, numbers of crews, hunting seasons, catch figures and annual yields are discussed.

Polar Record, Vol 18, No 116, May 1977, p 521, line 4. Stallworthy did indeed find die first trace of the lost German Arctic Expedition led by Dr Krüger, but not die only trace. Canadian field parties subsequently found two other records, at Cape Bourne in 1954, and at the north end of Meighen Island in 1957. Line 21, for Inspector Joyce read Inspector Joy.