In July 1971, the Moravian mission will have been working in northern Labrador for two hundred years. Theirs was the first mission to North American Eskimos and, as such, it has considerable historical interest. However it is not the purpose of this paper either to give a summary of the whole period—this can be found elsewhere (Anon, 1871; Davey, 1905; Kleivan, 1966)—or to attempt a general assessment of the mission's work. For good or ill, the mission has made its contribution, and the historian leaves consideration of its legacy to the social scientist (Kleivan, 1966; Ben-Dor, 1966). I shall concentrate here upon the foundation and early years of the mission, and try to explain how it gained its foothold.

The centennial of the Province of Manitoba is something more than a centenarian's birthday. For the truth was that Manitoba, unlike the North-West Territories, which came into existence at the same time, had no good reason for coming into being in 1870. The administration of a territory might have been possible with the resources of the day. but the administration of a province certainly was not.

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.”

In the 1860's, Svend Foyn laid the foundation of modern whaling in north Norway. In 1904, whaling was prohibited by the Norwegian Storting because fishermen claimed that it was detrimental to the cod fisheries, and, in the same year, whaling was begun in the Antarctic. Most accounts find a causal connection between the two events: whaling was begun in the one place because it had been prohibited in the other. This was not the case, for none of the whaling companies that were stopped from whaling in north Norway turned straightaway to Antarctic waters. The pioneer in 1904 was a completely new Argentine company, and the first three Norwegian companies to start whaling in the Antarctic, between 1905 and 1907, had never been whaling from north Norway. It has also been said that whalers had over exploited the Norwegian Sea by 1904 and that they had, therefore, to find new whaling grounds. But this is not true, either. From the whaling stations on the Norwegian Sea (excluding Norway), 1 427 whales were killed in 1901, 1 614 in 1902, 1 769 in 1903, 1 921 in 1904, and 2 613 in 1905. There was, therefore, a definite increase in the northern catches in precisely the year that Norwegians started whaling in the south. The reason for the development of whaling in Antarctic waters was neither the prohibition of 1904 nor a decease in the catches in the old northern grounds. The reason lay, in facf, partly in a steep fall in the price of whale oil and partly in a newly awakened global interest in the Antarctic continent and Antarctic waters.

By a Grace, dated 26 November 1920, the Senate of the University of Cambridge approved an earlier recommendation of the Council of the Senate “That the University would welcome the establishment of the proposed Polar Research Institute at Cambridge.…” Frank Debenham's “Retrospect”, written to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of this date, told of the circumstances that led to the formation of the Institute, and of its aims and facilities. Now, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of that date, a brief note seems appropriate.

[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.

The European north of the USSR can be roughly defined as the area between lats 60° and 70°N and longs 30° and 70°E. It covers some 1 500 000 km2; from the Finnish-Soviet frontier to the Urals is about 1 400 km, and from the Barents Sea to Vologda, about 1120 km. The area is intersected by the river systems of Dvina (750 km), Mezen (910 km), Vychegda (1 130 km) and Pechora (1 790 km). The inhabitants in 1960 numbered approximately 4 648 000.

In mid-1968, Atlantic Richfield Company announced an oil strike in northern Alaska that triggered off an exploration and development boom such as Alaska never had witnessed, either as a territory or as a state. The excitement still continues. Although the potential implications are still by no means clear, the effect on Alaska is bound to be great and lasting. In terms of persons involved, amount of capital expended, amount of work done, and importance of resources discovered, the current effort far exceeds any of the gold rushes of the early years of the century. This article attempts to weigh some of the implications of Alaska's current strike, to place them in some kind of perspective, and to predict some of the trends that may develop as Alaska struggles to become a major oil state.

There had been no English expedition to search for the North-west Passage for 40 years before the Hudson's Bay Company received its royal charter on 2 May 1670. Early enthusiasm, generated largely by Sir Humphrey Gilbert and the “Colleagues of the Fellowship for the discovery of the North-West Passage”, had been put to the test by the maritime skills of Frobisher and of Davis. But, although Frobisher had returned from his first voyage, in October 1576, convinced that he had found the passage and had “passed above fiftie leagues therein”, he had in fact crossed westwards from the coast of Greenland to enter Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island (Collinson, 1867, p 72); experience was to prove that no passage lay that way. Davis, too, came back from his first voyage convinced that, in 1585, he had in all likelihood been in “the place and passage by us laboured for” (Hakluyt, 1927, Vol 5, p 333). He had then entered Cumberland Sound, also on Baffin Island. Davis's second voyage brought him to Hudson Strait and convinced him (as Frobisher in turn had thought) that the great “overfall” of the water there betokened a vast sea to the westwards. He was sure that the passage could now be found without further cost. But Davis's third voyage, in 1587, took him, first, north through Davis Strait up the coast of Baffin Island and then, crossing eastwards, up the coast of Greenland as high as lat 73 °N, where he still found the sea open although the wind was contrary. Returning down the coast, he was again impressed by the “great ruttes” of the “overfall” in Hudson Strait and he concluded that, of the four possible openings for the passage, this one was the most likely. The others were to be found due north up Davis Strait, which he thought might be no more than a great gulf, or through Frobisher Bay or through Cumberland Sound, in both of which he had been held by ice (Hakluyt, 1927, Vol 5, p 281–336.)

Northern Canada consists of two political subdivisions. Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories. Some 3.8 million km2 of land and the large continental shelf lie north of lat 60°N, which is the southern boundary of the two territories. The land area comprises 40 per cent of the whole of Canada. Distances are great, topography varies from flat plains and muskeg to high mountains, and variations in temperature are extreme. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, the north is a land of great change and rapid development, particularly in the field of mineral exploitation. It was once considered that these territories were destined to remain a producer of precious metals only—commodities of high unit value. The turning point in mining developments came in November 1964, when the first shipment of ore from the Pine Point lead-zinc deposits marked the start of the tremendous and continuing surge forward in mining development. The oil and gas industry has also shown a keen interest in the potential of northern Canada in recent years and the sedimentary basins are all but covered with oil and gas exploration permits. A significant gas strike has been made in the Arctic archipelago and, far away in the south-west corner of the Northwest Territories, a major gas pool is being developed in the Pointed Mountain area.

Economic development programmes in rural Alaska face barriers created by ethnic and cultural variations from the standards of urban, industrialized Western society and by the virtual absence among the native population of the local capital and technical capabilities that are needed to achieve economic self-sufficiency. In addition, public and private agencies inevitably assume a dominant role, with respect to the local population, when they invest in or assist native villages or rural regions, a fact that compounds the problems of change. The objective of modernization may get in the way of the objective of self-determination, to the detriment of both. These problems confront programmes for vocational training, housing, transportation, community facilities, community organization, co-operative enterprises and small business development —virtually the entire range of programmes intended to support or to trigger further development and ultimately to increase self-sufficiency in Alaska's native villages and rural regions.

Judging from the common idea of the church calendar, a witty French meteorologist remarked, the saints of paradise are not above busying themselves in interfering with the weather and, sometimes, with each other's influence. The idea of associating weather with times and season is an old one, and, in Europe, goes back probably to the Middle Ages. It arose, no doubt, through the observation of more or less regular recurrences of certain kinds of weather and by the attribution of such recurrences, first to the gods, then, as Christianity spread, to the saints of the church.

To know the exact size and shape of the earth has long been a goal of scientists. Man's attempts to locate himself and to determine the configuration of his planet date from at least the time of Eratosthenes, about 200 BC. He observed that on a particular day in mid summer the sun shone directly down a well in Syene, Egypt (thus the zenith angle=0°). Supposing the earth to be a sphere, he measured the zenith angle on the same day to be 7.2° at Alexandria. His calculation of the distance between the points, based on the travel time of a camel caravan between them and on the assumption that both were on the same meridian, gave him enough information to compute the earth's circumference: 7.2°/360° = l/50. Therefore, the distance between Syene and Alexandria was 1/50th of the earth's circumference. His calculations were about 16 per cent too large. Considering, however, the primitiveness of his measurements and assumptions, his value was remarkably close. Two later determinations were made using this “astrogeodetic” principle, but with little increase in accuracy.

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.)

[Captain James W. Robinson was born in April 1824, the son of George William Robinson, a member of the crew of the US whaler General Gates that touched at Hobartown van Diemens Land in 1819, and who left the ship and remained to settle in the colony. He began his schooling in Hobart but, in 1836, was sent to continue his education among.relatives in Providence, Rhode Island. On return to Hobart, he took up whaling and soon became one of the outstanding seamen of the port. He (and after him his son, Alfred) commanded ships of my grandfather's fleet of whalers, which included Offley. In 1858–59, Captain Robinson joined in the rush of sealing voyages to Heard Island that followed first news of the great herds there of Elephant Seal Mirounga leonina, the oil of which then commanded a high price. Robinson's voyage was difficult and dangerous; it ended in tragedy, financial loss and litigation.

The year 1969 was a watershed in Alaska's history. This was the year when the full extent of the international petroleum industry's invasion became apparent to all Alaskans. Most viewed it as a cause of rejoicing and optimism. Overnight, the State of Alaska had become rich as the industry made bonus payments of over $900 million for oil and gas leases on the North Slope, and the prospects loomed of literally hundreds of millions of dollars of annual royalty and tax payments during the decade to come. The state no longer had to worry about where its money was coming from but could concentrate on spending. Private employment climbed, and all the gold rush legends of quick wealth resumed currency. The magnitude of what the oil developers and promoters had accomplished and what they proposed went beyond anything the most enthusiastic Alaskans had ever dreamed of. No physical barrier and no financial cost seemed too great to hinder a prolonged boom. All that Alaskans had to worry about was how to take their share.

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has been receiving regular satellite photo coverage of the Antarctic Peninsula area since 1967. Supplied by courtesy of the United States Environmental Science Services Administration from their National Environmental Satellite Center, the photographs have been used principally to observe the distribution of pack ice to facilitate the passage of the Survey's ships to Antarctic stations. While they are proving of immense importance in sea ice studies, they have also been used to plot the changing position of ice fronts. In the long term the series will provide an unparalleled source of data for climatology, since cloud patterns continually reveal weather systems that cannot be identified from observations coming only from the sparse network of meteorological stations in Antarctica.

This second instalment of our list deals mainly with the competition between the French and English for domination of the fur trade in Hudson Bay. The period has been comparatively little studied and it has been difficult to piece out accurately and succinctly from the sources available the history of this lively period.

In the time-scale of human history we have only just realized that air has substance and predictable properties. In the last 50 years, this realization has enabled man almost to overcome distance by means of aircraft. In the next 50 years, we can almost overcome the vagaries of weather by placing an airsupported membrane between ourselves and the elements. The theory involved is simple; the problems lie in its application and in finding suitable materials for the membrane. However, just as the development of the aircraft industry fostered the production of aluminium, so the development of air structures will doubtless encourage the manufacture of translucent and reflective plastic membranes.