There has been some uncertainty as to which of the two southerly probes, during which Bellingshausen passed latitude 69°S in early 1820, achieved the first sighting of an ice coast of Dronning Maud Land in Eastern Antarctica. The author criticizes Frank Debenham’s English translation of Bellingshausen’s narrative before presenting and discussing new translations of Bellingshausen’s descriptions of those events, with relevant sections of his track chart, plus a third passage from the book which interpreted what was seen. He concludes that the Russians first sighted an ice coast in mid-February, rather than late January as has been widely claimed.

The Russian naval officer Faddej Faddeevich Bellingshausen began life with a slightly different surname, in his case ‘Billingshausen’. It is possible to work out roughly when the Russian surname ‘Bellinsgauzen’ was chosen. Considerations prompting the selection of that particular Russian version can also be suggested.

The pair of paperweights illustrated on the front cover of this issue of Polar Record and reproduced as Fig. 1 were made in 1889 at the Burslem pottery of James Macintyre & Co. (best known for employing William Moorcroft a few years later) using maps engraved by the Edinburgh firm of J.G. Bartholomew (JGB). Macintyre produced other paperweights with Bartholomew maps of Central Africa, India, British South Africa and the rarest, Australasia, to a pottery design 9.9cm in diameter, weight 333gm, registered as No.141265. The correspondence shows that the hemispheres came first, and were intended to feature the British Empire worldwide, although that political appellation does not appear.

The celebrated meeting between Captain Bellingshausen of the Imperial Russian Navy and the American sealing skipper Nathaniel Brown Palmer, off the South Shetland Islands in February 1821, has often been described by following just one or other of the two men's divergent and in some respects irreconcilable accounts. The most contentious issue is whether or not Palmer told Bellingshausen about the existence of a body of land to the south of the South Shetlands, known today as the Antarctic Peninsula. This note attempts to reach a balanced assessment of the matter by examining evidence from both sides, including several previously unconsidered items. It concludes that, although the truth will never be known with absolute certainty, the basic American account is more plausible, by the narrowest of narrow margins, than the Russian.

In a recent interesting contribution to this journal, G.A. Mawer suggested that Antarctica was first so named in 1890 (Mawer 2008). New evidence however reveals that Antarctica first received its modern one-word name as early as 1840 at a congress of Italian scientists. The new name was soon adapted for other languages, and its use in English can be traced from 1849. A hypothesis is advanced as to why alternative French and German names were coined later in the century. The first map to use the new place name was published in 1843, and the first map to show a complete outline of the continent, estimated from expedition reports, was produced in 1844. But nothing could become the settled name of the south polar continent until its existence was confirmed at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Armenian-Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky completed a painting of a polar seascape entitled Ledyanyye gory [Ice mountains] in 1870. The picture has usually been taken for an Antarctic scene depicting HIMS Mirnyi, one of the two ships of the Russian Antarctic Expedition of 1819–1821, in the presence of icebergs, ice cliffs and floes. The author contends, first, that this identification is open to considerable doubt, and second, that other aspects of the painting are also problematic. The painting is in the Aivazovsky Museum in Ukraine. The Museum kindly supplied him with high resolution photographs of the painting but personal scrutiny has proved impossible hitherto. Further research, especially into Aivazovsky's papers, might resolve some of the questions which it raises.

None of the logbooks or officers’ journals of the 1819–1821 Russian Antarctic expedition, commanded by Junior Captain Faddei Faddeyevich Bellingshausen, have yet been found. The discovery of Peter I Island was recorded in two reports from the commander, on Sheet 13 of a 15-sheet track chart of the expedition which he prepared during the voyage home (Belov 1963: 32), in his subsequent book (Bellinsgauzen 1831), and in narratives penned by four other eye-witnesses.

The artist Pavel Nikolayevich Mikhailov (1786–1840) took part in the Antarctic expedition of the Imperial Russian Navy commanded by Captain F.F. Bellingshausen from 1819 to 1821. The author was invited to view the collection of Mikhailov's work, from two expeditions, that is held at the Russian Museum, St Petersburg. The Bellingshausen pieces in the collection are described, and their relationships to the smaller collection of Mikhailov's work for the Bellingshausen expedition, held at the State Historical Museum in Moscow, to the lithographs in the Atlas volume of Bellingshausen's published narrative, and to the various versions of Mikhailov's images that have been published in the 20th and 21st centuries, are discussed.

In 1949 a reassessment of the Imperial Russian Navy's Antarctic expedition of 1819–1821 was promulgated in the Soviet Union. The contention was that Russian seamen had made the first discovery of the mainland of Antarctica, two or three days before the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula was sighted by a British expedition, under William Smith and Edward Bransfield, sent to take formal possession of the South Shetland Islands. The new Soviet line apparently required that an important passage in a report which Captain Bellingshausen had sent from Australia in 1820 should, as far as possible, be overlooked or downplayed. Nineteenth century editions of the report and its covering letter are translated, the contemporary ice vocabulary in which they were phrased is explained, and the practice of discounting parts of them in the past and continuing to ignore those passages today is discussed.

In 1860 and 1861 Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury USN, (1806–1873), put forward the first ever proposal for international cooperation in polar research. Maury's initiative also prompted the first ever international correspondence about polar cooperation, fourteen years before Carl Weyprecht launched his better known proposal. For several reasons however, including the outbreak of the American Civil War, Maury's Antarctic project did not succeed. Maury's proposal was published in three languages, but the better known of its two English versions was prepared from text that had already been copied once or twice by hand. It suffered numerous minor errors and extensive editorial changes. To mark its 150th anniversary, Maury's autograph manuscript, now in the British National Archives, has been transcribed as accurately as possible, with his original wording, spellings and (lack of) punctuation. A commentary explains the origins and outcome of the project.

Frank Debenham believed, on naval authority, that the first English translation of Bellingshausen's account of his 1819–1821 voyage was made during World War I (Debenham 1945: vii). He may have been misinformed.

Pavel Sergeyevich Rozhkov was captain of the whale catcher Slava 3 on the first Soviet whaling cruise in the Antarctic, which took place in 1946–1947. He wrote an exceptionally frank and detailed account of the cruise, for those times, which was published in a Lithuanian newspaper and is now presented here for the first time in English translation.

On 7 December 1945 a captured German whaling factory, Wikinger, was allocated to the Soviet Union under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement between that country, the United States and the United Kingdom. In the first section, this article presents the first detailed account of how Wikinger was seized by the Royal Navy and eventually transferred to Soviet ownership. The second section illustrates the hostile attitudes of western governments towards the Slava whaling flotilla during the cold war, and the degree to which their suspicions were focused on the work of scientists assigned to the flotilla. The next four sections trace the fluctuating perceptions and presentations, during the Tsarist and early Soviet periods, of the Imperial Russian Navy's Antarctic expedition of 1819–1821, the problems in respect of Antarctica which confronted Soviet diplomacy and propaganda in the 1940s, and the new story, about Russians having been the first people to discover Antarctica, which was developed in order to address them. It is then possible, in the seventh section, to explain the political utility of the Slava flotilla in the early 1950s. An eighth section sketches the divergent cultural fortunes of the Bellingshausen expedition and the Slava flotilla after the period under consideration.

This article discusses the use of whaling and history in support of Soviet Antarctic policy between the end of World War 2 and the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958. But the Slava whaling flotilla did not just play a part in the historicisation of Soviet Antarctic policy. It was itself a historically constituted object, fraught with meanings on both sides of the cold war. For that reason the opportunity is taken to give a more detailed account of the flotilla's origins than has been available hitherto. The author notes that two contributors to this journal have preceded him in some of these matters (Armstrong 1950, 1971; Gan 2009). He ventures to suggest, however, that the connections between whaling, historiography and public information management in Soviet Antarctic policy have not been fully demonstrated before this.

Like many great institutions, the Antarctic Treaty system has its own creation myth, according to which it was brought into being by the Antarctic science programme of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY). As myths are prone to do, this one combines both an important truth and a good deal of misinformation. After fifty years in which it has shamelessly flattered the earth scientists, who are understandably rather fond of it, and undervalued the many non-scientists who advocated the internationalisation of Antarctica from 1910 onwards, it is time to lay it to rest. But before summarising the intermeshing contributions of private citizens, diplomats and other officials, and scientists, we should first take note of a different factor altogether, political geography.

At the first Comité Special de l'Année Geophysique Internationale (CSAGI) Antarctic conference, held in July 1955, the opening remarks of its president, supported by a resolution proposed by the Chilean Ambassador and passed unanimously, stipulated that the meeting was not to be concerned with political matters and that its purposes were exclusively scientific. Those guidelines were not entirely successful. The Chilean resolution was itself a political move, and delegates reported that the meeting was repeatedly disturbed by further political interventions. The conference was nevertheless significant because it was the first time that representatives of eleven countries ever attended such a meeting, thus ensuring that the International Geophysical Year would mark a new phase in international relations respecting Antarctica.

The first woman to work as a professional scientist in Antarctica was Mariya Vasilyevna Klyonova, during the first Soviet Antarctic Expedition of 1955–1957. Other women were crew members on the icebreakers Lena and Ob’. There is an outside possibility that there was more to one of them than meets the eye. But we shall never know.