During 664 round trips between London and Hudson Bay from 1670 to 1913,21 of the supply ships of the Hudson's Bay Company were wrecked, mainly in the Bay or in Hudson Strait; a further seven were severely damaged. The year 1864 was remarkable in that out of three ships making the outward voyage to the Bay, two ran aground on Mansel Island only one hour apart. One ship, Prince Arthur, was wrecked and abandoned. The other, Prince of Wales, was refloated and was able to reach York Factory with Prince Arthur's crew on board. There Prince of Wales was condemned; the crews of both ships returned to England on board Ocean Nymph. The events of the double shipwreck, the sojourn of the crew at York Factory, and the voyage home have been reconstructed, mainly on the basis of the journal of the medical officer of the Prince Arthur, the logs of both ships, and other documents in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives.

Discrete auroral arcs frequently bridge the polar cap connecting the morning and evening sectors of the auroral oval along the line of the transpolar (electron) current. Very high-latitude stations that lie wholly within the oval during the earth's diurnal rotation pass under this bridge twice a day, giving morning and evening maxima. Stations at slightly lower latitudes on Spitsbergen lie within the oval in the evening but under, or even south of, the oval in the morning. From such stations the evening, but not the morning, maximum is readily observed. This study is primarily concerned with the orientation of discrete polar cap arcs in the evening skies over Spitsbergen. It shows that the geomagnetic alignment of these arcs is latitude-dependent between geomagnetic colatitudes 6 to 20°N. At the highest latitudes within this range, the arcs are in transpolar alignment, whereas at the lowest latitudes within the polar cap, they are oval-aligned. At intermediate latitudes, the arcs are observed in transitional phases between transpolar and ovalalignment. The solar alignment of discrete polar cap arcs is a function of corrected geomagnetic local time. In the early afternoon, solar alignment is poor but this gradually improves throughout the late afternoon until there is excellent alignment at the time of the evening maximum. Recent satellite studies of plasma convection in the polar ionosphere have helped to explain some of the visual characteristics of discrete polar cap aurora observed from Spitsbergen, particularly the irregular alignment of arcs in the region of the Harang discontinuity.

Edwin Jesse De Haven (1816–1865) led the first Grinnell expedition in search of the lost British explorer Sir John Franklin in 1850–1851. Since it was the ship's charismatic surgeon, Elisha Kent Kane, who wrote the popular account of the voyage, De Haven's achievements have generally been overlooked. De Haven joined the United States Navy when he was 13 and was master on the ill-fated Peacock during the United States Exploring Expedition (1838–1842) to the Antarctic under Charles Wilkes. He saw action in the Mexican War in 1848, and was serving under Matthew Fontaine Maury at the Naval Observatory when he was chosen to take command of the first United States Franklin search expedition. He retired from the navy at the age of 46 and died three years later.

During every austral summer since the International Geophysical Year 1957–58 several thousand scientists and support staff have worked in Antarctica. A more recent development is the annual advent of 4000–5000 tourists, who now probably outnumber expedition members in the area covered by the Antarctic Treaty System. Most tourists come by ship, visiting coastal areas of the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Orkney and South Shetland islands that arc readily accessible beween November and March: smaller numbers visit the Ross Dependency and Adelie Land sectors. This article reviews Antarctic Treaty and International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) attitudes to tourism, and outlines a preliminary study of shipborne tourism between late December 1991 and March 1992 on Half Moon Island, South Shetland Islands. Within one month (January) a survey team from the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, recorded 14 visits by six tour ships, bringing more than 2000 tourists. In addition, attitudes and expectations of visitors were studied on five ships. Arising from this study, a programme of visitor monitoring is planned as a joint project between British, Chilean, and Argentine scientific institutions during the next five years. Objectives are to find ways of minimizing both short-term and long-term impacts of tourists and other visitors on breeding birds and other ecological communities, and to provide a factual basis for regulation under the Antarctic Treaty System.

By the early 1830s, American sealers expected free access to the waters and harbours of the Falkland Islands, an active rule over which had not been recognized by the United States. The US government, in the form of President Andrew Jackson and the State Department, adhered to a policy of freedom of the seas, and therefore backed the rights of American sealers to unrestricted access in the South Atlantic. After three sealing ships were impounded by the Argentinian authorities in the Falklands in 1831, the US Navy sloop Lexington, under the command of Captain Silas Duncan, destroyed the island group's capital at Puerto Soledad, and, with it, the Argentine military defences. The State Department informed the Argentine govermcnt that it had no claims, historic or actual, to the Falklands. The American policy of not recognizing the Argentine claims, which continued for half a century, did not interfere with British designs. In 1832–33 the British government issued orders for the Admiralty to send a warship to re-establish British control of the Falklands.