In the autumn of 1835, eleven ships from British ports were beset in Davis Strait. A journal kept by William Elder, an officer of one of the unfortunate ships, the Kirkcaldy whaler Viewforth, was recently given to the Scott Polar Research Institute by Elder's great-niece, Mrs Ann M. E. Jackson. It was this journal that provided the inspiration and the quarry for a small book, now rare, edited by the Reverend J. Bain of Kirkcaldy (Bain, 1836). Elder's original journal (Elder, 1835–36) is here summarized to provide further detail of that harrowing winter, which, as Bain remarked, “will be long remembered as one of the most eventful and disastrous in the history of the Whale Fishery”.

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 paper is the fourth to be published of a number of projected papers, each covering a major zoogeographical region of the world. For the Palearctic region see Boswall (1964, 1966 and 1969); for Australasia see Boswall (1965) and for the Ethiopian region see Boswall and North (1967). Nearctic, Neotropical and Oriental papers are in preparation.

In the five years or so since earlier articles on this subject appeared in the Polar Record, much has occurred. The present note, based on Soviet press and radio reports, 1963–68, aims to summarize the most important developments since that time in the region of the west Siberian plain. Administratively, the area under consideration falls largely within Tyumenskaya Oblast'.

The shape of the sea floor of the Arctic Basin is slowly being revealed by ice island programmes, icebreakers working the peripheral edges, under-ice nuclear submarine explorations and isolated ice landings by aircraft (Ostenso, 1962). The topographical features of the North American side of the Arctic have been studied by numerous investigators (Kutschale, 1966; DeLeeuw, 1967; Vogt and Ostenso, 1968), and are well documented. The Eurasian portion of the Arctic Basin is, however, less well known.

Domesticated reindeer are not indigenous to North America. Between the years 1892 and 1902, some 1 280 reindeer were imported into western Alaska from Siberia as a supplemental food item for the Bering Strait Eskimo, a novel attempt to introduce a herding technology among hunting societies. Very little is known about the experiences of Eskimo reindeer herdsmen or about the probable success or failure of this particular approach to the economic and social development of remote Arctic regions.