Following Cook's historic circumnavigation (1772–75) of the globe in Antarctic waters and his reports of great numbers of seals on South Georgia, considerable numbers of commercial sealing expeditions had made new discoveries of islands in the vicinity of the Antarctic Peninsula. However, not until 1819 was another government-sponsored exploring and scientific expedition organized to continue the search for the then still-unknown southern continent. This time the expedition was a Russian one, and in command of the two-ship squadron was Thaddeus Bellingshausen, then a lieutenant in the Black Sea Fleet; previously he had sailed around the world in an expedition under Kruzenstern in 1803–06. He also gained much experience in coastal surveying and charting in the Black Sea. The two ships in the squadron were Vostok (985 tonne, 117 men) under Bellingshausen's command, and Mirnyy (884 tonne, 73 men) under Lt Mikhail Lazarev, who had served for several years in the British Navy. Bellingshausen, in the opinion of some, merits equal consideration as a navigator and seaman with Cook (Debenham, 1945, p xi, xiii; Barratt, 1981, p 202). He, himself, had a high admiration for Cook and drew heavily upon Cook's narratives for guidance in sailing the. Southern Ocean. The aim of the expedition, according to a letter by the Minister of Marine to Bellingshausen, was ‘to carry out a voyage of discovery in the high southern latitudes, and to circumnavigate the ice-belt of the southern Polar Circle.’ (Debenham, 1945, p 6). The two ships sailed from Kronshtadt on 14 July 1819f and returned to that port on 5 August 1821 having achieved the aim of the expedition, spending two summer seasons in Antarctic waters and one season exploring the South Pacific islands. They called at Rio de Janeiro on the outward and homeward sailings.

South Georgia, at present governed as a Dependency of the Falkland Islands, has an interesting history of human activity extending back nearly two centuries. The sealers who visited the island in considerable numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries (Jones, 1973) almost certainly left gangs of men on the island for considerable periods, but not until the 20th century were permanent settlements established there. Published accounts of the initial stages of this colonisation (Matthews, 1931; Christie, 1951) contain various important errors, and give only the simplest outline of an interesting political problem. A more accurate account of some of these events has recently been published (Tonnessen and Johnsen, 1982). Material preserved in the Falkland Islands Government's (FIG) archives at Port Stanley has allowed a detailed account to be built up of this important period of South Georgia's history.

Between the austral summers of 1975–76 and 1979–80 the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition (ANARE) carried out field programmes in geology, geophysics, surveying and mapping, biology and glaciology in Enderby and Kemp lands, Antarctica (Fig 1). The glaciological research consisted of three closely related major projects: the determination of the mass flux across a section of the ice sheet, approximately along the 2 000 m elevation contour between 53°E and 62°E; an investigation of the dynamics and mass balance of the fast flowing outlet glacier streams between longitudes 48°E and 62°E; and a regional survey of the ice thickness and ice surface elevation over the same sector and up to about 250 km inland from the coast.

In the present era of instantaneous telecommunications it is scarcely conceivable that two major exploring or scientific expeditions could be planning simultaneously to operate in a particular area of the Arctic (or indeed anywhere on earth) in complete ignorance of each other's intentions until each arrived in the field. At the turn of the century, however, this was indeed possible, and did in fact happen in the case of a little-known expedition to Ellesmere Island, led by Dr Robert Stein, which found itself completely eclipsed by the much better equipped and funded expedition of Otto Sverdrup in Fram.

Karl Weyprecht has left an unforgettable record of polar exploration, but has himself tended to be forgotten. His fame rests not so much with his work in the Arctic, which included the discovery of Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa, but on the series of international scientific programmes which he initiated in 1875 with the first International Polar Year (IPY), 1882–83. International scientific programmes can be traced back to 1751, when observations of the parallaxes of the Moon, Mars and Venus were made at six stations in the Northern Hemisphere and at one in the Southern. The most recent, the World Climate Research Programme, organized jointly by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), began in 1980.

Polar Record, Vol 21, No 131, May 1982, p162. The source of the map should read: J. H. Bater and R. A. French, eds. Studies in the historical geography of Russia (in press).