Having spent 21 months on board their icebound ship, Tegetthoff, adrift in the pack ice to the north of Novaya Zemlya, and having explored a substantial part of Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa [Franz Josef Land], to which the ice-drift had carried their ship, on 20 May 1874 the members of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition abandoned it and started south by sledge and boat. Progress was painfully slow, and for weeks involved repeatedly alternating between man hauling across floes and rowing or sailing across leads and polynyas. The expedition finally reached open water on 15 August and started rowing and sailing south along the west coast of Novaya Zemlya. They encountered two Russian fishing boats at Mys Britvin [Cape Britvin], just south of Matochkin Shar on 24 August, and the Austrians persuaded one of their captains to take them to Vardø in Northern Norway. They arrived there on 3 September and caught the mail steamer south to Hamburg. Apart from the engineer, Otto Krisch, who died of tuberculosis and scurvy and was buried on Ostrov Vilcheka [Wilczek Island], the remaining 24 members of the expedition returned home safely. The diary of one of the co-leaders of the expedition, Lieutenant Carl Weyprecht, covering the period of the retreat, is published here in English for the first time.

New Zealand has important strategic interests in Antarctica that are as much about geography and the country's geostrategic needs, as they are about history and the politics of maintaining rights gained in an earlier era. This paper outlines the reasons behind New Zealand's involvement in and commitment to Antarctica; profiles the various bodies involved in maintaining and negotiating New Zealand's Antarctic presence and voice on Antarctic affairs; and discusses New Zealand's core interests in the Antarctic continent that help to shape its Antarctic policy.

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.

From 1852 to 1904 the captains of Royal Naval vessels visiting Tristan da Cunha were generally expected to prepare reports on their visits and these were published, usually in British Government papers. These reports constitute a most significant group of primary sources for the history of the island and they also provide information concerning the attitudes of the captains of the vessels to the islanders and their society. An annotated list of these visits is presented.

In the last few years, questions pertaining to cooperation and conflict in the Arctic have emerged in the media, as well as within academia. While many scholars have rightly rejected the prospect of an imminent escalation of conflicts, the current debate is insufficiently informed by the literature on political order within the field of international relations (IR). In this article, the author attempts to explain the political order in the Arctic, situating his analysis within the broader context of IR theory. Guided by the perspectives of ‘hegemonics stability’, ‘balance of power’ and ‘Kantian internationalist theory’, focus is laid on power capabilities, international regimes and domestic regime type as independent variables. The main finding is that the Arctic is a multipolar ‘region,’ the enduring stability and peacefulness of which can be explained by both the role played by international regimes, and by the balance of power between the ‘stakeholders’ involved. The paper concludes by explaining how and why the smaller littoral Arctic states are the prime beneficiaries of this order.

During World War 1 John Player & Sons issued two series of cigarette cards, both entitled ‘Polar Exploration’. The first, probably issued in 1915, covered both Arctic and Antarctic subjects, but the second, issued in 1916, confined itself to the southern continent. Eight cards from the first series were derived from Shackleton's book The heart of the Antarctic. Commander E.R.G.R. ‘Teddy’ Evans, captain of R.F. Scott's vessel Terra Nova, was responsible for both the illustrations and texts of the cards in the second series.

In January 1962, a US Navy aircraft patroling the Denmark Stait mysteriously disappeared. In spite of an international search continuing over several weeks, the crash was first found accidentally 4.5 years later by geologists, but subsequently it was discovered that all the bodies had not been returned. It was not until 2009 that the story was brought to a close with a ceremony at the naval air base in Jacksonville, Florida.

Alf Howard, (Fig. 1) died on 4 July 2010. He was the last surviving member of Sir Douglas Mawson's 1929–1931 British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) that made further extensive claims to sovereignty defining the limits of what was to become Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT) in 1933. He was also the last survivor to have served aboard the coal-fired three-masted wooden ship Discovery built in Dundee for Captain Robert Falcon Scott's 1901–1904 National Antarctic Expedition.