On 1 November 1951 Norsel sailed from Göteborg on her third voyage to Maudheim; this time to evacuate the expedition. On board were the personnel and two aircraft of a Swedish Air Force unit. Air reconnaissance had been carried out in the expedition's first season by a British R.A.F. Flight. In the second season a Norwegian commercial flying unit had done some photography, and in the final season it was the turn of the Swedes to provide these services. In preparation for this the writer, who commanded the unit, had accompanied Norsel on her second voyage, and had thus been able to study the area, and discuss plans with members of the expedition.

Polarbjørn (‘Polar Bear’) was launched at Narvik in 1919, having been constructed for work in the Arctic. In 1923 she was the expedition ship for Adrian Jacobsen's expedition to Franz Josef Land, Svalbard, and Novaya Zemlya. The following year she was the expedition ship for George Binney's Oxford University expedition to Svalbard. She sailed twice to the Arctic with aeroplanes onboard to chart the region, in 1924 to Svalbard and in 1932 to northeast Greenland. Between 1931 and 1948 she was expedition ship for 10 scientific expeditions to Svalbard, Jan Mayen, and northeast Greenland organized by the Norges Svalbard-og Ishavsundersøkelser, the forerunner to the Norsk Polarinstitutt. In 1940 Polarbjørn was engaged by the Norwegian government in exile in London to deliver equipment and supplies to wintering trappers and wireless operators and to bring secret codes to the telegraph stations in northeast Greenland. From autumn 1941 to the end of the war she was chartered by US government forces and shuttled between Boston and Halifax to Greenland, Baffin Island, and Labrador. After the war she returned to sealing under Norwegian ownership, and in 1949 caught fire and sank off Belle Isle, Newfoundland.

Henry James Snow hunted marine mammals in the sub-Arctic Kuril Islands and adjacent areas of the North Pacific between the years 1873 and 1896. His success resulted from careful study of the animals hunted, in particular the sea otter. He had continual difficulties with the governments of Japan and Russia, which had sovereignty over the land and territorial waters of the region, some of the encounters involving violence. At the same time, Snow was a careful observer of the wildlife and surveyor of the natural features, especially of the Kuril Islands. His works represented the most accessible source of information about the islands as late as the start of the Pacific War in 1941.

There was no animal on South Georgia that we took into our hearts so much as these comical ‘Johnnies’, as the whalers call them. Not one of us, I am convinced, will recall our isolated existence in later years without simultaneously thinking with inner pleasure of these wonderful creatures. In their droll caricaturing of human gait and movements they provided an inexhautible source of humorous observations; further, in that their eggs allowed our chef to rise to unexpected achievements, they provided an equally pleasant resource.

South Georgia has been the site of a controlled commercial sealing industry since 1909. The Southern Elephant Seal (Mirounga leonina) is killed for the oil obtained from the processing of the skin and subcutaneous fat, in a manner similar to the processing of whale blubber.

The island is divided into four sealing divisions, each with an annual catch quota which is subject to revision if necessary at the completion of each season, depending on information obtained from the average age of the catch, and an annual population census. There are also reserve areas, in which commercial killing is prohibited and which provide controls for comparison between commercially exploited herds and those which are undisturbed. The latter begin to breed an earlier age, reach their peak breeding period earlier and bear a smaller ratio of cow to bull calves than the former. The total kill permissible over the last decade has remained at 6000 adult bull seals over 3·5 m in length. At present, the catch quotas in each division are as follows:

The texts of the Decisions and Resolutions, and the text of Measure 1 (2004), together with a summary of the Management Plan for Antarctic Specially Managed area No. 2, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Southern Victoria Land, adopted at XXVII ATCM were reproduced in SCAR Bulletin No 155, October 2004. A summary of the Management Plan for Antarctic Specially Managed Area No. 3, Cape Denison, Commonwealth Bay, George V land, together with Measures 2–4, are reproduced here. The full versions of all the Decisions, Measures and Resolutions are on the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat website at http://www.ats.org.ar/