Alaska and Canada have recently been celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of those separate events, both occurring in 1867, which gave birth to their modern political alignment.

Because of its geographical position, Alaska's history, more than that of any other state of the union, developed in response to international events. Its original Russian occupation, and its acquisition by the United States a century ago, emerge from the history of eastern Siberia, and are related to events in the region of the river Amur, once a part of the ancient Chinese empire. Its purchase also carried with it a boundary dispute merging Alaska's history with that of western Canada.

Politics has been a lively part of the Alaskan way of life since the Territory was created by the Organic Act of 1912 (a half-loaf of self-government), and assumed new dimensions with the Statehood Act of 1958. But with the exception of Indians resident in the south-east region Alaskan politics was a game that the Eskimos and Aleuts of the western and northern coastal regions and the interior Indians (approximately 78 per cent of the total 1960 Native population) did not join in although they could participate automatically after 1924, and by application between 1915 and 1924. After World War II, these people began to exercise their right to vote, but they did not yet constitute an important political force.

In northern Canada, the provision of the amenities that twentieth-century technology has made available to everyday life is complicated by several factors. Chief among these are the severity of the climate and the fact that the population is small and scattered, which often means that the expense of such an amenity is considerably greater than it is in the southern part of the country.

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”.

In recent years Den Kongelige Grenlandske Handel (Royal Greenland Trade Department, or RGTD) has sold about 60000 seal skins, about 4000 fox skins, and 20 to 30 Polar Bear skins annually for native hunters on the west and east coasts of Greenland. As seals predominate in the Greenland crop of skins, this paper will deal mainly with the history and conditions of the seal skin industry, and its significance for the Greenland community.

Within the past half century the Canadian Government and the Hudson's Bay Company have established a number of settlements in the Canadian Arctic with Eskimo families drawn from different areas. These include the settlements on Southampton Island and at Great Whale River, Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord. Although these families have been living close to each other for years they maintain distinct sub-cultural differences in dialect and customs. Some cultural exchange has undoubtedly occurred but very real forces presumably exist within the factions that prevent any general exchange that would obscure their distinct collective identities.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game started marking Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus) in 1967 to obtain life history information (Lentfer, 1968), and continued in 1968 with the assistance of the US Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. Special thanks for use of facilities are given to the Arctic Research Laboratory at Barrow and to the Tin City and Cape Lisburne Air Force stations. Participating biologists were J. W. Lentfer, L. H. Miller, S. H. Eide, and G. N. Bos of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and J. W. Brooks of the US Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife.

The first reindeer were introduced into Canada for humanitarian rather than commercial reasons. Encouraged by the success achieved in Alaska, where 1280 reindeer imported by Dr Sheldon Jackson from Siberia between 1892 and 1902 had increased in a few years to several times that number, the missionary physician of Labrador, Wilfred Grenfell, hoped to develop a reindeer meat-and-dairy industry in his region, where tuberculosis was common and infant mortality high. In 1908, with financial support from the Boston Transcript and the Canadian Department of Agriculture, he bought 300 reindeer in Norway and brought them to St Anthony, Newfoundland. Under the supervision of four Lapp herders, the animals quickly adjusted to their new environment

The very low population densities in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, and the apparently rugged physical environment, tend to minimize one's conception of the possible effect of man's activities in these regions. In fact, of course, populations concentrate in fewer centres than in warmer regions: more than half the population of the Yukon Territory lives within 30 km of Whitehorse, and more than half Alaska's is associated with Fairbanks and Anchorage. The apparent ruggedness is offset by slow regenerative processes in areas disturbed by man. The presence of the impermeable permafrost layer over much of the Arctic and sub-Arctic prevents the dispersal of man's waste products and facilitates pollution of water and land. The air itself over centres of population is often exceptionally vulnerable to pollution.

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.

When considering the problems of building in the north to talk of an architecture of climate would be to tell only half of the story. It is people in the climate, the cities and the landscape, in families or crowds that count. Ordinary people, not architects, people who sometimes are born in the north and know it and love it or hate it, other people who are moving from more populous areas to small isolated communities in the wilderness, and must be given the amenities they previously enjoyed.

Children in the Canadian north—the children of hunters and trappers, of miners and prospectors, of bush-pilots and government workers—all attend school together. This year over 8500 pupils are enrolled in the sixty-seven schools of the Northwest Territories and Arctic Quebec comprising some 3600 Eskimo pupils, 1500 Indian pupils and 3400 white and Metis. It is estimated that about 13 per cent of school-age children in the north still do not attend school; these are children whose families live outside the settlements, mainly in the Upper Mackenzie, Nahanni and Central Arctic coast areas. Camp life, however, is swiftly disappearing and a much higher percentage of school-age enrolment is expected within the next few years.

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.

The reindeer experiment in the Mackenzie Districtf continues as the Canadian Reindeer Project, the contract for which is held by Sven Johansson, an immigrant from Sweden where he had gained experience in reindeer husbandry at Jokkmok and elsewhere. He had been employed as project manager in March 1963 for two years by A. J. Oeming, who was then sole contractor, and in 1965 he took up the contract himself for one year; it has been renewed annually since then. Project headquarters remain at Reindeer Station. Responsibility for the Project's support and over-all control lies with the Federal Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. The Inuvik Research Laboratory, 30 miles south of Reindeer Station, provides valuable technical assistance.

In July 1967 the Scott Polar Research Institute secured at public sale the manuscript autobiography, hitherto unknown to scholars, of the Arctic explorer Dr John Rae. The Institute was enabled to pay the unexpectedly high price of the manuscript through the good offices of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which matched Institute funds provided by generous friends in Canada and the United States who have wished not to be named.

Much of the literature relating to the climate of Antarctica has been concerned with the prevalence of strong winds and accompanying drifting snow which are such a feature of the environment. Not so well known are the variations, both with time and geographical location, in the frequency of occurrence of calms and light winds, or the synoptic scale and local influences associated with these conditions. However, calms are frequently of considerable operational importance to expeditions and the meteorological factors associated with them have some significance as indicators of general circulation characteristics.

These words were written by an American senator from California about his experience in the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. In the Canadian north of the 1890's, government meant public order. The first resident servants of the Dominion Government were an Inspector and twenty men of the North-West Mounted Police who were assigned to the Yukon in 1894 to “represent all the different departments of government in the district” (Canada, Department of Interior 1907, p 15).

The total area of Canada (land area and fresh water) is around 10 million sq km, making it the second largest country in the world, second only to the Soviet Union.

For various historic and economic reasons Canada's population of 20 million is very largely concentrated in the southern part of the country, with about twothirds of the population living in large urban centres. The heavy broken line on Fig 1 shows the northern boundary of the densely populated portion of Canada. Only 1·5 per cent of Canada's total population, or 300000 people, live north of this frontier, and out of this total only about 38000 live in the Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories. The Yukon has a population of only twenty seven people per 1000 sq km, and the Northwest Territories of eight people per 1000 sq km. The total Eskimo population in both territories is about 13600 and the total Indian population some 8000.

With the longest coastline in the world, Canada has a vital need for oceanographic information and it has been a matter of national policy for some years to increase substantially the scale and scope of Canadian oceanographic research and survey. A major step in the implementation of this policy, taken in mid-1962, was the opening of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO) at Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, since February 1968 known as the Bedford Institute (BI).

These notes, which are arranged in no special order, represent some of the facts learnt and impressions received during this visit. I made an earlier visit to the same general area of north-east Siberia in October 1965.

The Permafrost Institute [Institut Merzlotovedeniya], Yakutsk

The Director, P. I. Mel'nikov, was in Canada for two months on an exchange visit. His Deputies are now F. E. Are, who was here in 1965, and I. I. Tuchkov, a geologist recently transferred from the Yakut Filial to take N. A. Grave's place. These two looked after me in the friendliest and most helpful way.