[The British Antarctic Expedition, 1839–43, consisted of two Naval vessels, H.M.S. Erebus and Terror, with Sir James Clark Ross as leader and Captain F. R. M. Crozier as second-in-command. The objects of the expedition were mainly concerned with terrestrial magnetism, a subject of particular interest to Ross who had discovered the North Magnetic Pole in 1831. The expedition circumnavigated the Antarctic continent and made a number of important geographical discoveries. It twice penetrated the pack ice.of the Ross Sea; it discovered, and roughly charted, 500 miles of new coastline in Victoria Land; it discovered Ross Island and the Ross Ice Front, also the James Ross Island group; it visited Prince Edward Islands, les Crozet and les Kerguelen; and it sighted Joinville Island and the Balleny Islands. Observations of terrestrial magnetism were made from stations, either permanent or temporary, set up during the voyage.

New Zealanders interested in Antarctic exploration have for some years been concerned about the condition of the old huts in McMurdo Sound, built and occupied by the expeditions of the “heroic age”, and during the past two or three years sporadic attempts have been made to tidy up Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds and Scott's hut at Cape Evans. Working parties from H.M.N.Z.S. Endeavour and men from “Scott Base” have done urgent repair work and a certain amount of cleaning up, but it was evident that a more extensive project, properly organized and supervised, was necessary if the huts were to be made readily accessible to interested visitors and restored to a condition more in keeping with their historical interest.

There has for long been discussion among Soviet geographers on the definition of various terms in Soviet usage to indicate the northern part of the USSR. Some of these terms—“the Arctic” [Arktika], “the Arctic region” [arkticheskaya oblast'], “the sub-Arctic” [subarktika], “the polar regions” [Zapolyar'ye]—are normally used to denote areas defined according to physical criteria. Such criteria are similar to those usually applied outside the USSR, such as the “10° C. July isotherm”, the “tree line”, or the “limit of continuous permafrost”, and, again as in the non-Soviet world, the terms have no generally accepted precise meaning and must be defined by each user. But in addition to these terms for natural regions, there are certain terms in predominantly economic and administrative usage: “the north” [sever], “the far north” [dal'niy sever], “the extreme north” [krayniy sever], “the northern marches” [severnyye okrainy], and “the Soviet north” [sovetskiy sever]. Some explanation of their current connotations may be helpful to those studying Soviet literature.