yo 
E.—GEOGRAPHY 81 
The fur trade in the Arctic has never suffered quite such staggering 
blows as the whaling industry, yet it is not so very many years since nothing 
less than international complications were a strong enough threat to 
ensure that the fur-bearing seals should not be exterminated as a species. 
That is precisely what did happen in the Antarctic in the early years of 
last century, when in less than a decade all but a few hundred of this kind 
of seal were slaughtered. 
These products of hunting, fishing and mining were the natural re- 
sources of the North and were the first to be exploited, but quite recently 
a new factor in the commercial aspect of the North has come to the 
forefront. With the progress of long-distance aviation and the simple 
application of the principle of great-circle navigation, the idea of using these 
northern latitudes for passenger and even freight routes in the air 
has become not only prominent but almost insistent. 
Owing to the misleading projections on which most of our maps are 
constructed it is not usually recognised that the most direct route between, 
say, Berlin and Montreal or Glasgow and Winnipeg is over Greenland, 
but it is so. It seems to be only a matter of time and the inevitable im- 
provement of aeroplanes before some use is made of a route which was 
first investigated as to conditions by the Watkins Expedition of 1930. 
All these economic aspects of the polar regions necessarily have a 
political bearing. Though it was not until the present century that the 
great Powers began to take a close interest in the idea of possessing polar 
_ territories, there has been in recent years a degree of keenness in this 
respect which is not dissimilar to that which prompted the partition of 
_ Africa in the latter part of last century. In the eyes of the historian of 
the future it is probable that the more or less forcible partition of Africa 
will be regarded with condemnation, since in that case there were peoples 
whose rights had to be ignored, and a degree of envy and jealousy 
between participating nations which was far from being creditable. In 
the polar regions the case is different, in that those lands which had a 
native population were taken under protection at an early date by 
Russia, the United States, Canada, and Denmark. Though there has 
been, since the great war, a rush for the remaining unclaimed land areas 
of the north this was, however, carried out with a reasonable lack of 
animosity between the nations concerned. In the north there are now 
_ no tracts of land which are not either settled in part or specifically claimed 
by one of the Powers. The recent adjudication of rights over East 
Greenland by the International Court at The Hague in favour of Denmark 
has settled what might have been a standing cause for bickering. 
In the Antarctic regions, which are far less known than the Arctic, the 
political aspect has come forward of recent years almost entirely on account 
of the whaling industry which, though now largely carried out at sea, 
had at first to depend upon land stations for its full operation. It 
cannot be said, even by the British nation, which claims the greater part 
of the Antarctic continent, that the matter is settled in a satisfactory way 
as yet. It seems that none of the usual precedents of international law 
can be made to apply to the land mass of Antarctica, for not only is 
occupation, in the proper sense of the word, more or less impossible, but 
