ABSTRACT
The small volcanic Arctic island of Jan Mayen lies around 500 km north of the Arctic Circle and is roughly equidistant from mainland Norway, Greenland and Iceland. It was discovered in the seventeenth century, either by the Dutch or British according to different accounts. Seal hunting largely succeeded whaling as the chief commercial activity in the Arctic but, by the nineteenth century, this, too, was leading to overexploitation by European hunters. The 1887 Treaty hence saw the Norwegians, Swedes, Germans, Dutch, Russians and British agree to pass similarly worded concurrent domestic legislation banning sealing in the Jan Mayen seal fishery east of Greenland prior to 3 April each year with common penalties for violations of this ban. Jan Mayen was annexed by Norway in 1929 bringing the Seal Fishery Treaty to an end. However, this has not proven to be to the detriment of environmental protection.
