Curious incidents include both those in which nothing happened, as with Sherlock Holmes's famously inactive ‘dog in the night-time’ (Doyle Reference Doyle1892: 657), and those in which something did indeed happen. To take just one example of the latter, from the crowded collection of anecdotes which probably inspired the celebrated passage in ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’, in August 1705 a Kirkwall butcher chased a tax-gathering lawyer out of his house and through his cabbage patch, at knife-point, not once but twice on the same day (Mackintosh Reference Mackintosh1892: 125–127). So perhaps the phrase can also be applied to incidents in which either nothing or something may have happened, as in the present case.

As has been mentioned elsewhere (Bulkeley Reference Bulkeley2008) one of the minor distinctions of the first Soviet Antarctic expedition of 1955–1957 was that it included the first woman ever to work as a professional scientist in Antarctica, the marine geologist Mariya Vasilyevna Klyonova, on board the research vessel and icebreaker Ob’. Klyonova was a veteran of eleven oceanographic cruises in the Arctic, some of which she had led herself, another first in the history of science. She was the only female scientist in Antarctica during the 1955–1956 season. Between the scramble to unload, in which nearly all hands took part, the opening ceremony for Mirnyi Station on 13 February 1956, and a rumoured temporary evacuation of the icebreakers (Australian Broadcasting Corporation News, 27 February 1956), she almost certainly set foot on the mainland. Her own work was done from the ship.

The following year saw a trio of Soviet women scientists, zoologist Vera Sergeyevna Korotkevich, microbiologist Maiya Nikolayevna Lebyedeva, and geographer Lidiya Mikhailovna Nikolayeva, all on the Ob’. Lebyedeva was left off the personnel list but her presence is confirmed by a single publication (Lebyedeva Reference Lebyedeva and Maksimov1960) and her biography posted on the internet (Institute for Southern Ocean Biology 2007–2009). Another woman worked on the ship as a scientific translator.

As background to this note, it should be remarked that both Soviet vessels, Lena and Ob’, spent longer at Port Adelaide in 1956 than was necessary for scientific or political (‘good-will’) purposes. Lena spent sixteen and Ob’ nine nights there, whereas Ob’ had spent only three at Wellington. For all the friendly exchanges with Sir Douglas Mawson and Professor Martin Glaessner (an Austrian born geologist who had worked in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1937 and was married to a Soviet citizen), the cultural activities of Ob’ personnel in Adelaide took up only half a page more in Suzyumov's account than did those in Wellington (Suzyumov Reference Suzyumov and Bardin1958). For Lena the four day Easter holiday period, and for Ob’ the mid-week Anzac Day holiday on 25 April, would have contributed to their delays.

During the cold war such port visits could serve various purposes. Thus in April 1957, during the second Soviet Antarctic expedition, Ob’ visited the Cocos Islands at the invitation of the Australian government, in connection with negotiations about the possible use of Australian facilities by Soviet aircraft in support of their expeditions. The Australians wanted the Russians to use the two airstrips built on the islands during World War II as a compulsory entry point into their security zone, at which an observer from the Royal Australian Air Force would be taken on board. In June 1956 the Soviet government appeared to agree to this arrangement. A year later, soon after Ob’ had visited the islands and just before the opening of the International Geophysical Year proper, they retracted from it, pleading technical difficulties (British Embassy, Moscow Reference British Embassy1956; Bourchier Reference Bourchier1957). None of this featured in the published account of the cruise (Maksimov Reference Maksimov1959: 15–16).

At Port Adelaide in 1956 one important aim was financial. With no overwintering party to relieve, Ob’ had departed from Antarctica emptier that year than she ever would again. Both ships needed their time at Port Adelaide to load consignments of Australian grain for European ports, thus earning hard currency to offset the high costs of the expedition, such as bunkering at Cape Town on the outward and at Port Said on the homeward journey.

Lena carried the Mirnyi construction party of 81 people and a crew of 65, of whom five or six (sources differ) were women. A photograph of two of them appeared in the Australian press (Anon. 1956). After Lena had spent two weeks at Port Adelaide a local broadsheet newspaper reported that one of the women had delayed the ship's departure by going absent without leave (Adelaide Advertiser 11 April 1956). An official Australian report found that the delay had actually been caused by financial rather than personnel problems. But it did not entirely refute the Advertiser's story about an absconding crew member (Edson Reference Edson1956).

Thanks to Yevgyenii Matveyevich Suzyumov (Reference Suzyumov and Bardin1958), who was the scientific secretary of the oceanographic section of the first expedition, there is more information in the public domain about the visit of Ob’, which took place later that month. The Australian-Soviet friendship society (ASFS) played a leading role throughout the visit, organising such things as coach trips, a supply of Soviet newspapers, and diverse contacts with local scientists. Expedition members were taken to meet ASFS member Charles Duguid, a Presbyterian minister and president of the South Australian Aborigines’ advancement league, who had led the opposition to the establishment of the Woomera rocket testing range in the 1940s. The reception for women from Ob’, hosted by the ASFS and an unspecified ‘women's democratic organisation’ on the evening of 29 April 1956, was part of that overall programme. But the statement by Irina Gan, in her interesting article in this journal, that it was attended by ‘eight Soviet women scientists’, is inaccurate (Gan Reference Gan2009: 46). Suzyumov described them not as scientists but as ‘members of the expedition’ (Suzyumov Reference Suzyumov and Bardin1958: 227). The crew list, which can be consulted in the same volume, includes eight women. They are designated as three stewards, a laundry worker, and four cleaners (Bardin Reference Bardin1958: 15–16). Seven of them, plus Klyonova, made up the shore party listed by Suzyumov.

But where was the ninth woman from the Ob’ that evening? The cleaner Lidiya Vladimirovna Myelkaya was not mentioned by Suzyumov. Perhaps she went out on the town with male colleagues, but that seems highly unlikely. Attendance at a ‘progressive’ event like the reception would have been her civic duty. Or perhaps she was unwell. If not that, had she been confined to the ship by the captain because of some misdemeanour? Or was she simply on duty? The last two possibilities seem improbably unfair, given that the ship was sailing the next day and this was the only formal occasion to which these people from the bottom end of the crew list (nos 61–68) were invited during their extended visit to Adelaide.

The most innocuous explanation would be that Myelkaya did attend the function but Suzyumov accidentally left her name out. According to Gan (Reference Gan2009: 43) he may have slipped up like that elsewhere in his report, when naming the Soviet shore party at Macquarie Island. Could he have made the same mistake twice in a few pages, and this time with the crew list in front of him? The book went to press two years after Ob’ returned to Leningrad, so that Suzyumov was not writing under any great pressure. But he will have had other scholarly commitments, and the mere passage of time makes such minor errors probable. Lebyedeva, above, is probably a case in point.

A sign that something may have been going on, however, is that Suzyumov followed the order of the crew list when naming the women who went to the reception, except for transposing the two each side of the unmentioned Myelkaya, namely Boltayevskaya and Ilyina. There is also the question of Myelkaya's highly unusual surname, which can be translated as ‘Light-weight’ or possibly ‘Titch’. As an adjective it is commonly applied nowadays to underweight babies. It is virtually unheard of as a surname, but is used very occasionally in contexts where it could well be a nickname, for instance for creative artists. As for the present case, it has been suggested that this was ‘the sort of pseudonym that the KGB bestowed on its low-level agents’ (Olga Stone, personal communication, 10 March 2009).

It was certainly possible for such people not to be named in Soviet scientific texts. In his posthumous autobiography, written in the 1980s, the great Soviet chemist Aleksandr Nikolayevich Nesmeyanov, who was president of the Academy of Sciences from 1951 to 1961, described his participation in a three man delegation to the International Chemical Congress at London in 1947. He named his fellow scientist, Nikolai Vladimirovich Ageyev. But of the third person he simply remarked that he was not employed by the academy, adding ‘let us call him V’ (Nesmeyanov, Reference Nesmeyanov1999: 116). True, Myelkaya was listed elsewhere in the published account of Ob's first Antarctic cruise, or this note could not have been written. But Suzyumov need not have known that she would be.

The research cruise of Ob’ in 1955–1956 achieved many successes, logistic, scientific, cultural, political and, it is to be hoped, financial. But we will probably never know whether the curious incident in Adelaide, involving crew member no. 66, was one in which something, or one in which nothing, actually happened.