SKETCH OF BARON ADOLF ERIC NORDENSKIOLD. 537 



"An excursion of some length was made into the wilderness of ice, 

 everywhere full of bottomless clefts, which occupies the interior of 

 Greenland, and which, if I except unimportant wanderings along the 

 edge, and an inconsiderable attempt in the same direction in the year 

 1728, by the Dane Dalager, was now, for the first time, trodden by 

 human foot. I had here an opportunity of clearing up the nature of 

 a formation which, during one of the latest geological ages, covered 

 a great part of the civilized countries of Europe, and which, though 

 it has given occasion to an exceedingly comprehensive literature in all 

 cultivated languages, had never before been examined by any geolo- 

 gist." 



Another expedition, of two vessels, was fitted up in 1872, with the 

 design of attempting to reach the pole with reindeers, to which Lieu- 

 tenant Palander, the companion of his last voyage, was for the first 

 time attached. The ice was unusually unfavorable, and the winter 

 was spent in Mussel Bay, on the north of West Spitzbergen. Here 

 attention was first called to the presence of dust of cosmic origin con- 

 taining nickel-iron, the agency of which as a possible factor in build- 

 ing up the earth's crust is discussed with considerable fullness in the 

 "Voyage of the Vega"; more complete researches on the aurora 

 and its spectrum were carried on ; investigations were made on the 

 development of algae during the winter night of four months ; numer- 

 ous new contributions to a knowledge of polar countries during former 

 geological epochs were discovered ; and a complete series of meteoro- 

 logical and magnetic observations was made in the most northerly 

 latitude where such observations had up to this time been carried on. 

 With this expedition Nordenskiold's efforts to reach the pole ceased. 

 He had become convinced by his repeated voyages that there was no 

 open sea at the pole ; and he had his attention drawn to the " more 

 practical problem, which had interested the foremost commercial states 

 and the most daring navigators for three hundred years, and geogra- 

 phers for thousands of years " that of forcing a northeast passage to 

 China and Japan, and the circumnavigation of the Old World. 



In 1875 he succeeded, with the walrus-hunting sloop Proeven, in 

 sailing over the Kara Sea as far as to the mouth of the Yenisei, whence 

 he put himself in communication with the river-steamers to Yeniseisk ; 

 and whence he returned by land, while his companions came back by 

 sea to Europe. By this voyage, he says, " I was the first person who 

 succeeded in penetrating from the Atlantic Ocean in a vessel to the 

 mouths of the great Siberian rivers. One of the objects which the 

 old northeast voyagers had aimed at was at last accomplished, and 

 that in a way that promised to be of immense practical importance for 

 the whole of Siberia. The voyage was also regarded in that light by 

 leading men of the great empire of the East, and our return journey 

 from Yeniseisk by Krasnojarsk, Tomsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizh- 

 nee-Kovgorod, Mosqow, and St. Petersburg became, therefore, a jour- 



