INTRODUCTION. 
29 
but without any direct practical utility. For nearly a hundred 
and fifty years the same was the case with Spangberg’s voyage 
from Kamschatka to Japan in the year 1739, by which the 
exploring expeditions of the Russians, in the northernmost part 
of the Pacific Ocean, were connected with those of the Dutch 
and the Portuguese to India and Japan ; and in case our expedition 
succeeds in reaching the Suez Canal, after having circumnavi¬ 
gated Asia, there will meet us there a splendid work, which, 
more than any other, reminds us, that what to-da}^ is declared 
by experts to be impossible, is often carried into execution 
to-morrow. 
I am also fully convinced that it is not only possible to sail 
along the north coast of Asia, provided circumstances are not too 
unfavourable, but that such an enterprise will be of incalculable 
practical importance, by no means directly, as opening a new 
commercial route, but indirectly, by the impression which would 
thereby be communicated of the practical utility of a com¬ 
munication by sea between the ports of North Scandinavia and 
the Obi and Yenisej, on the one hand, and between the Pacific 
Ocean and the Lena on the other. 
Should the expedition, contrary to expectation, not succeed 
in carrying out the programme which has been arranged in its 
entirety, it ought not to be looked upon as having failed. In 
such a case the expedition will remain for a considerable time 
at places on the north coast of Siberia, suitable for scientific 
research. Every mile beyond the mouth of the Yenisej is a step 
forward to a complete knowledge of our globe—an object which 
sometime or other must be attained, and towards which it is 
a point of honour for every civilised nation to contribute in its 
proportion. 
Men of science will have an opportunity, in these hitherto 
unvisited waters, of answering a number of questions regarding 
the former and present state of the Polar countries, of which 
more than one is of sufficient weight and importance to lead to 
such an expedition as the present. I may be permitted here 
to refer to only a few of these. 
If we except that part of the Kara Sea which has been 
surveyed by the two last Swedish expeditions, we have for the 
present no knowledge of the vegetable and animal life in the 
sea which washes the north coast of Siberia. Quite certainly we 
shall here, in opposition to what has been hitherto supposed, 
meet with the same abundance of animals and plants as in the 
sea round Spitzbergen. In the Siberian Polar sea, the animal 
and vegetable types, so far as we can judge beforehand, exclusively 
