286 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
eastern side he followed the coast of Yalmal towards the north 
to Beli Ostrov. This island was reached on the 7th August, and 
from it he steered south along the east coast of Novaya Zemlya 
to the Kara Port, through which he returned to Norwayd 
The same year, the English sportsman, Mr. John Palliser^ 
sailed across the Kara Sea, through Matotschkin Schar to Beli 
Ostrov. He returned through Yugor Schar with abundance 
of booty ^ from the hunting grounds where formerly the 
walruses tumbled undisturbed among the drift-ice, and where 
the white bear has not yet met his superior.^ 
These voyages are amongst the rnost remarkable that the 
history of Arctic navigation can show. They at once overturned 
all the theories which, on the ground of an often superficial 
study of preceding unsuccessful voyages, had been set up 
regarding the state of the ice east of Novaya Zemlya, and they 
thus form the starting-point of a new era in the history of the 
North-east Passage. 
After his return to Norway Johannesen sent to the Academy 
of Sciences in Stockholm a paper on his voyage in 1869, and on 
his hydrographical observations in the Kara Sea, for w^hich he 
received a silver medal. This I was commissioned to send him, 
and in the correspondence which took place regarding it I on 
one occasion said in jest that a circumnavigation of Novaya 
Zemlya would certainly entitle him to a gold medal from the 
^ The first account of this voyage was published in Ofversigt af Svensha 
Veten&lmps-ahademiensforhandUngar^ 1870, p. 111. 
2 Atlienceum, 1869, p. 498. Petermann’s Mittlieilungen^ 1869, p. 391. 
3 Palliser’s game consisted of 49 walruses, 14 Polar bears and 25 
seals ; that of the working hunters was many times g];eater. All the 
vessels which went from Tromsoe that year captured 805 walruses, 2,302 
seals, 53 bears, &c. 
^ Sidoroff too started in 1869 on a north-east voyage in a steamer of his 
own, the George. However, he only reached the Petchora, and the statement 
that went the round of the press, that the George actually reached the Ob, 
is thus one of the many mistakes which so readily find their way into the 
news of the day. 
