302 
THE A^OYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[CHA1>. 
earnest. It is well known how this carefully equipped expedition 
■ afterwards for two winters in succession drifted about in the 
Polar Sea, until it finally came to a standstill at a previously un¬ 
known land lying north of Novaya Zemlya, which was named 
after the Austrian Emperor, Franz Josef. These two expeditions, 
however, did not touch the territory of the Vegas voyage, on 
which account I cannot here take any further notice of them.^ 
But the same year a wintering took place on the west coast of 
Novaya Zemlya, of which I consider that I ought to give a 
somewhat more detailed account, both because in the course of 
it one of the most gallant Polar voyagers of Norway met his 
fate, and because it shows us various new, hitherto untouched 
sides of winter life in the High North. 
Si VERT Tobiesen was one of the oldest and boldest of the 
Norwegian walrus-hunting skippers; he had with life and soul 
devoted himself to his calling, and in it was exposed to many 
dangers and difficulties, which he knew how to escape through 
courage and skill. In 1861 he had sailed round the north- 
eastern part of North-east Land, and had been very successful 
in hunting; but as he was about to return home, his vessel was 
beset by ice near the southern entrance to Hinloopen Strait, 
where the same fate also overtook two other hunting sloops, one 
of them commanded by the old hunting skipper Mattilas, who 
in the winter of 1872-73 died in a tent at Grey Hook, the 
other by the skipper J. AsTROM. They were compelled to save 
themselves in boats, in which they rowed through Hinloopen 
Strait to the mouth of Ice Fjord, where the shipwrecked crews 
were met and saved by the Swedish expedition of 1861. He 
1 Nor does space permit me to give an account of various expeditions, 
which indeed concerned Novaya Zemlya, but did not penetrate farther 
eastward than their predecessors; for instance, the Rosenthal expedition of 
1871, in which the well-known African traveller and Spitzbergen voyager 
Baron von Heuglin, and the Norwegian botanist Aage Aagaard, took part 
as naturalists ; Payer and Weyprecht’s voyage of reconnaissance in the 
sea between Spitzbergen and Novajui Zemlya in 1871, &c. 
