The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe

The Finnish geologist and Arctic explorer A. E. Nordenskild (1832-1901) spent much of his life in exile in Sweden, where he was made a baron. He served as Superintendent of the Mineralogical Department of the Swedish Royal Museum, and later became a Member of the Swedish Academy. Following a number of expeditions during the 1860s, he concluded that the North Pole could not be reached by ship, and in 1872 he tried unsuccessfully to reach it overland. A great historian of cartography, he amassed a huge collection of maps, now included in UNESCO's 'Memory of the World' Register. This two-volume work, published in Swedish in 1881, describes his most famous voyage, the first crossing of the North-East Passage. Volume 2 follows the expedition from the Bering Strait to Yokohama in Japan, and the return journey to Sweden, through the India Ocean, the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, in 1879.