Nordenskiöld

Nordenskiöld, BARON NILS ADOLF ERIK, Arctic navigator, was born at Helsingfors in Finland, on 18th November 1832, son of the superintendent of Finnish mines, and studied at home and in Berlin. In 1857 he naturalised himself in Sweden, and in the following year was appointed head of the mineralogical department of the Royal Museum at Stockholm. During the next twenty years he frequently visited Spitzbergen; in 1864 he completed the measurement of an arc of the meridian there, and mapped the south of the island. After two preliminary trips to the mouth of the Yenisei, by which he proved the navigability of the Kara Sea, he successfully accomplished (June 1878—September 1879), in the celebrated Vega, the navigation of the North-east Passage, from the Atlantic to the Pacific along the north coast of Asia. On his return he was made a baron of Sweden (1880), and during the next five years published the results of the journey in Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe (Eng. trans. 2 vols. 1881), Scientific Results of the Vega Expedition (1883), and Studies and Investigations (1885). To Greenland, too, he has made two expeditions; members of his party on the second occasion (1883) reached a point 140 miles distant from the east coast, but without finding the ice-free interior Baron Nordenskiöld believed to exist. Three years later he published a book on the icy interior of Greenland. In 1891 he proposed to lead an expedition to the Antarctic polar region, the expense being borne in part by the Australian colonies. For biographical details, see A. Leslie's Arctic Voyages of A. E. Nordenskiöld, 1858-79 (1879).