It will be remembered that Lieutenant Payer, of the Austrian navy, had accompanied Captain Koldewey’s first expedition. When driven back from the attempt to advance along the eastern shores of Greenland, that commander crossed over to Spitzbergen, and tried to find the Land of Gilles. He also accompanied Koldewey’s later expedition, and shared his belief that there is no continuous channel northwards on the western side of the North Atlantic channel. Believing still, however, with Dr. Petermann, the geographer, that there is an open Polar sea beyond the ice-barrier, Payer set out in 1871, in company with Weyprecht, towards the Land of Gilles. They did not find this mysterious land, but succeeded in passing 150 miles further north, after rounding the south-eastern shores of Spitzbergen, than any Arctic voyagers who had before penetrated into the region lying between Spitzbergen and Novaia Zemlia. Here they found, beyond the 76th parallel, and between 42° and 60° east longitude, an open sea, and a temperature of between 5° and 7° above the freezing-point. Unfortunately, they had not enough provisions with them to be able safely to travel further north, and were thus compelled to return. The season seems to have been an unusually open one; and it is much to be regretted that the expedition was not better supplied with provisions—a defect which appears to be not uncommon with German expeditions. Soon after their return, Payer and Weyprecht began to prepare for a new expedition; and this time their preparations were thorough, and adapted for a long stay in Arctic regions. “The chief aim of this expedition,” says the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, in an interesting account of recent Polar researches, “was to investigate the unknown regions of the Polar seas to the north of Siberia, and to try to reach Behring’s Straits by this route.” It was only if after two winters and three summers they failed to double the extreme promontory of Asia, that they were to direct their course towards the Pole. The voyagers, numbering twenty-four persons, left the Norwegian port of Tromsoë, in the steamer _Tegethoff_, on July 14, 1872. Count Wilczek followed shortly after in a yacht, which was to convey coals and provisions to an eastern point of the Arctic Ocean, for the benefit of the _Tegethoff_. At a point between Novaia Zemlia and the mouth of the Petschora, the yacht lost sight of the steamer, and nothing was heard of the latter for twenty-five months. General anxiety was felt for the fate of the expedition, and various efforts were made by Austria, England, and Russia to obtain news of it. In September, 1874, the voyagers suddenly turned up at another port, and soon after entered Vienna amid great enthusiasm. Their story was a strange one.