To begin with, Nordenskiöld made two voyages to the Yenesei. In the first voyage he left Tromsoe in the _Proeven_ on the 14th of June, 1875, and reached what he named Dickson Harbour at the mouth of the Yenesei on the 15th of August. Sending back the _Proeven_, which returned through Matyushin Shar, he, with Lundstrom the botanist and Stuxberg the zoologist, and three walrus-hunters, embarked in a boat they had brought out with them and proceeded up the estuary into the river; and during the first six hundred miles they landed only twice. On the last day of the month they caught up a steamer on which they became passengers. "We were yet," says Nordenskiöld, "far to the north of the Arctic Circle, and as many perhaps imagine that the little-known region we were now travelling through, the Siberian tundra, is a desert wilderness covered either by ice and snow, or by an exceedingly scanty moss vegetation, it perhaps may not be out of place to say that this is by no means the case. On the contrary, we saw snow during our journey up the Yenesei only at one place, in a deep valley cleft some fathoms in breadth, and the vegetation, especially on the islands which are overflowed during the spring floods, is distinguished by a luxuriance to which I have seldom seen anything comparable. Already had the fertility of the soil and the immeasurable extent and richness in grass of the pastures drawn forth from one of our walrus-hunters, a middle-aged man who is owner of a little patch of ground among the fells of Northern Norway, a cry of envy at the splendid land our Lord had given the Russian, and of astonishment that no creature pastured, no scythe mowed, the grass. Daily and hourly we heard the same cry repeated, and even in louder tones, when some weeks after we came to the grand old forests between Yeneseisk and Turuchansk, or to the nearly uninhabited plains on the other side of Krasnojarsk covered with deep black earth, equal without doubt in fertility to the best parts of Scania, and in extent surpassing the whole Scandinavian peninsula. This judgment formed on the spot by a genuine though illiterate agriculturist is not without interest in forming an idea of the future importance of Siberia." In fact, Siberia is particularly rich in mineral and agricultural wealth, and this voyage, which opened up the route to and from Europe by the natural outlets to the north, was of such commercial promise that the explorer received for it the special thanks of the Russian Government. As, however, there were people who looked upon it as an exceptional voyage in an exceptional year, Nordenskiöld next season took another voyage to the river, this time in the _Ymer_, carrying the first instalment of merchandise so as to begin the trade; and he was followed in a few weeks by Captain Joseph Wiggins, in the _Thames_, whose subsequent voyages made the northern route well known.