Only three years before that a very similar experience had happened to the smaller ship of a German expedition under Captain Koldewey, of which the larger went up the east coast of Greenland to 75½° N., where a grim headland was named Cape Bismarck. It is just south of the land sighted by Lambert in 1670. The little _Hansa_, however, was crushed in the ice near Scoresby Sound. The crew escaped to the floe, where they built a house of blocks of patent fuel, filled it with provisions, and trusted themselves to the great Arctic current which carried them south, at the rate of about sixty-five miles a day at first, until finally, in June, 1870, it took them to the Moravian missions near Cape Farewell, more than twelve hundred miles from where they were wrecked. The seas and archipelagoes north of Europe were being questioned, all this time, as well as those north of America. The Norwegian fishermen had been familiar with Spitzbergen waters from long ago, but it was not until 1863 that the group was circumnavigated. The next year Captain Tobieson sailed around Northeast Land, and in 1870 Nova Zembla was circumnavigated, and the mouth of the Obi reached. The men who did these feats were sealers or shark-fishers in small stanch Norwegian schooners, which flocked in Barentz Sea at this period, and they furnished invaluable material, as did the whalers and sealers of American and Scotch ports, for the ice-pilots and crews of the scientific expeditions which now began to go to the north: moreover many of the commanders were trained by amateur service in such vessels. It was thus Nordenskjöld began his experiences in 1864. Among these earlier expeditions was an Austrian naval lieutenant, Julius von Payer, who became notable, not only because he interested a new nation in Arctic research, but because of his discoveries. His first experience was with the German expedition to Greenland in 1869, and in 1871 he and another Austrian navy officer named Weyprecht spent the summer in examining the edge of the ice between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla.