“Weyprecht was to command the ship, _Tegetthoff_, while Lieutenant Payer was to conduct the sledge parties. The _Tegetthoff_ sailed from Bremerhaven June 13, 1872, bearing in her course to Tromsoe. Her equipment was liberal and carefully selected, the total expense of the expedition amounting to £18,333. The officers and crew numbered twenty-four souls. “Delayed by storms among the Loffoden Isles, they did not reach Tromsoe until July 3. Ten days later the _Tegetthoff_ turned her prow to the north; the Norwegian coast with its many glaciers was in full view on July 16, North Cape loomed in the blue distance. By July 25, while in lat. 74° 0´ 15´´ N., the ice was sighted; proceeding with careful navigation through opens in the frozen ocean, the ship moved in her course until the end of August, when she became beset near Cape Nassan, at the northern end of Nova Zembla, having just parted with the _Isbjorn_ near Barentz Isle, where Count Wilczek was placing supplies for their possible retreat.” “Ominous were the events of that day,” writes Payer, “for immediately after we had made fast the _Tegetthoff_ to that floe, the ice closed in upon us from all sides and we became close prisoners in its grasp. No water was to be seen around us, and _never again were we destined to see our vessel in water_. Happy is it for men that inextinguishable hope enables them to endure all the vicissitudes of fate, which are to test their powers of endurance, and that they can never see, at a glance, the long series of disappointments in store for them! We must have been filled with despair, had we known that evening that we were henceforward doomed to obey the caprices of the ice, that the ship would never again float on the waters of the sea, that all the expectations with which our friends, but a few hours before, saw the _Tegetthoff_ steam away to the north, were now crushed; _that we were in fact no longer discoverers, but passengers against our will on the ice_. From day to day, we hoped for the hour of our deliverance! At first we expected it hourly, then daily, then from week to week; then at the seasons of the year and changes of the weather, then in the chances of new years! _But that hour never came_, yet the light of hope, which supports man in all his suffering, and raises him above them all, never forsook us, amid all the depressing influence of expectations cherished only to be disappointed.” To reach the coast of Siberia under these circumstances had become an impossibility, and even in case the ship became liberated, the search for a winter harbour in Nova Zembla would be a matter of peril and difficulty.