metres Length of keel 37.6 Length over deck 43.4 Beam extreme 8.4 Depth of hold 4.6 She had a sixty horse-power engine, which required ten cubic feet of coal per hour, developing an average speed of six or seven knots per hour. The vessel was a full-rigged bark, with pitch pine masts, iron wire rigging and patent reefing top sails; under sail alone she was able to attain a speed of nine or ten knots. She carried the Swedish man-of-war flag with a crowned “O” in the middle, and bore this triumphantly throughout a voyage which stands in history as the first circumnavigation of Asia and Europe. [Sidenote: _VOYAGE OF THE “VEGA”_] With Nordenskjöld as leader, Lieutenant Palander commander of the ship, and an efficient staff of officers and scientists, which included such men as Lieutenant Horgaard of the Royal Danish Navy, for superintendent of the magnetical and meteorological work, F. R. Kjellman, Ph.D., Docent in Botany in the University of Upsala, and Lieutenant G. Bore, of the Royal Italian Navy, superintendent of the hydrographical work, the _Vega_ sailed from Gothenburg July 4, 1878, in company with her convoy, the _Lena_. Port Dickson was reached on the morning of August 10, and nine days later Cape Serero or Chelyuskin in 77° 41´ north latitude. Of this, the most northern point of Siberia, Nordenskjöld writes:— “We had now reached a great goal, which for centuries had been the object of unsuccessful struggles. For the first time a vessel lay at anchor off the northernmost cape of the old world. No wonder then that the occurrence was celebrated by a display of flags and the firing of salutes, and when we returned from our excursion on land, by festivities on board, by wine and toast.” “The north point of Asia forms a low promontory, which a bay divides into two, the eastern arm projecting a little farther to the north than the western. A ridge of hills with gently sloping sides runs into the land from the eastern point, and appears within sight of the western to reach a height of three hundred metres. Like the plain lying below, the summits of this range were nearly free of snow. Only on the hillsides or in deep furrows excavated by the streams of melted snow, and in dales in the plains, were large white snow-fields to be seen. A low ice-foot still remained at most places along the shore. But no glacier rolled its bluish-white ice-masses down the mountain sides, and no inland lakes, no perpendicular cliffs, no high mountain summits, gave any natural beauty to the landscape, which was the most monotonous and the most desolate I have seen in the High North.” [Illustration: FOUL BAY, ON THE COAST OF SPITZBERGEN _From “The Voyage of the Vega,” Macmillan & Co., Ltd., London_]