Nordenskiöld’s activities did not cease with this, the greatest of his achievements. He made a second journey over the inland ice of Greenland, effected a landing on the east coast, and encouraged the aspirations of young men such as Björling and Kallstenius, whose melancholy fate was a cause of sorrow to him[154]. After he was ennobled Nordenskiöld lived chiefly at his beautiful country seat of Dalbyo, where I twice visited him. His latest labours, in bringing to light and publishing medieval maps and charts and portolans in two splendid volumes, were not the least important. His researches and discoveries threw much new light on the history of cartography. When he died a vast amount of knowledge died with him, and there passed away from among us an illustrious man of science, a great explorer, a great geographer, and a man of whom his countrymen may well be proud[155]. While Nordenskiöld was engaged in his Siberian labours, there was an enthusiastic English master mariner who was also filled with the idea of opening a trade with Russia by the Arctic Sea. Joseph Wiggins was born in 1832 at Norwich, between which place and London his father drove the “Nelson” coach three times a week, until railroads superseded coaches. At fourteen Joseph went to sea, and became master of a ship trading to the Mediterranean when he was twenty-one. From 1868 to 1874 he was examiner in navigation at Sunderland, and in the latter year his mind became full of ideas about opening a Russian trade by the north. He was a practical and very persevering man, with whom thought was soon followed by action. On June 3rd, 1874, he sailed in the _Diana_ of 103 tons, successfully crossed the ice-bound Kara Sea to the river Obi, and returned. In 1875 he went to Archangel in a Yarmouth ship, called the _William_. In 1876, with help from the Russian merchant Sibirikoff and Mr Gardiner, he sailed in the _Thames_ of 120 tons, and reached the Yenisei river. Leaving her there with the crew on board, he returned overland by way of Petrograd. He went out again to his ship, accompanied by Mr Seebohm, the distinguished ornithologist, who had long desired to investigate the bird-life of this region. They arrived at the town of Yeniseisk on April 5th, 1877, and reached the _Thames_ at the Kureika, lower down the river Yenisei, on the 23rd. The crew were in good health, but the ship had to be cut out of the ice. No sooner was the _Thames_ free than she ran on a sand-bank on her way down the river and was finally abandoned. The _Ibis_, a little vessel belonging to Seebohm, was uninjured, but all the crew of the _Thames_ except three refused to go home in her. Mr Seebohm, who made a valuable ornithological collection, calculated that 50,000 acres of ice passed down the river in the spring, at the rate of ten to twenty miles an hour, and his description of the break-up of the ice on these great Siberian rivers is of extraordinary interest. He returned home