Adolf Erik Nordenskiold led a number of expeditions to the Arctic and was the first person to sail through the North-east Passage from northern Norway to the Bering Strait. Nordenskiold is the most internationally famous Finnish-born scientist.The collection of his maps and geographical works held by the University of Helsinki Library is regarded by UNESCO as one of the world’s most important collections of documents.
Background
Adolf Nordenskioldwas born on November 18, 1832. The Nordenskiölds were an old Finland-Swedish family, and members of the nobility. Nordenskiöld's father, Nils Gustav Nordenskiöld, was a prominent Finnish mineralogist, civil servant and traveller. He was also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Education
When Nordenskiold was thirteen years old, he and his brother were sent to the famous grammar school at Porvoo. The school’s headmaster and Greek teacher was the national poet J. L. Runeberg, at whose home Nordenskiold sometimes spent evenings during his school days.
When he entered university at the age of seventeen, Nordenskiold was already oriented towards a scientific career, and he began studying mathematics, chemistry, mineralogy and geology. His first scientific work dealt with molluscs.
He wrote a number of treatises, including a large general work entitled Beskrivning over de i Finlandfunna mineralier (‘Description of minerals occurring in Finland ) which was published in 1855. He trained himself to write in a concise fashion, but with a wealth of content and a precise, scientific attention to details. All seemed promising. Nordenskiold gained his doctorate, and he would probably have been given a professorship at the University if he had not come into conflict with the Russian authorities in Finland.
Career
Nordenskiöld settled in Stockholm, and soon he received an offer from Otto Torell, a geologist, to accompany him on an expedition to Spitsbergen. To the observations of Torell on glacial phenomena Nordenskiöld added the discovery at Bell Sound of remains of Tertiary plants, and on the return of the expedition he received the appointment of a curator and Director of the Mineralogical Department of the Swedish Museum of Natural History (Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet) and a professorship in Mineralogy at the Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was also awarded the 1869 Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Gold Medal.
Nordenskiöld's participation in three geological expeditions to Spitsbergen, followed by longer Arctic explorations in 1867, 1870, 1872 and 1875, led him to attempt the discovery of the long-sought Northeast Passage. This he accomplished in the voyage of the Vega, navigating for the first time the northern coasts of Europe and Asia. Starting from Karlskrona on 22 June 1878, the Vega doubled Cape Chelyuskin in the following August, and after being frozen in at the end of September near the Bering Strait, completed the voyage successfully in the following summer. He edited a monumental record of the expedition in five volumes, and himself wrote a more popular summary in two volumes.
On his return to Sweden he received an enthusiastic welcome, and in April 1880 was made a baron and a commander of the Order of the North Star.
In 1883, he visited the east coast of Greenland for the second time, and succeeded in taking his ship through the great ice barrier, a feat attempted in vain during more than three centuries. The captain on the Vega expedition, Louis Palander, was made a nobleman at the same time, and took the name Palander af Vega.
In 1893, Nordenskiöld was elected to the 12th chair of the Swedish Academy.
Nordenskiöld published in 1896 "About Drilling for Water in Primary Rock" (Swedish: "Om borrningar efter vatten i urberget").
In 1900 he received the Murchison Medal from the Geological Society of London. He was nominated for the first Nobel Prize in Physics, but died in 1901 before the prizes were awarded.
Politics
Having studied under Runeberg he belonged to Liberal, anti-tsarist circles that agitated for Finland's liberation from Russia by the Swedes during the Crimean War, and an unguarded speech at a convivial entertainment in 1855 drew the attention of the Imperial Russian authorities to his political views, and led to a dismissal from the university.
In 1857 he aroused the suspicion of the authorities again, so that he was forced to leave Finland, practically as a political refugee, and was deprived of the right of ever holding office in the university of Finland. He fled to Sweden.