"The Discovery of Franz Josef Land 1873 " Topic

"The Emperor Franz Josef (1830 – 1916) of the Austro-Hungarian Empire reigned for an amazing 68 years and is probably best remembered today for his complicity in starting World War 1. Conscientious, unimaginative, hardworking, pig-headed, but essentially stupid, his tenure was to be marked by military defeat, political decline and personal tragedy. His wife was murdered, his son died in a suicide pact, his brother – the so-called Emperor of Mexico – was shot by a firing squad and his nephew's assassination triggered disaster in 1914. His domains lay in Central and Southern Europe and it is therefore all the more surprising that the archipelago named after him – Franz Josef Land – should be located in the Arctic Ocean and be today a Russian possession of considerable strategic value.

In an earlier blog (30 September 2016 – accessible through sidebar on right) I described Austro-Hungary's Novara scientific expedition of 1857-59. In this period, such expeditions were matters of international prestige comparable to space exploration in our own day and Austro-Hungary, which had only acquired a navy in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, was keen not to be left out. The resulting Novara expedition was to be a triumph that included oceanographic and geomagnetic surveys as well as onshore botany and geology of lands visited and it provided material for what would become Vienna's Naturhistorisches Museum in such volume that some of it is still under examination today…"

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