In the early years of this century the Chief Hydrographic Directorate of the Imperial Russian Navy mounted a concerted attempt at surveying the Northern Sea Route with a view to determining its feasibility as a commercial shipping route. Two specially‐built icebreaking survey ships,TaymyrandVaygachbegan operations from the Bering Strait end of the route in 1910. Since it was late in the season and ice conditions in the Chukchi Sea were bad, that first voyage was little more than a reconnaissance sortie. Over the next three seasons the. ships worked their way progressively farther west along the arctic coast of Siberia, sounding and surveying as they went, and returning to Vladivostok every winter. In 1911 they reached the mouth of the Kolyma, in 1912 the east coast of the Taymyr Peninsula, and in 1913 they discovered the archipelago now known as Severnaya Zemlya. In 1914 the two ships were ordered to attempt the through‐passage to Arkhangel'sk but due to heavy ice conditions were forced to winter near the west end of Vil'litskiy Strait. They reached Arkhangel'sk safely in the summer of 1915. While a considerable amount of the survey and oceanographic material from the expedition has been published previously, the first major compilation of the scientific results has only recently been released.