This is a bottle of red wine that was on the Vega sailing vessel which was kept as something of a memento. As indeed were quite a lot of things from the ship.
The Vega Expedition (1878–1880) was a Swedish-led Arctic voyage, named after the steamship SS Vega and commanded by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, that became the first expedition to navigate the Northeast Passage and the first to circumnavigate Eurasia, collecting a fair chunk of scientific material along the way.
Vega sailed from Karlskrona in June 1878, stopped at Tromsø, reached Cape Chelyuskin in August and then pushed east along Siberia’s coast until it was trapped in pack ice near the Chukchi Peninsula in late September, just short of the Bering Strait, forcing the crew to winter there and making first sustained contact with the Chukchi people. Freed in August 1879, Vega passed through the Bering Strait, paused in Japan for repairs, then returned to Sweden via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal, arriving in Stockholm in April 1880 to huge celebrations, an achievement later framed as a high point of Swedish scientific exploration.
The above painting is of the Vega when it was parked up in Naples where it arrived on 14 February 1880 and remained for two days amidst some considerable celebrations.
Always good to have a menu from on board, this one is from 18 November 1878.
Incidentally, back to the wine, the museum notes that:
“During the winter the crew drank much more alcohol than the annual average for a Swede at the time”.
I’m not entirely sure that this would be a surprise to very many people…
And here’s some wood from the keel that was kept when it was turned into a whaling vessel.