German North Polar Expedition

[1] The second expedition consisted of a two-vessel convoy: The crew included two medical doctors, who were also capable naturalists: Adolf Pansch on Germania and Reinhold Wilhelm Buchholz on Hansa; astronomers and geophysicists Karl Nikolai Jensen Börgen and Ralph Copeland; Austrian cartographer Julius von Payer and Austrian geologist Gustav Karl Laube.

[1] Germania made it through the pack ice thanks to its auxiliary engine and, during late summer, explored the region around Sabine, Little Pendulum, and Shannon Island.

The crew managed to survive the winter in a shelter built of coal dust briquettes, while drifting on the sea ice southward along the eastern coast of Greenland.

[3] From there they followed the shore southwards until they reached the Moravian Herrnhut mission at Friedrichsthal (modern Narsaq Kujalleq) near Cape Farewell, from where they got back to Germany on 3 September 1870 on a Danish ship.

Collected vascular plants were later treated by the botanists Franz Georg Philipp Buchenau and Wilhelm Olbers Focke, both from the University of Bremen.