He co-led, with Julius von Payer, the 1872-1874 Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition which discovered the archipelago Franz Josef Land in the Arctic Ocean. The expedition's ship Admiral Tegetthoff was abandoned in the pack ice. The expedition then moved on sledges to go further north, then to open water, where they used boats to reach the Black Cape of Novaya Zemlya and would eventually contact a Russian schooner, "Nikolaj", under Captain Feodor Voronin, and get to Vardø, Norway, where they took the mail boat south and eventually returned to Vienna.