Flora on 25 July where Bruce found that Jackson's expedition party had been joined by Fridtjof Nansen and his companion Hjalmar Johansen. The two Norwegians had been living on the ice for more than a year since leaving their ship Fram for a dash to the North Pole, and it was pure chance that had brought them to the one inhabited spot among thousands of square miles of Arctic wastes. Bruce mentions meeting Nansen in a letter to Mill, and his acquaintance with the celebrated Norwegian would be a future source of much advice and encouragement. During his year at Cape Flora Bruce collected around 700 zoological specimens, in often very disagreeable conditions. According to Jackson: "It is no pleasant job to dabble in icy-cold water, with the thermometer some degrees below zero, or to plod in the summer through snow, slush and mud many miles in search of animal life, as I have known Mr Bruce frequently to do". Jackson named Cape Bruce after him, on the northern edge of Northbrook Island, at 80°55′N. Jackson was less pleased with Bruce's proprietorial attitude to his personal specimens, which he refused to entrust to the British Museum with the expedition's other finds. This "tendency towards scientific conceit", and lack of tact in interpersonal dealings, were early demonstrations of character flaws that in later life would be held against him. Arctic voyages On his return from Franz Josef Land in 1897, Bruce worked in Edinburgh as an assistant to his former mentor John Arthur Thomson, and resumed his duties at the Ben Nevis observatory. In March 1898 he received an offer to join Major Andrew Coats on a hunting voyage to the Arctic waters around Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen, in the private yacht Blencathra. This offer had originally been made to Mill, who was unable to obtain leave from the Royal Geographical Society, and once again suggested Bruce as a replacement. Andrew Coats was a member of the prosperous Coats family of thread manufacturers, who had founded the Coats Observatory at Paisley. Bruce joined Blencathra at Tromsø, Norway in May 1898, for a cruise which explored the Barents Sea, the dual islands of Novaya Zemlya, and the island of Kolguyev, before a retreat to Vardø in north-eastern Norway to re-provision for the voyage to Spitsbergen. In a letter to Mill, Bruce reported: "This is a pure yachting cruise and life is luxurious".