 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 " . But his scientific work was unabated : " I have been taking 4 @-@ hourly observations in meteorology and temperature of the sea surface [ ... ] have tested salinity with Buchanan 's hydrometer ; my tow @-@ nets [ ... ] have been going almost constantly " . 
