Otto Sverdrup

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Otto Sverdrup (1898)

Otto Neumann Knoph Sverdrup (born October 31, 1854 in Bindal , † November 26, 1930 in Sandvika near Oslo ) was a Norwegian navigator and polar explorer . He was the captain of the Fram on Fridtjof Nansen's North Pole expedition and led a very successful polar expedition from 1898 to 1902, which mapped 150,000 km² of previously unknown land in the Canadian Arctic .

Life

Early years

Otto Sverdrup was born in 1854 as the son of farmer Ulrik Frederik Suhm Sverdrup (1833-1914) and his wife Petrikke ("Petra") Neumann Knoph (1831-1885) on his father's farm in Haarstad near Bindal. At the age of 17 he began his maritime career. He sailed on various Norwegian and American ships, passed his helmsman's examination in 1875 and received his master's license in 1878 . At the age of 24 he was in command of the steamship trio .

Crossing Greenland

Participants in the Greenland expedition (  from left to right : Sverdrup, Kristiansen, Dietrichson, Balto and Ravna) marching across the ice sheet
Nansen's Greenland crossing in 1888
  • The dotted line shows Jason’s voyage through July 17th. The solid line shows the ice drift up to July 29th and the coastal migration up to August 11th.
  • The originally planned route from Sermilik to Christianshåb.
  • The real route from August 15th to October 3rd.

    • Through his friend, the lawyer Alexander Nansen (1862–1945), he met his brother Fridtjof Nansen. Sverdrup followed suit when he put together a team for the first crossing of Greenland on skis . On May 2nd, 1888, they left Christiania harbor on the Jason . The project threatened to fail when the ship could only approach the Greenland east coast within 20 km due to the existing ice. After a month of waiting, the six men attempted to reach the coast in two boats on July 17. However, they could not cross the ice belt and were driven about 380 km south by the strong current before entering land on July 29 near the 62nd parallel. The men followed the coast north to the Umivikfjord, where they set out west on August 15th. They had to pull their sledges to a height of up to 2,720 m. They gave up their plan to go to Christianshåb after twelve strenuous days. Instead, they now directed their course towards Godthåb . Within 42 days they covered a distance of about 560 km across the Greenland ice sheet before reaching the Ameralikfjord on September 26th. With a makeshift boat, Sverdrup and Nansen reached Godthåb on October 3rd and had the rest of the crew picked up. The autumn was now so advanced that no ship left for Europe. For Sverdrup and Nansen's later ventures, this circumstance turned out to be favorable. During the winter in Godthåb, they learned from the Inuit how to survive in the Arctic, and in particular how to dog sledges . It was not until April 25, 1889 that Nansen and his men went on board the Hvidbjørnen from Godthåb to Denmark . After a stopover in Copenhagen , the expedition members arrived on board the post ship M. G. Melchior on May 30, 1889 in Christiania.

    On October 12, 1891 Otto Sverdrup married his cousin Gretha Andrea Engelschiøn (1866–1937). Their daughter Audhild Sverdrup (1893–1932) was later the wife of the linguist Carl Marstrander .

    First Fram Expedition

    The routes of the Fram expedition between 1893 and 1896:
  • The journey of the Fram from Vardø along the Siberian coast to the New Siberian Islands and into the pack ice (July to September 1893).
  • Ice drift of the Fram from the New Siberian Islands to Spitsbergen (September 1893 to August 1896).
  • The march from Nansen and Johansen up to a latitude of 86 ° 13.6 ′ N (northern record at that time) and the subsequent return to Cape Flora on the Northbrook Island of the Franz Josef Archipelago (March 1895 to June 1896).
  • Return from Nansen and Johansen from Cape Flora to Vardø (August 1896).
  • Return of the Fram from Spitzbergen to Tromsø (August 1896).

    • Immediately after returning from Greenland, Nansen planned his next expedition. In 1884 parts of the Jeannette, lost three years earlier north of the New Siberian Islands , were found on the southwest coast of Greenland. Nansen made the decision to begin an ice drift through the Arctic Ocean where George De Long's expedition had failed in order to learn more about the movements of the Arctic ice and to get close to the North Pole . To do this, however, he needed a ship that could withstand the expected strong ice pressures. From the beginning, Nansen included Sverdrup in his planning, who also personally supervised the construction of the ship by Colin Archer from 1890 to 1893.

    Otto Sverdrup in his cabin on the Fram

    As a result, Sverdrup became captain of the Fram . In 1893 he navigated the ship through the Northeast Passage to the New Siberian Islands and steered it there on September 25th directly into the pack ice to freeze it. The ship was drifting northwest with the ice, and it soon became clear that its course would not be directly over the North Pole. Nansen decided to leave the ship and try to reach the pole by dog ​​sledding. At the end of February 1895, Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen set out north with two dog teams. Sverdrup took over the leadership of the expedition. From now on until the end of the drift he was solely responsible for the ship, the crew and the scientific program. It was not until the summer of 1896 that the Fram was released near Spitzbergen and on August 14th it landed on the Danish island ( Norwegian: Danskøya ), where Salomon August Andrée waited for a favorable wind to take the balloon to the North Pole. The two polar explorers met on board the Fram . Sverdrup reached Tromsø at the end of August , seven days after Nansen and Johansen had also safely returned to Norway.

    In the summer of 1897, Sverdrup carried out seven one-week tourist trips to Spitsbergen as the captain of Lofoten . On behalf of the Vesteraalens Dampskibsselskab , the ship operated between Hammerfest and Advent Bay , where the shipping company operated a hotel near Longyearbyen .

    Second Fram Expedition

    The participants of the Second Fram Expedition, Sverdrup in the middle

    At Nansen's suggestion, Sverdrup began preparing his own expedition with the Fram as early as 1896 . The plan provided for coming from Baffin Bay to cross the Nares Strait between Greenland and Ellesmere Island and to turn eastward in the Lincoln Sea . On the north coast of Greenland you should spend the winter in a suitable bay in order to find the northernmost point of Greenland on a sledge trip and to explore the unknown northeast coast. Reaching the North Pole was not one of the goals of the expedition. Most of the financing was taken over by the owners of the Ringnes brewery , the brothers Amund and Ellef Ringnes and Axel Heiberg .

    On June 24, 1898, five years to the day after the start of her first expedition, the Fram left the port of Christiania. In addition to the ship's crew, the cartographer Gunnerius Ingvald Isachsen , the botanist Herman Georg Simmons (1866–1943), the zoologist Edvard Bay (1867–1932), the geologist Per Schei (1875–1905), the doctor Johan Svendsen (1866–1932) were on board. 1899) and Roald Amundsen's later companion in the conquest of the South Pole , Sverre Hassel . The Nares Street was impassable that year. An ice barrier in Smithsund blocked the way north. After several unsuccessful attempts to overcome this, Sverdrup sought a safe anchorage in the Rice Strait between Pim Island and Ellesmere Island to spend the winter here. During his hunting trips he discovered that Bache Island in the west is connected to Ellesmere Island by a land bridge and is therefore a peninsula. In the spring, the expedition undertook two extended sleigh rides into the interior of Ellesmere Island. With Edvard Bay, Sverdrup on Bay Fiord first reached the west coast of the island.

    Map of the discoveries of the Second Fram Expedition 1898–1902

    With Smithsund also blocked in the summer of 1899, Sverdrup had to abandon its original plan to explore northern Greenland. He decided to explore the still completely unknown areas west of Ellesmere Island. He navigated his ship south into Baffin Bay and then west into Jonessund , where he put the Fram at anchor for the second wintering in Harbor Fiord on the south coast of Ellesmere Island. In September he and three men explored the north coast of Jonessund. They were held by the ice in their boat in Baad Fiord and had to wait several weeks until the sound was frozen so far that they could return to the Fram on the ice . At this point two members of the expedition had already died.

    The winter was used to make improvements to the sled. On March 20, 1900, Sverdrup set out west with seven men. Jonessund was left through Hell Gate, the strait between Ellesmere Island and North Kent Island , and Norwegian Bay was reached. Now began a time of discovery. On April 7th, Sverdrup entered Axel Heiberg Island , Isachsen reached Amund Ringnes Island and Schei explored Graham Island , Buckingham Island and North Kent Island. In the summer, Sverdrup tried to bring the Fram closer to the newly discovered areas. However, he could neither pass Cardigan Strait nor Hell Gate and finally looked for an anchorage in Goose Fiord for the third winter.

    In the spring of 1901, the sledge expeditions entered the Eureka Sound and Greely Fiord in the northwest of Ellesmere Island. Isachsen mapped the coasts of Amund Ringnes Island and discovered another large island called Ellef Ringnes Island . Despite intensive efforts with ice saws and explosives, the expedition failed to break through the ice barrier at the exit of the Goose Fiord in the summer, so that the fourth wintering had to be tackled. This opened up the possibility of going on further sleigh trips in the spring of 1902. Sverdrup wanted to finally clarify the question of whether Axel Heiberg was actually an island and drove up the Eureka Sound and the Nansen Sound to its exit into the Arctic Ocean with Schei , without a connection between the Axel Heiberg and Ellesmere Islands to find. Sverdrup reaches the northernmost point of the expedition at 81 ° 40 ′. In the meantime, Isachsen investigated the still unknown north coast of the Devon Island . The Fram was released on August 6 and reached Stavanger on September 9, 1902.

    The most important result of the expedition was the discovery and mapping of Axel Heiberg Island, Amund Ringnes Island and Ellef Ringnes Island as well as some smaller islands, which are now called Sverdrup Islands and which are larger than the Svalbard Archipelago in terms of area . The west coast of Ellesmere Island and most of the north coast of Devon Island were also mapped. The scientific results in the fields of geology , botany , zoology , meteorology and archeology fill 39 issues in four volumes and one supplementary volume.

    Sverdrup took possession of the newly discovered areas for Norway. The Norwegian government waived in 1930 in favor of Canada, which paid Sverdrup $ 67,000  for its cards and logbooks .

    The science historian William Barr calls the Second Fram Expedition "one of the most impressive achievements that have ever been achieved in polar research" and Peter Dawes counts it among "the most successful expeditions in the history of Arctic exploration".

    Later Arctic voyages

    In 1914 the Russian government commissioned Sverdrup to carry out a search and rescue operation for the expeditions of Vladimir Russanov and Georgi Brusilov . Both drove into the Kara Sea in 1912 with the aim of conquering the Northeast Passage for the first time by Russia and have since disappeared. There was also no news of Georgi Sedov's expedition , which set out in the direction of Franz Josef Land in 1912 to reach the North Pole. The coordinator of the relief operations in the Russian Naval Office, Leonid Breitfuß , had chartered two ships in Norway, one of which, the Hertha , went to Franz Josef Land under Russian crew to look for Sedov. The whereabouts of the Russanov and Brusilov expeditions were completely unknown, but it was hoped to find them on one of the coasts of the Kara Sea between the north island of Novaya Zemlya and Cape Chelyuskin . Sverdrup was commissioned to search this area as the captain of the Eclipse , a former whaler .

    Sverdrup set sail from Oslo on July 13, 1914 and passed Kara Street a month later . Three days later, the eclipse got stuck in the ice and drifted east. On September 9, she unexpectedly caught a radio message from the icebreakers Taimyr and Waigatsch of the Northern Arctic Ocean Hydrographic Expedition , which were in distress near the Fearnley Islands off the Taimyr Peninsula . The ships under the command of Boris Wilkizki came from Vladivostok and got into severe ice pressures at Cape Chelyuskin , which had severely damaged the Taimyr in particular . In January 1915, the Eclipse was able to establish radio contact with the Russian mainland for the first time and report on the predicament of the two ships. Sverdrup also learned about the return of the Sedov expedition and the tragic fate of the Brusilov expedition.

    The Taimyr and the Waigatsch had enough provisions on board, but only if they were released in summer and did not have to hibernate in the ice again. As a precaution, it was decided to evacuate half of the crew from the ships. Immediately after the end of the polar night , Sverdrup began to set up food depots between the Eclipse and the icebreakers. On April 29th, he went to Taimyr with three men and three dog sledges . From there he led 39 men over 280 km to the Eclipse , which was reached on June 4th. A rescue team came from Turukhansk with reindeer sleighs and brought the sailors to safety. The three ships were released at the end of July. Sverdrup was bunkering coal in Dikson and was supplying the icebreakers with it when he met them a short time later near Scott Hansen Island . Then the Eclipse continued its search for Russanow and headed for Solitude Island , but without finding a trace of the lost expedition. Sverdrup's assignment was over.

    In the spring of 1920, Breitfuß commissioned Sverdrup with another rescue operation. The icebreaker Solowej Budimirowitsch (later Malygin ) was frozen in the Kara Sea with 87 people on board. The coal and food reserves were almost exhausted. Sverdrup succeeded in advancing with the chartered icebreaker Svjatogor (later Krasin ) to Solowej Budimirowitsch and freeing the ship from the ice. In 1921 he and the icebreaker Lenin (the former St. Alexander Newski ) led a convoy consisting of five cargo ships safely to the mouth of the Yenisei and back again. This was a first step in establishing the Northern Sea Route as a trade route in the Soviet Union .

    Late years

    Otto Sverdrup in 1928

    In the 1920s, Sverdrup worked tirelessly to save his old ship, the Fram , which had been lying unused in Horten since 1914 , from deterioration. In 1925 he was elected chairman of the Fram committee. With the help of Lars Christensen , he managed to raise the financial resources that enabled the Fram to be restored under Sverdrup's supervision from 1929 to 1930. Sverdrup did not live to see the founding of the Fram Museum . He died on November 26, 1930 at his home in Sandvika.

    Honors

    For his work during the Fram expeditions Otto Sverdrup was awarded the Commander's Cross with a Star by the Norwegian King Oskar II in 1896 and the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Olav in 1902 . He was also the holder of the Prussian Crown Order I Class and the Russian Order of Saint Anne II Class. The University of Saint Andrews awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1926 . The Royal Geographical Society awarded him their gold medal ( Patron's Medal ) in 1903 for his discoveries in the Arctic and his important role as captain of the Fram on Nansen's Fram expedition.

    The archipelago he discovered in the Canadian Arctic is now called the Sverdrup Islands . There is also the Sverdrup Canal there . The Sverdrup Glacier can be found on Devon Island , on the coast to Joness and also the bay Sverdrup Inlet. Also named after Otto Sverdrup are the Sverdrup Island in the Kara Sea and another island off the northwest of Greenland as well as the Sverdrupfjellet mountains on Spitsbergen and Gora Sverdrupa on the Taimyr Peninsula. A moon crater also bears his name.

    The Norwegian Navy 2008, the eponymous guided missile frigate Otto Sverdrup of Fridtjof Nansen-class frigate in service.

    Works

    • New land. Four years in arctic regions , 2 volumes, Brockhaus, Leipzig 1903 (original title: Nyt Land. Fire Aar i arktiske Egne )
    • Under russisk flag , Aschehoug, Oslo 1928 (Norwegian)

    literature

    Web links

    Commons : Otto Sverdrup  - collection of images, videos and audio files

    Individual evidence

    1. ^ Fridtjof Nansen: The first crossing of Greenland , 1919, p. 446.
    2. ↑ Per Egil Hegge: Otto Sverdrup . In: Norsk biografisk leksikon (Norwegian), accessed on August 27, 2013
    3. ^ Jan Erik Ringstad: Carl Marstrander . In: Norsk biografisk leksikon (Norwegian), accessed on August 27, 2013
    4. ↑ B. Nordahl: We Framleute . In: Fritjof Nansen: Through night and ice . Volume 3, FA Brockhaus, 1898, Chapter 13 ( digitized in the Gutenberg project )
    5. ^ JT Reilly: Greetings from Spitsbergen. Tourists at the Eternal Ice 1827-1914 . Tapir Academic Press, Trondheim 2009. ISBN 978-82-519-2460-3 . P. 104 (English)
    6. ^ WC Brøgger et al. (Ed.): Report of the Second Norwegian Arctic Expedition in the Fram 1898–1902 , four volumes and one supplementary volume, Videnskabs-Selskabet, Kristiania 1904–1926
    7. ↑ TT Thorleifsson: Norway “must really drop their absurd claims such as that to the Otto Sverdrup Islands.” Bi-Polar International Diplomacy: The Sverdrup Islands Question, 1902-1930 . Master thesis, Simon Fraser University , Burnaby 2006, p. 101 (English)
    8. ↑ Barr (1984), p. 73
    9. ↑ Peter R. Dawes: Per Schei (1875–1905) (PDF; 468 kB). In: Arctic . Volume 39, 1986, p. 106 f. (English)
    10. ^ Two Arctic Rescue Ships. Russia Buys Them to Use in Search for Explorers . In: New York Times , March 28, 1914
    11. ↑ List of Gold Medal Winners from the Royal Geographic Society , accessed June 17, 2018.
    personal data
    SURNAME Sverdrup, Otto
    ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sverdrup, Otto Neumann Knoph (full name)
    BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian navigator and polar explorer
    DATE OF BIRTH October 31, 1854
    PLACE OF BIRTH Bindal
    DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1930
    Place of death Sandvika near Oslo