Belgica (ship, 1884)
 The Belgica in the Antarctic in front of Mount William
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The Belgica was a barque rigged steamship , 1884 as whale and seal hunters built by 1897-1899 the Antarctic expedition Belgian was performed.
Construction and technical data
The ship was built in 1884 as a whale and seal catcher at Christian Brinch Jørgensen's shipyard in Svelvik on the Drsamefjord in southern Norway and was named Patria . The building design came from its owner, Johan Christian Jakobsen. The skeleton of the hull consisted of pine and oak trees - frames . The planks were made of 110 mm thick green heart wood, which was clad with oak and covered with iron . The bow was reinforced with continuous iron ribs so that it could also operate in the ice, and under the waterline it was shaped so that the ship could slide over ice like an icebreaker and then break it.
The Patria was 35.97 m long and 7.62 m wide and had a draft of 4.11 m . In addition to their sails they had a steam engine of 35 horsepower from the company Nylands Verksted in Christiania . The propeller could if necessary on the waterline are raised.
history
The Patria was designed for hunting duck whales and had four fishing boats on board. Their first fishing trip was in 1885, the last in 1896.
Belgian Antarctic Expedition
In 1896 the ship was bought by Adrien de Gerlache , who had it converted into a research ship. On June 5, 1896, the ship was in Sandefjord on the new name Belgica renamed and then rebuilt under the direction of the original designer, JC Jacobsen. On August 16, 1897, the Belgica left Antwerp for the Antarctic. The crew of only 23 men under de Gerlache included u. a. Georges Lecointe as first officer and Roald Amundsen as second officer, Henryk Arctowski , Antoni Dobrowolski and Emil Racoviță . The ship, which was excessively loaded with provisions, ammunition and research equipment, suffered a first accident in the North Sea, so that it had to return to Ostend for repairs.
Although it was threatened with capsizing several times when crossing the Atlantic , the ship reached Rio de Janeiro on October 6, 1897, where Frederick Cook joined the expedition as ship's doctor. The Arctic Circle was crossed on February 15, 1898. The plan was to find a wintering place for four men and to build a hut for research purposes, while the Belgica would then sail to Melbourne , Australia . However, the ship was trapped in the pack ice on March 3 , and the men, although poorly prepared, had to hibernate in the ice. This provided opportunities for the scientists to safely examine the ice and carry out meteorological measurements. On the other hand, the endless polar night and the one-sided malnutrition had a negative effect on the minds and health of men, a number of whom contracted scurvy . De Gerlache had banned the consumption of penguin and seal meat because he couldn't stand the taste of it. Cook knew, however, that Eskimos did not suffer from the disease, which he attributed to their consumption of raw seal meat. Therefore, raw penguin and seal meat was needed. At first only Amundsen had experience with killing these animals. In this position, he and Cook practically led the expedition, especially when de Gerlache and Lecointe became too seriously ill from July 22, 1898 to continue leading the expedition themselves. Cook insisted that the men eat penguin and seal meat, and their health improved very quickly.
Although the Antarctic summer had begun in October 1898, no liberation from the pack ice was in prospect. In December 1898, Cook de Gerlache feared that four of the men would not survive a second hibernation. The supplies were strictly rationed. At this point in time, the Belgica had already driven 3000 km of pack ice behind it.
In mid-February 1899 it was discovered that one was near the open sea. When, after a few days, it was only 600 m to get there, the men started to cut a fairway through the pack ice, which was not very successful with ice floes up to four meters high. Even the battered Tonit - explosives disappointed initially in blasting the pack ice. At the beginning of March, a storm ruined the work and closed the fairway again. When trying to reopen the fairway, the explosives went out. Now the team was left with only their own muscle strength and the use of ice axes. In mid-March, a storm tore open the fairway, so that the Belgica was back in the open sea on March 14, 1899 after 377 days of pack ice drift.
Now that the team was saved, the dispute between Amundsen and de Gerlache broke out again. In Punta Arenas , the capital of the Chilean Tierra del Fuego, which was reached on March 28, 1899, de Gerlache left the ship in protest. The Belgica was repaired there and then sailed to Buenos Aires without de Gerlache . From there she left for home on August 14th. She reached Boulogne-sur-Mer on October 30 and Antwerp on November 5, 1899 , where she was enthusiastically received.
Adrien de Gerlache in his cabin
The tour of the Belgica by Fridtjof Nansen
Frederick Cook
The Belgica in pack ice
The course of the expedition
Arctic expeditions
The Belgica then passed into the possession of the Société anonyme du Steamer Belgica , based in Antwerp. Half of the 100 shares for 1000 Belgian francs belonged to Belgian and half Norwegian investors. The ship sailed under the Belgian flag with a Norwegian crew under captain Christian Halvorsen and was initially used as a whaler again. In 1901 Evelyn Baldwin chartered the Belgica in order to use her to set up supply depots for the Baldwin-Ziegler expedition off the coast of northeast Greenland . The plan was to reach the North Pole from Franz-Josef-Land and - using the ice drift - return to civilization via Greenland. The director of the Société anonyme du Steamer Belgica , Johan Bryde (1858–1925), insisted on leading this trip himself. In August 1901 a large depot of food, coal and clothing, but also balloons and a hydrogen generator, was set up on Shannon Island . Subsequently , two huts were built on Bass Rock , one of the Pendulum Islands , which were examined by Norwegian scientists in 2004 and described as “the oldest usable buildings in Northeast Greenland”.
In 1905 the Belgica was chartered by the French pretender to the throne , Prince Philippe of Orléans . Philippe was an avid hunter and trophy collector . In 1904 he went on a hunting trip to Spitsbergen with his yacht Maroussia and wanted to repeat this with an ice-capable ship. De Gerlache, who had meanwhile become a co-owner of the Belgica , volunteered as captain. First officer was Frantz Leonard Andreassen (1858-1920), who had returned in 1904 from the Swedish Antarctic Expedition , where he had also been first officer of the expedition ship Antarctic . De Gerlache managed to steer the expedition planned as a pure hunting trip in a scientific direction. After the Belgica had left Sandefjord on May 3, 1905, she first called at Bergen , where the marine biologist Einar Koefoed (1875–1963) went on board with his scientific equipment. The actual Arctic voyage began on June 3rd, when the ship left Tromsø for Spitsbergen. The entry into the Bellsund failed due to the ice conditions, and in the Smeerenburgfjord the Belgica got into a two-day heavy storm. Here the crew of the Svanen , a sealer who had not survived the storm, was rescued, hired the ship's captain as an ice pilot and began a two-week hunting excursion. After the Svanen's crew had been handed over to the returning whaler Hvidfisken , the Belgica sailed north to the ice edge and along this to Greenland. De Gerlache managed to cross the ice of the East Greenland Current and to reach the Greenland coast south of Cape Bismarck . The next day, the island of Île de France (renamed Qeqertaq Prins Henrik in 2004 ) was discovered. On July 31, the Belgica reached 78 ° 14 ′ N, the northernmost position of a scientific expedition in north-east Greenland up to that point. The expedition then carried out soundings and dredges on the Belgicabank between Cape Philippe and Cape Bismarck before returning to Europe via Iceland .
Prince Philippe was satisfied with the Belgica and bought it in 1906 for 130,000 francs. In 1907 he undertook another trip to the Arctic, again with de Gerlache as captain and Andreassen as helmsman. The goal was the Kara Sea , the depth of which was to be measured. The ship left Vardø on July 5 and hit the west coast of Novaya Zemlya on July 12 . De Gerlache steered the ship through Matotschkin Schar , the strait between the North and South Islands, and three days later reached the completely frozen Kara Sea, where the ship froze in the ice. A month-long drift to the south began, which was used by the scientists for oceanographic observations and the study of marine organisms, while the hunters hardly got their money's worth. On August 21, the Belgica was released again, sailed once more along the west coast of Novaya Zemlya up to the 78th parallel and then returned to Norway.
In 1909 the Belgica sailed again to the Arctic when the ice conditions were much more favorable. Prince Philippe again left command of the ship to de Gerlache. The route initially led via Jan Mayen to the east coast of Greenland, where the ship anchored south of Sabine Ø on July 1st . Three weeks later, the Belgica went to Spitsbergen to Bellsund and visited the Recherchefjord and Braganza Bay to hunt reindeer. She then sailed to Franz Josef Land, and the expedition landed on Pritchett Island , where they found a depot for the Baldwin Ziegler expedition. At the end of August, the Belgica returned to Europe via the island of Hopen .
Later fate
In 1916 the ship was sold to the Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompagni (Det Norske Kulsyndikat) on Spitzbergen and converted into a coal freighter with passenger cabins. Under the new name Isfjord , it brought coal from the Spitzberg capital, Longyearbyen, to ports in northern Norway. At the same time, it also carried passengers in both directions. The captain was the polar veteran Carl Julius Evensen (1851-1937).
In 1918 the ship was sold on to Kristian Holst in Harstad , renamed Belgica again and, after removing the entire rigging, converted into a floating fish processing and cod liver oil factory. From the late 1930s, the Belgica served as a coal hulk .
In April 1940 it was requisitioned in Harstad by British troops who fought against Major General Dietl's German mountain troops near Narvik and used as an ammunition store. A bomb attack by a German Heinkel He 111 on May 19 did not result in any direct hits, but the ship was so damaged by pressure waves that the British sank it themselves before evacuating from northern Norway. It is unclear whether the sinking took place on May 19 or on June 7 or 8, 1940. The wreck was found in the spring of 1990. The anchor of the Belgica is on display at the Polar Museum in Tromso.
The ship is namesake for several geographic objects in the Antarctic. These include the Belgica Mountains , the Belgica Glacier , the Belgica-Guyot deep-sea mountain and the Belgica subglacial highlands .
Replica
In 2006, "was association non-profit New Belgica " established their intention a replica of the Belgica is. The keel-laying took place on 9 September 2007 at De Steenschuit's shipyard in Boom, Antwerp, in the presence of Kris Peeters , Prime Minister of Flanders . Queen Paola is the project's patron . The construction was originally supposed to be completed in 2013. By April 2015, however, nothing more than the shell had been built.
The wreck of the original Belgica is to be lifted and exhibited in the Belgian National Maritime Museum in Antwerp. Before the lift, the Norwegian Navy will remove the remaining ammunition from the hull.
Web links
- Photo of the Patria
- Technical description of the Patria (Dutch)
- Adrien de Gerlache - Belgica; Belgian Antarctic Expedition 1897-1899
- Description of the expedition (English or Spanish)
- New Belgica Association
- Belgica († 1940), on www.wrecksite.eu
- Views and News from Norway: Polar ship emerges from the depths (August 20, 2009)
- Jan Kurlemann: Save the "Belgica", December 20, 2006
literature
- Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery: Le Voyage de la Belgica. Brussels, 1902
- Frederick A. Cook: The first south polar night, 1898-1899. Publishing house d. Jos. Kösel'schen Buchhandlung, Kempten, 1903
- Georges Lecointe: In Penguin Country. Société Belges de Librarie, Oscar Schepens & Cie, Editeurs, Brussels 1904
- Hugo Decleir (red.): Roald Amundsens Belgica-dagboek. De first Belgische zuidpoolexpeditie , Hadewijch, Antwerpen / Baarn, 1998
- Kjell-G- Kjær: Belgica in the Arctic (PDF; 1.85 MB). In: Polar Record 41 (219), 2005, pp. 205-214
- Jozef Verlinden: Het Poolschip Belgica (PDF; 849 kB). In: M&L 30, 2011, pp. 6-24
Individual evidence
- ↑ Verlinden: Het Poolschip Belgica , p. 12
- ^ PJ Capelotti: A “radically new method”: balloon buoy communications of the Baldwin – Ziegler Polar Expedition, Franz Josef Land, June 1902 . In: Polar Research . Volume 27, 2008, pp. 52-72. doi : 10.1111 / j.1751-8369.2008.00045.x
- ↑ Verlinden: Het Poolschip Belgica , p. 13
- ^ Kjær: Belgica in the Arctic , p. 208
- ↑ Verlinden: Het Poolschip Belgica , p. 18
- ^ Kjær: Belgica in the Arctic , p. 210
- ^ Chronicle of the Franz-Joseph-Land on the website www.franz-josef-land.info , accessed on June 12, 2013
- ↑ Belgicaproject. Retrieved March 14, 2019 .
Coordinates: 68 ° 47 ′ 42 " N , 16 ° 35 ′ 37" E