Danskøya
| Danskøya | ||
|---|---|---|
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| Waters | Greenland Sea | |
| Archipelago | Spitsbergen | |
| Geographical location | 79 ° 40 '12 " N , 10 ° 54' 18" E | |
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| length | 9 km | |
| width | 7 km | |
| surface | 40.6 km² | |
| Highest elevation | Wellman pollen 351 m |
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| Residents | uninhabited | |
| main place | Virgohamna (historical) | |
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Danskøya ( German also Däneninsel ) is an uninhabited island in the extreme northwest of the Norwegian Svalbard Archipelago and belongs to the Albert-I-Land area . Around 1900 the island was the starting point for several failed attempts to reach the North Pole by air.
geography
From Svalbard , the main island of the archipelago, Danskøya is separated in the east by the Smeerenburgfjorden , in the south by the Sørgatt (south gate). The one to two kilometer wide waterway between Danskøya and the island of Amsterdamøya to the north is called Danskegatt (Danish Gate).
The island is about nine kilometers long in north-south direction and up to seven kilometers wide in east-west direction. Their area is 40.6 km². The Kobbefjorden, which penetrates far into the island from the west, forms one of the best natural harbors in northwestern Spitsbergen, which is protected from winds and remains ice-free for most of the year. The highest point on the island is Svedbergfjellet with a height of 351 m. The island has several small freshwater lakes.
history
In 1625 a Danish whaling station was set up on the south bank of the Kobbefjorden , from which the island owes its name. In 1636 the Dutch station Harlinger Kokerij followed in the Houkerbucht (today Virgohamna) on the north coast of Danskøya. Both existed until around 1660 and were then abandoned because the whales in the coastal waters were extinct. On Postholmen, a small island in the Kobbefjorden, the whalers deposited their mail to and from home.
The first scientific investigation of the island took place in 1868 when the Swedish polar explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld landed a group of naturalists in the Kobbefjorden on 23 August.
In 1888 the British adventurer Arnold Pike built a wooden prefabricated house right next to the remains of the Harlinger Kokerij and spent the winter here with six companions. The stable house also served later expeditions until it was dismantled in 1925 and transported to Barentsburg .
In 1894, the American Walter Wellman made a stopover on Danskøya on his first North Pole expedition and lived in Pike's house for three days.
Deenſe Eyland on the map of the 17th century
Start of Andrées on July 11, 1897
In 1896 Salomon August Andrée came to Danskøya on the steamer Virgo to start a balloon ride to the North Pole . A balloon hall was built next to Pike's house and a system for producing hydrogen was put into operation. Andrée was in the company of important scientists such as the meteorologist Nils Ekholm , who wanted to take part in aviation, and the physicist and chemist Svante Arrhenius . The project also attracted numerous onlookers. The German journalist and polar traveler Theodor Lerner was there with the ship Expres , as was Captain Wilhelm Bade , the pioneer of the Arctic cruise , with the Erling Jarl . When Andrée was still waiting for a favorable wind for his venture, the Fram entered the Virgohamna on August 14 under Captain Otto Sverdrup after three years of ice drift . Two days later, Andrée broke off his attempt to return a year later. On July 11, 1897, the Örnen finally took off with Andrée and his two companions and left Danskøya for the north. The balloon stayed in the air for only ten and a half hours and then came to a stop after a subsequent 41-hour grinding drive. After an exhausting walk across the ice, the balloonists died in October 1897 on the remote island of Kvitøya .
In 1906 Wellman returned to Danskøya with the plan to reach the pole with an airship that he had built at Louis Godard in Paris. Because the airship hangar at Virgohamna was not completed in time, the hull of the airship was leaking and the engines did not work, the expedition no longer took place in 1906. Wellman returned in 1907 with his airship America , redesigned by Melvin Vaniman , and dared to take off on September 2, 1907. The journey took two hours and ended at the Fuglepyntbreen glacier, 15 km away, on which the America had to make an emergency landing . After all, Wellman had made the first motorized flight in the Arctic. Two years later, on August 15, 1909, Wellman repeated the attempt with the improved and enlarged airship America II . After reaching the limit of the pack ice , the towing belt caught on the ice and tore off, which meant that ballast and some of the provisions were lost. Wellman decided to give up and returned to Danskøya with the help of Gunnar Isachsen's survey ship Farm . Carelessness during the subsequent unloading destroyed the airship, which ended Wellman's dream of the pole.
Since 1973 Danskøya has been part of the Nordvest Spitsbergen National Park . The offshore island Moseøya to the south is designated as a bird sanctuary ( Moseøya fuglereservat ), as are the small rocky islands off Harpunodden, the westernmost point of the island ( Skorpa fuglereservat ).
literature
- Hein B. Bjerck and Leif Johnny Johannessen: The Race to the North Pole . Sysselmannen på Svalbard, Longyearbyen 1999. ISBN 82-91850-05-4 (English)
- William James Mills: Exploring Polar Frontiers - A Historical Encyclopedia , Vol. 1, ABC-CLIO, 2003. ISBN 1-57607-422-6 (English)
- Bea Uusma: The expedition. A love story: How I solved the puzzle of a polar tragedy . btb Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-442-75497-7 (Swedish: Expeditions - Min Kärläkshistoria . 2013. Translated by Susanne Dahmann).
Web links
- Øystein Overrein, Jørn Henriksen, Bjørn Fossli Johansen, Kristin Prestvold: Virgohamna (79 ° 40 ′ N 10 ° 30 ′ E) . Cruise Handbook of Svalbard, Norsk Polarinstitutt, 2015 (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Danskøya . In: The Place Names of Svalbard (first edition 1942). Norsk Polarinstitutt , Oslo 2001, ISBN 82-90307-82-9 (English, Norwegian).
- ↑ Mills, p. 171
- ↑ Kristin Prestvold: Nordvesthjørnet - whaling country . In: Cruise Handbook for Svalbard , Norwegian Polar Institute 2008 (English)
- ↑ Jørn Henriksen, Øystein Overrein, Kristin Prestvold: Virgohamna . In: Cruise Handbook for Svalbard , Norwegian Polar Institute 2008 (English)
- ↑ Martin Conway: No Man's Land. A History of Spitsbergen from Its Discovery in 1596 to the Beginning of the Scientific Exploration of the Country . University Press, Cambridge 1906, p. 355 (English)
- ↑ Alexander Leslie: The Arctic voyages of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, 1858–1879 , MacMillan, London 1879, p. 141 (English)
- ↑ Bjerck and Johannessen, p. 8f
- ↑ Theodor Lerner: Under the spell of the Arctic . Edited by Frank Berger, Oesch Verlag, Zurich 2005, p. 17. ISBN 3-0350-2014-0
- ^ Klaus Barthelmess: The Commencement of Regular Arctic Cruise Ship Tourism: Wilhelm Bade and the "Nordische Hochseefischerei Gesellschaft" of 1892/1893 . In: Tourism in Marine Environments 4, 2007, pp. 113–120 (English)
- ^ Peter J. Capelotti: The Wellman Polar Airship Expeditions at Virgohamna, Danskøya, Svalbard. A Studa in Aerospace Archeology , Norwegian Polar Institute, Oslo 1999, p. 58f (English)
- ↑ Bjerck and Johannessen, p. 25
- ↑ Mills, pp. 693f
- ↑ Moseøya fuglereservat , Directorate for Nature retrieved 18 January 2012
- ↑ Skorpa fuglereservat ,directorate for Naturforvaltning, accessed on January 18, 2012