Georg Carl Amdrup

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Premierløjtnant (First Lieutenant) C. Amdrup

Georg Carl Amdrup (born November 19, 1866 in Copenhagen ; † January 15, 1947 there ) was a Danish naval officer and polar explorer .

He was the son of the office manager Carl Emil Amdrup (1825-1910) and his wife Jeanette Georgine Ricard (1840-1874). He embarked on a military career in the Danish Navy and rose to Vice Admiral by 1927 . From 1906 to 1916 he was an adjutant to Prince Waldemar . He was a member of the committee of the Danmark Expedition 1906-1908 and wrote the expedition report after the tragic death of its leader Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen . In 1932 he was a member of the Danish delegation to the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague , which decided the Danish-Norwegian dispute over East Greenland in 1933 in Denmark's favor.

Carlsberg Foundation expedition to East Greenland

The routes of the Antarctic and Aggas on Amdrup's East Greenland expedition of 1900

From 1898 to 1900 he led an expedition to Greenland financed by the Carlsberg Foundation . At that time, much of the east coast was only roughly measured or completely unknown. There was a gap of about 800 km between the 66th and 70th parallel north, as the ice drift of the East Greenland Current is accelerated and compressed in the Denmark Strait and the coast is therefore difficult to reach. Several ships had already failed. In 1833 the French brig La Lilloise under Captain Jules de Blosseville (1802–1833) disappeared without a trace here with a crew of 80.

In the summer of 1898, Amdrup and four other expedition members went to Ammassalik , the only settlement on the east coast of Greenland, where there had been a Danish trading post since 1894. In autumn, a first supply depot was set up on a boat trip on the island of Depot Ø, 80 km to the north. The expedition spent the winter with geomagnetic and astronomical observations and ethnographic studies of the Inuit culture . On June 21, 1899, the second boat trip started in a north-easterly direction in order to create further depots and - if possible - to reach the Kangerlussuaq fjord , which was only known from the stories of the Inuit. In the constant fight against the east Greenland Current , which is directed to the southwest , which always carries large ice masses with it, Amdrup only managed to advance as far as Nualik, about 100 km south of the mouth of the Kangerlussuaq. In a house here he found the bodies of 30 to 40 Inuit who had left Ammassalik in 1882 and whose fate he was now able to clarify. In September the expedition returned to Copenhagen.

On June 14, 1900, the expedition set sail again, this time with its own ship, the Bark Antarctic , which Amdrup had bought from the Swedish polar explorer Alfred Gabriel Nathorst . The expedition team had been reinforced. On board were Christian Kruuse (1867–1952), Otto Nordenskjöld , Johan Peter Koch and Ejnar Mikkelsen , who would later lead polar expeditions themselves. The expedition first visited the Sabine Island to plant, fossils from the Tertiary to collect, and then drove south to Cape Dalton. From here Amdrup explored the coast with Mikkelsen and two other men in a south-westerly direction in the only 5.60 m long open boat Aggas , while the Antarctic , which was now under the command of the botanist Nikolaj Hartz , mapped the coastline in a northerly direction. With a load of 1.6 tons, consisting of food for two and a half months, a tent, weapons, ammunition, tools, scientific equipment, etc., the men around Amdrup rowed the Aggas along the coast and were repeatedly covered by thick fields of ice floes and scattered icebergs . In such cases, they climbed hills close to the coast and in individual cases also drifting icebergs in order to get an overview of the ice conditions. After a successful journey of 730 km, the group reached Ammassalik on September 2nd and went back on board the Antarctic . The mapped coast of Kong-Christian-IX-Land had been taken over by Amdrup for the Danish Crown.

In addition to the clarification of the coastline, the expedition brought rich scientific results, which were published in the following years by various scientists in the Meddelelser om Grønland (volumes 27 to 30, 39 and 40). Amdrup was awarded the Danish Gold Medal of Merit in 1900 .

Familiar

Georg Amdrup married Alma Marguerite Bloch (1883–1917), the daughter of the painter Carl Bloch , on February 12, 1904 . After the early death of his wife in 1933 he married Karen Helen Vilhelmine Louise Werner (1890–1950), a daughter of the later director of the life insurance company Hafnia Forsikring .

Honors

The following geographical objects are named after Georg Amdrup:

He received the following medals and orders:

Fonts (selection)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d G. C. Amdrup in Dansk biografisk leksikon (Danish)
  2. Apollonio, 2008, p. 87
  3. Anthony K. Higgins: Exploration history of northern East Greenland (PDF; 2.9 MB). In: Exploration history and place names of northern East Greenland (= Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin Vol. 21, 2010), ISBN 978-87-7871-292-9 . P. 21 (English)
  4. a b Amdrup: Den østgrønlandske Expedition 1898–99 , 1899–1900
  5. ^ William James Mills: Exploring Polar Frontiers - A Historical Encyclopedia . tape 1 . ABC-CLIO, 2003, ISBN 1-57607-422-6 , pp. 12 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  6. Amdrup Havn . In: Anthony K. Higgins: Exploration history and place names of northern East Greenland. (= Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin Vol. 21, 2010). Copenhagen 2010, ISBN 978-87-7871-292-9 (English), accessed June 26, 2014
  7. ^ Amdrup Land . In: Anthony K. Higgins: Exploration history and place names of northern East Greenland. (= Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin Vol. 21, 2010). Copenhagen 2010, ISBN 978-87-7871-292-9 (English), accessed June 26, 2014
  8. Amdrup Ø: Greenland at www.geographic.org, accessed on August 11, 2014
  9. Amdrup Højland . In: Anthony K. Higgins: Exploration history and place names of northern East Greenland. (= Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin Vol. 21, 2010). Copenhagen 2010, ISBN 978-87-7871-292-9 (English), accessed June 26, 2014
  10. Amdrup Fjord: Greenland at www.geographic.org, accessed July 3, 2014