Johan Koren (polar explorer)

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Johan Koren (1903)

Johan Koren (born October 4, 1879 in Fredrikstad , Norway , † March 3, 1919 in Vladivostok , Russia ) was a Norwegian hunter and polar explorer .

Life

Ship's cat Nansen (drawing by Johan Koren)

His parents, the captain and banker Fredrik Koren (1846-1891) and his wife Caroline Louise Ramm (1855-1891), died when Johan Koren was eleven years old. He grew up with his uncle in Fredrikstad and attended middle school. At the age of 17, he signed on to the Belgica and took part in the Belgian Antarctic expedition led by Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery , which was the first to winter in the Antarctic . Koren had brought the ship's cat on board, which was named after Fridtjof Nansen . His interest in nature made Koren the assistant to the Romanian zoologist Emil Racoviță .

Back in Norway, Koren worked as a draftsman at the Zoological Museum at Christiania University . In the autumn of 1900 he traveled to Pasvik in Finnmark, Norway, with ornithologist Hans Schaanning . They collected eggs and bird skins , which they supplied to museums and collectors in Norway, Finland and Russia on a large scale. They continued this lucrative activity when they participated in Kristian Birkeland's northern lights expedition as Hans Riddervord's assistant in 1902/1903 and wintered on Novaya Zemlya . The collaboration with Schaanning lasted until 1906. During this time they sold a total of 52 skulls, 224 furs , 1557 hides and 2488 eggs.

For the Zoological Museum in Christiania, Koren took part in a trip on Henryk Bull's sealer Cathrine in the Southern Ocean in 1906 . The barque was shipwrecked on the Île de la Possession , one of the Crozet Islands . While Koren and Bull stayed on the island with nine other men, Captain Ree and two men managed to get to Australia by dinghy and organize help. Since Koren had lost all of his equipment in the shipwreck, he had to stay in Australia for a year to earn money for his return and a new expedition.

Accompanied by his compatriot Hjalmar Jensen, he came to Kamchatka via the Philippines and Japan in the spring of 1908 , from where they traveled on to the Anadyr . When crossing the river on September 8, her boat capsized. Jensen drowned while Koren was rescued by Chukchi . He went to the trading post of the Northeastern Siberian Company and took the first winter ship to Nome , Alaska . The following year he sat on the schooner Teddy Bear on Big Diomede to Chukotka on and visited the islands Idlidlja and Kolyutschin . A second trip took him to Little Diomede Island . The yield of the two trips were 348 birds of 105 species and 157 eggs. His collections of East Asian birds aroused great interest in the USA. Koren established business contacts with the owners of private ornithological collections such as John Lewis Childs (1856–1921), John Eliot Thayer (1862–1933) and Louis B. Bishop (1865–1950). Thayer financed the John Е. Thayer Expedition of 1910–1911 with the schooner Kittiwake . The ship was damaged in a storm and had to return to Seattle. In 1911 Koren drove the Kittiwake over the Bering Strait and followed the north coast of the Chukchi Peninsula to the mouth of the Kolyma , where he decided to continue upriver to Nizhnekolymsk and spend the winter there. The return trip the following year was slow due to a lack of coal. The Bering Strait was not reached, the ship was surrounded by ice and sank on October 4, 1912 near Cape Serdze-Kamen. However, Koren managed to save most of his prey. He spent the winter on Ratmanov Island and walked across the ice to Alaska in March. In 1913 he collected mainly on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. With the support of several American museums, Koren carried out his own expedition to Chukotka in 1914/15, which, however, suffered from underfunding and serious differences between the participants. Koren lost several fingers from frostbite on both hands. He stayed in Nizhnekolymsk until the autumn of 1917, where he lived with the Russian Yefimja Nikolajewna Rebrowa († 1937) and her child. He was now also engaged in the fur trade . In the confusion after the October Revolution he was from the fur trade company Co. Youroveta Home & Foreign Trade do. On a train journey from Irkutsk to Vladivostok, Koren fell ill with the Spanish flu . He died on March 3, 1919 in the American Red Cross Hospital on Ruski Island . He was buried in the Pokrovsky cemetery.

power

Although he was not a trained zoologist, Johan Koren is considered an important researcher of the avifauna of Northern Europe as well as Northeast Asia and Alaska. He made important contributions to the knowledge of the bird world of the Chukchi Peninsula and the area on the lower reaches of the Kolyma. His contributions to the study of mammals in this region are also recognized. At the beginning of the 20th century, Koren was known in Norway and the USA from numerous scientific articles that dealt with the animals he collected.

Today there are over 1,600 items in Koren's collection from 1909 to 1918 in 16 museums worldwide. Most of them are owned by the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in Cambridge , followed by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.

Honor

The nature reserve established by the Sakha Republic in 1995 in the Kolyma Delta with an area of ​​208,628 hectares is named "Kolyma-Koren" in honor of Johan Koren.

Fonts

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Steinar Wikan: Johan Koren - 2. In: Norsk biografisk leksikon (Norwegian)
  2. ↑ Johan Koren on the Norsk Polarhistorie website (Norwegian), accessed on April 27, 2017
  3. ↑ Olga Akindinowna Makarova: Hans Schaanning and bird fauna research in the Pasvik valley. In: N. Polikarpova (Ed.): Hans Schaanning. The first ornithologist of Pasvik , Collection of articles, Ryazan 2014. ISBN 978-5-98436-038-8 ( digitized ; PDF; 6.35 MB English)
  4. ↑ The wrecked Barque Catherine , The Advertiser on February 15, 1907 (English), accessed on April 20, 2017
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Artjuchin, Schergalin: Йохан Корен (1879–1919) - натуралист и коллектор птиц Северо-Востока Азиа и Северо 2013, Азиа и Север, Russian, 2013
  6. ↑ Kolyma-Koren Nature Reserve on the "Protected Areas of Russia" website (Russian), accessed on April 26, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Koren, Johan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian hunter and polar explorer
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Fredrikstad , Norway
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 1919
Place of death Vladivostok , Russia