Page Sec1:13 - Labyrint 2013 - English Edition

Isolated, frozen, wild and lonely. Svalbard
has always been a dangerous place to
visit, and for the early European whalers,
death was a familiar guest. The hundreds
of burial grounds in Svalbard bear witness
to a workplace where even the slight-
est mistake could be fatal and a climate
where ignorance or bad luck could mean
your demise.
Even Willem Barentsz, who discovered
Svalbard in 1596, didn’t survive the trip
home. He died after his ship became
trapped in the ice off Novaya Zemlya,
and his crew was forced to spend the
winter there. But the expedition’s tragic
ending didn’t stop news of its discovery
from spreading like wildfire throughout
Europe.
The discovery of new lands was always
met with excitement, and the English
were the first to reach the new territory.
They discovered huge pods of whales and
other marine mammals and realized there
were enormous riches to be had in the icy
wilderness.
“The market for animal oils in Europe
during this period experienced a huge
surge. The oils were used for processing
textiles, as a constituent of paint, for lamp
oil and for the new modern consumer
product, soap,” says Tora Hultgreen,
director of the Svalbard Museum.
The oil adventure
Arctic marine mammals with their huge
reserves of blubber were perfect for this
purpose, and Europe’s major empires
immediately began to argue about who
had the right to exploit this new treas-
ure trove. An agreement was reached
when Europe’s two major naval powers,
­England and the Netherlands, divided the
area between them, and Europe’s first oil
industry was born.
“Neither of these countries had any expe-
rience with whaling, and were dependent
on help from the Basques, who had hunt-
ed whales in the Bay of Biscay and along
the Labrador coast,” Hultgreen said.
Men from all over Europe soon signed up
for whaling ships and learned the tech-
niques of harpooning whales, bringing
them to shore, flensing them and extract­
ing the oil from the blubber in large cop-
per kettles. At the end of the summer they
travelled back to the mainland with the
oil stored in barrels.
Still, there were many who were left
behind after the season ended, buried in
shallow graves in homemade coffins.
Excavations at Likneset uncovered this elegant man, dressed in a blue jacket and a felted wool cap. The bottom of the
coffin contains sawdust to absorb fluid from the corpse. Photo: Dag Nævestad.
University of Tromsø – Labyrint E/13 ••• 13
Text: Linn Sollied Madsen