A brief history of Svalbard

Naming and discovery

The name ‘Svalbarði funnin’ was first mentioned in Icelandic annals as far back as 1194. Svalbarði can be translated to ‘cold coasts’, while funninmeans ‘found’. So Svalbardi funnin simply means ‘cold coasts that have been found’. It’s not certain if the Svalbard that these texts mention is the one we know today, but the name stuck nonetheless.

Some speculate that Norsemen or Pomors actually discovered Svalbard earlier, but it was first ‘officially’ discovered in 1596 by Willem Barentsz, an experienced Dutch sea explorer who also gave his name to the nearby Barents Sea.

He named the area of sharp mountaintops in the northwest ‘Spitsbergen’, which literally means ‘pointed mountains’ in Dutch. This is now the name of the Svalbard Archipelago’s largest island. He also discovered the southernmost island of the archipelago, later named Bjørnøya.

The rush for whale oil

In 1607, when Englishman Henry Hudson announced that the waters around Svalbard were full of bowhead whales, whalers flocked to the islands in search of lucrative whale oil. Whale hunters and seamen from the Netherlands, England, Spain, France, Germany, and Denmark nearly emptied the sea of its whale population throughout the 1600s.

During this period, Svalbard and its surroundings were marked as ‘terra nullius’, meaning it was considered a no-man’s–land belonging to no jurisdiction or country, free for all. That didn’t stop the two main whaling nations, the Dutch and the English, from carving up the whaling waters between themselves. It was agreed that the English would hunt south of the Magdalenefjord, while the Dutch hunted the northwest corner of Spitsbergen. Other countries, much to their chagrin, were forced to make separate deals with the two nations.

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Photo: Eric James Ryan, Oscar Farrera, Lise Dreistel and Genna Roland

The first settlers

The Pomors, who came from the north of Russia from the shores of the White Sea, came to Svalbard to hunt the wild animals that flourished in the Arctic climate: reindeer, Arctic foxes, seals, walrus, and polar bears. It’s not known exactly when they first started coming to Svalbard. Unlike the whalers, however, the Pomors had a more sustainable way of hunting that didn’t deplete the wildlife population.

They began by setting up small trapping stations along Svalbard’s coast from the middle of the 17th century. Some of their later trapping stations were quite advanced, with living quarters, storage, and even a sauna! We know of about 71 Russian trapping stations in Svalbard, and most of them appear equipped to operate all year round.

The Pomor activity on Svalbard grew and reached its peak at the end of the 18th century, when an estimated 100 to 150 Pomors spent the winter on the icy archipelago—the first people ever thought to do so. They set up numerous large wooden crosses along the Svalbard coast as protection from higher powers and to bring luck to their trapping and hunting—not to mention to mark their territory. You can still find two of these Russian Orthodox crosses standing at Nordaustlandet today.

Early expeditions

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Svalbard was a hotspot for scientific experiments and both large- and small-scale explorations. Some of the most important scientific explorers were Baltazar Mathias Keilhau, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, and Martin Conway.

Conway was the first to produce a map of the interior of Spitsbergen. Keilhau was the first to carry out expeditions in the interior and published several important papers on the Arctic. Nordenskiöld dedicated most of his research to the archipelago as a whole. But these are just a few of the many scientists and explorers who dedicated their time and interest to the frozen lands of Svalbard.

Coal mining

Starting in the 19th century, Svalbard became more dominated by Norwegians, who also took to trapping stations and overwintering. This activity shifted in 1906, when the settlement of Longyearbyen was established to support coal mining in the region. By the 1920s, permanent coal mining was established in several areas of Svalbard.

The Spitsbergen Treaty came into full effect in 1925, granting Norway sovereignty of the archipelago and prohibiting all ‘warlike purposes’. By the 1930s, all settlements here were either Norwegian or Soviet. Since the end of the USSR in the 1990s, the Russian population on the islands has sharply declined.

A new industry arrives

Today, tourism is one of the most important sources of income for Svalbard, especially for the main settlement of Longyearbyen. It was, in fact, Hurtigruten that was behind this wave of tourism.

Hurtigruten’s founder, Richard With, established a route called the ‘Sportsman’s Route’ in 1896, from Hammerfest, in mainland Norway, to Svalbard. Along with this new route, which quickly became popular for holiday-goers, he also moved a prefabricated hotel to Svalbard, close to Longyearbyen, on what is still called ‘Hotellneset’ (The Hotel Point). It was the first of several hotels to follow, establishing Svalbard as a premier destination for adventurers looking to explore the High Arctic.

While sailing with us, you’ll travel in the footsteps of the brave explorers that contributed to what this Arctic archipelago is today.