Smeerenburg

The 'High Arctic City of Dreams' was how Smeerenburg, on Amsterdamøya (Amsterdam Island), was promoted in the early seventeenth century, although the literal meaning of the word should have given pause for second thoughts. "Blubbertown" was a serious clue to the actual function of this remote settlement. A mere 200 souls resided in an establishment of shacks and shanties as opposed to the 20,000 who populated the fantasy metropolis of persuasive recruitment advertisements posted around the North Sea ports of Elizabethan Holland.

Gullible young gentlemen, desperate to make their fortunes, cast off their ruffs and codpieces and clothed in wool, leather and canvas clothing, they braved the stormy seas to sail as far north as you physically can on this planet. Carried north on the tail of the Gulf Stream, their wooden sailing ships beam-reached up the coast of Norway and crossed the Barents Sea via Bear Island to the northwest coast of Svalbard, where the fjords were a flop with whales.

Living in canvas tents and working through the long days of the midnight sun from April to September, they chased the bowhead and northern right whales down in rowing boats with hand-thrown harpoons. As guests walked along those beaches today, they witnessed, after 400 years, the evidence of their blubber melting pots: broken black circles of consolidated blubber and sand. They could only imagine their desperate lives. As in The Eagles' song "Desperado", the early whalers "could not tell the night-time from the day".

Fridtjof Nansen, in 1920, summed up the whaling situation in Svalbard as follows, "So little by little they killed off the whales, and they all disappeared - and winter reclaimed the land as its own."Read more