Coal is seen in Kongsfjorden

In 1610 the English seaman Jonas Poole found coal at King's Bay, the fjord now called Kongsfjorden, in the Ny-Ålesund area. Store norske leksikon names him as the discoverer of the deposits there. Nathan Haskell Dole, in his book America in Spitsbergen, writes that Poole, sailing the seventy-ton Amitie, went hunting in King's Bay. Martin Conway's No Man's Land says these hunting trips, made into the bay that Poole called Deer Sound, were very successful and also turned up "Seacoales, which burnt very well." Conway adds that the coal was probably taken at what is now called Coal Haven.

The coal was a side finding of a hunting and exploring voyage. According to Conway, Poole also worked in Ice Sound and Bell Sound, killed bears and reindeer on the shore of Charles Foreland, and gathered whalebone that lay on the beaches. Dole puts the catch at 120 walruses, 51 reindeer and 30 bears, with a narwhal horn and whalebone. Conway gives the same figures, adding three bear cubs taken alive. Helge Ingstad's Landet med de kalde kyster counts 33 bears. The sources also differ on the end of the voyage: Dole says Poole reached London on 1 August, while Conway quotes Poole as writing that he arrived on the last of August.

What the Muscovy Company took from Poole's report was the whales, not the coal. Conway writes that Poole's account of the many whales in the bays led the company to plan a larger expedition for 1611. He writes that its first chart of Spitsbergen, drawn in London in the winter of 1611 to 1612, held what the voyages of 1610 and 1611 had learned. The coal of King's Bay was mentioned again by later visitors. Dole quotes the whaling writer Scoresby as saying that Dutch fishers had taken a stock of it for fuel on the passage home. Dole also describes the Swedish expedition member C. W. Blomstrand, who spent ten days around King's Bay. Blomstrand found no sign that the seams had ever been worked, and thought the coal useful only as fuel for the steam vessels of walrus and seal hunters.

Mining did not follow for a long time. Store norske leksikon says that coal was taken out at Ny-Ålesund only from 1916, when a Norwegian Arctic shipowner set up the company Kings Bay Kull Compani to secure coal for his own fleet during the First World War. The lexicon article by Susan Barr on the history of Svalbard also lists the founding of the company in Ny-Ålesund under 1916. Ingstad adds that a Norwegian claim covering the most favourable Kongsfjorden deposits was sold that year to Kings Bay Kull Comp. A/S of Ålesund, a company that was still working when he wrote.

The lexicon records that mining conditions at Ny-Ålesund were harder than at Isfjorden, and that low coal prices at times made it difficult to keep the work going. The company worked in separate periods, with pauses in between. The state bought all its shares in 1933.