First Norwegian science expedition

In 1827 the geologist B. M. Keilhau carried out the first Norwegian scientific expedition to Svalbard. The Store norske leksikon, in Susan Barr's historical overview, lists it under that year. Helge Ingstad writes in Landet med de kalde kyster that Keilhau, whom he calls a professor, travelled that summer to Bjørnøya and Edgeøya, carried out geological work there and gathered a number of items of information about the archipelago.

Nathan Haskell Dole's America in Spitsbergen says that Balthasar Mathias Keilhau of Kristiania University was the first Norwegian with a scientific education to take an interest in Svalbard, and calls him the pioneer of geological investigation in the archipelago. According to Dole he went at his own expense in a small, poorly regarded craft, with a German burgomaster of Burtscheid as companion. Two Englishmen who were at Tromsø were offered a place on the trip, but Dole reports that they lost their enthusiasm when they saw the vessel.

Martin Conway's No Man's Land places the sloop near South Cape at the time when Parry's ship Hecla was leaving the island of Spitsbergen, and says Keilhau made observations at South Cape and on Edge Island in the weeks that followed. Conway calls Keilhau the earliest Scandinavian scientist to go to Svalbard and a forerunner of the Scandinavians who later carried out most of the scientific exploration there. He wrote that Keilhau "went up in the most modest manner, with no Government backing or flourish of trumpets". In a footnote Conway gives Keilhau's birth as 1797 near Christiania and his professorship there as dating from 1826. It adds that he visited Bear Island and the island of Spitsbergen in 1827 and travelled in Finmark in 1828. The same note cites Everest, who met Keilhau at Hammerfest that year, as calling him "a young man of great talents and enthusiasm".

Ingstad's bibliography lists Keilhau's own account as Reize i Øst og Vest Finmarken, extended to Beeren Eiland and Spitsbergen and covering 1827 and 1828, printed at Christiania in 1831. Thoralv Lund's Kalde krigsår describes the trip as a geological research expedition led by Keilhau, who came back with observations and geological material that Lund calls very valuable. Conway writes that Keilhau showed that great funds were not needed: a man with the right training, ready to endure hardship and work on land, could reach valuable results at very small expense. According to Conway the example was not followed at once but bore fruit in the end. Ingstad adds that Keilhau also contributed to the rise of Norwegian fishing and sealing in the Arctic. The jubilee history of Store Norske (the state-owned mining company) says that many regard Keilhau as the pioneer of the scientific exploration of the land areas of Svalbard.

Conway notes that ten years passed before another Scandinavian followed. In 1837 Sven Lovén of Stockholm visited the west coast. Conway says the Torell expedition and the later Swedish expeditions were the direct result of Lovén's initiative, and he thinks Lovén was himself prompted by Keilhau, who died on 1 January 1858, just before Torell's start. Lund and the Store Norske history both say that Swedish scientists came ten years after Keilhau, and the Store Norske history names Otto Torell, A. E. Nordenskiöld and Alfred Nathorst among those who worked on the archipelago afterwards. Lund adds that Norwegians took the lead in the research from 1906 and that their work counted when Norway was awarded sovereignty in 1925.