First Norwegian wintering

The first Norwegian wintering hunting expedition to Svalbard is held to have taken place in 1795 and 1796, on the island of Spitsbergen. Store norske leksikon, in the articles by Susan Barr on Svalbard's history, states it that way: the expedition is said to have taken place then, and hunting only got properly under way about twenty-five years afterwards. The lexicon's timeline lists it as the first Norwegian wintering hunting expedition to the archipelago.

The sources differ on who sent the men and who they were. The lexicon's Svalbard article says the trading house Buch in Hammerfest outfitted a group of sjøsamer to winter together with a Russian crew. Kjell Fjørtoft, in his book Kongen av Sassen Bay, writes that the brothers Buck of Hammerfest sent an expedition of both Norwegians and Russians to winter, and that the catch was good. Martin Conway, in No Man's Land, cites Keilhau and Lowenigh for a small party that a merchant of Hammerfest, together with a Russian partner, sent to the island of Spitsbergen. It hunted and fished and apparently wintered. Conway adds: "This is the first wintering in which Norwegians are known to have taken part."

Before this, Russians had wintered on the islands. One lexicon article by Barr gives 1715 as the start of their wintering and another gives 1704, and both say Russian hunting lasted until about 1850. Nathan Haskell Dole wrote that Norwegians had gone to the island of Spitsbergen after game before the end of the 1700s, probably earlier. Helge Ingstad writes that the first certain accounts of Norwegian wintering trappers come from about 1800, and that the authorities of Denmark and Norway had offered bounties for ships sent north by notices of 1784 and 1787.

Ingstad describes the first Norwegian wintering expeditions as heavy going. They were often about twenty men on a limited stretch of ground, and scurvy brought many deaths. Fjørtoft adds that the vessels were frail, had no engine and had to rely on sail, and that the kit of the winterers was mostly poor: porridge grain, peas, flour and salt fish, with reindeer and seal meat when it could be had. Weapons were harpoons and lances. Dole wrote that the Norwegians tried wintering, but that their huts were less satisfactory than those the Russians built.

Norwegian wintering took hold only slowly. Dole credits Crowe, the English vice-consul at Hammerfest, with founding the systematic Norwegian use of the hunting fields, and says that in 1819 he sent a sloop with eleven men. Fjørtoft says Norwegians began wintering in earnest from 1822. Conway records that the first independent Norwegian wintering was in 1822 and 1823, when 16 men were sent to Cross Road by employers in Bremen and Norway and built two wooden huts. According to Conway, Crowe then had 22 men put up a hut at Green Harbour for the winter of 1823 and 1824, and 22 more Norwegians stayed at Green Harbour in the winter after the summer of 1825. Of five men at an out-station that winter, he writes, all died of scurvy.

Conway writes that Keilhau's visit to the islands in 1827, and his published account of their resources, drew notice to the Norwegian hunting industry and spurred Norwegians to compete with the Russian trappers, a competition he thinks in the end destroyed the Russian trade. Ingstad says the Norwegian expeditions continued and grew in number, with Hammerfest as the hub for them in the first half of the 1800s, and that the Russians had withdrawn by about 1850.