Russian trappers stay the winter

Russian fur trappers were overwintering on Svalbard by 1715, according to Store norske leksikon. Susan Barr's lexicon article on the history of Svalbard says that Russian hunters overwintered from that year. The lexicon's general article on Svalbard gives 1704 instead, and the two entries are not reconciled.

Barr writes that the Russian hunting faded out around 1850, while Norwegian sealing vessels and wintering expeditions went on. The general lexicon article on Svalbard says the first Norwegian wintering took place in 1795, when the Buch trading house of Hammerfest equipped a group of sjøsamer to winter with a Russian crew. The lexicon's article on Svalbard also says that Norwegian wintering and summer hunting grew in the nineteenth century, with Tromsø becoming Norway's leading Arctic town.

Conway's No Man's Land traces the Russians to the whaling years. He reports that whalers noted several Russian vessels in the waters off the island of Spitsbergen in 1697 and did not credit them with any whales, so he concluded that they came to hunt walrus, seals, bears, reindeer and foxes. Zorgdrager's book of 1720 knew nothing of Russians wintering on the islands, which led Conway to place the start of the industry between that year and 1740. He adds that one of the four sailors cast away on Edge Island in 1743 had, in the narrative's words, "had passed the winter several times on the western coast of Spitsbergen." Those four, Alexis and Ivan Himkof, Scharapof and Weregin, landed to look for a hut while their ship lay in ice, and the ice carried the ship off. They stayed six years. Weregin died of scurvy, and the other three were taken off in August by a Russian ship that had been driven off course. Conway writes that their success probably encouraged the White Sea people to develop the hunting. He adds that Count Schuwalow soon sent a wintering party to the same hut on Edge Island.

Helge Ingstad's book on Svalbard says the expeditions were sent out by merchants and monasteries, with the Solovetsky monastery long interested. Ingstad's book adds that the men came from Mezen, Onega and other places around the White Sea. He describes the routine: a main station first, then outstations, reindeer hunted in September for food, then polar foxes through the winter, and after the dark season bears, white whales, seals and walrus, with eider down also gathered. Thoralv Lund's book says the Russians, who called the islands Grumant, began hunting early in the eighteenth century, in groups of 15 to 20 men who stayed a couple of years in a row before a new group took over. Ingstad names Ermil Starostin as the best-known overwinterer, on Svalbard for over thirty years, fifteen of them in one stretch, at Grønfjorden. The jubilee history of Store Norske (the state-owned mining company) says the pomors, as it calls the White Sea hunters, appear to have deliberately tended their hunting grounds and avoided over-hunting.

Conway quotes Daines Barrington as reporting three or four Russian settlements on the island of Spitsbergen. Ingstad, citing Keilhau, says two Russian parties wintering at South Cape took twelve hundred walrus in one season. Losses were heavy. Conway lists a party at Bell Sound with eight graves, a party at King's Bay in which all died, and a party near the Foreland in which 10 of 15 died. He says the trappers moved north as the game thinned. Ingstad says the Russians withdrew in the middle of the nineteenth century because the companies were losing money, the crews were of lower quality, and Norwegian fur hunters competed more. The Store Norske jubilee history gives conditions in Russia as one reason and says the activity was over by about 1850. Conway records the last wintering in 1851 to 52 at Red Bay, where a lodja landed 18 men. By his account six survived, with help from two Norwegian sloops. Dole's America in Spitsbergen also gives 18 men and says all but six died of scurvy.