A tin-can guitar, a Bellsund hut and the winter of 1947

The guitar is a tin can 24 cm long, with a wooden neck of 63 cm, five frets and strings that can be tightened.

It was found in July 1965 in Camp Bell, a hut in Vårsolbukta on the north shore of Bellsund, by the Polish polar researcher Stanisław Siedlecki.

Who made it is not known for certain. The museum's catalogue connects it, as probable, with two trappers who came to Camp Bell in the autumn of 1947, Erling Nordby and Martin Strømsnes.

They had a plan for that winter. At Christmas they would go north along the coast to the radio station at Kapp Linné and spend the holiday with the telegraphists there.

They left Longyearbyen for Bellsund at the end of the summer of 1947. Their outfitter was Hilmar Nøis, who had trapped on Svalbard since 1909.

Vårsolbukta is a small bay behind the low Reinius islands.

Camp Bell had stood on the shore for 39 years. A carpenter from Goldhanger in Essex, Charles Mann, built it in seven weeks in the summer of 1908.

It was for the British prospector Ernest Mansfield and his Northern Exploration Company, which needed a house to guard its claims around Bellsund. The timber came from Norway.

Mann made the walls of three-inch planks, felted them inside and out, and banked them with stones to three feet. He put in two stoves, one in the store room and one in the living room, and two windows with shutters inside and out. The house could sleep 16 men.

The company kept watchmen in it for about 20 years. After the Norwegian state bought it in 1932, it became a trappers' house.

To the east the long black ridge of Ingeborgfjellet runs down to the coast, and beyond it lies Fridtjovhamna, a harbour sheltered by the island Akseløya.

The two men made Camp Bell their main station.

At Fridtjovhamna, about 6 km along the shore, they built a side hut of their own: a timber frame with a single-pitch roof, the door and the window facing west.

Kapp Linné, at the mouth of Isfjorden, had a manned radio station, Isfjord Radio, and Christmas there was the date the two men had fixed.

The German trapper who had lived at Camp Bell in the 1930s used to keep Christmas the same way, walking north to the station.

Wreckage from the war was still coming ashore. That September a navy crew clearing mines around Svalbard found masses of methanol drums on the beaches, most of them rusted through and empty.

In the middle of the month the mining inspector, Gunnar Aasgaard, told Nordby and Strømsnes not to drink from any barrel of spirits they might find on the shore.

On 27 September the two trappers found one: a drum of 200 litres, three-quarters full of what they took to be 96% spirit.

The find made them look forward to the winter, the diary shows. They kept to a rule, though. The autumn work came first.

In early October, with about three weeks of sun left, they brought the drum by boat to the hut at Fridtjovhamna. That day they drank from it.

One of them woke at about 10:00 the next morning.

His companion was lying on the floor, groaning with pain.

He lit the stove and fell asleep again.

When he woke in the afternoon, his companion was dead.

He wrote in the diary that he would try to reach Kapp Linné for help.

The way to Kapp Linné passed Camp Bell, along the shore below Ingeborgfjellet.

He got as far as Camp Bell.

He was Erling Nordby.

The sun would go down for the winter at the end of October and not come back until the middle of February.

Christmas came in the dark, and the two men did not arrive at Kapp Linné.

No word came from them later in the winter either, and in Longyearbyen people began to fear for them.

At the end of February two men set out from Longyearbyen for Kapp Linné and went on south to Vårsolbukta.

Aslak Forberg ran the telegraph office in Longyearbyen. Bjørn Horsberg, a radio technician, had come north that autumn to make programmes for Norsk rikskringkasting (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), and had taken at once to driving dogs.

The door of Camp Bell stood wide open. Inside it was dark.

By the light of their torches they found Nordby dead.

He had fallen onto the bunk.

Beside it, on the table, lay the diary.

On the stove lay kindling and matches he had not used.

Dog sledges from the Svea mine, at the head of Van Mijenfjorden, brought the bodies in.

The doctor in Longyearbyen found that both men had died of methanol poisoning.

The news went out from Longyearbyen on 10 March 1948. The families heard it from the priest in their home parish.

Strømsnes's body was sent home. Nordby was to be buried in Longyearbyen, but the ground was frozen, and the burial waited until 8 September 1948, before the frost could close the ground again.

The governor, Håkon Balstad, was called to Ny-Ålesund just before the day, and his wife, Liv Balstad, arranged it. The governor's office had no money for digging graves. Two men offered to dig and gave up in the frozen ground. She found a third, who did it for ordinary overtime pay.

Notices went up at the mess halls, the telegraph office and the post office, and the priest, Henrik Riiber, expected a large gathering. The church had burned in the war.

On the day a gale blew up and sleet drove down the valley. The lorry with the white coffin stuck in the mud, and the men laid logs under its wheels.

In the end the party was small. Five men carried the coffin the last stretch up the slope to the cemetery below Platåfjellet. Horsberg, who had gone to look for the two trappers in February, was one of them.

The priest had changed into his cassock in a bunker below the cemetery. The wind took his voice. The grave was shallow, only just deep enough for the coffin.

None of the mourners had ever met the man they buried.

Siedlecki found the guitar at Camp Bell in the summer of 1965. In 1983 two men from Norsk Polarinstitutt (the Norwegian Polar Institute) told the museum it had been made in Camp Bell in the winter of 1946 to 1947. Three men had made it, they said, and all three died of wood alcohol.

No one is recorded at Camp Bell that winter. Under the note the museum wrote that it probably meant the winter of 1947 to 1948, and Nordby and Strømsnes.

None of the accounts of their winter mentions a guitar.