The Sverdrup maps and High Arctic sovereignty

Otto Sverdrup was born on a farm in Norway, but his career took him far from his rural roots to the ice of Greenland, the Arctic Ocean and the Canadian High Arctic.

In 1888, he got his first taste of the far North as part of a six-man expedition that skied across the Greenland ice cap in 40 days and wintered at Godthaab (now Nuuk). The expedition was led by his countryman, Fridtjof Nansen.

On their return to Norway, Nansen began making plans for an ambitious adventure which would see a ship, specially designed to withstand the force of Arctic ice, drift with the Arctic current.

The vessel was named Fram — Norwegian for “forward” — and Otto Sverdrup oversaw her construction, which took three years.

In September 1893, the Fram was beset by ice north of Russia and began her planned drift westward. But things didn’t go according to plan — the drift did not take the ship as far north as Nansen had expected, so he and another Norwegian left the vessel and travelled by dogsled over the Arctic ice.

Sverdrup remained aboard as captain and supervised the expedition’s scientific program. The ship finally emerged from the ice north of Svalbard in August 1896.

Immediately upon returning home, Sverdrup began making plans for another Arctic expedition. This time, he would sail not in the shadow of Nansen, but as an expedition leader in his own right. The vessel would again be the Fram.

In June 1898, the Fram left Norway. Sverdrup’s intention was to take her through the channels separating Greenland and Ellesmere Island, to the northern coast of Greenland.

Impenetrable ice thwarted Sverdrup’s plans, and he instead wintered the vessel on the eastern coast of Ellesmere Island at a harbour he named Fram Haven. During that winter and spring, Sverdrup and his men explored Bache Peninsula and central Ellesmere Island, and one sledge party reached the island’s western coast.

The next summer, ice again blocked Sverdrup’s way north, and he was forced to abandon his original plan. Instead, he decided to focus his research on Ellesmere Island and the seas around it.

He took the Fram south, then west into Jones Sound where he passed three consecutive winters, the first at Harbour Fjord and the next two at Goose Fjord.

From these bases, Sverdrup and his party explored and mapped most of the west coast of Ellesmere Island and a group of islands known collectively as the Sverdrup Islands.

This accounts for the liberal dose of Norwegian names on islands of the Canadian Arctic, for the islands included Axel Heiberg, King Christian, Amund Ringnes, and Ellef Ringnes, as well as Cornwall and Graham islands.

Arctic historian William Barr has called this “one of the most impressive feats of polar exploration ever achieved.”

Incidentally, one of the place names bestowed by Sverdrup on the south coast of Ellesmere Island was Grise Fjord, which means “Pig Fjord” in Norwegian.

When Sverdrup returned to Norway in 1902, he informed King Oscar that he had taken possession of all the lands he had discovered in the name of Norway. But Norway was not up to aggressively pursuing its claim for ownership of the High Arctic at the time, as it was still striving to gain its own independence from Sweden.

Canada took little interest in the claims until the 1920s, when it finally woke up to the fact that another nation professed ownership of much of what it considered its own, albeit neglected, Arctic.

The dispute was settled amicably, through negotiation.

Sverdrup’s maps were the key to the settlement.

A biographer of Sverdrup wrote: “Without them, Ottawa would have remained ignorant, for who knows how long, of the simple fact that the islands were there, in need of ‘saving’ for Canada.

“If Sverdrup had not discovered the islands when he did, they would almost certainly have been found and claimed by explorers of a country much better able than Norway to follow up the matter.”

The possibility in the back of some Canadian minds was that that country might well have been the United States, whose explorer, Robert Peary, had traversed parts of northern Ellesmere Island.

On Nov. 11, 1930, the Norwegian government formally relinquished its claim to the land explored by Sverdrup, and at the same time Canada paid Sverdrup personally for his original maps and documents related to his expedition.

During the negotiations — in which future Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson, then a young civil servant with the Department of External Affairs, played a role — Canada had considered paying Sverdrup an annual payment for the rest of his life.

However, the bureaucrats decided the amount suggested might ultimately turn out to be a very large sum if Sverdrup lived to an advanced age, though he was already 76 years old.

They opted instead for a lump-sum payment of $67,000. Settling the dispute with Norway was certainly a wise decision for Canada, and clinched Canada’s claims to sovereignty in the far North.

But the lump-sum payment proved to be a poor financial decision on Canada’s part: Fifteen days after the settlement was announced, Otto Sverdrup died.

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for more than 50 years. He is the author of “Minik: The New York Eskimo” and “Thou Shalt Do No Murder,” among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.