Saturday, July 2 (part III)
After wandering around town (post here) and crossing over to mainland Norway to visit the Arctic Ocean Cathedral (post here), we rounded out our day of sightseeing at the Polarmuseet (Polar Museum).
I’ve said it before: we’re not museum people; not really. If there is a collection of material on a topic that is near and dear to our hearts — well, that’s a different story. We’ll visit such exhibits and browse through the displays … sometimes for hours on end. And that’s what we did at the Polar Museum, even though our time there was cut short by the hordes that eventually overran the small museum.
Tromsø was established in the late 1800s as the “Gateway to the Arctic.” Not only was it the center of seal hunting in North Norway, it also served as the base for many polar expeditions — scientific and otherwise. Housed in a historic Customs warehouse that dates back to the 1830s, the museum takes visitors back to those times. It opened on 18 June 1978, a date that has considerable Polar significance. It was on this date 50 years before that Roald Amundsen left Tromsø to search for Umberto Nobile, lost in the polar region aboard the airship Italia. Nobile was found several days later; tragically, Amundsen and his crew didn’t make it back. (Ironically, Nobile died in Rome in 1978, the same year the museum opened.)
Outside the Polarmuseet are artifacts from the days of whaling, such as whaling guns and a pot used to boil down whale blubber.
After paying the 50 NOK ($9.25) per person admission fee, we set about browsing through the rooms filled with “… exhibits on the first hunters on Svalbard; the trappers of polar bears, polar foxes, and seals, who wintered in the icy wasteland. Everyday articles, utensils, and a wealth of other material left by hunters, whalers and sealers around Northern Norway…” (Description from the DK Guide).
The practice of hunting to the point of decimating whole populations of wildlife is abhorrent to us. Much of our time studying these exhibits was spent trying to understand this chapter in human history. An impossible task. I get it that times were different then, but … words fail me. We can only hope that mankind has learned its lesson and won’t repeat the errors of its ways — at least in this regard.
How can anyone raise a gun or a sealing pick at an animal when it looks at you like this?
The first room at the museum contains a trappers’ hut, complete with life-size mannequins. The hut was built in 1910 as the main station for five trappers in Wijdefjord (Svalbard). Used regularly until 1936, it was built of Siberian drift wood and insulated with moss.
The "shutter trap" was the most common method used to hunt foxes.
The next room we went into was dedicated to sealing. Life-size exhibits showed the working boats and the methods used to hunt seals. Each boat had a crew of three or more, and each man had a specific duty. The rower, sitting in the aft, was responsible for ensuring that the boat moved quietly towards the unsuspecting seals. The man sitting in the middle pushed the ice aside when the going became difficult; he was also the one who jumped out onto the ice to kill baby seals using a “hakapik” (sealing pick). The rifleman sat in the bow. (There was no explanation as to his responsibilities — I imagine he shot seals that were in range, and was likely the bear guard as I’m sure there was competition for the seals from the polar bears.)
The adjoining room displayed skins and/or stuffed seals representing the seven species of seals that are found in Norwegian waters: walrus, grey, harbor, harp, hooded, bearded, and ringed.
There was a lot more to see on the ground floor, but it was starting to get crowded. We didn’t want to miss out on the area we’d actually come to see, so we moved upstairs. Here we found an extensive collection of material on early polar research, especially the work of Amundsen and Nansen (no surprise since both were Norwegian). My only regret is that the displays were behind glass and photography was a lot more difficult.
We started out in the room dedicated to Roald Amundsen …
Amundsen (1872-1928)
Display case filled with artifacts from the South Pole Expedition of 1910-1912, including a flag, a cup from the Fram, and clothes belonging to Hjalmar Johansen.
before leaving the South Pole on 18 December 1911, Amundsen and his men pitched a small tent with a Norwegian flag flying atop.
[photo of a historic photograph]
Sled dogs were a key partner in polar exploration.
Amundsen, Ellsworth, and Nobile flew over the polar sea in 1926 aboard the airship Norge.
Starting in Ny-Ålesund (Svalbard) they flew to Alaska.
Our intent was to next move onto the exhibits about Fridtjof Nansen — polar explorer, zoologist, oceanographer, diplomat, and humanist. Unfortunately, it was at about this time that we really started to battle the tour-bus crowds. The temperature inside the museum had been overly warm all along. With so many people in there at one time, it became downright unbearable. Eventually, we retreated, but first …
the Nansen exhibit. The kayak in the foreground is a replica of the one Hjalmar Johansen used in the first voyage of the Fram (1893-1896). When he and Nansen had to abandon their goal to reach the north pole, it was the original of this kayak that took him (nansen had his own kayak) to the safety of Franz Josef Land where they built a stone hut in which to survive the severe winter.
As we walked out the door, I couldn’t resist taking this shot of a journal kept by the 1962 Swiss Expedition to Magdalene-Fjorden on Spitsbergen (Svalbard).
Good to see that travel “blogging” was alive and well even back then; it just required paper and pencil instead of the modern day digital tools. Simpler — for sure. More fun — well, that depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?
