Lars Christensen

Lars Christensen was a Norwegian shipowner and whaling magnate with a keen interest in the exploration of Antarctica.

Christensen was born into a wealthy family. He inherited his whaling fleet from his rich father, Commander Christen Christensen.

Whaling museum and library

The Whaling Museum, now Sandefjord Museum, was donated to Sandefjord in 1917. This was one of the first dedicated museum buildings in Norway.

In his travels, Christensen collected a considerable volume of literature, including much on the subject of whaling; his interests included research as well as merely supporting the industry. This material was donated to the library of Sandefjord Museum in the 1920s and 1930s. Christensen also provided funds for the further expansion of the library, which was masterminded by Consul Bjarne Aagaard.

Antarctica

Christensen had a deep interest in Antarctica and its animal life. He was particularly interested in making geographical discoveries, and gave his captains wide latitude to do so. He financed several expeditions specifically devoted to the exploration of the Antarctic continent and its waters, and participated in some of these himself, even bringing his wife Ingrid with him in the 1936–1937 expedition. He was among the first to use aerial surveying with seaplanes to map the coast of East Antarctica, which he completed from the Weddell Sea to the Shackleton Ice Shelf, concentrating on Bouvetøya and the region from Enderby Land to Coats Land. In the seaplane brought in the 1936–1937 expedition, members took 2,200 oblique aerial photographs, covering 6,250 square miles. Mrs. Christensen became the first woman to fly over the continent.

On December 1 1927, as leader of one of his financed expeditions, Christensen landed on and claimed Bouvetøya for Norway; it had previously been claimed by Great Britain, but the British soon abandoned their claim and recognised the island as Norwegian.

In the expeditions he financed between 1927 and 1937, Christensen's men discovered and surveyed substantial new land on the Dronning Maud Land and MacRobertson Land coasts.

Trivia

Antarctica has a couple of places named after Christensen:
* Lars Christensen Peak
* Lars Christensen Land, also known as MacRobertson Land. This is where the (now closed) Russian Soyuz station operated.
* Lars Christensen Coast

Endurance, the ship that became famous after Sir Ernest Shackleton's failed "Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition" of 1914, was originally built for Christensen, who intended to use her for polar cruises for tourists to hunt polar bears. When this did not happen, Christensen sold the ship to Shackleton.

Together with Otto Sverdrup and Oscar Wisting, Christensen initiated an expedition to recover another famous ship, the Fram. In 1935 the Fram was installed in the museum where it now stands: the Fram Museum in Oslo, Norway.

References