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Dutch whalers near Spitsbergen by Abraham Storck (1690) The first recorded sighting of the island was by Willem Barentsz, a Dutch explorer who came across it while searching for the Northern Sea Route in June 1596. [19] The first good map, with the east coast roughly indicated, appeared in 1623, printed by Willem Janszoon Blaeu. Around 1660 and ...
Amsterdam Island is located off Spitsbergen's northwestern coast. 17th-century Dutch map of "Amsterdammer Eyland". Amsterdam Island [1] [2] [3] (Norwegian: Amsterdamøya) is a small island off the northwest coast of West-Spitsbergen. It is separated from Danes Island by the strait Danskegattet. Its total area is 16.8 km 2.
Whaling at Spitsbergen lasted until the 1820s, when the Dutch, British, and Danish whalers moved elsewhere in the Arctic. [39] By the late 17th century, Russian hunters arrived; they overwintered to a greater extent and hunted land mammals such as the polar bear and fox. [40] Norwegian hunting—mostly for walrus—started in the 1790s.
Spitsbergen, here mapped for the first time, is indicated as "Het Nieuwe Land" (Dutch for "the New Land"), center-left. In the Age of Discovery (Age of Exploration), the Dutch were the first (non-natives) to undisputedly explore and map many unknown isolated areas of the world, such as the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.
English: Location of Nordvest-Spitsbergen Nature Reserve in Svalbard. Other national parks in green; other nature reserves in purple; geotop protect areas in orange; bird sanctuaries with a bird icon. The map is created partially based on output from OpenStreetMap. The icon for bird sanctuary is a modification of File:Ruddy-turnstone-icon.png.
English: Location of Sør-Spitsbergen Land National Park in Svalbard. Other national parks in green; other nature reserves in purple; geotope protect areas in orange; bird sanctuaries with a bird icon. The map is created partially based on output from OpenStreetMap. The icon for bird sanctuary is a modification of File:Ruddy-turnstone-icon.png.
The sighting of the archipelago was included in the accounts and maps made by the expedition and Spitsbergen was quickly included by cartographers. The name Spitsbergen, meaning "pointed mountains" (from the Dutch spits – pointed, bergen – mountains), was at first applied to both the main island and the Svalbard archipelago as a whole. [1] [3]
Svalbard has many mineral resources, and coal was mined extensively on the west side of Spitsbergen. [1] Ice floes often block up the entrance to Bellsund (a transit point for coal exports) on the west coast and occasionally make parts of the northeastern coast inaccessible to maritime traffic