Otto Sverdrup

 ( 1854 Births ) 

His father was born on Buøy in Kolvereid Municipality. As oldest son Otto was heir to the Sverdrup properties at Buøy. However, he left it all to his younger brothers and went to Åbygda in Bindal, to the farm named Hårstad, where Otto Sverdrup was born. In 1872, at the age of 17, Otto Sverdrup returned to Nærøy Municipality, to Ottersøy where his uncle Søren worked in transportation with his own vessels. Here Sverdrup started his career as a seaman and after a while he was sailing abroad. In 1875, he passed his mate's examination, and some years later the shipmaster's examination.

In 1877 Sverdrup's parents moved from Bindal to the farm Trana outside the town of Steinkjer. At this time O. T. Olsen, a teacher and employee in the bank at Kolvereid and a relative of his mother, had purchased the steamboat TRIO. Sverdrup was employed as captain. Around this time Sverdrup also met the lawyer Alexander Nansen who lived in the town of Namsos. He was the brother of Fridtjof Nansen and through him Sverdrup and Fridtjof Nansen learned to know each other.

Between 1899 and 1902, he overwintered three more times on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic with the Fram, continuing to explore and map, culminating in the discovery of the islands to the west of Ellesmere Island, namely Axel Heiberg, Amund Ringnes and Ellef Ringnes, collectively known as the Sverdrup Islands. In adopting Inuit methods, Sverdrup and his crew were able to chart a total of 260,000 square kilometers - more than any other polar exploration.Gerard Kenney Ships of Wood and Men of Iron: A Norwegian-Canadian Saga of Exploration in the High Arctic, , 1984 The area was famously mapped by his topographer, Gunnar Isachsen, and 35 academic publications were penned as a result of the expedition. Upon Sverdrup's return in Norway, he was treated as a national hero. However, he remains relatively unknown in North America, and relatively unknown for his Canadian exploration in Norway.

Sverdrup officially claimed all three islands he discovered for Norway in 1902, setting off a sovereignty dispute with Canada, which claimed sovereignty over all land, discovered or undiscovered in what is now the Canadian Arctic. The dispute was not settled until 1930 when Norway ceded the islands to Canada. In that year Sverdrup signed a deal with the Canadian Government, who would buy the records of Sverdrup's expeditions for $67,000 Canadian dollars. Sverdrup died just two weeks after the deal was signed, but the money secured the future of his family. The records were archived in the National Archives of Canada, but were later returned to the National Library of Norway.

One of Sverdrup's lesser known exploits was a search-and-rescue expedition aboard ship Eklips in the Kara Sea in 1914–1915. His aim was to search for two missing Arctic expeditions, that of Captain Georgy Brusilov on the Svyataya Anna and that of Vladimir Rusanov on the Gerkules. Sverdrup's fourth and last expedition in Arctic Siberian waters was in 1921, when, from the bridge of the Soviet Union Icebreaker Lenin, he commanded a convoy of five cargo ships on an experimental run through the Kara Sea to the mouths of the Ob River and Yenisei. The ships reached their destinations and returned safely. This was considered an important step in the development of the Kara Sea sector of the Northern Sea Route.T. C. Fairley, Sverdrup's Arctic Adventures, p. 272. London 1959. Sverdrup also has an unsuccessful business venture in Cuba, a plantation project in the Oriente Province in 1904.