Everything about Lars Christensen totally explained
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:
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 didn't 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Lars Christensen'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://lars_christensen.totallyexplained.com">Lars Christensen Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
