Entering the Polity
The first major economic and political activity in the Arctic Ocean concerned resource extraction, a pattern that has remained largely unchanged to this day. After the discovery of Spitsbergen in 1596 by Willem Barents, who also drew a map of the Arctic Ocean in 1599, and eyewitness reports in the following years of the excess availability of whales, walrus and seals a bonanza of whaling expeditions to harvest maritime resources was triggered.
These expeditions were first summer campaigns, only from the 1630s occasionally including wintering, and initially with Basque expert whalers hired by the participating nations. At its peak the Svalbard whaling was a major operation. The Dutch set up the Smeerenburg station which was sometimes called a ‘city’, employing 200 people, with bars and restaurants. By the late seventeenth century there were, in peak years, several hundred ships and in excess of 10,000 whalers around Spitsbergen.Claims were made on the islands, first by the Danish crown in 1616, including Jan Mayen, which was before the Danes founded their colony in Greenland in 1721. Denmark, which until 1814 included Norway, founded their position on the fact that the entire North Sea had always been Norwegian tax land. A few years earlier, in 1613, the English Muscovy Company had also claimed ownership based on their charter from the English Crown granting a monopoly on whaling in Spitsbergen, based on the (erroneous) claim that Hugh Willoughby had discovered the land in 1553 and discoveries made by Henry Hudson during his first Arctic voyage in 1607.[794] Initially the English tried to drive away competitors; but after disputes with the Dutch (1613-24), they claimed only the bays south of Kongsfjorden. The Dutch rejected the English exclusive rights, claiming the mare liberum principle.
The perceived value of the resource, and this northern ocean, manifested in the events that unfolded.
First, England offered to purchase the rights from Denmark-Norway in 1614, but the Danes refused and instead sent warships to collect taxes from English and Dutch whalers. The English also sent warships to Spitsbergen and for a few years European powers were on the brink of a resource war in the Arctic Ocean. An interesting situation occurred, namely that some countries (Denmark and England) claimed sovereignty whereas France, the Netherlands and Spain claimed it a free zone under mare liberum. A certain partition of the whaling also took place with the French in the northeast, the English further south, and the Dutch, who had started their own Noordsche Compagnie were active in the northwest with the Danes. This arrangement gradually lowered the tension and from the 1630s incidents of conflict were rare. Whaling and sealing continued, although with fewer participating countries and was dominated by the British during the eighteenth century.[795] There were also hunting of walrus conducted by the northwest Russian hunting and fishing Pomor population.[796]The Spitsbergen whaling wars, marginal as they turned out to be, were the more important as they initiated the period of Danish colonialism. It had outliers in Africa (the Guinea Coast), India (Tranquebar, now Tharangambadi) and the Caribbean (Virgin Islands), but essentially it was a North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean empire with Norway, Iceland and Greenland as the main assets along with the smaller Faroe Islands.[797] This development could also be seen as an opening phase of a more general Scandinavian colonial relationship with the northern oceans.
Norway, assuming semi-autonomy in a union with Sweden from 1814, largely continued the Danish colonial resource expansionism in the north and this became a central theme of Norwegian foreign policy after full independence in 1905, then including Antarctica and the South Seas. Sweden, similarly, made colonialist forays to Spitsbergen based on mineral deposits there, often spearheaded by entrepreneurially minded scientists and explorers. Sweden also started new mines, but gave this up after World War I when coal prices dropped in the 1920s recession and the Svalbard Treaty fundamentally changed the rules of the resource game and gave most of the authority to Norway.[798]