It’s been very warm here on the
Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest the last week. Not compared to Phoenix,
of course, but high for those of us more used to summer temperatures in the sixties
and low seventies. The heat encourages me to continue on with polar themes.
Recently,
for my travel book North Coast of the North, about Arctic Norway, I’ve
been doing some research into a handful of Sámi from Northern Norway who
accompanied some of the famous polar explorers on expeditions to Svalbard, Greenland
and Antarctic. A good source has been the website, Polar History, sponsored by the Polar Institute and the Arctic University in Tromsø.
Along with
biographies of over two hundred men, including six Sámi, is a separate category listing twenty-eight
women who had a connection to one or both of the poles, whether as cook, wife,
hunter, scientist, or explorer. One woman appears in both categories.
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| Margarthe Kitti |
This is Margarthe
(Lango) Kitti. As a young girl from a reindeer herding family outside Tromsø, Kitti
was approached for her skill in sewing and commissioned to create the
Sami-style gákti, fur and skin clothing and shoes, for Roald Amundsen’s
Gjøa
Expedition through the Northwest Passage.
The idea of
employing Sámi men, known for their abilities as skiers, on expeditions to the
frozen ends of the earth seems to have originated with Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld,
who participated in three geological trips to Svalbard. On one such expedition
in 1872, he purchased forty reindeer and hired four Sámi men to take care of
them, only one of whom is named: Nils Mathisen Sara. After Nordenskiöld’s
successful transit of the Northeast Passage, he set his sights on Greenland. In
1883, Nordenskiöld recruited two hardy Sámi men, Pava Lars Tuorda and Anders
Rassa, to sail with him and his team of scientists to the west coast of
Greenland and from there see if they could cross overland to the east coast.
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| Pava Lars Tuorda |
Pava Lars Tuorda was
born in the Tuorpan siida, in the mountains west of Jokkmokk, Sweden in
1847. He early showed himself to be a skier of great endurance and an excellent
hunter of wolves and bears, with spear and rifle. In the 1860s he was hired as
a guide for Swedish geographers who were in the process of mapping areas of
Norrbotten province. In addition to bearing large loads, Tuorda was adept at
finding routes through challenging terrains. Asked for other recommendations,
Tuorda suggested his neighbor Anders Rassa. The two men sailed off in the Sophie
from Göteborg with the rest of Nordenskiöld’s team in June 1883 for the west
coast of Greenland.
One of
Nordenskiöld’s theories was that he might discover a warmer center to the
world’s largest island, where trees and other vegetation could conceivably
thrive in a drier climate away from the coast. But the team, burdened with a
massive amount of equipment, found it difficult to navigate their sledges
across Greenland’s glacial fissures and the deep snow that hid wet pockets
underneath. Tuorda took the lead, but eventually Nordenskiöld decided the
sledges could no longer go on. Instead, he sent Tuorda and Rassa ahead. With
two compasses, a barometer, and a pocket watch, they were to ski as far as they
could inland. Tuorda also took his bear spear. In the next fifty-two hours the
two Sámi skied east 143 miles and then turned around and skied back, resting
only two hours during that time, when they were enveloped in a snowstorm and
had to dig themselves into the snow until it passed. They found no grass or
trees, only endless vistas of ice and snow.
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| Per Saivo (l.) and Ole Must,1898 | |
|
Another
pair of Sámi men who participated in Arctic exploration were Ole Must and Per
Saivo from Kirkenes.
These
two young men had their photographs taken by Elissif Wessel before they left
for the South Pole on the British Antarctic Expedition 1898-1900, headed by the
Norwegian-British leader, Carsten Borchgrevink, and with the aim of collecting
scientific data, including fixing the location of magnetic south pole, and then
advancing as far as possible towards the pole itself. The expedition’s crew,
almost all Norwegian, successfully spent the winter of 1899 in two
prefabricated houses on the Antarctic mainland and managed to get by sledge to
78° 50′ S., setting the “farthest south” record of the time.
