page_title: Spitsbergen
section_title: Danish expansion
hierarchical_section_title: Spitsbergen / History / Danish expansion
caption_attribution_description: English: Norwegian whaling factory Bucentaur (1875) in Bellsund, Spitsbergen. Norsk bokmål: Flytende hvalkokeri «Bucentaur» (1875) i Bellsund, SpitSbergen.
context_page_description: Spitsbergen is the largest and only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway. Constituting the westernmost bulk of the archipelago, it borders the Arctic Ocean, the Norwegian Sea, and the Greenland Sea. Spitsbergen covers an area of 37,673 km², making it the largest island in Norway and the 36th-largest in the world. The administrative centre is Longyearbyen. Other settlements, in addition to research outposts, are the Russian mining community of Barentsburg, the research community of Ny-Ålesund, and the mining outpost of Sveagruva. Spitsbergen was covered in 21,977 km² of ice in 1999, which was approximately 58.5% of the island's total area.
  The island was first used as a whaling base in the 17th and 18th centuries, after which it was abandoned. Coal mining started at the end of the 19th century, and several permanent communities were established. The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 recognized Norwegian sovereignty and established Svalbard as a free economic zone and a demilitarized zone.
  The Norwegian Store Norske and the Russian Arktikugol are the only mining companies at Spitsbergen.
context_section_description: From 1617 onwards, a Danish-chartered company began sending whaling fleets to Spitsbergen. This successful expansion by Denmark into the North Atlantic has recently been cited by historians as the first step of the Danish-Norwegian state into overseas colonialism. It eventually built a small overseas empire of East Indian trade posts, North Atlantic possessions (such as Greenland and Iceland), and a small Atlantic trade route between possessions on the Guinea Coast (in modern Ghana) and what are now the United States Virgin Islands. The entire Svalbard archipelago, nominally ruled first by Denmark–Norway, and later the Norwegians (as Union between Sweden and Norway from 1814 to 1905, independent Norway from 1905), remained a source of riches for fishery and whaling vessels from many nations. The islands also became the launching point for a number of Arctic explorers, including William Edward Parry, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, Otto Martin Torell, Alfred Gabriel Nathorst, Roald Amundsen, and Ernest Shackleton.
caption: A 1906 photograph of the Norwegian whaling factory ship Bucentaur in Bellsund, Spitsbergen
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