page_title: List of Dutch explorations
section_title: Svalbard (1596)
hierarchical_section_title: List of Dutch explorations / Explorations / Voyages of discovery / Svalbard (1596)
caption_attribution_description: English: The location of the Barents Sea north of Russia and Norway, and the surrounding seas and islands. Also includes political borders with their corresponding nation-states listed.
context_page_description: The Netherlands had a considerable part in the making of modern society. The Netherlands and its people have made numerous seminal contributions to the world's civilization, especially in art, science, technology and engineering, economics and finance, cartography and geography, exploration and navigation, law and jurisprudence, thought and philosophy, medicine, and agriculture. Dutch-speaking people, in spite of their relatively small number, have a significant history of invention, innovation, discovery and exploration. The following list is composed of objects, unknown lands, breakthrough ideas/concepts, principles, phenomena, processes, methods, techniques, styles etc., that were discovered or invented by people from the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking people from the former Southern Netherlands. Until the fall of Antwerp, the Dutch and Flemish were generally seen as one people.
context_section_description: On 10 June 1596, Barentsz and Dutchman Jacob van Heemskerk discovered Bear Island, a week before their discovery of Spitsbergen Island.
  The first undisputed discovery of the archipelago was an expedition led by the Dutch mariner Willem Barentsz, who was looking for the Northern Sea Route to China. He first spotted Bjørnøya on 10 June 1596 and the northwestern tip of Spitsbergen on 17 June. The sighting of the archipelago was included in the accounts and maps made by the expedition and Spitsbergen was quickly included by cartographers. The name Spitsbergen, meaning "pointed mountains" (from the Dutch spits – pointed, bergen – mountains), was at first applied to both the main island and the Svalbard archipelago as a whole.
caption: Willem Barentsz made the first indisputable discovery of Svalbard in 1596, in an attempt to find the Northern Sea Route. The three voyages of Willem Barents are remembered today chiefly for the first documented wintering in the High Arctic.
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