Svenskhuset Tragedy

Overview

The Svenskhuset tragedy refers to the deaths of 17 Norwegian seal hunters who overwintered at Svenskhuset (“the Swedish House”) at Kapp Thordsen on Spitsbergen, the main island of Svalbard, in the winter of 1872-73. The house had been built only that same year by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld for a mining venture that never took off, and it was well stocked with provisions when the men arrived. For more than a century the deaths were attributed to scurvy. Forensic work published in 2009 and 2010 found strong evidence that at least one of the men died from acute or subacute lead poisoning, probably from contaminated tinned food. But the bone samples came from a single skeleton, not all 17 men, so extending the finding to every death is a historical interpretation rather than a proven forensic fact (BMJ).

Why 17 hunters ended up at Svenskhuset

Svenskhuset was established by Nordenskiöld in 1872 as part of a plan to extract minerals, including coprolites, found in Spitsbergen and to promote scientific work in the polar regions; the commercial extraction was never realized (Visit Svalbard). The mining colony was run through a company called AB Isfjorden; six buildings were planned, few were finished, and miners wintered there in 1873-74 (spitsbergen-svalbard.com). The BMJ study adds that the house had been set up the previous summer by a mining company that abandoned its project because of poor harbour conditions (BMJ).

In September 1872, six sealing vessels with 59 sealers aboard became trapped in ice near Gråhuken in northern Svalbard (BMJ). One source gives the total crew as 58 rather than 59; that discrepancy is unresolved (see openItems) (spitsbergen-svalbard.com). Seven of the stranded sealers crossed the ice, some 50 km, to ask the Nordenskiöld expedition, which was overwintering at Mosselbukta, for help; Nordenskiöld was able to help some of them but advised the others to spend the winter in the Swedish house at Kapp Thordsen (BMJ). Seventeen men then left in two open boats on 7 October and, after rowing some 350 km, reached the house in seven days, on 14 October (BMJ).

Before they left, Axel Envall, Nordenskiöld’s physician, instructed the men in how to avoid scurvy (BMJ). The house was well stocked with tinned food (BMJ). A diary of the winter was kept, attributed in the study’s references to K. Albrigtsen; it recorded food, weather, sickness and deaths but gave no details on symptoms (BMJ).

Illness, the diary, and discovery

Two of the men were ill by 2 December, and by Christmas all of them were sick (BMJ). The first two died on 19 January, two more died in February, and five in March; the final death probably occurred shortly before the men were found (BMJ). The last entry in the diary is dated 19 April (spitsbergen-svalbard.com).

The 17 were found dead in June 1873. Skipper Ole Barth Tellefsen discovered them on 16 June; the first two men to die had been buried, the next five were left outside under a tarpaulin, six were found in an adjoining room and the rest in the living quarters, and the rescue team buried them all in a common grave (BMJ; spitsbergen-svalbard.com). Not all of the trapped party died at Svenskhuset: when the ice broke up, the remaining sealers escaped in two ships, except for two who chose to stay with the ships and died of scurvy in April 1873 (BMJ). Rescue attempts during the winter failed; one ship reached Isfjorden in February but could not get further because of the ice (spitsbergen-svalbard.com).

The men’s reputation suffered after the event: they were long accused of having caused scurvy through idleness, a judgment that the later investigation would challenge (spitsbergen-svalbard.com).

From scurvy to the lead-poisoning hypothesis

The scurvy explanation was questioned when, in 2007, researchers noticed a previously unregistered two-person grave near the house and hundreds of discarded food tins outside it with heavy internal soldering (BMJ). Scurvy had always seemed odd given that Envall had advised the men against it and the house was stocked with food; lead poisoning, by contrast, fit the heavy lead soldering of the tins (BMJ).

In August 2008, the researchers abandoned an attempted excavation of the common grave after finding that the bodies were preserved in permafrost, and instead took bone samples from one of the skeletons in the two-person grave (BMJ). The sampled bones showed no macroscopic evidence of scurvy (BMJ). The adjusted bone-lead concentration was 102.05 micrograms per gram, compared with 16 micrograms per gram in the surrounding soil, so the lead could only have accumulated in the weeks the men lived at Svenskhuset through heavy contamination from the canned food (BMJ). For comparison, bones from members of the Franklin expedition showed lead levels of 97.6 to 188.6 micrograms per gram accumulated over about three years, meaning the Svenskhuset figure, reached in only 13-14 weeks, was strikingly high for the short time available (BMJ). The tin-can solder itself tested at 40 percent lead (BMJ).

The researchers concluded there were strong indications that the sampled person had died from acute or subacute lead poisoning, and that the second person in the same grave probably shared that fate (BMJ). According to the inventory of stores, the men consumed large amounts of tinned food, and the researchers judged they probably reheated the tins on the stove, exposing the lead alloy to acid and dissolving the lead into the food (BMJ). They also allowed that the debilitating effects of lead, including anorexia, may have acted in combination with other factors (BMJ).

Limits of the forensic evidence

The strongest claims in this profile end where the evidence ends. Only one skeleton was sampled, so the forensic proof applies to one person; the probable fate of the second person in the grave, and the inferred fate of the other 15, are the researchers’ interpretations, not tested facts (BMJ). No macroscopic signs of scurvy were seen in that one skeleton, which weakens scurvy as the explanation but does not exclude it for every man (PubMed). Botulism was also considered: testing for Clostridium botulinum was attempted but failed because other bacteria overgrew the culture, so botulism was not definitively ruled out (BMJ).

The house after the tragedy

Ten years later, Svenskhuset became the base for Sweden’s contribution to the first International Polar Year of 1882-83. Eight countries established fourteen research stations for the polar year, twelve of them in the Arctic, and Sweden took responsibility for the Spitsbergen station at Kapp Thordsen (Svalbard Museum). The existing house was expanded and outfitted into a full-fledged research station; the rebuilding was led by Salomon August Andrée, a mechanical engineer, and the expedition included six scientists led by meteorologist Nils Gustav Ekholm, plus three Swedish and three Norwegian workmen (Svalbard Museum). Scientific work began in August 1882, and through the winter observations and measurements were made regularly, essentially every hour; the expedition was judged a success, and the Norwegian Kristian Birkeland used the Kapp Thordsen data around 1900 in his research into the causes of the northern lights (Svalbard Museum).

The 1882-83 team studied the aurora itself: they found that both the green and the red aurora came from oxygen in the atmosphere under unusual conditions, and suggested that the aurora was affected by the Earth’s magnetic field and flow high in the atmosphere, estimating its height at between 5 and 1000 km (UNIS). Andrée later died attempting to reach the North Pole by hot-air balloon (Visit Svalbard).

The house is the only one of the large houses dating from the 1800s that has been preserved, and it is valued for its cultural legacy and dramatic history (Visit Svalbard). The house is cared for by the Sysselmann, and its surroundings in Isfjorden National Park have all traces of human activity protected as cultural heritage (PolarQuest).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim that all 17 men were tested or that all 17 died of lead poisoning; bone samples were taken from one skeleton only, and the rest is interpretation (BMJ). It does not claim scurvy was definitively excluded for every man, only that the one sampled skeleton showed no macroscopic signs of it (PubMed). It does not claim botulism was ruled out, since the laboratory test failed (BMJ). It does not attempt to identify the 17 men individually, as no source read here names them. It does not resolve the 59-versus-58 discrepancy in the reported size of the trapped party (see openItems). The diary keeper is identified in the BMJ paper’s references only as K. Albrigtsen, and that attribution was not independently verified.