Jan Mayen 🇸🇯

Three separate expeditions reached the island in the summer of 1614: Fopp Gerritsz for the Englishman John Clarke, and two Noordsche Compagnie ships under Jan Jacobszoon May van Schellinkhout and Jacob de Gouwenaer, who found a Delft ship already there. Each party gave the island a different name, including Isabella, Mr. Joris Eylant and Maurits Eylandt. The island's entry into verified European knowledge began its exploitation as an Arctic whaling ground.

The Northern Company was established in January 1614, modelled on the Dutch East India Company, to support Dutch whaling in the Arctic, and was granted a monopoly on Arctic whaling by the States General. Its ships reached Jan Mayen in July of the same year. The company's charter framed the island's commercial exploitation for the next quarter century.

From 1615 to 1638 the island served as a whaling base for the Noordsche Compagnie. In 1616 a score of ships arrived, including eight company vessels with three warships under Jan Jacobsz. Schrobop, five Delft ships, two from Dunkirk and one each from London and Hull, and 200 men worked seasonally at six temporary stations along the northwest coast. Foreign ships were tolerated only on condition of surrendering half their catch to the Dutch.

The Delft merchants had concealed their 1614 landfall and returned in 1615 to hunt for their own profit, provoking a quarrel with the Noordsche Compagnie. The dispute was resolved in 1617, with both parties permitted to whale at Jan Mayen in the interim. Ships from Dunkirk that came in 1617 were driven away or forced to surrender a third of their catch.

The island first appeared on Blaeu's 1620 edition map of Europe, named after captain Jan Jacobszoon May van Schellinkhout of the Amsterdam-financed Gouden Cath. Blaeu produced the first detailed map of the island in his Zeespiegel atlas of 1623, establishing the name still in use.

In 1624 the Dutch replaced tents of sail and crude furnaces with two semi-permanent stations at South Bay and North Bay, equipped with wooden storehouses, dwellings and large brick furnaces. From this second period five to ten ships were sent each year, down from more than ten in the first decade. The investment marked a shift from seasonal camps to fixed processing infrastructure.

Fortifications were built in 1628 to defend the South Bay and North Bay stations. The defences reflected the armed rivalry among Arctic whaling nations over access to the grounds.

After the Noordsche Compagnie expelled them from Spitsbergen in 1632, the Basques sailed to Jan Mayen while the Dutch had left for the winter and destroyed the equipment, settlements and factories. In response Captain Outger Jacobsz and six shipmates were left to overwinter and defend the island in 1633/34, and all seven died of scurvy or trichinosis. The episode showed the impossibility of holding the island year-round with the means then available.

Around 1640, after roughly 1,000 bowheads had been killed and processed on the island, the local stock collapsed and whaling ceased. Jan Mayen was abandoned and remained uninhabited for two and a half centuries. Catches had already fallen sharply, with eleven ships taking only 47 whales in 1633.

The expedition stayed a year at Jan Mayen and carried out extensive mapping whose quality kept the charts in use until the 1950s. The Austrian polar station was built and equipped in 1882 entirely at Count Wilczek's expense. It was the first sustained scientific presence on the island.

A number of Norwegian trappers spent winters on Jan Mayen in the first two decades of the twentieth century, taking Arctic foxes and some polar bears. Over-exploitation caused profits to decline and the hunting ended, leaving polar bear numbers diminished compared with earlier times.

Norway received jurisdiction over the island and in the same year opened its first meteorological station there. The grant began the process of formal Norwegian control that culminated in annexation and incorporation into the kingdom.

The station on the eastern side of the island used a 3 kW Telefunken spark-gap transmitter and a 55 m wooden radio mast. Together with the meteorological station it gave Jan Mayen a permanent communications and observation function in the North Atlantic.

The institute annexed the middle part of Jan Mayen in 1922 and the entire island in 1926, when Hallvard Devold headed the weather observation base. The annexations converted an occupied research site into a Norwegian territorial claim.

After centuries of only occasional visits by seal hunters and trappers, the desolate, arctic, mountainous island came under Norwegian sovereignty in 1929.

On 27 February 1930 the island was formally incorporated into the Kingdom of Norway. This settled its legal status as Norwegian territory rather than a mere claimed dependency.

After Germany invaded continental Norway in spring 1940, the four-man team on Jan Mayen kept working and defiantly sent their weather reports to the United Kingdom instead of Norway. Fearing German seizure, the station was destroyed in September 1940 and the crew evacuated to Iceland. The British codenamed the island 'Island X' and planned reinforcement.

On 8 November 1940 the Norwegian patrol boat struck an uncharted lava reef and its 68-man crew joined the team ashore. The loss prompted the British expedition commander to abandon Jan Mayen until spring; a rescue ship evacuated all personnel after demolishing the weather station.

In late 2025 the ministry presented a draft proposal for possible expansion of military police powers on Jan Mayen. The move signals renewed strategic attention to the territory's governance.

The Loran-C station, in operation since the Cold War NATO navigation programme, ceased operation at the end of 2015. Its closure ended the island's original strategic navigation function, leaving weather, radio and transport roles served by Royal Norwegian Air Force C-130 flights to Jan Mayensfield.

A regulation dating from 2010 made the whole island a protected nature reserve. The Regulation on the protection of Jan Mayen Nature Reserve was last consolidated in 2021.

Since 1995 Jan Mayen has been administered by the statsforvalter of Nordland, the nearest northern Norwegian county. The arrangement gave the territory a settled civil administrative link to the mainland.

A VHF receiver had been installed in 1989, and in October 1994 local operation of Jan Mayen Radio was terminated. The station is now controlled remotely by satellite via the Eik Satellite Earth Station in Rogaland, though local control can be resumed by disconnection.

The 1991–2020 temperature normal is 1.9 °C warmer than the 1961–1990 baseline, pushing the annual mean above zero. The warming is accompanied by pressure on the island's glaciers, which cover 114.2 km2 around Beerenberg.

The disagreement over the zone between Jan Mayen and Greenland was resolved in 1988, granting Denmark the greater area of sovereignty. The outcome trimmed the practical reach of Norway's maritime claim to the west.

The EEZ declared in 1980 encompasses more than a quarter of a million square kilometres of ocean. It converted the uninhabited island into the basis of a very large maritime resource claim.

The two states briefly contested the island's status before Iceland accepted Norwegian sovereignty over Jan Mayen. The settlement secured Norway's legal position ahead of its maritime zone claim.

The long-dormant Beerenberg, the northernmost active volcano on earth, reawakened in 1970 after scientists had doubted it would become active again, erupting for three weeks and adding about 3 km2 of new land to the island. Further eruptions followed in 1973 and 1985, the most recent; during eruptions the surrounding sea temperature can rise from near freezing to about 30 °C.

The station was relocated in 1962 to a site about 3 km north of the Norwegian army's LORAN station. It was moved again in 1984 to the army station itself.

Construction of Atlantic LORAN-C sites started in 1959, one of them on the island. By 1961 the new military installations, including a new airfield, were operational, giving Jan Mayen a permanent Cold War navigation and military role.

After the war the weather station operated at the American-built Atlantic City site before moving to a new location in 1949. Radio Jan Mayen also served as an important station for ship traffic in the Arctic Ocean.

The station was set up to locate German radio bases in Greenland. It extended Allied signals coverage of the Arctic from Jan Mayen and later housed the postwar meteorological station.

On 7 August 1942 the aircraft, probably on a mission to bomb the station, flew into the mountainside near the base. Another German plane with four crew crashed on the southwest side on an unknown date, the wreck being discovered only in 1950.

On 10 March 1941 the Norwegian ship Veslekari, escorted by the patrol boat Honningsvaag, landed twelve weathermen on Jan Mayen. German aircraft from Norway bombed and strafed the island once its transmissions were detected, but did little damage, and supplies, reinforcements and anti-aircraft guns followed. By 1941 Germany had abandoned hope of evicting the Allies and the raids ceased.

A replacement for the destroyed 1921 station was built in 1941 and later moved to a plateau above. It restored wartime weather and communications capability on the island.

On 16 November 1940 the German trawler carrying a weather team crashed on rocks off Jan Mayen after a patrolling British destroyer detected it by radar. British wireless interceptors of the Radio Security Service had followed Abwehr communications and compromised the plan from the outset, so the destroyer had been waiting. Most of the crew reached shore and were taken prisoner.