Polar evening about the Ellsworth expeditions
New Polar Evening at the Ishavsmuseet:
The Ellsworth Expeditions
For the first polar evening of the year at the Ishavsmuseet on January 23, the Ishavsmuseet will be visited by Kenneth Staurset Fåne, who will talk about the Ellsworth expeditions in Antarctica.
The "Ellsworth Trans-Antarctic Flight Expedition" was the name of four polar expeditions to Antarctica. It was spearheaded by the wealthy American Lincoln Ellsworth and the Australian polar explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins. Ellsworth and Wilkins had a desire to be part of an attempt to fly across the South Pole from coast to coast as the first ever.
The plan was to map the then unknown landscape of the Antarctic continent and find out whether the South Pole was one large continent or divided into several, with fjord arms in between. For Ellsworth and Wilkins, there was also a lot of honor and fame in this, but what many do not know is that there were 29 Norwegians on these four expeditions, and many of them came from Sunnmøre. The expedition ship they used was called "Fanefjord", renamed "Wyatt Earp" in 1933, owned by Wyatt Earp A/S Ltd, with Axel Holm, Ålesund and Lincoln Ellsworth. The ship was based in Ålesund.
Speaker Kenneth Staurset Fåne, leader of the Romsdal Historical Society and conservator at the Romsdal Museum, will discuss the expeditions from 1933 to 1939. He has collected a lot of material on the topic and specifically on the Ellsworth expeditions since 2018. A focus of the lecture is to show who the crew was on board, but also how these expeditions went.
The lecture lasts about an hour, and in the usual style, dinner will be served at the museum after the lecture. This time with confit duck leg with good side dishes on the menu and panacotta for dessert. Registration for dinner is required.

