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Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen were two young men from Norway who went with fellow Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen on his 1918 Arctic expedition aboard ship ''Maud''. Peter Tessem was a carpenter and Paul Knutsen was an able-bodied seaman. One year into the expedition, in 1919, Amundsen left Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen behind at Cape Chelyuskin after having made winter quarters there. Amundsen chose Peter Tessem because he had been suffering from chronic headaches throughout the winter and was not fit to continue the long expedition; and Paul Knutsen because he had wintered previously in the Kara Sea in 1914-1915 with Otto Sverdrup on ship ''Eclipse'', so he knew about the locations of the caches of provisions left by Sverdrup in the area. The men were instructed to wait for the freeze-up of the Kara Sea and then sledge southwestwards along the western coast of the Taymyr Peninsula towards Dikson carrying the mail and the valuable scientific data accumulated by the expedition. Meanwhile the ''Maud'' continued eastwards into the Laptev Sea.〔William Barr, ''The Last Journey of Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen'', 1919.〕 These two men disappeared mysteriously during their 800-km trip over the ice and were never seen again. The Norwegians' journey was identical in its last 600 km to the sledge trip undertaken a few years earlier at the orders of Baron Eduard Toll by ''Zarya'' Captain Nikolai Kolomeitsev and Cossack Stepan Rastorguyev. In 1901 Kolomeitsev and Rastorguev had covered the distance from Bukhta Kolin Archera, SW of Taymyr Island, to Dikson in one month, so Tessem and Knutsen's trip should not have taken much longer. However, almost a year passed and nothing was heard of the two Norwegians.〔William Barr, ''The Last Journey of Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen'', 1919.〕 ==Norwegian search expedition== The alarm was raised in March 1920 by Amundsen's brother Leon when he got a telegram from his brother. Roald Amundsen, who was wintering then near Ayon Island, in the East Siberian Sea, was enquiring whether his men had reached home safely.〔William Barr, ''The Last Journey of Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen'', 1919.〕 Veteran Arctic explorer Otto Sverdrup, acting on behalf of the Royal Norwegian Department for Churches and Education, tried to conduct a search by sending schooner ''Heimen'' to the Kara Sea on 23 August 1920. But the schooner encountered heavy ice already east of Dikson and Captain Lars Jakobsen was forced to turn back when he was close to the Mikhailov Peninsula. Jakobsen tried then to hire dogs or reindeer for an overland expedition, but the practical difficulties he encountered became unsurmountable, for the area was practically uninhabited except for the little station at Dikson.〔William Barr, ''The Last Journey of Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen'', 1919.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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