The early history of polar exploration leads, strange though it may seem, to space exploration. And the early history of polar exploration is firmly netted to cod fishing. Ergo, cod fishing took us to the moon! I first heard this interesting historical perspective from my arctic explorer father, Willie Knutsen. I was writing a book on his 30 plus years in arctic work, 1936-1969, that came out in 2005 via The Explorers Club as Arctic Sun on My Path: the true story of America’s last great polar explorer.

As my Brooklyn-born father put it, albeit with a smile, "Space travel began with salted cod!" What he meant was that for centuries, Norway, where he was raised, had a lively trade with the Mediterranean dealing salted cod, the now famous baccalao of Spanish menus. Cod Fishing (and later, sealing) in arctic waters required better wooden ships than were previously available, and so when early polar explorers wanted to probe further into the then unknown arctic, the only ships that could go there "safely" were these arctic hunting and fishing ships. My father’s early arctic work (1936-39) had been on board such wooden ships, including the famous “Quest” which had earlier been Ernest Shackleton’s ship on Antarctic expeditions, though it had been built in Norway for sealing. So it was cod fishing, and then sealing that had spurred the technology that later allowed ships to explore the arctic. Then, because the following decades of arctic exploration had made that "wasteland" accessible, when the Cold War started, the Arctic Ocean became the front line between Russia and the USA.

Then, need being the mother of invention, better and better technologies were required for both the radar stations employed in the North on the DEWLine radar sites stretching across the arctic from Alaska to Iceland, and the communication and supply system required to maintain those radar sites in "moon-like" conditions. These technologies included better and better computer systems which evolved at a higher speed than would have happened without the perceived nuclear-war threat from Russia. By the end of the 50's, the Americans had built not only the DEWLine; it had also built Century City, a nuclear powered station set under the Greenland Icecap! For all these projects, new metals and other materials had had to be invented to cope with the harsh conditions. My father had worked for the USAF and The Pentagon on all these projects in one capacity or other, and when Century City was completed he said: "It won't be long before we are on the moon!" His friends just laughed, but he had seen at first hand the geometrically-increasing speed of changes since his wooden ships days of the 30s when ships radios could not yet even reach from Greenland to Europe or North America, and so in 1959, only 30 years later, with satellites beaming messages around the world in an instant, and nuclear-powered subs cruising beneath arctic ice, it was to him no leap of faith to presume we would soon be on the moon.

And only a decade later we were! And all thanks to salted cod.

Will Knutsen
American writer living in Denmark

“Arctic Sun on My Path: the true story of America’s last great polar explorer” can be purchased from Lyons Press (Globe Pequot Press), or from online book sellers such as Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble .com