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. He selected Paul Knutsen because he had previously wintered in the Kara Sea in 1914–1915 with Otto Sverdrup on ship Eclipse, so he knew about the locations of the caches of provisions that had been left in the area by Sverdrup.
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.[1]
These two men disappeared mysteriously during their 800-kilometre (500 mi) trip over the ice and were never seen again. The Norwegians' journey was identical in its last 600 kilometres (370 mi) 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.[1]
- ^ a b Barr, William. "The Last Journey of Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen (1919)" (PDF). ARCTIC. Vol. 36, no. 4. pp. 311–327. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-01-20. Retrieved 2017-11-02 – via University of Calgary.