Spitsbergen is a Norwegian island, the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The history of Svalbard, or Spitsbergen as it was generally known as before the ratification of the Svalbard treaty in 1925, has always been connected to the exploitation of natural resources. The archipelago was discovered in 1596 by Dutch explorer Willem Barents. In the following years, the islands became the scene of intense whale hunting activity. Whalers from several European nations were active all around the archipelago, hunting for whales and producing oil in land based blubber cookers. For a period of time, it amounted to an industry. However, after a few decades the whale populations crashed and the whalers left the archipelago. The first attempts to mine coal for commercial purposes was made in the late 1890s, when the international coal prices peaked. These early mining operations were only minor camps, consisting of a house or two, a mine pit in the mountainside and a simple pier. A few years into the 20th century, these companies offered to sell their properties and found ready buyers. One of these companies sold its claims on the southern side of Adventfjorden to American capitalists Frederick Ayer and John Munroe Longyear, who founded the Arctic Coal Company. This company established Longyear City, a mining town that came to be one of the most important on Svalbard in the 20th century. It is widely agreed among historians that the establishment of Longyear City and the Arctic Coal Company was of major importance for the later development of the mining industry on Svalbard. Their operations proved to other interested actors that it was possible to establish a successful coal mine in the Arctic. Longyear City was sold to the Norwegian company “Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani A/S” in 1916 and, now known as Longyearbyen, is the administrative capital of Svalbard today. The Svalbard coal rush came to abrupt end in the 1920s for two main reasons; falling world market prices on coal and the fact that Norway established control over the archipelago with the ratification of the Svalbard treaty in 1925 (excerpted from "Svalbard Archaeology," http://www.svalbardarchaeology.org/history.html, accessed Feb. 2010).