Amsterdamøya is a small island off the northwest coast of West-Spitsbergen

Spitsbergen

Spitsbergen is the largest and only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. Constituting the western-most bulk of the archipelago, it borders the Arctic Ocean, the Norwegian Sea and the Greenland Sea...

.

History

Amsterdamøya was first seen by Willem Barents

Willem Barents

Willem Barentsz was a Dutch navigator, cartographer, explorer, and a leader of early expeditions to the far north....

 in 1596. The Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 first occupied it in 1614 (the year in which it was probably named), building a temporary whaling

Whaling

Whaling is the hunting of whales mainly for meat and oil. Its earliest forms date to at least 3000 BC. Various coastal communities have long histories of sustenance whaling and harvesting beached whales...

 station on the island's southeastern promontory. In 1619 a semi-permanent station was constructed. It came to be called Smeerenburg

Smeerenburg

The settlement of Smeerenburg on Amsterdam Island in north-west Svalbard, originated with Danish and Dutch whalers in 1619: one of Europe's northernmost outposts.-Reality:...

(Dutch for "Blubber Town"). The settlement went into decline in the 1640s, and was abandoned sometime before 1660.