Recherchefjorden is a small fjord on the south side of Bellsund

Bellsund

Bellsund is a 20 km long sound on the west coast of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago.-History:Bellsund was first seen by William Barents in 1596. He simply referred to it as Inwyck . In 1610 Jonas Poole explored Bellsund, giving the fjord the name it retains to this day. He named it...

, 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

The fjord is named after the French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 cruiser La Recherche, which visited Spitsbergen in 1838 and 1839. Before being renamed, it had been called Schoonhaven (English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

: Clean Bay) by the Dutch since the early 17th century. The English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 commonly called it Ice Bay. Both countries established several whaling stations within the fjord in the first half of the seventeenth century, most notably Lægerneset

Lægerneset

Lægerneset is a point on the eastern side of Recherchefjorden, Svalbard. It was once known as "Whale Head" or "Edge's Point", which was named after the English merchant and whaler Thomas Edge. An English whaling station was situated on the point in the first half of the 17th century.-References:*...

on the eastern side of the fjord.