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Location on door: front, panel 3
CHRISTIAN LEDEN
Christian Leden (1882-1957) was a Norwegian explorer and ethnographer who headed several expeditions to the Arctic in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1913, Leden sailed to the Keewatin Region of Canada, an area northwest of the Hudson Bay, where he spent three years living with the native Inuit. In the summer of 1919 he led an expedition back to the area to search for mineral deposits of copper, iron, and possibly gold, which he had found on his last journey. He also planned to establish trading with the Inuit and to acquaint them with modern industrial life by showing them films. That expedition ended prematurely when Leden's yacht hit a reef along the coast of the Hudson Bay. Despite this, and another shipwreck the following year, Leden continued to launch expeditions to the Arctic, Central and South America, and Easter Island through the 1950s. Trained in musicology, Leden recorded the language and music of the Inuit on wax cylinders, and in the 1930s he established a project to record and preserve the musical traditions of Norway. Leden also wrote and published a number of books in German about his travels. During the 1920s, Leden gave several public lectures in New York and wrote articles for the New York Times, recounting the discoveries he made during his explorations and his findings about Inuit culture.
We have not yet found an artifact related to Christian Leden in the Ransom Center collections.