Randa Abdel-Fattah

This was a man who, legend has it, could smell coal.

He went somewhere and he could just smell the coal.

He knew where it was.

Call it a sniff sense.

Sorry, I had to.

I went to look at his archives in Marquette, Michigan, very far north, and I was immediately struck by how similarly Marquette in the winter smelled like Svalbard.

Quick context.

Svalbard, being so cold and so far north, was uninhabited pretty much until the Europeans discovered it in the late 16th century.

And by the time Longyear came along a few hundred years later, Svalbard still had no permanent population.

It was terra nullius, a legal no-man's land.

A rare thing to find by this time because of industrialization and colonialism.

People knew there was coal there, but previous efforts to get it had been abandoned.

Longyear, though, was up for the challenge.

He sets up a settlement, names it Longyear City after himself, and starts the Arctic Coal Company.

People said that he thought of himself as a polar emperor, which gives you a glimpse at his mindset and the kind of animating philosophy behind these things.

For a few years, he could live in this fantasy, slowly building a new little world on his terms.

He's creating a company town.

There's a shop.

The laborers can only shop at the shop.

They can only sleep at the dorms.