Early and Personal Life
He was born in Bindal as a son of farmer Ulrik Frederik Suhm Sverdrup (1833–1914) and his wife Petra Neumann Knoph (1831–1885). He was a great-grandnephew of Georg Sverdrup and Jacob Liv Borch Sverdrup, first cousin twice removed of Harald Ulrik and Johan Sverdrup, second cousin once removed of Jakob, Georg and Edvard Sverdrup, third cousin of Georg Johan, Jakob, Mimi, Leif and Harald Ulrik Sverdrup. He was a brother-in-law of Johan Vaaler, and Otto himself married his own first cousin, Gretha Andrea Engelschiøn (1866–1937), in October 1891 in Kristiania. Their daughter Audhild Sverdrup (1893–1932) married Carl Johan Sverdrup Marstrander.
His father was born on Buøy in Kolvereid municipality. As oldest son Otto was heir to the Sverdrup properties at Buøy. However, he left it all to his younger brothers and went to Åbygda in Bindal, to the farm named Hårstad, where Otto Sverdrup was born. In 1872, at the age of 17, Otto Sverdrup returned to Nærøy, to Ottersøy where his uncle Søren worked in transportation with his own vessels. Here Sverdrup started his career as a seaman and after a while he was sailing abroad. In 1875 he passed his mate's examination, and some years later the shipmaster's examination.
In 1877 Sverdrup's parents moved from Bindal to the farm Trana outside Steinkjer. At this time O.T. Olsen, a teacher and employee in the bank at Kolvereid and a relative of his mother, had purchased the steamboat TRIO. Sverdrup was employed as captain. Around this time Sverdrup also met the lawyer Alexander Nansen who lived in Namsos. He was the brother of Fridtjof Nansen and through him Sverdrup and Fridtjof Nansen learned to know each other.
Read more about this topic: Otto Sverdrup
Famous quotes containing the words early, personal and/or life:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality.... Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948)