Galathea expeditions

Preparations The first Galathea Expedition took place from 1845 to 1847 and had political and scientific objectives. It was initiated by the King of Denmark, Christian VIII, with its main purposes the handover of the Danish colonies in India, following their sale to the British East India Company, as well as a final Danish attempt to explore and recolonise the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean. Additional aims were the expansion of trade with China and the discovery of new trading opportunities, as well as making extensive scientific collections. was a three-masted sailing ship, a naval corvette which had been built in 1831 at the Gammelholm naval shipyard in Copenhagen. It was in length and had a draught of . When it departed on its voyage under the leadership of Captain Steen Andersen Bille it carried 231 seamen and scientists, 36 guns, and supplies for one year. The scientists included physician and assistant botanist Didrik Ferdinand Didrichsen, botanist Bernhard Casper Kamphøvener, entomologist Carl Emil Kiellerup, geologist Hinrich Johannes Rink and zoologists Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Behn and Johannes Theodor Reinhardt, not all of whom remained for the duration of the voyage, as well as sketch artist Johan Christian Thornam and genre painter Poul August Plum. It was an expensive undertaking, with a budget of nearly half a million Rixdollars, equivalent to 3% of Denmark's annual state revenues at the time. The intention of Christian VIII was to sponsor the publication of the scientific results of the expedition. However, the King died in January 1848 and the country was thrown into the Three Years' War. Most of the boxes of collected items lay unopened for many years and, with some exceptions, were never properly processed, nor the full results formally published. The collections subsequently served mainly as reference material. ==Second expedition==

The second expedition, Galathea Deep Sea Expedition was conceived in 1941 in discussions between journalist and author Hakon Mielche and oceanographer and ichthyologist Anton Frederik Bruun. It was originally hoped to send out a second expedition on the centenary of the first; however, World War II intervened and preparations had to be postponed. In June 1945 the two protagonists, along with explorers Eigil Knuth, Ebbe Munch and Henning Haslund-Christensen, decided to establish the Danish Expedition Foundation, which was to raise funds for the second Galathea, as well as other, expeditions. The expedition eventually started in 1950, with its main purpose deep sea oceanography. For the use of the expedition a British sloop, , was acquired and renamed HDMS Galathea. It was long and wide, with a draught of and was powered by two steam turbines that gave it a cruising speed of . Galathea 2 left Copenhagen in October 1950 carrying a crew of about 100 seamen and scientists, visiting many of the same places the original Galathea had visited over a century earlier. The main difference in the route taken from the earlier expedition was in using the Panama Canal, rather than the Drake Passage at the southern end of South America, to transit between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic. From 1950 to 1952 the expedition carried out a program of scientific exploration; the highlight occurred in July 1951 when, while investigating the Philippine Trench, scientists secured biological material from a record depth of . The expedition returned to Copenhagen in June 1952 where the ship was welcomed by a crowd of 20,000 people. Results The second Galathea expedition led to the discovery of, among other things, the fish species Antipodocottus galatheae and Abyssobrotula galatheae, the snail species Guttula galatheae and, above all, living Monoplacophora, a class of "ancestral mollusc" which until then was known only from the fossil record. The biggest sensation at the time, however, was the discovery of sea anemones on a rock from the bottom of the Philippine Trench since it had been assumed that life could not exist at this sea depth. Dr Claude E. ZoBell, the 'Father of Marine Microbiology', was aboard this expedition. ==Third expedition==

The third expedition took place during 2006–2007, using the offshore patrol frigate , which was refitted to serve as an expedition ship. It is a which was built at the Svendborg Shipyards in 1990 and is long and wide. Although the voyage was publicised as the third Galathea expedition, the ship itself was not renamed. ==See also==