When Martin Karlsen and Kristoffer Marø ordered the new schooner in Scotland, they thought they had found a great name: Polar voyage. They also established a company with the same name that would own the ship. But there were probably some shipyard workers who pulled the smiley face when they painted the name on the side of the ship. English skills were somewhat weaker among Norwegians at that time, and it took some time before the owners realized that they had sewn for a little laughter and fun with the name choice.
The English dictionaries explain the last part of the name – “fart” – as the colloquial word for what in medical terms is called “expel intestinal gas from the anus”. In other words: To let out intestinal gas. Or fart, in more everyday Norwegian. “Fart” in this meaning has been used in English for many hundreds of years, but probably mostly in the lower social classes. The word is often marked with a warning triangle in dictionaries, and notes such as “often vulgar” and “not in polite use”. “Fart” is also used in reference to people. In this case, we are talking about people who are disliked, irritating and unpleasant – as in “the old fart”, the old sour pomp.
The newly built seal catcher left the shipyard in Glasgow in 1948 under the no longer so proud name Polar voyageBut the shipowners realized they had made a blunder, and quickly had the ship given the new name. Polar StarIt was necessary, considering that the ship would be at freezing speed and would call at British ports relatively often that autumn.
Magnus Sefland wrote in 2011 about the name Polar voyage in Isflaket. He said that a little over a decade after the fun in Scotland, another ship with the same name was built in Tromsø. She sailed on the Arctic Ocean as Polar voyage until she was sold to Canada in 1981. Sefland writes about the aftermath of the Sunnmøre name change:
"In 1951, Odd Vollan's book "Ishavsfart" (sic!) was published. The book was supposed to mark fifty years since the start of Arctic fishing from Sunnmøre in 1898 and was actually supposed to have been published in 1948. But for various reasons, the book was not published until 1951. At that time, Polar Star one of the most modern vessels. A photograph in the book shows the new ship. In the photograph, the original name Polar voyage was legible. But someone has tried to write the new last part of the name by hand on the photograph itself. The handwritten correction has also been included in the book.
