Otto Wilhelm Lindholm

Otto Wilhelm Lindholm (17 July 1832 - 29 December 1914) was a Finnish businessman and whaleman who served under the Russian flag.
Early years
Lindholm was born on the island of Utö. He spent his youth duck hunting and fishing.
Trading and whaling voyages, 1848-1861
Lindholm shipped on his first voyage aboard the ship Souame, which sailed from Turku in October 1848 with a cargo of timber to Cádiz, returning to Viborg the following May with a shipment of salt. Between September 1849 and August 1851, he sailed on the Russian-American Company ship Atka on a voyage that took him to Valparaíso, San Francisco, Ayan, and Petropavlovsk. He then sailed in the ship Turku on a whaling voyage that lasted from September 1852 to May 1857, which caught whales in the Gulf of Alaska, the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the Sea of Okhotsk, and visited Honolulu, Ponape, and Guam for men and provisions. During this voyage he was promoted to chief officer and finally acting commander. Following this a whaling company in Helsinki gave him command of the brig Storfursten Constantin (214 registered tons), which sailed on a voyage that lasted nearly four years - from September 1857 to August 1861 - and cruised for bowhead whales in the Sea of Okhotsk during the summer and gray whales in the lagoons of Baja California in the winter, stopping at Honolulu, Guam, and Hakodate during the spring and fall for provisions. The vessel returned with a cargo of of whale oil and of whalebone.
The following year, 1863, he found a site for his whaling station at the head of Tugur Bay. Situated at the mouth of the Kuteen River, on the eastern side of the mouth of the Tugur River, here his men built winter quarters and a warehouse for supplies. Lindholm and his men usually wintered at Tugur in the 1860s and at Mamga in the 1870s. In 1888 he published a paper on whaling in the Russian Far East.
In fiction
In 1962, A. A. Vakhov published The Tragedy of Captain Ligov. Oleg Nikolaevich Ligov was based on Lindholm.

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