once more, but crashed near the coast of the North Eastern part of Svalbard. Riiser-Larsen also became involved in a search for Amundsen, when he as passenger in a French naval flying boat went missing while he was en route to join the search for Nobile. Eventually Nobile and most of his team were found, but Amundsen was not. The Norvegia expeditions The Norvegia expeditions were a sequence of Antarctic expeditions financed by the Norwegian shipowner and whaling merchant Lars Christensen during the late 1920s and 1930s. Ostensibly their goal was scientific research and the discovery of new whaling grounds, but Christensen also requested permission from the Norwegian Foreign Office to claim for Norway any uncharted territory that was found. By the end of the second expedition, two small islands in the Southern Ocean, Bouvet Island and Peter I Island, had been annexed. In 1929 Christensen decided to include aeroplanes in the next expedition and appointed Riiser-Larsen its leader. Riiser-Larsen then supervised and took part in mapping most of the Antarctic in this and three further expeditions. More territory was also annexed, this time the large area of the continent known as Queen Maud Land. Commerce and war In 1939, the Norwegian military was downsized and Riiser-Larssen was among those officers finding themselves out of work. However, he was quickly offered a new job by the shipping company Fred. Olsen & Co. as manager of its newly formed airline, DNL. He invited some former naval pilots to join the airline and soon made it the most successful in Norway. In 1946, DNL would be one of the four Scandinavian airlines merged to create the present-day Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS). During the Nazi German occupation of Norway, Riiser-Larsen rejoined the Royal Norwegian Navy Air Service. However, both the Norwegian Army and Royal Norwegian Navy Air Services were quickly overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht before he saw combat. Instead, he accompanied the Norwegian cabinet and military leaders into exile in London, before moving on to Canada, to become the first commander of the Royal Norwegian Air Force training camp dubbed Little Norway in Ontario. At the beginning of 1941, Riiser-Larsen returned to London to take up the post of Commander in Chief of the Naval Air Service; then of the Combined Arms Air Force; and finally, in 1944, of the fully amalgamated Royal Norwegian Air Force. By the end of the war, however,