Christen Christensen (shipowner)

Christen Christensen (9 September 1845 – 16 November 1923) was a Norwegian shipyard and ship-owner. He was the founder and chairman of the world's largest whaling company, A/S Oceana.

Christen Christensen was born in Sandefjord, as a son of ship-owner Søren Lorentz Christensen (1810–1862) and his wife Othilie Juliane (née Kruge) (1820–1903). He was a brother of military officer Sophus Christensen, and doctor and politician Julius Christensen.

He was sent to boarding school in Scotland and then at 17 went on to study at the Trade Academy in Copenhagen.

In 1868 Christensen took over as manager of Rødsverven from his widowed mother, who had run the company for a number of years after her husband's early death in 1862. The first ship he built was the schooner Freddrike in 1869.

In the summer of 1872, Christen Christensen, shopkeeper P.C. Pedersen, shopkeeper G. Wierød and Christen Lorentz Sørensen, built a steam sawmill at Svines by lake Goksjø, named Gogsjø Dampsag. When a shareholder in Rødsverven died in April 1878. Christensen became the sole owner of the shipyard, and with it, what many consider the beginning of modern industrial shipbuilding in Sandefjord. The shipyard provided year-round jobs, a sharp contrast to previously, where work was typically seasonal.

In 1892 he bought Sandefjord Mekaniske Verksted, merging it with his other ship yards to form Framnæs Mekaniske Værksted. The shipbuilding engineer Ole Wegger became its director and remained in that position for 47 years. Christensen then entered the whaling business as owner of the company Shields & Værge, which ran most of the fishing in Finnmark. The company was bought at auction for a small price, undoubtedly because of the decline in the North Atlantic whaling stocks, which led to much of the whaling industry going bankrupt. Christensen, however, saw this as an opportunity, having remembered a pamphlet published in 1874 titled, Report on the new whaling grounds of the southern seas by Daniel and Jon Gray. Giving him the idea to send an expedition to Antarctica, in search of new sealing and whaling grounds. Something he would become well known for along with a young Carl Anton Larsen who was an officer aboard the barque Freden, one of Christensen's ships.

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