Otto Neumann Knoph Sverdrup (31 October 1854, in Bindal Municipality in Helgeland – 26 November 1930) was a Norwegian sailor and Arctic explorer.

He was born in Bindal Municipality as a son of farmer Ulrik Frederik Suhm Sverdrup (1833–1914) and his wife Petra Neumann Knoph (1831–1885).

However, he left it all to his younger brothers and went to Åbygda in Bindal, to the farm named Hårstad, where Otto Sverdrup was born.

In 1872, at the age of 17, Otto Sverdrup returned to Nærøy Municipality, to Ottersøy where his uncle Søren worked in transportation with his own vessels.

Sverdrup managed to free the ship from the ice near Svalbard in August 1896 and sailed to Skjervøy, arriving just 4 days after Nansen had reached Norway.

[1] His aim was to search for two missing Arctic expeditions, that of Captain Georgy Brusilov on the St. Anna and that of Vladimir Rusanov on the Gerkules.

Sverdrup's fourth and last expedition in Arctic Siberian waters was in 1921, when, from the bridge of the Soviet Icebreaker Lenin, he commanded a convoy of five cargo ships on an experimental run through the Kara Sea to the mouths of the Ob and Yenisei.

[1] In 2008, the Royal Norwegian Navy commissioned the HNoMS Otto Sverdrup, a Nansen class frigate, in honor of the mariner and explorer.

[1] Sverdrup had also been made a Knight 1st Class of the Prussian Order of the Crown in 1902,[9] but in an open letter to the German legation in Oslo on 25 October 1917 declared that he was returning the order in protest against the unrestricted warfare then being waged by the German U-boats in the First World War, causing the deaths of hundreds of Norwegian sailors.