In 1623 two Basque ships employed by the Danes arrived at Smeerenburg and began taking whaling gear from the Danish huts before they were driven away by the Dutch.

In 1625, when the Danish-employed Basque ships arrived at their place in Smeerenburg they found that their station had been damaged, the work of the Dutch and English in the previous season.

[5] In its heyday (1630s), Smeerenburg was made up of 16–17 buildings,[6] including a fort at its centre, built in or before 1631 to ward off the Danish and other interlopers.

Amsterdam had three of the buildings and two of the double ovens, while to the west were the stations of the Middelburg, Veere, Vlissingen, Enkhuizen, Delft, and Hoorn chambers.

[13] Around 1660, with the transition to processing blubber into oil on return to port and expansion into pelagic whaling, the settlement was finally abandoned.

[16] The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1920) made similar claims, stating that hundreds of ships anchored along the flat of Smeerenburg where ten thousand people visited a complete town with stalls and streets.

[19] Despite the results of archaeological excavations that took place in the period 1979–81, modern authors still sometimes repeat the fabulous legends told of Smeerenburg.

[20] The 2019 animated film Klaus takes place in the town of "Smeerensburg", on a distant northern Scandinavian island, an intentional misspelling, according to producer Sergio Pablos.