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The small skulls and mandibles of bowhead calves are often found in Alaskan ruins. Yet if a young bowhead made it to adulthood, it could easily outlive the whaler who had tried to kill it as a calf – and then bury his son and his grandson as well. 5 The current understanding of bowhead whale migrations reflects this ancient belief: bowheads travel south in winter, never straying far from the marginal ice zone. Calves are born during this spring migration, while the whales are moving through a long corridor in the polar ice – along stress cracks, polynyas (areas of the ocean that remain open through winter) and shore leads – into the Beaufort or Chukchi Seas.

21 57 A whale hunt amid icebergs, by the French marine painter Ambroise Louis Garneray, c. 1830. Dutch whaling had its golden age in the 17th and 18th centuries. These Delftware tiles are based on drawings of the Arctic grounds by Sieuwert van der Meulen, c. 1720. The target of the hunt, the bowhead, was known as the Greenland right whale, because it was considered a ‘loggy fish’, with plentiful oil. When the whale was dead, they cut off the flukes, or tail. Some ships used the flukes and fins as bumpers to protect them from the sharp ice.

Equipped with whaleboats and harpoons, the men were intent on sustaining themselves on proceeds from right whales. 19 Whalers had to know the migration patterns, the seasonal abundances and the weaknesses and strengths of the whales, just as any predator must know its prey. In 1671 Frederic Marten described bowhead whaling off Spitsbergen: To those that are wild we come softly or gently from behind . . 20 They learned to kill the whale as efficiently as possible, for the more time spent in the whaleboat, the longer the cruise and the 56 greater the risk of being iced in.