Word: bowhead
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...Islands tucked between those mainland heights, rose a forest of masts, sails, and rigging. Closer inspection revealed a listing, three-masted whaleship. Moored to it by a web of radiating ropes bobbed five smaller vessels, the 35-foot whaleboats that, on better days, the whaleship dispatched to harpoon the bowhead whales that brought white men to these remote climes. And, completing the scene, forming its outer perimeter, nine other whaling vessels swung at anchor in the eerily calm waters of this 37°F cloudless Arctic morning. A day earlier, the winds that often slice through this storied...
...groups we now call the Dorset people. They were, according to Inuit legend, tall and gentle folk, and they hunted from the ice edge, harpooning seals and walruses with tools made of bone and ivory. When a slight warming period hit about 1,000 years ago, the ice receded. Bowhead whales moved in from Alaskan waters, followed by seafaring hunters from the Bering Strait. With their boats, those hunters, the forebears of Canadian Inuit, eventually spread east to Greenland. For reasons still not clear, the Dorset disappeared. As with most environmental changes, the warming of northern Canada set in motion...
...down Alaska's coast, alarm is spreading that the natural bounty on which the culture is built is at risk. At Point Hope, a bowhead-whaling village that dates from 600 B.C., flooding seawater threatens the airport runway and a seven-mile evacuation road. "During storms, people begin to panic," says town official Rex Rock. In the Pribilof Islands, villagers blame global warming along with industrial contaminants for the decline of 20 species, ranging from kelp to sea lion. In Barrow, capital of the oil-rich North Slope Borough, sandbags and dredging haven't protected $500 million in infrastructure...
...Eskimos in Kaktovik also hunt caribou, but they depend more heavily on the sea, where captains like Isaac Akootchook go out in 18-ft. boats after seal and bowhead whale. The Inupiat (as they prefer to be called), who chose to participate in the 1971 claims settlement, have benefited from oil revenues in the form of a school, a community center and other projects. "We feel caught in the middle," says Akootchook. "We don't like exploration, but if we oppose it and they impose it anyway, we get nothing...
...press flocked to the site, the oil companies, biologists and Eskimos discovered they had unleashed a juggernaut they could not control. The Eskimos quickly abandoned their seasonal hunt for endangered bowhead whales in the belief that it would not look good on network news. The oil companies found themselves in a no-win situation. Lampooned by an Anchorage Daily News cartoon that showed oil-company workers competing in a race for a "Public Relations Cup," the rescuers also faced the possibility of inadvertently killing the whales with kindness. Would the shock of heavy equipment hammering the ice pack panic...