Word: bowhead
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Between the cozy certitudes of 19th century New England and the savage, uncharted Arctic Ocean, there was a compelling connection. It was the bowhead whale. A fat, amiable, elegant creature who wound and warbled (in middle C) through the ice pack on his northward journey each spring, Baleana mysticetus grew up to 75 ft. long, weighed about a ton a foot, and returned fortunes to the Quaker entrepreneurs of New Bedford who sold his blubber and bones to make candles and corsets...
...bowhead today is a hard-to-find mammal, and so indeed should be a number of writers who blubber over the fate of the whale. But not Everett S. Allen. In Children of the Light, Allen, a New Bedfordman and writer for that town's redoubtable Standard Times, has put together a marvelous book about everything that went into the financing, building and provisioning of whaling ships, the men who sailed and lost them, the "overweening pursuit of wealth" that drove them to riches and ruin. Allen writes poetically but with a naturalist's restraint about the climate...