Word: bowhead
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...mammals, Cetacea, for centuries. Archeologists believe Alaskan Eskimos have been whaling for over 2000 years. But some groups have been working to even the odds for the whales. In recent years controversy has arisen over whether the Eskimos should be allowed to continue killing the bowhead whale...
Last year the 17-nation International Whaling Commission (IWC) decided to ban bowhead hunting effective this year. A decade ago 10,000 of these sea-giants roamed the waters of the world; the IWC estimates that today there are only about 1000 remaining. But last Wednesday the IWC compromised its position just before the ban was to take effect. At the request of the U.S. government the IWC voted to allow the Eskimos a quota of 12 whales. Eskimo leaders promptly responded that they would "be forced to break a quota that small," according to The New York Times...
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...
Worse, perhaps, the bowhead had been hunted to death-that leviathan of the Quakers' psalmbook that God put in "this great and wide sea ... to play therein...