Popular account of author's visit to Aleutian Islands to investigate problems of North Pacific Sea Products Co., a whaling company, in 1914-15.

In 1850, commercial whaling ships entered the Bering Sea for the first time. There, they found the summer grounds of bowhead whales, as well as local Inuit people who had been whaling the Alaskan coast for 2,000 years. Within a few years, almost the entire Pacific fleet came north each June to find a path through the melting ice, and the Inuit way of whalingin fact, their entire livelihoodwould be forever changed. Baleen was worth nearly $5 a pound. But the new trading posts brought guns, alcohol, and disease. In 1905, a new type of whaling using modern steel whale-catchers and harpoon cannons appeared along the Alaskan coast. Yet the Inuit and Inupiat continue whaling today from approximately 15 small towns scattered along the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Strait. Whaling for these people is a life-or-death proposition in a land considered uninhabitable by many, for without the whale, whole villages probably could not survive as they have for centuries.

Part 1, Books, Group 1, v. 23 : Nos. 1-128 (Issued April, 1926 - March, 1927)

On the Northwest is the first complete history of commercial whaling in the Pacific Northwest from its shadowy origins in the late 1700s to its demise in western Canada in 1967. Whaling in the eastern North Pacific represented a century and a half of exploration and exploitation which involved the entrepreneurs, merchants, politicians, and seamen of a dozen nations.

Alaska, with its Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut heritage, its century of Russian colonization, its peoples’ formidable struggles to wrest a living (or a fortune) from the North’s isolated and harsh environment, and its relatively recent achievement of statehood, has long captured the popular imagination. In An Alaska Anthology, twenty-five contemporary scholars explore the region’s pivotal events, significant themes, and major players, Native, Russian, Canadian, and American. The essays chosen for this anthology represent the very best writing on Alaska, giving great depth to our understanding and appreciation of its history from the days of Russian-American Company domination to the more recent threat of nuclear testing by the Atomic Energy Commission and the influence of oil money on inexperienced politicians. Readers may be familiar with an earlier anthology, Interpreting Alaska’s History, from which the present volume evolved to accommodate an explosion of research in the past decade. While a number of the original pieces were found to be irreplaceable, more than half of the essays are new. The result is a fresh perspective on the subject and an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and scholars.