An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery

William Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery made Arctic exploration, whale-fishery practice, and natural history part of a single ambitious work. Published in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1820, it became a standard against which later accounts were measured. Its authority rested not only on the breadth of its descriptions but on the tension those descriptions preserve: the whale is at once a creature studied through exact observation, a resource pursued by ships, and part of a divinely ordered natural world whose deeper meanings remain uncertain.

A scientific account built from the sea

Scoresby brought experience from Arctic whaling voyages to a project that combined practical knowledge with scientific inquiry. He had gone to sea as a boy, studied science in Edinburgh, and served in the navy. After leaving the navy, he met Joseph Banks in London and described the Arctic regions he had explored with his father. Whaling financed Scoresby’s investigations, but it also supplied the observations and circumstances that shaped them.

On voyages commanding the Resolution and later the Esk, Scoresby investigated whether seawater was warmer beneath the surface. He sent findings to Banks, and together they developed the Marine Diver, a brass instrument that could be lowered 7,000 feet to measure the ocean’s residual heat. The Esk’s hazardous passage through pack ice placed scientific curiosity alongside the immediate demands of a working whaling voyage. Scoresby continued making calculations, sketches, and descriptions even when the ship and its crew faced danger.

The resulting book was profusely illustrated with maps and engravings. Its range extended across cetology, whaling methods, and the Arctic environment, and it included ninety-six images of snow crystals. Those repeated patterns give the book a striking visual dimension: close attention to minute forms sits beside descriptions of immense animals and difficult seas. The work’s scale and detail helped establish it as a compendium rather than a travel narrative alone.

The whale observed and captured

Scoresby’s account of the Greenland Sea classified animals while making clear how closely natural history was entangled with the fishery. He described the Bowhead whale as especially productive of oil, relatively slow-moving, and easier to capture than other kinds of whale. The classification records an animal’s bodily characteristics, but it also reflects the practical priorities of a pursuit organized around capture and oil production.

Scoresby drew on his own experience to convey the animal’s scale. He reported having been personally involved in the capture of 322 whales and believed none exceeded sixty feet in length. To render the Bowhead whale’s open mouth comprehensible, he compared its cavity with a room large enough to contain a small boat carrying men, then supplied measurements for its width, height, and length. Such dimensions turn the whale into an object of close description, but they also mark the limits of what could be known through observation and dissection. Scoresby noted that its small eyes appeared disproportionate to its body and that the opening for sound could not be identified until the skin was removed. The book’s attention to physical evidence thus records knowledge gained through a fishery that killed the animals it studied.

Scoresby also considered the whale’s perception. He reported that Whales could detect one another at great distances beneath clear water, while seeing less far at the surface, and described them as producing a loud sound when breathing or blowing. He did not understand that sound as evidence of a voice. The contrast between his observations and his interpretation makes the account valuable beyond its answers: it shows how attentive description could coexist with assumptions that later readers would question.

Faith, facts, and the Arctic

The book’s scientific rigor did not displace its religious outlook. Scoresby presented the animals, places, and natural phenomena he catalogued with an emphasis that could make the Arctic seem like evidence of Eden. His faith echoed his father’s, and he described finding the North-West Passage as an aim pursued by God’s grace. The text therefore does not divide investigation from belief; it places careful observation within a providential understanding of the world.

That combination gave the book a life beyond specialist natural history. The Religious Tract Society later adopted it, and it was distributed through the American Sunday School movement as an affirmation of Creation. The same detailed work could consequently serve readers interested in Arctic exploration, whale-fishery techniques, or religious instruction. Yet Scoresby’s facts do not resolve every question his framework raises. His descriptions accumulate evidence, while the meanings of the evidence remain, in the book’s presentation, partly submerged.

The stone lance and the book’s afterlife

One of the work’s most consequential observations concerns a stone lance found embedded in a whale. Scoresby recorded that the master of the Whitby whaler Volunteer showed him part of a lance taken from the blubber of a whale killed near Spitsbergen in 1813. The wound had healed, leaving a small white scar. Scoresby connected the weapon to tools in common use among Indigenous people of the northern American coast, and considered whether it could have come from a region not yet explored by Europeans. For him, the find suggested the possibility of a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, an answer relevant to the long search for a northern route.

The observation also carried a more startling implication that Scoresby did not pursue to its full consequence. On 29 April 1850, Herman Melville borrowed both volumes from the New York Society Library and kept them for a year. The account of the lance inspired a passage in Moby-Dick, where Ishmael considers whether such an ancient weapon might have entered the animal long before America was known to Europeans. Melville’s suggestion turned Scoresby’s record into a question about how long a whale could live: if the lance had remained in its body for generations, the animal itself might have been extraordinarily old.

Later scientific understanding made that question newly significant. Editors once treated claims of whale lifespans extending across centuries as sailors’ myth, but evidence from Indigenous Alaskans and findings of old stone or ivory harpoon points in Bowhead whales challenged earlier estimates. The episode reveals the book’s unusual afterlife: a detail initially framed by Scoresby as evidence relevant to Arctic geography became a clue in a different inquiry, about whale longevity. Its lasting importance lies both in the knowledge it assembled and in the way one carefully recorded object could open a question its author had not fully recognized.