Greenland island appears chiefly through the history of Arctic whaling rather than as a landscape described in isolation. Its significance emerges through the surrounding Greenland Sea, where European fleets pursued whales, built commercial fortunes, and produced knowledge about a region that remained difficult to understand. The same waters that promised resources also exposed the limits of human control: voyages could be lost to ice, whale populations were heavily depleted, and modern environmental damage reaches communities and animals far beyond the reach of any one policy.

A contested northern fishery

At the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, British ships tried to compete with the Dutch in the Arctic whaling grounds. The Dutch established a processing station at Smeerenberg on Spitsbergen, while British whalers sailed from ports including Hull and Exeter. The disparity in scale was stark: by 1671 the Netherlands was sending 155 whaling ships to Greenland, and its annual catch could reach 2,000 whales. Greenland and the northern sea therefore entered British commercial debate not as remote curiosities, but as a source of wealth that rival powers appeared to be exploiting more effectively.

In 1693, London financier and merchant Sir William Scawen urged Parliament to revive British whaling. He argued that the trade supplied valuable whale products and trained seamen, while the absence of British ships from the Greenland fishery since 1683 had helped drive the price of baleen from £60 to £400 per ton. The argument joined national competition to practical concerns about employment, shipping, and imports. It also treated the northern animals as an economic resource whose value could be measured in cargo and price.

The South Sea Company later tried to turn such arguments into an enterprise. In the 1720s, it fitted out twelve ships on the Thames and sent them north, encouraged by a government exemption from tax on whale products. The expedition returned with only twenty-five whales, too few to cover its costs. The failure did not end British ambitions, but it showed that investment and state support could not guarantee a profitable catch in difficult northern waters.

Fleets, ports, and the cost of expansion

British whaling grew rapidly during the eighteenth century. In 1782, forty-four British whale-ships were operating in the Greenland Sea; the number doubled two years later, and by 1787 some 250 ships were sailing from British ports. That expansion was interrupted by war. Young sailors were placed on whale-ships for training before naval service, while experienced whalemen were impressed to fight Napoleon. The fishery thus depended not only on access to whales, but on a vulnerable supply of ships and skilled crews subject to the demands of state power.

Whitby became one of the principal ports serving the northern grounds. Whaling began there in 1753, when only three animals were taken. Over the following eighty years, however, fifty-eight ships made 577 voyages from the Yorkshire port, taking 2,761 whales, 25,000 seals, and 55 polar bears. Each April, as the weather improved, ships departed for Greenland. Returning vessels brought blubber ashore for processing, and the resulting smell made the port notorious. The annual rhythm connected a distant fishery to local work and wealth, while making the consequences of extraction tangible in the streets and waterfront of a whaling town.

The voyages were dangerous as well as profitable. Whitby lost seventeen ships during its peak years, and four men died in 1810 when a boat belonging to the Aimwell was stove in by a whale. Such losses were part of the cost hidden behind cargo totals and commercial success. The wider Arctic was also treated as a storehouse of exploitable materials and human lives: in 1847, Memidadluk and Uckaluk were exhibited with their artefacts to crowds in Hull, York, and Manchester. The account places this display within an imperial view of the north in which people, animals, and products could all be presented as objects for British consumption.

William Scoresby and the making of Arctic knowledge

The fishery also produced a record of the region. William Scoresby went to sea as a boy, later studied science in Edinburgh, and met the naturalist Joseph Banks after entering the navy and leaving it. A year later he took command of a whale-ship. Whaling provided a livelihood and a means of reaching northern waters, but Scoresby also used his voyages to investigate the sea. He sought to test whether water below the surface was warmer, and worked with Banks on the Marine Diver, a brass instrument designed to measure residual heat at depths of as much as 7,000 feet.

His research took place amid the dangers of the fishery. During one perilous voyage, pack ice nearly cost him his ship; while the crew faced that danger, Scoresby continued to make observations and fill his papers with calculations, sketches, and descriptions. His work turned a whaling voyage into an account of an Arctic environment that had rarely been documented in such detail. The two-volume An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery appeared in Edinburgh in 1820. Its maps, engravings, and ninety-six illustrations of snow crystals made it a standard work on Arctic animals, whaling techniques, and the region itself.

The book joined scientific description to religious interpretation. Scoresby understood the animals and phenomena he catalogued as evidence of Creation, and the Religious Tract Society later circulated the work to American Sunday schools. His investigations and beliefs were not presented as opposites. Yet the account also emphasizes a limit to what observation could settle: like the unseen extent of an iceberg beneath the water, the deepest meaning of the facts remained partly submerged. The Arctic could be measured and described without becoming fully knowable.

Whaling’s continuing consequences

The history of hunting in the northern waters is not confined to the age of sail. The account notes that Inuit communities in Greenland retain subsistence hunts, including the eating of beluga and narwhal. It also links that food to the long reach of industrial pollution: Inuit who consume these animals are described as among the most contaminated people on Earth, despite living in places often imagined as pristine. The contrast undermines any simple division between a remote Arctic and distant industrial societies. Contaminants move through marine food chains into people whose lives remain closely connected to the animals.

International restrictions have not ended pressure on whales. The account estimates that 25,000 great whales died after the commercial whaling moratorium eventually took effect in 1987, while describing exceptions for Indigenous subsistence hunts in Greenland, Russia, and Alaska, among other places. Its broader argument is that protection operates across a changing political landscape: whales move between jurisdictions and through international waters, while hunting, pollution, and other human activity continue to affect them. Greenland island’s place in this history is therefore double. It is associated with a fishery that helped sustain European commercial ambition and with communities now exposed to environmental harms that cannot be contained by distance from industrial centers.