The Arctic is presented as both a physical region and a powerful human idea: a world of seasonal ice, long darkness, and abundant seas that became a stage for exploration, whaling, and fantasies of the unknown. Its isolation helped preserve some whale populations, but it never placed them beyond human reach. The contrast between the Arctic as sanctuary and the Arctic as resource frontier gives the region its central significance in Philip Hoare’s account.

A landscape of extremes

The Arctic’s alternative names, including the Barren Grounds and Ultima Thule, register the difficulty of imagining a place so inhospitable that it could seem almost planetary. Six months of darkness make it a region of apparent emptiness, yet its cold waters support abundant marine life. The same conditions that threaten unaccustomed life can preserve an ecosystem: ice and low temperatures shape both the region’s hazards and its extraordinary capacity to shelter animals.

This apparent emptiness has also made the Arctic a screen for imaginative projection. In accounts of the polar world, animals and landscapes that were poorly known could be assembled into scenes that mixed observation with invention. The region’s remoteness lent authority to the fantastic even as it made reliable knowledge difficult to obtain. Its whiteness, in particular, becomes more than a description of snow and ice: it carries associations of danger, mystery, and the unknown, and provides the setting in which the imagined white whale acquires its symbolic force.

Whales of the polar seas

Bowheads, belugas, and narwhals are described as especially adapted to the Arctic’s seasonal cycle. They move with changing ice and remain associated with their birthplaces; unlike most whales, these species live in the Arctic throughout the year. Their presence makes them indicators of a world that is difficult to see from outside, with populations living within a bounded, shifting environment of open water and ice.

The beluga and narwhal are the two members of the Monodontidae. Belugas are born grey and become white only in adulthood, so their whiteness is an effect of age rather than the absence of pigment associated with an albino. Their flexible foreheads and mobile necks also give them an unusually changeable appearance. The narwhal changes colour as it matures, passing from pale grey through darker, spotted stages before its markings recede in old age. These long transformations are set against the hazards of hunting: fishing nets and harpoons can interrupt a life cycle that unfolds over many years.

The bowhead occupies a different place in the account, as both an emblem of the Arctic and a whale that can push through ice with its massive head. Its baleen can reach fifteen feet. A report from 1823 describes a fifty-seven-foot female circling the Cumbrian, a whaling ship from Kingston upon Hull, and pushing it backwards with her snout. The encounter briefly reverses the expected relation between hunter and quarry: the whale’s strength and command of its environment are made unmistakable. Yet the same account warns that even a remote habitat could not guarantee safety from pursuit.

Exploration, display, and extraction

The Arctic entered European public life not only through ships and printed accounts, but also through exhibits. In 1847, Memidadluk and Uckaluk, identified in the account as Inuit, were displayed with their artefacts before audiences in Kingston upon Hull, York, and Manchester. The episode places people as well as animals within a history of treating the region as something to be collected, classified, and presented to metropolitan spectators. The Arctic’s wealth was imagined broadly: fish, animals, blubber, baleen, and oil all appeared as resources available for use.

British whaling developed in competition with the Dutch, who established a station at Smeerenberg on Spitsbergen. British ships sailed from ports including Kingston upon Hull, but the trade declined while Dutch activity expanded. By 1671, the Netherlands was sending 155 whalers to Greenland, with annual catches sometimes reaching two thousand whales. A later attempt to revive British whaling argued that the trade mattered not only for whale products but also for seamen and ship provisions. The history thus joins the Arctic’s animals to the economic ambitions of distant ports and states.

The region also became a site of scientific inference. In 1813, William Scoresby recorded that a stone lance had been found embedded in a whale killed near Spitsbergen. He understood the tool to be of a kind used by Inuit communities on the northern coast of the American continent. The find suggested that a whale could have travelled between ocean regions carrying evidence of human activity from far away; Scoresby connected that possibility to the search for a North-West Passage. The stone tool and the technological Marine Diver displayed beside it set radically different forms of knowledge against one another: an ancient object carried in a whale, and an instrument designed to investigate the sea.

Ice, survival, and the changing future

Ice is both habitat and hazard. In winter, inlets can freeze across so that belugas and narwhals cannot reach open water in a single breath. At Point Barrow, nine hundred belugas were reported confined to an ice opening measuring 150 yards by 50 yards. They surfaced at intervals to breathe, and the account records that three hundred were taken in one day. The episode makes a community’s shared dependence on limited breathing space a source of acute vulnerability. It also shows how a natural crisis can become an opportunity for hunting.

Protection and regulation have not removed that pressure. Canada introduced licences for beluga hunting in the mid-twentieth century, while permitting Indigenous people and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to kill whales for domestic use and dog food. The account notes that thousands of belugas and narwhals continued to be hunted each year from small boats or from the ice. For the bowhead, the severe Arctic environment had once offered a measure of concealment, but that refuge was never absolute: whalers could seek animals even in distant waters.

The Arctic’s future is tied to a wider environmental transformation. The Industrial Revolution marks the beginning of the Anthropocene in the account, and the retreat of polar ice is making the North-West Passage increasingly real while opening the region to renewed resource claims. Yet the consequences for whales remain uncertain. Ice-associated food sources may diminish, and warming waters may push food supplies and whales farther north, toward habitats whose ice barriers are disappearing. Changes elsewhere could also release nutrients and benefit marine food chains. The uncertainty is integral to the warning: the region is being altered faster than its full consequences can be known.

The Arctic therefore resists being reduced to either a pristine wilderness or an inexhaustible storehouse. Its animals have their own seasonal lives and ecological dependencies, while human histories have repeatedly recast the region as a route, a specimen cabinet, and a source of wealth. As ice retreats, the old image of distance no longer guarantees protection. The Arctic’s changing geography brings the consequences of extraction into sharper view, while leaving open what its whales and other inhabitants will be able to inherit.