Alaska's Whaling Coast

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 whaling—in fact, their entire livelihood—would be forever changed. Baleen was worth nearly $5 a pound. But the new trading posts brought guns,...