T HE civilized world has always been interested in the animal life of its frontiers. This is no less true of the arctic frontiers of our civilization than it was for the hinterland of the Graeco-Roman world. In part the interest is commercial; the whalebone whales and the walrus were followed from c...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.512.1524 http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/arctic7-3%264-255.pdf |
| Summary: | T HE civilized world has always been interested in the animal life of its frontiers. This is no less true of the arctic frontiers of our civilization than it was for the hinterland of the Graeco-Roman world. In part the interest is commercial; the whalebone whales and the walrus were followed from civilized shores to their arctic home waters, and the merchants who had sought sea routes to the orient soon contented themselves with new sources of furs. The gyrfalcon was commercialized for falconry in the middle ages, and the Greenland gyrfalcon was specially prized. Its unavailability at the end of the fourteenth century is a witness to the decline of the Greenland colony. As the falcon trade preceded recorded exploration, so the fur trade preceded scientific investigation. There has also been from the beginning an element of curiosity, which is the foundation of science. Early naturalists speculated on how animals lived in the Arctic, and explorers left a series of incidental notes, which modern investigators can find only by reading their whole narrative. Barents, for instance, the first explorer in the modern sense, wrote an account of the toxic |
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