carved from them. Pulverized or 
turned into shavings, narwhal ivory 
was sold as the wonder drug ikkaku in 
Japan as recently as the 1950s. 
Even without the encouragement of 
Europeans eager to purchase tusks, the 
native people of Baffin Island and West 
Greenland would have continued to 
hunt narwhals. The narwhal’s chewy 
skin, called muktuk, has always been a 
northern delicacy. Head and blubber 
oil from narwhals and other marine 
mammals made primitive dwellings 
glow with warmth and light during 
long winter nights. Narwhal sinews 
served as a tough but pliable thread for 
sewing garments and binding leather 
implements. Any parts of the carcass 
not consumed directly by people were 
fed to the sled dogs. Tusks, in this con- 
text, were little more than a byproduct. 
In some parts of the Arctic where nar- 
whal tusks were readily available, they 
were the favorite material for harpoon 
shafts made and used by native hunters. 
As wood and iron became increasingly 
available, however, and as the trade 
value of narwhal tusks became more 
widely recognized, the incidence of na- 
tives using narwhal tusks to kill more 
narwhals lessened. 
Narwhals were hunted occasionally 
by European and American commer- 
cial whalers, who from the seventeenth 
century to the early twentieth, sailed to 
the Arctic regions in search of bowhead 
whales. As part of his contract, one 
nineteenth-century Scottish whaling 
captain was guaranteed a 15 percent 
commission on any narwhal ivory he 
brought home. Commercial whalers 
generally harpooned “unies” for sport, 
but their preferred prey was unques- 
tionably bowheads. Nonetheless, fancy 
walking sticks and even bedposts could 
be fashioned from narwhal tusks, and 
the blubber and head yielded a modest 
amount of fine oil. Commercial whalers 
seldom ate the skin in the manner of the 
Eskimos; instead, they brought it home 
to be tanned. “Porpoise leather,” as the 
product was called, being tough, pli- 
able, and waterproof, was especially 
popular for making boots and boot- 
laces. During the 1920s there was a spe- 
cial market in Peterhead, Scotland, for 
narwhal skins, which were shipped to 
France for the manufacture of stylish 
gloves. 
However “incidental" narwhal hunt- 
ing may have been to the commercial 
whalers, their presence in the Arctic led 
inevitably to the establishment of per- 
manent trading posts where commerce 
in narwhal products was conducted on 
Helen Gerson 
54 
a grand scale, at least for a few years. 
Several free traders (as distinct from 
the giant Hudson’s Bay Company mo- 
nopoly) came to the Pond Inlet area on 
northern Baffin Island during the early 
twentieth century. They prospected for 
gold (unsuccessfully) and bartered to- 
bacco, firearm ammunition, and, some- 
times, winter rations for skins and 
ivory. Although we have only a sketchy 
record of these transactions, we do 
know that in 1912 three tons of ivory, 
probably most of it from narwhals, 
were taken out of Pond Inlet by the free 
traders. This amount would have re- 
quired the slaying of about 600 tusked 
narwhals. 
Henry Toke Munn, a Scotsman, 
made narwhal exploitation his particu- 
lar specialty. With the help of a dozen 
native families, Munn operated a 
unique whaling station near Pond Inlet 
devoted entirely to the catching and 
processing of narwhals. According to 
an old Hudson’s Bay Company report, 
in an “ordinary” year Munn’s “fac- 
tory” processed the oil, skins, and ivory 
of 500 to 600 narwhals. 
An important aspect of the modern 
narwhal hunt is the loss of wounded 
and dead animals. The traditional Es- 
kimo method of first harpooning the 
whales, then killing them, resulted in 
few such losses. Polar Eskimos of 
Greenland’s Thule District still hunt 
narwhals this way, and they apparently 
lose very few of the animals they strike. 
In Canada, however, most hunters be- 
gin by shooting at narwhals with high- 
powered rifles, sometimes from long 
range, in hopes of crippling the prey to 
allow closer approach. As firearms 
have been available to the native nar- 
whal hunters of northern Baffin Island 
since the late nineteenth century, these 
weapons have come to be regarded as 
essential tools of the trade. Conse- 
quently, wildlife managers and biolo- 
gists, when assessing catch levels, must 
correct landed harvest figures to take 
into account significant hunting losses 
caused by the rifle-first technique. In 
our evaluation of the early twentieth- 
century removals by Eskimos on behalf 
of traders, we have had to assume that, 
in addition to those whales that were 
landed, some whales were killed and 
lost and some were mortally wounded. 
Also, as many untusked females as 
tusked males are usually killed, so that 
the volume of ivory traded grossly un- 
derrepresents even the landed catch. 
One conclusion of our study is that 
the decade from 1915 to 1924 was prob- 
