ably a peak period for hunting mortal- 
ity in the Baffin Bay-Davis Strait stock. 
Not only were Munn and the other free 
traders encouraging the Eskimos and 
supplying ammunition, but during this 
period there were also several excep- 
tional catches due to ice entrapment that 
served to inflate the numbers. When 
weather conditions change abruptly at 
the end of the brief Arctic summer, nar- 
whals sometimes become trapped in 
small pools of open water and are un- 
able to swim under the miles of ice that 
have formed between them and the 
open sea. This phenomenon, usually re- 
ferred to by the Greenlandic term savs- 
sat, enables hunters to kill large 
numbers of narwhals with relatively lit- 
tle effort. 
In the severe winter of 1914-15 a se- 
ries of savssats were exploited by hunt- 
ers in Disko Bay, West Greenland. The 
slaughter was described in the re- 
strained prose of M.P. Porsild, director 
of the Danish Arctic Station in Disko: 
Every man placed himself astride a hole 
with his rifle loaded, awaited calmly the ar- 
rival of a school, shot one of the animals — if 
possible a male with a tusk — and harpooned 
it immediately after the shot; or, if he were 
exceptionally clever, he simply seized the 
animal by its nostrils or by one of the flip- 
pers. He then enlarged the hole, pulled his 
prey up, and proceeded with the flensing. 
By this procedure the cleverest and coolest 
of the hunters got up to seven animals a day 
without leaving the spot first chosen. 
Altogether, the local Greenlanders 
killed more than 1,000 narwhals that 
one winter. We have reason to believe 
that during the ensuing decade two 
savssat hunts in the northern Baffin Is- 
land region accounted for more than 
3,000 killed narwhals. Adding the sum 
of these abnormal kills to estimates of 
the annual average catches for Canada 
and Greenland, we concluded that ap- 
proximately 11,000 narwhals were re- 
moved from the Baffin Bay-Davis 
Strait stock by hunting during the dec- 
ade from 1915 to 1924. 
Munn left the Arctic in the mid- 
1920s, and in his absence the Hudson’s 
Bay Company encouraged the people 
of northern Baffin Island to trap foxes 
with more zeal than they had under the 
influence of Munn and the free traders. 
They certainly did not stop hunting 
narwhals, but we have no record of sub- 
sequent catches that match those of the 
first three decades of the twentieth cen- 
tury. It is possible that the Great De- 
pression and the Second World War, 
particularly in combination with the 
Hudson’s Bay Company’s emphasis on 
fur trading, had a negative effect on the 
demand side of the narwhal market. By 
the late 1960s, however, ivory prices 
were on the increase. 
There seem to have been regular fluc- 
tuations in the price of narwhal ivory, 
but the causes are difficult to identify. 
The price of “unicorn” in Frankfurt 
apothecaries dropped from 64 florins 
per half ounce in 1612 to only 4 florins 
in 1669. Either consumers had lost 
their credulity or Danish merchants 
had glutted the market. In 1868 the 
British naturalist Robert Brown wrote: 
“The price of Narwhal’s ivory ... of 
late years . . . has risen prodigiously in 
value owing to the repair of the Chinese 
palaces, but is again falling.” 
We are particularly interested in the 
trend of the past twenty years. A for- 
mer Hudson’s Bay Company employee 
A hunter examines two adult males 
that were killed when they appeared 
in a narrow crack, or lead , in the 
ice. Since 1976, Canada has set 
annual quotas and limited 
hunting to permit-holding Inuit. 
told us that in 1961, when he worked in 
northern Baffin Island, he was buying 
tusks from hunters for fifty to seventy- 
five cents a pound. By 1965, the price 
had crept up to SI. 25, but in spring of 
1967 there was a sharp increase. Sud- 
denly, the hunter could expect S10 per 
pound for unbroken tusks. Since 1973, 
when narwhal ivory was selling for 
S15 per pound at Pond Inlet, the price 
has climbed dramatically. In 1974, it 
reached S25, then S30 in 1975, and S35 
in 1976. Unbroken tusks were selling 
for S45 per pound in Pond Inlet in 
1979, and the largest one sold in that 
year, weighing more than twenty-two 
pounds, fetched SI, 043 for the hunter. 
A premium is usually paid for tusks 
longer than seven and a half feet and for 
the rare “double tuskers,” or skulls 
with two fully developed tusks. We 
know of one such bidental skull that 
sold for S5,000 in 1979. 
The prices paid to hunters, although 
they are, of course, related to prices 
paid by the ultimate consumers of the 
product, do not necessarily give an 
accurate impression of the value of 
narwhal ivory on the retail market. 
Frequently there are one or two mid- 
dlemen between the hunter and the col- 
lector or the apothecary, and their high 
markup reflects the shadowy character 
of the enterprise. Unmounted narwhal 
tusks were sold at auction in London in 
1978 for approximately £500 per meter. 
As far as we know the United States is 
at present the only country in the world 
where commercial exchange in nar- 
whal products is illegal. The species is 
listed in Appendix II of the Convention 
on International Trade in Endangered 
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, how- 
ever, which means CITES export per- 
mits are required for narwhal products 
that cross international boundaries. 
The International Whaling Commis- 
sion’s Scientific Committee recom- 
mended in 1979 that the narwhal and 
the white whale be added to the com- 
mission’s schedule of whaling regula- 
tions. Such a move would have required 
member governments whose nationals 
hunt these species to implement conser- 
vation measures recommended by the 
commission. But the commission de- 
cided that according to the intent of the 
IWC’s convention these two small ceta- 
cean species are not “whales.” There- 
fore, narwhal and white whale con- 
servation remains a domestic matter in 
Greenland, Canada, and elsewhere. 
In 1976 Canada issued Narwhal Pro- 
tection Regulations under its Fisheries 
Act. These limit narwhal hunting to 
55 
