hunt, diving deep into the water and staying down as long as possible. Each time they surfaced, the hunter would spout a mouthful of water towards the centre of the lake, trying to sound like a whale. The most determined divers were reported to surface with blood trickling from their ears.

Northern hunters also used songs and amulets to increase their chances of killing and retrieving whales. The harpoon-rests along the gunwales of boats were adorned with images of animals, often bears or seals, designed to comfort the whales, not frighten them off.

There was real danger in breaking the taboos, or in being unprepared. According to the ethnologist Philip Drucker,

The whale might turn toward the canoe, smashing it to bits in one of his blind rushes; a crewman mightwhale had fallen out of favour, strandings were thought to be signs of God's anger, a presage of disaster. In a depiction of a stranding near Beverwick in 1601, the iconography that frames the whale augurs an earthquake and a solar and lunar eclipse. Father Time's sand has run out.

A set of sixteen plates based on drawings of the Davis Strait by Sieuwert van der Meulen was etched around 1720 in Amsterdam. To this day, they are considered remarkable for their artistry, historical accuracy and maritime knowledge. Just as the Basque technique of killing whales endured for centuries, these engravings were the provenance of hundreds of images depicting the worldwide quest for whales. Many Europeans, when  they thought about whaling at all, conjured up images of polar