A View of the Whale-Fishery and the Manner of Killing Bears near Greenland, 1778

About this piece

A View of the Whale-Fishery, and the manner of Killing Bears near on the coast of Greenland, an original copper engraving of 1778 from a London geography. The legend engraved above the image reads "Engraved for Bankes's New System of Geography Published by the Kings Royal Licence," while the old catalog attributes the plate to Charles Middleton's A New and Complete System of Geography, published in London by J. Cooke in 1778.

The view looks over a cold, open sea with icebergs in the distance and sailing ships scattered across the water, several of them with the British flag at the masthead. In the middle distance, small whaleboats crowded with oarsmen row up to harpooned whales, while a large ship at the right stands by. At the left, on a rocky shore, three men armed with long poles confront a standing polar bear, and a bear and a smaller animal wander the ice floe at the lower right.

The sheet shows the northern whale fishery of the later eighteenth century, in which ships from Britain and the Netherlands worked the seas around Greenland and Spitsbergen for whale oil and baleen. Greenland and the Davis Strait were also the gateway to Baffin Bay and the Canadian Arctic.