Lands of Ice and Mice: An Alternate History of the Thule

[DG Valdron]

You end this paragraph mid-sentence.

It's all looking quite plausible so far.

With regards to the earlier post on the spread of roseroot, that was also looking very plausible, though I think it is still quite fast - I'd have thought roseroot would have taken a century to spread that much, rather than 50 years.

fasquardon

Never underestimate the speed of a good drug. A this point keep in mind that the spread of Roseroot is still pretty limited. There's a supply bottleneck in Iceland and later northern Norway, and distribution is probably limited to the noble and merchant classes in Scandinavia and the Hanseatic League, with perhaps a little bit of filtering through elsewhere. The demand is hard outrunning the supply, creating exorbitant prices and a generalized bubble, but both are relatively small potatoes in terms of actual volume.

It's by no means widespread or widely established, that will take at least a century for production to increase enough to satisfy a broad based demand in the mainstream. But at this point, for all our purposes, all we need is a high value specialty drug, it'll carve its own path.

The Spanish introduced tobacco to Europeans in about 1518, and by 1523, Diego Columbus mentioned a tobacco merchant of Lisbon in his will, showing how quickly the traffic had sprung up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tobacco#In_Western_Europe

 

[Danbensen]

Rather, they're in an environment which is very vulnerable to excessive pressure. .

Maybe a good comparison would be to medieval Europe , where the climate was (comparatively) mild, but the political landscape punished mistakes very quickly. By looking at who got obliterated when, any student of history could work out general rules of statecraft.

The Thule, on the other hand, were punished for environmental infractions, and their "training" gave them a better arsenal of ecological best practices.

 

[fasquardon]

Never underestimate the speed of a good drug. A this point keep in mind that the spread of Roseroot is still pretty limited. There's a supply bottleneck in Iceland and later northern Norway, and distribution is probably limited to the noble and merchant classes in Scandinavia and the Hanseatic League, with perhaps a little bit of filtering through elsewhere. The demand is hard outrunning the supply, creating exorbitant prices and a generalized bubble, but both are relatively small potatoes in terms of actual volume.

OK. I concede the point.

http://www.historian.org/bysubject/tobacco1.htm

Looks like you are dead on.

fasquardon

 

[Danbensen]

I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but it occurred to me that a good way of thinking about Thule environmental engineering practices would be to compare them to Arab ones. Especially pigs. There are all sorts of good reasons why farming pigs in Arabia is a bad idea, but Arab farmers aren't aware of them. They just know pigs piss off God. The Thule might think the same thing about sheep/caribou. Sheep spirits kill caribou spirits, and we haven't found out how to mediate that argument yet, so just keep your sheep away from my caribou.

 

[Shevek23]

I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but it occurred to me that a good way of thinking about Thule environmental engineering practices would be to compare them to Arab ones. Especially pigs. There are all sorts of good reasons why farming pigs in Arabia is a bad idea, but Arab farmers aren't aware of them. They just know pigs piss off God. The Thule might think the same thing about sheep/caribou. Sheep spirits kill caribou spirits, and we haven't found out how to mediate that argument yet, so just keep your sheep away from my caribou.

Is this direct from Marvin Harris or has this concept been broadly generalized in anthropology? It's been a good while since I read some of Harris's books in introductory Anthro classes, to the point I forget the names of the books; also Harris may simply have been chosen as a cogent exponent of concepts widely current and much older than his expressions of them. My teachers on the subject also disagreed about its validity; FWIW Harris's arguments made sense to me.

The idea Harris was expressing, as he put it anyway, was a bit more than mere trial and error evolution of pragmatic survival tips. The Semitic aversion to pork for instance (Harris was talking more about Hebrew than Arab culture) isn't so much that pigs are impossible to keep in the Levant--one can raise them there, but it represents an opportunity cost; in those semiarid conditions a herd of pigs represents a number of poor people deprived of subsistence for the benefit of the rich--not in moister climes in temperate places like Europe or the wetter tropics though. Similarly Harris argued that Hindu sacred cows operate as a way of equalizing wealth between the rich and the poor; the poor (who don't treat the cows in a manner that Western animal fanciers would regard as exactly humane, Harris cites Gandhi bewailing this) benefit from the milk of cattle free by custom to graze on the crops and gardens of the rich. And so on. The point seems to be that in the course of class struggle, people could and did conceive and put these arguments in direct economic and pragmatic terms, but the evolution of religious strictures is a way of settling it on ostensibly other grounds; this is not necessarily a triumph of the common people over the powerful so much as shrewd members of the elite letting bounds be set on the less astute members of their own class but on terms that are more top-down. It represents a compromise whereby the powerful stay in power by learning to avoid flashpoints of conflict and thus keep the lower classes from flaring up.

And as I say not all anthropologists are impressed with the logic, many find it too "Marxist" whereas your more openly Marxist thinkers find Harris's logic itself a kind of meliorist compromise of the very kind he liked to point out. It isn't clear to everyone that these sorts of institutions arose in this precise way.

But these kinds of considerations do make sense to me.

The interesting thing about the Thule is, while compared to OTL they've made tremendous progress, in absolute terms they are still living close to hand to mouth, and in alt-historical terms they've transformed their society quite recently and rapidly; they haven't developed thousands of years of tried and true customs. The "bones" of Harrisian mystifications of pragmatic rulings are still showing and since the way DValdron has tended to portray them is as people listening to shamans whose arguments have to make immediate pragmatic sense to persuade other Thule, they haven't acquired the patina of "because the Gods say so!" yet.

And I for one long suggested the "ice Arab" analogy, largely based on the idea that these are a thinly but widespread people eking a hard existence out of marginal land, and with the potential of serving as mediators between many civilizations their desert (by the richer lands' standards) regions border and potentially connect.

 

[Danbensen]

I wasn't aware of that theory, although some watered-down version of it is probably what I was thinking of (at least for cows...I think that was Jewel in the Crown that mentioned the idea. For pigs, all I can remember is an Arab acquaintance who said he thought it all came from trichinosis)

Anyway, I wasn't thinking of Marxism, but rather of competition between communities. Communities with competitive practices will succeed where their neighbors fail, and thus spread. Nobody has to think about any of this stuff explicitly, although of course there's that possibility too. I remember some references to how the Thule shamans are brushing up against empiricism.

 

[Magnum]

Hi, just saw this thread regarding the discory of a viking trade outpost on Baffin Island from the 14th century. Had this emerged earlier, would it have had any effecton the TL ? Or was the possibility of something like this accounted for and I missed it ?

 

[Falecius]

Hi, just saw this thread regarding the discory of a viking trade outpost on Baffin Island from the 14th century. Had this emerged earlier, would it have had any effecton the TL ? Or was the possibility of something like this accounted for and I missed it ?

I was wondering the same.
DValdron has hinted to "missed opportunities" of Norse-Thule contact. If this site in Baffin was actually a Norse settlement, contact will likely happen earlier and, more significantly, not limited to Greenland.
These discoveries appear to confirm a work that Patricia Sutherland has been doing for years. OTOH, one might think that more heavily populated Thule lands discouraged Norse interlopers there ITTL.

 

[Shevek23]

I was wondering the same.
DValdron has hinted to "missed opportunities" of Norse-Thule contact. If this site in Baffin was actually a Norse settlement, contact will likely happen earlier and, more significantly, not limited to Greenland.
These discoveries appear to confirm a work that Patricia Sutherland has been doing for years. OTOH, one might think that more heavily populated Thule lands discouraged Norse interlopers there ITTL.

Yah, if I were writing it, I'd have had Norse contact earlier and more incorporation of Thule methods, herding and agriculture, and a surviving pretty-much-Norse SW Greenland society, one that has in fact started spreading and founded a lumber colony or three, even one that jumps all the way down the American coast to where European crops work well.

But if I were writing it, it wouldn't exist because I'd never have believed there was all this botanical potential in Arctic crops and domestication of Arctic critters! I certainly wouldn't have done all the extensive homework DValdron did.

I saw DValdron getting interested in a few berries and the like for up on Svalbard some time ago--more than a year ago I think--but dismissed the possibilities as being too damn marginal. It was only with the Prykrete thread that a lot of people, mostly DValdron in fact, started coming forward with lots of candidates for an enhanced subsistence in the Arctic, someone started doing the math, and concluded that the Arctic can indeed support civilization-level population densities.

So I'm going to defer to DValdron's judgment, come down heavily as he does on the Thule taking their own sweet time to advance to the degree that they take an interest in interacting with the Norse, and by then it's too late.

Does that contradict the notion that it was Thule resistance which ITTL stunted the Norse ventures north and west that are becoming evident in OTL archaeology? I think not; DValdron has been very clear, the Thule expansion comes in layers. On the outside, we have people pretty much as OTL Inuit--as Arctic hunter-gatherers (and I reverse the order, I usually write "gatherer-hunter," quite advisedly) who are very sophisticated for their level of development, using quite advanced kit ingeniously wrested from their sparse environment--but are not in any significant sense cultivators of flora or fauna. However ITTL there are more of them and they are moving into new ranges faster, because behind them are the Thule who are adopting cultivation; this raises the size of the pool of Thule population and drives the conservative fringe of those who can't or won't adopt cultivation outward. At the very least they have all the OTL Inuit kit and they possibly have adopted a few extra tricks too.

This wave of Thule, who are not attuned to the nuances of cultivation and not much into trade either, are the first to run into the Norse forays, and as OTL they are hostile. The difference is, they encounter the Norse sooner and closer to their settlements, and close off possibilities that OTL did exist. The outcome is roughly the same for the Norse, because those possibilities OTL didn't amount to much. Clearly the positives of being present in places where they did have trade partners of a sort and did have resources, such as iron, not available to them back in the Settlements did not outweigh the negatives of being even farther out of the range where European cultivation worked and in the presence of people who were adapted to the land and were dangerous and hostile. Aborting those ventures, when the original explorers failed to return, probably didn't do a lot of harm to the Norse, and there wasn't really potential for them to do a lot of good either. It's a wash. Having exactly these things happen ITTL might possibly be woven successfully into the timeline as a "by the way," but ITTL it would not be the case that the same ventures would have found the kind of Thule who would be interested in contact so the whole thing is moot. And the simplest retcon is to just to say the ventures failed and any OTL follow-up that happened was not attempted here--thus compensating for the damage done to the Norse ecumene by losing the original explorers, so that Grandfather's venture found the Norse pretty much as they were OTL at that point.

It took time for the layer of Thule society that would be interested in what the Norse had to offer, and by the time that wavefront approached them it was too late for the Settlements to survive as such.

 

[DG Valdron]

Hi, just saw this thread regarding the discory of a viking trade outpost on Baffin Island from the 14th century. Had this emerged earlier, would it have had any effecton the TL ? Or was the possibility of something like this accounted for and I missed it ?

For my own part, possibly quite arbitrarily, I'm inclined to dismiss the relevance of the discovery to this Timeline. I'd count it as a hypothetical missed opportunity.

The interactions describe are consistently between the Norse and the Dorset culture. The Dorsets are the group that the emerging Thule displaced and wiped out. The case for Thule/Norse trade is a lot less substantial.

So, why would that be? In part, I would suggest timing. These contacts and the Baffin outpost were most likely in the earlier days of the Greenland colony, the first couple of hundred years, when the Greenlanders still possessed ships that could travel across open seas for a few hundred miles.

Greenland and Iceland lacked forests for good ship timber. There had been some possibility of good Timber in L'anse la Meadows (sic?) but that colony failed. Seagoing ships had a limited life span, and when those ships finally sank or fell apart or were lost, then Greenland and Iceland were both dependent on foreign ships from places like Norway, Denmark, England, Portugal, the Basques or the Hanseatic League.

Another part of it might simply be economics. What exactly did the Dorset have to trade that the Norse would want? The Dorset were arctic hunter/gatherers. They weren't going to be coming up with trade goods that the Norse would consider making the trip for. Apart from food surpluses, they weren't producing anything that the Vikings would cross the sea to get at.

My best guess is that there was some effort to plant a colony along the lines of the Greenland west or middle settlements, it just didn't take, and the Norse were forced to do subsistence trading with the Dorset - ie, buying food, until they gave up the place as a bad job. I certainly don't see any deeper foundation - ie, a source of raw materials/gold/gems uniquely valuable plant or animal products, not available in Greenland.

You might have had a camp of convenience - a really good spot for killing or butchering walrus or whales. Or perhaps a prospective site for digging up and smelting bog iron (not available in Greenland mostly). But the value of the place simply wouldn't justify the economics of a long term investment.

Even assuming some enduring local relationship, the displacement of the Dorset by the Thule probably ended that. Local relationships are delicate. Supposing a new bunch of Skraelings show up that drive off, kill off, or otherwise wreck the bunch that you are dealing with? Odds of dealing with the new bunch are much worse. They're aggressive and they've killed off people you considered friends. Their language is different. Whatever pidgin or sign language you've worked out for the Dorset aren't necessarily working.

So essentially, the same sorts of factors that lead to the failure of the Baffin 'settlement' are still at work here.

Things might have been different if the Agricultural Thule had impinged on the Norse. But then again, location is everything. One of the original centers of Thule Agriculture was on the west coast of Baffin. But the Thule settlement was on the opposite side of the Island, across some extremely rugged and impassable terrain, in a place where Agriculture would spread only slowly, and where the hunter/gatherer populations were either holding on persistently, or where they were being displaced to.

So the first couple of waves of Thule - the hunter/gatherers who displace the dorset, and the hunter/gatherers being displaced by agriculture are the types who don't do much good.

At best, the Baffin Island settlement contributes to Thule folklore another scattering of tales of moss faced giants, which will eventually intrigue someone like Grandfather to go looking.

I think that Shevek's analysis is pretty much dead on.

It's arguable that ITTL there's a missed opportunity here, and I can imagine that the Alt Historians living in this timeline have lines of speculation where the Norse Baffin colony makes contact with the right sort of Thule, perhaps agricultural Thule who have heard enough rumours or picked up enough artifacts that they went looking - found them - and provided enough genuine trade for the Norse to persist. Then you get an earlier, possibly more equitable, definitely different Norse interchange, European discovery, etc. Alas, it didn't happen here.

Or possibly, when its all done with here, someone may want to spin off their own timeline from this with that as a POD. If that's on the agenda, I'm okay.

 

[Falecius]

For my own part, possibly quite arbitrarily, I'm inclined to dismiss the relevance of the discovery to this Timeline. I'd count it as a hypothetical missed opportunity.

The interactions describe are consistently between the Norse and the Dorset culture. The Dorsets are the group that the emerging Thule displaced and wiped out. The case for Thule/Norse trade is a lot less substantial.

So, why would that be? In part, I would suggest timing. These contacts and the Baffin outpost were most likely in the earlier days of the Greenland colony, the first couple of hundred years, when the Greenlanders still possessed ships that could travel across open seas for a few hundred miles.

Greenland and Iceland lacked forests for good ship timber. There had been some possibility of good Timber in L'anse la Meadows (sic?) but that colony failed. Seagoing ships had a limited life span, and when those ships finally sank or fell apart or were lost, then Greenland and Iceland were both dependent on foreign ships from places like Norway, Denmark, England, Portugal, the Basques or the Hanseatic League.

Another part of it might simply be economics. What exactly did the Dorset have to trade that the Norse would want? The Dorset were arctic hunter/gatherers. They weren't going to be coming up with trade goods that the Norse would consider making the trip for. Apart from food surpluses, they weren't producing anything that the Vikings would cross the sea to get at.

My best guess is that there was some effort to plant a colony along the lines of the Greenland west or middle settlements, it just didn't take, and the Norse were forced to do subsistence trading with the Dorset - ie, buying food, until they gave up the place as a bad job. I certainly don't see any deeper foundation - ie, a source of raw materials/gold/gems uniquely valuable plant or animal products, not available in Greenland.

You might have had a camp of convenience - a really good spot for killing or butchering walrus or whales. Or perhaps a prospective site for digging up and smelting bog iron (not available in Greenland mostly). But the value of the place simply wouldn't justify the economics of a long term investment.

Even assuming some enduring local relationship, the displacement of the Dorset by the Thule probably ended that. Local relationships are delicate. Supposing a new bunch of Skraelings show up that drive off, kill off, or otherwise wreck the bunch that you are dealing with? Odds of dealing with the new bunch are much worse. They're aggressive and they've killed off people you considered friends. Their language is different. Whatever pidgin or sign language you've worked out for the Dorset aren't necessarily working.

So essentially, the same sorts of factors that lead to the failure of the Baffin 'settlement' are still at work here.

Things might have been different if the Agricultural Thule had impinged on the Norse. But then again, location is everything. One of the original centers of Thule Agriculture was on the west coast of Baffin. But the Thule settlement was on the opposite side of the Island, across some extremely rugged and impassable terrain, in a place where Agriculture would spread only slowly, and where the hunter/gatherer populations were either holding on persistently, or where they were being displaced to.

So the first couple of waves of Thule - the hunter/gatherers who displace the dorset, and the hunter/gatherers being displaced by agriculture are the types who don't do much good.

At best, the Baffin Island settlement contributes to Thule folklore another scattering of tales of moss faced giants, which will eventually intrigue someone like Grandfather to go looking.

I think that Shevek's analysis is pretty much dead on.

It's arguable that ITTL there's a missed opportunity here, and I can imagine that the Alt Historians living in this timeline have lines of speculation where the Norse Baffin colony makes contact with the right sort of Thule, perhaps agricultural Thule who have heard enough rumours or picked up enough artifacts that they went looking - found them - and provided enough genuine trade for the Norse to persist. Then you get an earlier, possibly more equitable, definitely different Norse interchange, European discovery, etc. Alas, it didn't happen here.

Or possibly, when its all done with here, someone may want to spin off their own timeline from this with that as a POD. If that's on the agenda, I'm okay.

Sutherland suggests that Norse presence there was trade oriented. Basically walrus tusks she thinks, which sounds reasonable (the Dorset would be more than happy to trade ivory for metal). Also, she concedes that the dating of all the findings relating to supposedly Norse presence and activity in Canadian Arctic is problematic, with evidence ranging from the first millennium to the fourteenth century. Radiocarbon dating has unresolved issues, since some objects of apparent European origin found in Baffin appear to pre-date any known Norse presence even in Greenland or Iceland. The case for a European presence, in Baffin of all places, previously unheard of, prior the Norse documented travels in the general area, is very weak to say the least. One may think of St. Brendan, but assuming problems with radicarbon is probably a safer proposition.

 

[DG Valdron]

Well, the trouble is that the Norse were harvesting Walrus themselves, and with a fair bit of intensity. Along the west coast, as far up as Disko, Norse hunting expeditions ranged along the Greenland coast. One of the notable Norse exports was rope made from Walrus hide. So pretty clearly they were intensely involved in harvesting.

Of course, the big export was Walrus ivory, so its possible that the Norse would have been more than willing to trade for it. But its not as if the Dorset were dragging around surpluses of it. Presumably, a trading station might have driven specialized Walrus hunting by the Dorset.

 

[Falecius]

Well, the trouble is that the Norse were harvesting Walrus themselves, and with a fair bit of intensity. Along the west coast, as far up as Disko, Norse hunting expeditions ranged along the Greenland coast. One of the notable Norse exports was rope made from Walrus hide. So pretty clearly they were intensely involved in harvesting.

Of course, the big export was Walrus ivory, so its possible that the Norse would have been more than willing to trade for it. But its not as if the Dorset were dragging around surpluses of it. Presumably, a trading station might have driven specialized Walrus hunting by the Dorset.

This is the notion I gather from Sutherland's paper I read, that, however, was written three years ago. I don't know whether more recent discoveries changed the picture.

 

[DG Valdron]

The Sea Harvest - Beluga Whales


Beluga Whales - the white whales - Ten to eighteen feet in length, and 1500 to 3500 pounds weight. Male Beluga tend to be 25% larger than females. Age of sexual maturity is 4 to 7 for males, and 4 to 9 for females. Females give birth to one calf every three years, with gestation taking 12 to 15 months. A female’s reproductive life span is between twenty and thirty years on average, producing seven to ten offspring.

Beluga’s are relatively slow swimmers for whales, but are one of the few whales that can swim backwards. For this reason perhaps, they’re noted for entering river systems and are quite tolerant of fresh water. Mostly occupying coastal waters, they’re relatively migratory, travelling to different feeding grounds in summer and winter.

Reproductively, the Beluga are an intermediate species. They’re not fast breeders like Caribou who can be harvested at high rates continually. On the other hand, they’re not such slow breeders that regular harvesting will collapse the species. They are vulnerable to overhunting, and experienced local population depletions. But they were resilient enough that population declines could be observed and social proscriptions evolved to compensate for that decline, as the Thule transitioned from simple opportunistic hunters to managers.

Long term sustained hunting/harvesting has actually changed the species, both physically and socially. Because Beluga males are larger, they tend to be identified more easily and hunted preferentially by the Thule, favouring a disproportionately large population of breeding females. This allows the population to sustain itself more easily, and has produced differences in social, courtship and reproductive behaviour than in largely untouched populations. Hunting pressure by the Thule has pushed the average age of sexual maturity closer to four years for most populations, and has tended to produce physically smaller populations. There are marked differences in size and breeding age between Beluga populations which are intensively harvested by Thule and ‘wild’ populations, with isolated ‘wild populations’ being noticeably larger in size and later to in age to breed.

Over time, the Thule have evolved a number of management practices, spread and guided by specialized shamans. These consist largely of designating families with hereditary hunting rights (a larger number of families) and proscriptions for and against certain kinds of hunting (large males, as opposed to small females, nursing females, or juveniles). Hunting is also restricted to ‘ceremonial’ seasons, in part this is a practical matter, during parts of migration, Beluga are inaccessible anyway. Hunting expeditions have a ceremonial component, with hunters singing and beating the water. Because hunting episodes are formal and ceremonially confined, there are opportunities to observe the Beluga outside of hunting, and to develop a degree of knowledge and familiarity.

The Beluga themselves have learned to distinguish between simple human presence and hunting activity, and are highly tolerant of or habituated to humans when they are not hunting. Communities or families which have hereditary hunting rights to Beluga often tell stories of the animals coming right up to Kayaks or Umiaks to be petted, and mothers apparently ‘introducing’ or showing calves to the sailors.

Despite migration, local populations of Beluga are well established and jealously guarded by the communities and families which have rights to them. Although they migrate, Beluga apparently have a strong homing instinct and tend to return to their traditional grounds. The communities or families which have hereditary rights to the beluga in an area often acquire a fair bit of knowledge and insight into their animals, to the point of becoming personally familiar with individuals. Often decisions of how many animals to take are debated in light of observations of the health or fatness of animals, or how many young they have produced, as much as local needs and wishes.

There have been efforts to spread the range of Beluga by driving individuals or pods into new territories. Mostly these have been into large rivers and lakes, or into the Western Arctic Archipelago. The success has been mixed - a new area often demands new or adapted feeding strategies, so much depends on the Beluga’s ability to adapt to new surroundings.

Winter areas of open water are vital, and in some areas, this requires communities to establish and maintain them. One of the innovations borrowed from Thule agriculture was the construction of ice mounds, usually in areas of fast running water. These mounds were usually V shaped or U shaped, to act as wind breaks in areas of fast current. The resulting microclimate makes it easier to stop or slow the freezing of opened water. In other areas, temporary hide lodges or tents are opened over a patch of ice to create a sheltered area for which breathing holes can be cut.

The effort to expand Beluga’s arctic ranges, or to preserve those arctic ranges against the Little Ice Age, has been generally successful, although this success has been slower and less dramatic than hoped for. Nevertheless, populations of Beluga are established in the McKenzie and Yukon rivers in particular, and in Great Bear and Great Slave lakes.

Where a local population appears to be in trouble or decline, the families with hereditary rights may negotiate with other families to drive foreign Beluga in to repopulate a local area. But this is rare, to overhunt your territories Beluga is a mark of shame and waste, and while it is possible to ‘borrow’ other Beluga to rebuild your population, the ‘prices’ are steep and negotiations are fierce.

Conversely, in some areas Beluga are not welcome. This is notable in areas of Alaska, where Beluga feed primarily on pacific salmon, competing directly with fishing villages. In some areas, Belugas can destroy fishing nets. The restriction of Beluga harvesting to specific family lineages can bring about numerous conflicts, ranging from poaching, to hostility from fishing communities or families who cannot access the resource and become frustrated that Beluga are consuming their fish. At times, Beluga are blamed for bad harvests, and Beluga and Beluga harvesters can be killed in revenge.

The large proportion of the population that are breeding females, proscriptions against taking infants, juveniles and nursing or apparently pregnant mothers, and relatively fast maturation and breeding tends to mean that Beluga are sustainably hunted with much more intensity than Narwhals. The population of Beluga’s in the Thule realm is estimated to be over 200,000, of which roughly ten to fifteen per cent are taken yearly.

Overall, Thule approaches to Beluga focus on low level regional management and hunting strategies which fall just short of semi-domestication.
　

 

[DG Valdron]

Sea Harvest - Narwhals


Narwhals - the ‘unicorn’ whales - 12 to 18 feet long, adults range from 1800 to 3500 pounds. Age of sexual maturity is 5 to 8 for females, and 11 to 13 for males. The wider breeding range for females means that there are always more reproductive females than males.

Narwhal’s are deep benthic predators, diving and hunting along the sea floor. They have the some of the deepest dives of marine mammals, during winter feeding, they will go down as far as 2600 to 5000 feet, as many as a dozen times a day, for dives lasting up to half an hour.

Narwhals are highly migratory, coming into shallows during open water. During cold water, they retreat to the pack ice of the arctic ocean, coming up and breathing through fissures (leads) in the sea ice packs. During winter they congregate in groups of up to five to ten, but during the summer form coalitions of hundreds of animals.

For the Thule, Narwhals are very seasonal prey. Lacking significant natural predators, Narwhals are a long lived slow reproducing species and as such are vulnerable to hunting pressure. Thule hunting pressure around Baffin Island all but eradicated the species around there, and they have been slow to return. Mostly, their range in the Thule era is on the Eastern coast of Greenland through a band that runs through the Islands of the Sea Thule - Svalbard, Franz Josef, Svernaya Zemyla.

Due to the habits of Narwhal, there is very little that the Thule can do to manage the species beyond controlling hunting pressure. Following collapse of Narwhal populations around Hudson Bay, the Shamanic wisdom was that excessive or impious hunting had displeased the spirits.

Narwhal hunting was restricted to a traditional right of specialized families, rather than any sea hunter, with huge taboos and spiritual consequences due for an unauthorized person or party killing them. Narwhal hunts were preceded and followed by elaborate rituals, and shamanic tradition mandated ‘tithing’ ie - no more than one or two could be taken from a travelling pod, and no small ones could be taken. These restrictions did not apply to large coalitions.

The Arctic population of Narwhals is about 80,000 of which, perhaps 5% is harvested annually.
　

 

[DG Valdron]

Sea Harvest - Bowhead Whales

Bowhead Whales - Up to 66 feet in length and up to 100 tons in weight, bowheads represented the pinnacle of Thule hunting and drove the culmination of umiak development. An arctic baleen whale, the bowheads were known for the largest heads of any animal. They use their massive heads to break through winter ice or sea ice, and have been observed smashing through as much as two feet of ice.

Reproduction, or sexual maturity begins when the whale is about ten or fifteen years old, gestation takes about 14 months and a female will give birth once every three or four years.

This seems like the typical formula for extremely slow growing, slow reproducing, long lived animals which tend to emerge in environments with limited resources and no predators. The wrinkle here is that the whales are so incredibly long lived (150 to 200 years, with reports of females being fertile into their 70's) that even that slow reproductive pace, over a reasonable time span can produce impressive results.

In OTL it took the Bowheads roughly thirty or forty years to rebuild their numbers to historical levels after a moratorium on commercial whaling. The ‘state of nature’ population levels of Bowheads seems to be about 50,000 animals. Given their ability to replenish their numbers, presumably social or ecological factors keep their population from expanding once it reaches its limits.

Although Bowhead hunting was vital to the emergence of the Sea Thule, and although Bowheads are critical to some Thule communities, local hunting never reached the point of threatening the viability of local populations. The Bowheads were able to adjust their reproduction to account for the pressure of Thule hunting, even when that hunting spread as far as Alaska and Siberia.

For most of its hunting history, the Thule made no real effort to manage Bowhead stocks, unlike several other marine mammals. In part this was because the animals had no difficulty coping with Thule hunting pressure, due to their extensive deep sea range and the limitations of the Thule.

And it was in part because the available Thule technology to take the animals was limited. Bowhead hunting amounted to a communal activity of dozens upon dozens of people and several umiaks. Only specialized Umiaks could be used and those were hard to manufacture. A high degree of skill and cooperation was required. This tended to limit hunting efforts.

Capture or killing of bowheads was a windfall of up to 100 tons of meat, bone, baleen, blubber, hide and organs. Harvesting before the animal could decay was a community effort. The bones, particularly the skull, jaw and ribs were used for the construction of specialized Umiaks that could double as sleds across expanses of sea ice.

Because of their vast size, and the efforts required to hunt them, the Bowheads achieved huge cultural significance for coastal Thule who relied on or hunted them. They became an important mythic and folkloric beast.

Emergence of European whaling in the 17th and 18th centuries, which depleted local stocks brought a great deal of resentment from many Thule. There are a number of reports of whaling crews being massacred during this time.

The Bowhead Whale population is approximately 50,000. Thule harvest during the 1500's was never higher than roughly 1 to 2%.
　
　

 

[twovultures]

Very fascinating update! I like how the Thule are managing the beluga population. Those are pretty cool whales.

Apparently the degree to which belugas migrate is pretty controversial. There's evidence that they do mate across populations during the winter, but at the same time the females return extremely regularly to their calving grounds. So even if the Thule can't control beluga's breeding or their movement, they can still manage the populations pretty closely (especially if it's a majority-female population and the males are largely culled).

 

[DG Valdron]

Thanks. I jotted down some rough numbers in terms of the whale harvests so far.

Assuming 500 bowhead whales taken a year through the Thule range, and an average size of 90 tons, assume further about half of this is actually edible, then you're producing about 45 million pounds of food. Assuming that you need about 700 lbs of food to maintain a person, then the Bowhead harvest feeds roughly 65,000 people. But no one eats a 100% whale meat diet. So we can reasonably assume that for Thule dependent on whale, it makes up between 10% and 30% of their diet. So roughly 200,000 to 650,000 Thule are tied into the Bowhead whale economy. I suspect that's actually high, the real efficiency of whale meat is probably lower than 50%.

This population is scattered through the north, including Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, the Sea Thule and Baffin Island (but likely not Hudson Bay, Labrador or McKenzie (the Bowheads don't seem to venture into the western regions of the Canadian archipelago). Even making such allowances, you can see the vital role that whaling must play in the economy and lives of the Sea Thule and East Coast Greenland Thule, particularly in tough times when other shortcomings in their economy or subsistence package force them into whaling.

Applying the same standards to Beluga suggests that the sustainable Beluga harvest produces enough meat for 35,000 people, or at 10 to 30% of diet, it helps to sustain 100,000 to 350,000 people. Beluga are generally closer to main population centers and diversified and productive subsistence economies, so you can get a sense of the contribution they make.

We've talked about fish, but haven't crunched any ballpark numbers, but the implication here is that those would likely be substantial.

We'll get a clearer idea of the importance of the sea harvest to Thule culture and population, and the evolution of management traditions, as we go on, but it does look like a big part of the picture.

I think that with the exception of Walrus and possibly Sea Cows, the Thule hit a high water mark with their management of Beluga, coming nearly as close to a sea mammal domestication as you can reasonably manage.

 

[Falecius]

I think that with the exception of Walrus and possibly Sea Cows, the Thule hit a high water mark with their management of Beluga, coming nearly as close to a sea mammal domestication as you can reasonably manage.

One wonders if they can employ Beluga for uses other than their meat, fat, bones and hides, that however, I suspect would be quite a big deal alone.
As most sea mammals, and even more than most of them, those animals appear to be very intelligent. I gather that modern attempts at training have been noticeably successful, whatever one thinks of the purposes.
Riding them is probably too much, however fascinating the notion may be. But are there uses like tracing fish migrations, salvaging stuff under the sea (wrecks I suppose) and similar things, that may prove relevant, though probably minor overall?
Another point is that narwhal's "horns" are likely to become a significant luxury and prestige item, especially for exports. In Europe, there will be a noticeable demand. Would it provide enough economic push for attempts at closer management down the line?

 

[DG Valdron]

One wonders if they can employ Beluga for uses other than their meat, fat, bones and hides, that however, I suspect would be quite a big deal alone.

I wouldn't want to try and milk one.

I'm not sure what other uses you'd put it to. I don't think that they'd do much as pack or draft animals, and they wouldn't be terribly efficient pulling a boat. Basically, land animals have traction. Sea critters don't.

Riding them is probably too much, however fascinating the notion may be.

That's Walrus Cavalry, coming up.

But are there uses like tracing fish migrations,

Possible. Particularly in terms of locating or corralling schools of fish for spearing or netting. This is already part of the behavioural repertoire.

They also join together into coordinated groups of five or more to feed on shoals of fish by steering the fish into shallow water, where the belugas then attack them.[57] For example, in the estuary of the Amur River, where they mainly feed on salmon, groups of six or eight individuals will join together to surround a shoal of fish and prevent their escape. Individuals will then take turns feeding on the fish

(from wikipedia)

But I think that would be gilding the Lily. Personally, while its hypothetically feasible, I would not push it as a development until perhaps the 19th or 20th centuries. Even this level of management pseudo-domestication is pretty much unheard of.

Mind you, those of you who are interested could google "Old Tom" and "The Law of Tongues."

salvaging stuff under the sea (wrecks I suppose) and similar things, that may prove relevant, though probably minor overall?

I'm not sure what's on the sea floor that the Thule would want or could train Beluga to retrieve.

Another point is that narwhal's "horns" are likely to become a significant luxury and prestige item, especially for exports. In Europe, there will be a noticeable demand. Would it provide enough economic push for attempts at closer management down the line?

Well, its a significant cultural item to the Sea Thule. But for various reasons, the Narwhal population is difficult to manage. Their reproduction rate is relatively slow, and they're deep water dwellers. So I think that the relatively light level of regional harvesting is pretty much all we'll see.