The best, called "Lay On, Cut In, Try Out, Stow Down: Or, From Blubber to Oil," provides logbook entries of an afternoon's chase in 1844, with glosses by the author translating what he calls whalemen's "patois".
Highlights include Larkin House (464 Calle Principal at Jefferson Street), an antique-filled 1840 adobe; and the Old Whaling Station (Heritage Harbor, off Oliver Street), adorned with the giant iron pots that turned blubber into oil.
They use similar methods to Western whalers in the early 19th Century - when crews travelled great distances in search of whales and their blubber for oil - and long before some species were hunted to near extinction.
Over the past two years alone, Iceland has exported more than 1,200 tons of whale meat, blubber and oil -- worth some $17 million -- to Japan, and has made additional shipments to Norway, Latvia and Belarus.
In their resource constrained environment, the Inuit had identified a use for every part: blubber for oil, meat for food, bone for housing or sleds, skin for vitamins or covering -- they used everything.
Unknown-3 compounds have previously been identified in Atlantic dolphin blubber, fish oil supplements, passive samplers deployed along the Great Barrier Reef, and a Mediterranean sponge.
The EU ban includes processed goods derived from seals, including their skins which are used to make coats, bags and clothing, as well as meat, oil blubber, organs and seal oil, which is used in some omega-3 pills.
A dwindling supply of biscuits was rationed to last for months, and penguins were slaughtered and carefully allocated so that no part went to waste: "The blubber for lamp oil, skin for the cooking stoves and the flippers to brush the floor, and their clothes".
