bowhead

BOW-hed

The Greenland right whale, named for the enormous upward curve of its jaw — the largest mouth in the animal kingdom. Bowheads live in Arctic waters, can reach 60 feet, and may live 200 years. They sing. Their bones wash up on Arctic beaches like architecture.

Etymology

English: bow (the curve of a ship's prow) + head. Named by whalers for the shape of the skull.

Notes

Bowhead whales show up in several well-known books. The most famous is Moby-Dick by Herman Melville — while the white whale itself is a sperm whale, Melville discusses bowheads (which he calls "right whales" or references under older whaling terminology) in his extensive cetological chapters, particularly when cataloging whale species.

Beyond Melville, bowheads appear in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams — Lopez writes beautifully about bowhead whales in the context of Arctic ecology, Iñupiat subsistence hunting, and the deeper relationship between Indigenous peoples and the northern marine environment. It's one of the more lyrical treatments of the species in modern nonfiction.

Farley Mowat touched on bowheads in several of his Arctic books, and they appear in various accounts of the history of commercial whaling, since bowheads were heavily targeted by Yankee whalers and European whaling fleets in the 18th and 19th centuries.

More recently, Rebecca Giggs' Fathoms: The World Below discusses whale biology and culture broadly, with bowheads getting attention for their extraordinary longevity — some individuals may live over 200 years, making them among the longest-lived mammals known.