Abstract: Among the Inuvialuit of Canada’s western Arctic it is possible to trace modern-day descendants of Azorean and Cape Verdean sailors who had served aboard primarily American whaling ships hunting for bowhead whales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Inuvialuit oral history, confronted with written records, sheds light on the little known Arctic history of Portuguese and African-Portuguese seamen, some of whom married local women and started families well after the whalers had stopped coming north.

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