They fished with woven grass nets or hooks made from shells, and used harpoons of wood and bone to hunt dugong and turtles.

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And the Darmstadt meeting was presented with an array of concepts that included the use of nets, harpoons, tentacles, ion thrusters and lasers.

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Ideas such as deploying large nets to catch debris or firing harpoons into old satellites to drag them back to Earth are non-starters.

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He even harpoons beluga whales, navigating a boat out into the labyrinth of the Mackenzie Delta, then sharing the meat and blubber with others in the community.

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His fishing methods were different: he used aluminium beer barrels as floats because wooden ones would break up in a minute, and rather than harpoons, with their stainless-steel darts that folded back and slipped right out of the fish, he preferred hand-held gaffs with a three-inch hook that went in and stayed there.

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As I wander through, reading the young sailors' stories -- many were teenagers who couldn't even swim -- and looking at the harpoons and killing irons, a mother awkwardly tries to explain to her young daughter (they are the only other visitors) exactly what the point was, and why the leviathans were driven to near extinction before whaling played itself out in the Pacific by the 1870s.

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