Many of the earliest and bravest Arctic explorers were fortune-seeking prospectors who went in search not of silver and gold but of ducks. Fowlers, these feather-hunters were called. Female eider ducks line their nests with breast feathers--known to those shopping for an excellent parka or comforter as eiderdown. Eider ducks are by nature docile and defenseless birds. Hence their preference for cliffs.To harvest eiderdown, you had to rappel down an Arctic cliff on a braided seal-hide rope, coax the mother duck from her nest, and then, dangling hundreds of feet above the icy, rocky surf, plunder her feathers, pocketing a few of her pale green eggs for tomorrow's breakfast, being sure to leave at least one, so that she would pluck more feathers from her breast, which you could come back to harvest later. Then you'd wad the harvested feathers into balls and lob these down to a boat pitching around in the rocky shallows below.
"We who have been brought up in comparative ease and luxury," one 19th century journalist wrote, "can scarcely picture to ourselves a more wretched lot than that of these poor islanders, compelled to undergo such toils, and expose themselves to so great dangers, for acquiring the mere necessaries of life." (Moby-Duck, 318)
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