Iluileq Coast

The waters off Iluileq belong to the Greenland Sea, where Greenland's eastern coast faces the northern Atlantic and approaches to the Arctic. Inuit hunters had pursued whales in this wider sea since the fifteenth century, using a non-industrial maritime tradition attested by archaeology. From the beginning of the seventeenth century European whaling expanded dramatically and severely reduced bowhead and other whale populations.

Seasonal ice shaped the geography of that industry. British whalers identified the West Ice between Greenland and Jan Mayen in the early eighteenth century, and seal hunting developed there from the late 1750s. Scientific exploration followed commercial knowledge.

In 1765 and 1766 Russian expeditions under Vasily Chichagov searched for a northern passage while measuring depths, observing weather and studying currents and drifting ice. These activities belonged to the wider Greenland Sea surrounding the coast. Indigenous hunting, expanding European extraction and systematic surveying thus formed successive layers of maritime history in waters where ice could both sustain animals and obstruct ships.