The aim of the PhD project is to examine the log books, travelogues, and diaries of eighteenth-century whalers plying their trade in the offshore waters of Greenland and Svalbard, with an eye to how they imagined the farthest reaches of the North. In a second step, the literary, scientific, and historico-philosophical reception of these images is to be analyzed and compared. How and why did the images of this region change during the eighteenth century?