The history of the commercial hunting of whales in Chile allows us to distinguish three foreign whaling traditions, which we shall call the “Yankee”, the “Norwegian” and the “Japanese”, which inserted themselves into a pre-existing tradition: passive hunting or the butchering of whales stranded on beaches undertaken not only by the native populations but Europeans and their descendants as well. This montage of traditions shapes a sequence of superposed processes which have been narrated by a group of contemporary observers of these events. A review of the accounts written by these observers reveals different conceptual constructions about whales (as a “monster”, “re­source” and “scarce resource”) and the whale hunters (as “heroes” and “pro­fessionals”), linked to the technological evolution of whale hunting in our country (passive hunting, traditional hunting, modern hunting).