Bowhead Hyper-text

To give an idea of what I was talking about in my previous post about noting obscurities in a poem, I've taken the poem in question and hyperlinked various things, more or less obscure (who decides?)--excluding instances of ambiguity caused by polysemy (rot, corrupting) or homophonic puns and leaving alone the question of possible buried intertextual allusions to passages in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams and Herman Melville's Moby Dick--to Wikipedia (or elsewhere, when not covered by Wikipedia). So, is "maqtaq" really the most obscure thing in this poem? To whom? Why note it and not everything else?

Bowhead


I can hardly stand the rot
our cargo wafts: the redolent fat
of a Greenland Right, this year's legal
cull of ancient rites cross-stacked
aft of me in plastic-strapped
waxed boxes, despite which snappy
package, stench of maqtaq
drenches this Hawker, as it did holds
of Victorian whalers, the same reek
at sixteen thousand feet as a hundred
stripped crangs corrupting
on Pond's Bay floes -- London's
streetlamps aglow and Oxford dons
dry ‘neath baleen-ribbed brollies --
the same as it must have been -- and still is
in this land that hoards scars
and preserves what it kills --
cached under stacked stones

a thousand-odd years ago.