A person who throws or operates a harpoon, especially on a whaling ship.
From harpoon plus the agent suffix -eer (from French -ier, from Latin -arius). The -eer suffix was adopted into English for specialized occupational titles, often from French military and maritime vocabulary.
The harpooneer was the sharpshooter of whaling ships—they had to judge distance, wind, and wave motion to strike a moving whale from a pitching boat, making them some of the most skilled and highest-paid crew members in maritime history.
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