As a coastal town, Tromsø was once the centre for hunting, trapping, and trade expeditions, as well as being the setting off point for many Arctic explorations. The polar expeditions included those of Roald Amundsen (who discovered the Northwest Passage and who led the expedition that was the first to reach the South Pole), and Fridtjof Nansen (who led the cross-country ski trek that was the first expedition to cross the interior of Greenland). Quite some guys, these Norwegians!
The excellent Polar Museum describes the various adventures, many of which went to the Svalbard archipelago that lies even farther north and is even more remote than Tromsø. The area teemed with furry or blubbery wildlife, so the hunt was on for various types of seal as well as walruses, polar bears, Arctic foxes, reindeer, whales, birds and fish.
As seems to be the case everywhere humans set foot, some of the species were hunted almost to extinction before regulations set in. The Polar Museum has several well made tableaus and stuffed animals that illustrate the life and times of hunters and trappers. 
The numbers of polar bears killed in the period up to as late as the 1970s is appalling, as were some of the methods used. In the 1920s, for example, about 900 polar bears were killed every single year. The hunters used guns, poison, traps, and baited self-shooters like the contraption pictured below, where the polar bear pokes its curious head into the baited box and triggers a sawed-off gun that shoots it. Sometimes the polar bear died; sometimes it was merely wounded. Often, motherless cubs were left behind.
Seal pups, like the three different kinds of stuffed ones pictured below, were bashed on the head with a blunt instrument to render them unconscious after which they were hit on the head with the spiked side of the same instrument to kill them – instantly, so it is said.
