In the formative Colonial era, and especially after the United States had shed the shackles of Great Britain and become independent, the so-called “whale fishery” was a mainstay of the local and regional economy of eastern New England and Long Island, and would emerge as a cornerstone of the commercial viability and economic stability of the Young Republic. With Independence, America’s habitual trading ports in Great Britain and her colonies were closed to Yankee merchants, but American cotton, timber, sperm oil, whale oil, and baleen were among the products that were in demand and could be readily traded in the international marketplace. Despite some competition from England and France, in standpoint of experience, efficiency, and productivity the Yanks were the real whaling experts: it was a lucrative business in which they were truly gifted. Americans dominated the trade worldwide. In fact, the sperm whale fisheries of France and England were founded, pioneered, nurtured, and many of their ships commanded and manned, by Nantucketers. On eastern Long Island, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Cape Cod — and soon after, in New Bedford, New London, New York, and Wilmington, Delaware — whaling developed into a profession that had its own distinctive culture, endowed with a highminded pride of occupation and a galaxy of uniquely special features. It had its own system of remuneration, a pro-rated hierarchy of fractional shares or “lays” in any whaling voyage or any shore-based whaling enterprise, all rooted in precedents established by the Vikings and Basques in medieval Europe; and whaling had its own shipboard hierarchies, its own highly evolved, purpose-built small craft, its own hardware and gear, its own routines and methods of the hunt, and would come to have its own songs and lore and visual artistry that distinguished it from any other seafaring enterprise.

It was in this context of occupational pride and enthusiastic patriotism, in combination with the potentially debilitating effects of long, languid months at sea that were dramatically but only occasionally interrupted by the frenzied, backbreaking labor of capturing and processing whales, that scrimshaw — the whalemen’s own, indigenous art form — emerged as a distinctive, signature medium of artistic expression.

The authentic definition of scrimshaw is quite specific, and has more to do with the actual products used than the method or means of production: scrimshaw is the indigenous occupational shipboard pastime of whalemen in the 19th- and early 20th-century Age of Sail, using the hard byproducts of whaling — sperm whale ivory, walrus ivory, skeletal bone, and baleen, often in combination with other “found” materials — to produce practical, utilitarian, decorative, and ornamental objects for themselves and as gifts for folks back home. Scrimshandering was also occasionally practiced by the wives and children of the whaling  aptains with whom they sometimes went to sea, and was sometimes taken up by seamen in the navy and, less often, in the merchant carrying trades.

The first appearances were in the late 1760s, when a few Massachusetts whalemen working independently carved a small handful of rudimentary pictures and crude inscriptions on pieces of skeletal whale bone.† However, it was after the Napoleonic wars, when export markets and the whale fishery itself expanded exponentially in response to a rapidly enlarging, increasingly industrialized world economy, and when pelagic whaling voyages became much longer (now venturing for a matter of years around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the High Arctic, and the threshold of Antarctica) that scrimshaw came into its own and ultimately became a common practice on whaleships everywhere. Prior to 1815, sperm whale teeth had been a market commodity, sold by whaling merchants to China traders for barter in the South Pacific, to obtain sandalwood and bêche de mer (sea cucumbers) for sale in Canton. When that market for the teeth collapsed on account of surplus, and China trade merchants were no longer interested in buying them, the teeth became available to the whalemen themselves. The earliest uses (circa 1817-25) were evidently by British South Sea whalemen, from whom the first known American practitioners probably acquired the habit in the Pacific in the 1820s; but by the 1830s scrimshaw had been Americanized and, like the sperm whale fishery itself, the genre was dominated by Americans and the diverse, polyglot accumulation of crewmen that populated Yankee whaling vessels: Native Americans (some of them from dynasties who were whaling for generations), African Americans (some of them former slaves), immigrants from Britain, Ireland, Continental Europe, and Portugal (the majority of the latter from the Azores Islands), a scattered few from East Asia, the Philippines, and South America, and even a few women and children. In a wholesale diaspora over the next generation, which brought whaling to such American outports as Hudson and Poughkeepsie, New York; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Wiscasset, Maine; and even Wilmington, Delaware, scrimshaw-making became nearly universal on Yankee whaleships, as well as those of England and Australia, and appears to have been practiced to some degree on French, Chilean, Hawaiian, Canadian, and German whaling vessels, as well as in the American and British navies and (less often) on merchantmen. It lasted as long as the whale fishery itself, into the 1920s in the USA and well beyond that in the Azores.

The resulting products varied greatly, but key to each is the use of marine ivory, bone, and baleen. In popular perception, the characteristic manifestation is pictorial: sperm whale teeth, slabs of jawbone (“panbone”), and walrus tusks engraved with pictures, some also with mottoes and inscriptions. Even the whole jawbones of smaller cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises, belugas, and “killer whales” or blackfish) were occasionally turned to artistic purpose. However, these same materials were utilized, often in combination with wood, mother of pearl, abalone, coin silver, and lesser metals, in the shipboard production of boxes, bins, baskets, canes, swifts (yarnwinders), kitchen implements, gadgets for sewing, weaving, and embroidery; hand-tools for ship’s use, navigation, carpentry, and cooperage; children’s toys, doll furniture, whistles, and even full-size furniture and musical instruments: basically, anything that might otherwise be made of wood.‡ There is significant evidence of shipboard collaboration in many such pieces of “built” scrimshaw, but most of the pictorial works were crafted by individual sailor-artists, often working side-by-side with shipmates engaged in similar pursuits.

Scrimshaw has sometimes been classified as a folk art by virtue of it having been practiced by amateurs who had no formal training, no commercial intentions, and adhered to no “school” of commonly held rules. But more importantly, it was an occupational art practiced exclusively by firsthand witnesses to the whale hunt, and by other deepwater mariners who were accordingly knowledgeable and technically proficient seafaring insiders. Scrimshandering thus developed an evolving series of conventions and standard practices of its own, based upon intimate familiarity with ships, whales, navy ordnance, and other features that came to be represented on their work. By contrast, in the generations that followed the decline and fall of the whaling industry, artists (both with and without artistic training) have adopted the materials and techniques of engraving pictures and building things out of whale ivory, walrus ivory, and bone; but authentic deepwater scrimshaw is rooted in the firsthand experience and technical proficiency of veteran seafarers.

It is also important to note that, while most of the whaling scenes and many of the shipportraits encountered on whalemen’s pictorial scrimshaw are originals devised by “the fishermen themselves” (to use Melville’s phrase) based upon their own experience, most of the landscapes, shorescapes, and human portraits were copied from published sources. Contrary to the enduring popular myths about the rowdy and uncivilized ill-behavior of sailors, Yankee whalemen (unlike many of their foreign counterparts) were self-consciously part of the relentlessly egalitarian working classes of the Young Republic: to varying degrees they tended to be educated; whaling communities (notably Nantucket and New Bedford) tended to place a high value on schooling; some whalemen had even attended academies and colleges, but even most American farm boys and urban youths were reasonably literate. Common foremast hands on Yankee whaleships, as well as the captains, officers, ship’s carpenters, and coopers, typically read prodigiously, passed around books and magazines among themselves, swapped them ship to ship, and engraved copies of illustrations they found in books and periodicals onto whale teeth, panbone plaques, walrus tusks, and objects made of baleen.

In recent years antique scrimshaw has suffered some misguided discrimination on account of the ill-founded misimpression that an appreciation of this culturally significant art-form-ofthe-past somehow condones whaling and the butchering of endangered species. This is of course a misinformed outgrowth of the righteous and urgent concern for elephants, which are critically endangered and have been relentlessly hunted for the ivory. It is well and prudent to continue to control commerce in elephant ivory, which trade directly threatens the survival of elephants in the wild. However, scrimshaw never posed any threat to whales or elephants, either today or in the past. Whales have never been hunted for the ivory, and no sperm whale has ever been killed for the teeth or bone. Throughout the 19th century, even at the height of the whaling industry, whale teeth and skeletal bone were always non-marketable byproducts, the jetsam of a much larger commercial interest in oil and baleen (“whalebone”). The genesis of scrimshaw art was the laborer’s need to apply his time and skill to some constructive between-times activity that could allay the tedium of idle months at sea, while providing an outlet for creative expression and the opportunity to produce things of utilitarian and decorative value, some of which could be gifts for dear ones back home. When the ivory and bone became available and would otherwise have been thrown into the sea, the whalemen found they could use it constructively. Unlike the elephant ivory carvings from England, Europe, China, or Japan, which were characteristically manufactured by professional artisans in workshops or factories, or crafted by academicians in studios, scrimshaw was neither commercially motivated nor corporately produced, but was a grassroots utilization of found materials for the pleasure and entertainment of amateurs, whose livelihood was oil, or defense of the realm, not ivory. Scrimshaw is art for Art’s sake.

As such, authentic whalemen’s scrimshaw is uniquely integral to the history and cultural legacy of its homeland territories in the USA, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, as well as the Indigenous traditions of the North American Arctic and Polynesia. Despite that a majority of scrimshaw remains anonymous, it is clear that a significant proportion was produced by sailors and others of differing colors, nationalities, and ethnicities, some of whose names are known and their careers at least partly documented — thus providing a unique window onto the interests and pursuits of mariners in the Age of Sail, and a perspective on the mainstream culture of working people in centuries past.