History of Scrimshaw
History of Scrimshaw 1
Scrimshaw is a younger art form than many people suppose: for economic reasons, it did not arise full blown until after the Napoleonic Wars. Whales were vigorously hunted for oil and meat by medieval Norse mariners, and even more systematically by Spanish and French Basques in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Narwhal tusks harvested from the Norse hunt were marketed in Britain and throughout Europe as unicorn tusks, valued for their medical, magical, and aphrodisiacal powers (how was anyone in Italy or Spain to know about Arctic narwhals and their exotic, spiral tusks if the Vikings were keeping the source a trade secret?). Walrus tusks were a viable byproduct of the Norse hunt. Whale and walrus skeletal bone were often turned to practical purposes by the Norse themselves, but walrus ivory was distributed throughout Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East as a substitute for elephant ivory. It was not only used for such practical implements as handles for tools and cutlery, and also veneer for crossbows, but for decorative inlay and, notably, for disc-shaped game markers, character chessmen, and ditty boxes of various kinds. Even more significant were relief-carved altar pieces, crosses, panels, reliquary boxes, and frieze miniatures depicting the Crucifixion or Lives of the Saints — sacred objects mostly produced by monastic artisans in East Anglia and Denmark in the 11th and 12th centuries.2 However, none of these are scrimshaw: they were not made by the whalemen themselves; rather, the ivory and bone were produced, exported, and sold as part of the proceeds of the hunt, and the actual objects were made far away by cloistered monks and urban artisans, most of whom had never seen a whale or a walrus nor ever met a whaleman.
Practical and ornamental objects were made out of whale skeletal bone and walrus ivory in Norway and Denmark during the Viking era, from the 8th or 9th century at least until the 15th; 3 but these were not necessarily made by the whale huntersthemselves and were surely produced on shore. Whale ribs, scapulae, and vertebrae — stronger than woodand analogously workable —were used as architectural components and grave markers, and as raw materialsfor decorative pieces and domestic implements. Comparatively few Norse objects made out of walrus ivory or whale bone have survived, and none made out of baleen; therefore, some, perhaps most of the purposes for which the Vikings used the hard byproducts may be permanently lost to memory.
Most of the known domestic implements are archaeological specimens of whale skeletal bone, excavated from such adult femaletombs as had good drainage,thus preserving organicmaterials that might otherwise have deteriorated centuries ago. The majority of what survives are gender- stereotyped women’simplements presumed to have been used for food preparation, needlework, textile production, and working cloth, such as mangles, bodkins, and hasps. They are often ornamented with characteristic Norse knot patterns and figural images (closely related to Celtic motifs known from medieval Ireland), and the consensus seems to be that they were likely made by women, rather than by male artisans or by the part-time whalemen themselves.
Pelagic deep-sea whaling, pioneered by the Basques in the late Middle Ages and perfected by them in the 16th century, emerged as an organized commercial fishery in Dutch, British, German, and Scandinavian hands in the 17th century. The Dutch, who purchased their whaling technology directly from Basque hirelings, soon became dominant. The principal specieshunted were bowhead and right whales, especially the northern varieties found in Arctic and sub-Arctic waters off Norway, Spitsbergen, Jan Mayen Island, Greenland, and the Davis Strait, but eventually also the kindred southern variety, encountered in the Atlantic all the way south to the Brazil Banks and southwest Africa. The primary object of the commercial hunt was oil, both whale oil and the similarly versatile oil of the walrus (in both cases the meat was so little valued in Europe by this time that it was mostly discarded in the process of flensing). A secondary object was baleen, the burly plates of keratin that the toothless mysticete or so-called baleen whales have in their mouths in place of teeth. There were myriad uses for baleen in fashion and industry, and walrus ivory retained commercial value even for the Dutch and Englishwhalers, so these materials were not casually available to sailors for their personal use. And because the bones of whales and walruses were sometimes drained and boiled for the oil, then discarded as worthless, they were not readily available either.
Baleen had been prized for various practicalapplications since classical antiquity. Writing in Latin about right whales in 1572, the greatFrench naturalist, physician, surgeon, and founder of modern dentistry, Ambroise Paré (1510-1590), succinctly characterizes some of the already ancient uses of baleen, while his English translator epitomizes the etymological source of the universal English misnomer for baleen, whalebone (the German is fischbein, “fish bone”):
“The Fins [sic] that stand forth oftheir mouths, which are commonly called Whale-bones, being dried and polished, serveto make Busks [quae Bustavocant] for Women,Whip-staves, and little Staves, as also to stiffen garments.” (Opera, Paris, 1561; first English translation, London, 1678)
When the Arctic whale hunt was taken up by British and Dutch interests in the early 17th century, the uses for baleen were too limited to keep up with a mounting supply.So much raw material was being returned to Holland that the Noordse Compagnie, who held the Dutch whaling monopoly, granted exclusive patents intended to develop new markets for baleen. One was awarded in 1618 to Jan Osborn (circa 1581-1643) to devise ornamental panels for furniture as a cheaper substitute for hand-carved wood. Another practitioner in Amsterdam around the same time was cabinetmaker HermanDoomer (1595-1650), a friendof Rembrandt: in the 1640s he built wooden caskets and at least one collectors’ cabinet (intended to house “curiosities”) ornamented with pressed baleen panels. The aesthetic results of these Dutch baleen treasures were satisfactory but actual production fell shortof commercial viability. When for a variety of economic and practical reasons the Noordse Compagnie dissolved their whaling monopoly and cancelled the patents in 1631, the baleen surplus persisted, commercial expectations for baleen diminished dramatically, and baleen was no longer valued by the merchants; so it suddenly became available to the whalemen for their own decorative work.
Thus, the first known productions that can properly be called whalemen’s scrimshaw are two oval bandboxes with baleen sides affixed to wooden tops and bottoms, both attributed to an anonymous Rotterdam whalingcommandeur (captain) and dated that very same year, 1631 — a direct result of the monopolyremoving the embargo of baleen. In English, these pioneer baleen objects are commonly referred to as ditty boxes, precursors of the oval baleen ditty boxes that were later produced by American whalemen, and the analogous wooden ones made by Shakers in the 19th century. In Dutch they are called kapdoos — literally, cap box — intended to store the traditional white starched cloth caps and silver or gold accompanying headgear worn by women throughout the Netherlands at that time, which, whether or nor the boxes were actually made on shipboard or back in Holland, indicates that they were produced as gifts for women back home. The two prototypes (in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and Kendall Collection, NBWM) typify the best work of this kind, with wooden tops ornately carvedin relief, featuring the symbolic Dutch Lion, and the polished baleen sides incised with ship portraits, whaling and harbor vignettes, trees, and other images.4
However, Arctic whaling voyages in those days were comparatively short, a single season from May to October at most, not requiring or even providing opportunities for the kinds of time-filling activities that emerged in the Yankeewhaling industry of the 19th century, when the typical whaling voyage to the Pacificwas a matter of two, three, or even four years. Thus, in this early era of Arctic whaling from Europe, the making of such scrimshaw precursors was comparatively infrequent, may have transpired on shore rather than on shipboard, and never achieved the kind of florescence that sailor arts underwent in the 19th century.
In 18th- and early 19th-century England and Scotland, various commercially produced items sometimes had baleen components, but (as was the case in Holland) they were not manufactured in great quantities and consumed only part of the huge stockpiles of baleen returned from the British Arctic whale hunt: silver ladles with slender, twisted baleen handles (prefiguring the coconut-shell ladles with scrimshaw handles that American sailors would produce a century later); insulators for the handles of metal coffee pots, teapots, and chocolate pots; coarse brushes and brooms; even springs for forte-pianos and carriages. The ladles were elegant and popular for a while — George and Martha Washington are known to have owned at least two of them and many survive today — but they never caught on tenaciously enough on either side of the Atlantic to make much of a dent in the seemingly endless supply of baleen.
Scrimshaw Genesis
In was sperm whaling, an indigenously American phenomenon, that ultimately occasioned the advent of classic scrimshaw. But even this was not immediate. The spermaceti or “sperm” whale is the only large odontocete— that is, the only great whale that has teeth. 5 Its oil is prized for its stable viscosity when used as a lubricant, the strong and virtually smokeless light when used for illumination, and its rich spermaceti wax and stearines that can be extracted for the manufacture of candles, soap, and a host of secondary products. Hitherto known primarily from drift whales and from carcasses stranded on beaches in northern Europe, sperm whales were not known to inhabit the waters off New England until the early18th century. Tradition ascribes the discovery of offshore sperm whale migratory pathways to Nantucket circa 1712, and it was the Nantucket colonists who soon exploited the stock, tuning their already highly evolved whaling methods to the greaterrequirements of the feisty sperm whale. Entrepreneurs in Newport, Rhode Island, perfected the processes for refining whale oil for the manufacture of spermaceti candles (America’s first industry), merchants in Massachusetts and Rhode Island developed a thriving export trade, and the Americans came to dominate the industry worldwide for two centuries.
Whaling thus evolvedinto a full-time occupation for a discreet caste of marinerson Nantucket and adjacent parts of New England and New York. Scrimshaw would eventually become an integral component of the distinctive whaling culture that resulted.
Nevertheless, it took a century and more for conducive circumstances to congealbefore the emergence of scrimshaw. At the outset, sperm whales were plentiful in the Atlantic, so the whaling grounds were comparatively nearby — offshore adjacent to New England itself, around the Azores Islands, on the coasts of Brazil, Patagonia, and southern Africa, and so on. Whaling voyages were a matter of weeks, eventually a few months, rarely longer. It was not until the 1790s, after England, France, and (briefly) Nova Scotia had also entered the sperm whaling trade, that declining whale stocks and increasing demand for product pushed the fishery around Cape Horn into the Pacific (with England in the vanguard), and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. 6 At this point, whaling voyages were becoming so protracted that the outward and homeward passages were each longer than entire Atlantic voyages had been only a few years earlier. Longer voyages required larger crews, to man enough boats to take sufficient quantities of oil to render the longer voyages profitable, because productivity and yield ratios must be substantially higher when five or six months of a voyage are consumed in the outward and homeward passages. Longer voyages also required larger vessels, to house the crew, store the gear, and stow the oil. Over-manning of the ship itself, idle periods on long passages, and opportunities for boredom all increased dramatically, hand-in-hand.
However, just as the stage was set for the creative use of leisure hours — just when whalemen would have benefited from being encouraged to make scrimshaw out of the teeth and bone— other factors of Pacific navigation intervened. China traders wanted sperm whale teeth for barter in Polynesia to obtain goods that could be exchanged in Canton for tea, silk, ceramics, and other high-value merchandise. So whale teeth became a byproduct commodity that contributed to the profitability of the hunt. Whaling merchants could sell the good-sized teeth to China trade merchants in Salem, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; the teeth were simply too valuable to let the whalers keep them for their own frivolous diversions. Shipboard journal-keeping, recreational drawing, and transcribing of songs and poems began to flourish in the whalefishery of the late 18th and early 19th centuries on a larger scale than ever before, spurred by idle time. The moment was right for scrimshaw too, but the teeth were not yet available.
In the increasingly productive American whale fishery of the very late Colonial and early Federal eras there had been some early efforts at whalemen’s scrimshaw (though the word itself had not yet emerged). Some straightedges of sperm whale panbone, and of wood trimmed with panbone, have been attributed to this era, also a few fids (sailors’marlinspikes) and tool handles, and possibly also a swift (yarn winder) or two, though the dating of these early manifestations has not been definitively corroborated. The first known pictorial work on sperm whale bone—in this case, polished panbone (jawbone) — is a corset busk or mangle made by a Cape Cod whale- man living temporarily in Nova Scotia, boldly inscribed with the stipple-engraved maker’s name “ALDEN SEARS,” his initials “A.S.,” the date 1766, and stipple-engraved pictures of a shallop- like schooner and a well defined whaleboat with the crew harpooning a sperm whale (Kendall Collection, New Bedford Whaling Museum). A sperm whale ivory fid inscribed “Foster” and dated 1774 (Flayderman, 119), and a panbone straightedge (Kendall), signed thrice circa 1811- 19 by “Nathl. Shiverick,” a shipbuilder and merchant of Falmouth, Massachusetts, evidence that even by then mariners were making personal objects from salvaged pieces of bone, while a tooth scratched with a geometric design dated “1776” and signed “Nathl Healy” (Flayderman, p. 90) may be the earliest manifestation of a genre that would flourish in the next generation or two, when scrimshaw would become a regular feature of the whaling trade.
The American China Trade, pioneered in the 1780s, was a complicated network of routes and destinations involving extensive barter in the Pacific to obtain goods marketable in Canton. By the time whalemen were plyingthe Pacific, the China merchants had discovered that some of these island cultures placed great value on sperm whale teeth, from which they made totemic, ceremonial, and practical objects — notably the Fijian pendant necklace called tabua and the dis- tinctive “hook” necklace of Hawaiian royalty, called lei niho palaoa, each crafted from a single tooth. As the teeth could be obtained from whaling merchants in New England fairly cheaply (there being no other market for them), China traders bought them up for barter in Polynesia.
The China merchants’ specific instructions to Captain Caleb Reynolds, bound for Canton in 1815 in the Boston ship Sultan, forewarned that the Polynesian market for whale teeth may already be saturated: “Formerly the Whalemen considered them of little or no value, and perhaps by the time you might visit the Islands, the supply has been such that the Natives may esteem them less.”7 The owners’ prediction proved accurate, for not long after this — probably by the time the advance guard of the whaling fleet reached Hawaii in 1819 — a mounting surplus of teeth in the Pacific had seriously diminished their value as barter commodities. With no other markets on the horizon, the teeth became available in increasing quantities for the whalemen’s own use.
The whale tooth surplus and consequent crash has been attributed in part to the publication in 1815 of U.S. Navy Captain David Porter’s narrative of his War of 1812 exploits in the frigate Essex. 8 Charged with the task of disrupting British shipping, and the British South Sea whaling fleet in particular, thereby causing economic distress as well as diverting the Royal Navy from incursions against American shipping, Porter made the unilateral decision to follow the British whalers around Cape Horn into the Pacific and to conduct his depredations there. His efforts were successful throughout most of the war until he was eventually cornered and captured by a British squadron at Valparaiso in 1814. His memoir, published in 1815, inadvertently revealed the hitherto closely-held secret about the value of sperm whale teeth in Polynesia and the other Pacific islands. 9 The earliest date on what emerged over the next few years as the classic form of whalemen’s scrimshaw — a sperm whale tooth that has an engraved picture and (in this case) an inscription — is 1817. Contrary to popular expectation, this earliest for-sure manifestation is British, not American.
Scrimshaw
“In the Intervals of Taking Whales”
Whaleman Joshua Fillebrown Beane was a well educated fellow from Maine who went two voyages in the New Bedford bark Java 2d during 1860-69. On his first voyage, Manuel Enos, one of the greatest scrimshaw artists of all time, was first mate, on the second voyage he was captain, and it was under Enos’s tutelage and patronage that Beane underwent a meteoric rise from green hand to second mate, emerging as a seasoned professional who, ironically, never went whaling again. Years later he wrote a compelling account of his whaling experiences and remarked authoritatively on the value of “scrimshoning” as a “very interesting way of passing dull hours on board a whaler”:
This word, coined by the whaling fraternity for their private use, encompasses the making of everything from a plain ivory bodkin to the most elaborate inlay work imaginable. Boxes of fancy woods of different kinds inlaid with other woods, with pearl cut into diamonds, squares, crescents, and leaves, with silver, ivory, and bone, in designs simple or elaborate, as the taste of the maker might suggest…. Canes were made of ebony or other wood, of white bone from the jaw of the sperm whale, and of ivoryfrom the teeth of the same animal….Swifts were manufactured of bone and ivory, riveted with silver wire, designed especially for a sweetheart or wife…. Whales’ teeth were ornamented with etchings and engravings in colors, many of them of more than ordinary merit.10
Scrimshaw is one of those odd, indigenous seafaring terms that came ashore and waxed generic. On shipboard in the mid 19th century, scrimshaw — alternatively, scrimshank, scrimshander, scrimshant, scrimshone, andother variants of the noun and verb — referredto the various decorative and practical objects that whalers made to while away their leisure hours at sea, mostly intended as mementos of the voyage and especially as gifts for loved ones at home. Moreover — as distinct from knot tying, rope fancywork (macramé), woolwork, ship models, wood carving, drawing, and other sailor arts — scrimshawreferred to objectsmade from the hard byproducts of the whale hunt: sperm whale teeth, walrus tusks, skeletal bone, and baleen, often in combination with such other “found” materials as wood, mother of pearl, abalone, tortoise shell, coconut shell, coin silver, and other bits of metal.
Nobody knows for sure where the term scrimshaw came from: lexicographers disagree, etymologists are stumped, and a few hilariously implausible theories have been propounded. Self-anointed authorities in various genres have attempted to define the term, trace its origins and provenance, and forge some semblance of unanimity in its usage, and have credited the national origin and meaning of scrimshaw variously to Anglo-Saxon, Low German, Old Dutch, French, various American Indian, Eskimo, and Inuit languages, and even Chinese, but with little credible result. Meanwhile, the propriety of applying the term to the sundry ancillary art-forms with which scrimshaw has inadvertently become entangled has been controversial. Nor have the bluechip lexicographers been any more successful than the philological amateurs and armchair sophists. Dictionaries do not agree; and even if they did, dictionaries are notoriously inconclusive when it comes to deciphering technical terms that entered the mainstream of the English language from nautical usage or shipboard slang. The pages of whalemen’s shipboard journals have a jumble of different spellings, they are silent on the subject of etymology, and they provideno meaningful clues.In any case, by 1850 Rev. Henry T. Cheever could accurately claim that
Mux and skimshander are the general names by which they express the ways in which whalemen busy themselves when making passages, and in the intervals of taking whales, in working up sperm whales’ jaws and teeth and right whale bone into boxes, swifts, reels, canes, whips, folders, stamps, and all sorts of things, according to their ingenuity. (The Whale and His Captors, 1850)
Since Cheever’s time, mux has become extinct even in the whalemen’s vocabulary (it is rarely if ever encountered even in sailors’ journals). As Cheever himself remarks, “Had Noah Webster [the 19th-century American lexicographer] ever gone a whaling, he would have been able to add some five or six notable and genuine English words to his Dictionary, which may never be known off salt water unless we record them here.” By its ultimate disappearance in sailor parlance, mux illustrates the transient and evolving character of semi-technical terms in nautical jargon. In fact, in its early manifestations before the 1820s, scrimshaw originally referred not to the recreational activities of the mariners for their own benefit and enjoyment, but rather signified a form of “ship’s work”: the production of such implements as belaying pins, thole pins, tool handles, sheave blocks, and snatch blocks for use on the ship and boats.By and large, aside from the odd handtool, these becamethe property of the ship and the owners; that is, they were not personalsouvenirs for the seamen to take home. Sperm whalepanbone (jawbone), by reason of its density, workability, and tensile strength, is ideally suited to these applications—indeed better suited than most woods,and in much more plentifulsupply on a whaleship. On the 20th-century “industrial” factory-ships and shore-whaling stations, where machinery had taken over most of the laborious tasks formerly accomplished by hand, the whalers also extolled the self-lubricating virtues of hand tools made out of sperm whale bone: “When a fid was no longer supple and got dried out from hard use and exposure to salt air and salt water — that is, when it was no longer oily and self-lubricating — one simply threw it overboard and made another from the ample supply of bone on board.”11
On the other hand, to practitioners aboard 20th-century factory-ships or whaling stations, scrimshaw usually had a narrowermeaning, limited to the scratching or engraving of pictures on sperm whale teeth. In this context the term would have excluded carving or relief-carving ivory or bone, for which there were other words in English and Norwegian, and certainly excluded work on sea shells or tortoiseshell. Conversely, nowadays scrimshaw is often too loosely used, to refer to any kind of scratching or carving on found materials — not only marine ivory, bone, and baleen, but also seashells, tortoiseshell, antler, and even cow horn, cow bone, or wood.
However, it is the original shipboard genre that is the focus of most private and institutional collections, the classic era of American and British South Sea whaling in sailing ships: the epoch that in the popular mind is epitomized in Moby-Dick. In this historical context, scrimshaw and its many variants and misspellings came broadly to refer to thedecorative and practical creations of sailors in their leisure hours at sea, using the hard byproducts of the whale hunt.
The fundamental distinguishing criterion of scrimshaw is that it must contain whale ivory, walrus ivory, cetacean or pinniped skeletal bone, or baleen — or some combination of these — no matter what other materials may also be involved. The secondary criterion is that it be made by whalemen themselves, by other sailors, at sea or ashore, or by others who were participants in or were firsthand eyewitnesses to the whale hunt. Scrimshaw-making is thus at root an endemic, occupational pastime of whalemen, whaling wives, and others at sea, widely practiced in the 19th and early 20th centuries — and by extension, the Indigenous artisans of Arctic subsistence cultures using analogous materials. After the decline of sailing ships and hand-whaling, scrim- shaw was taken up and adapted by a host of latter-day, 20th- and 21st-century practitioners, utilizing similar materials and analogous methods. Their works can only be of derivative and secondary historical value (as they are not firsthand products by eyewitnesses to the occupations from which the raw materials originated); but judged by aesthetic standards, in many cases this modernwork is more than merelyimitative and constitutes an authentic dedication to the original purpose of scrimshaw: to create Art.
1 Adapted from the book by Stuart M. Frank, Ingenious Contrivances, Curiously Carved: Scrimshaw in the New Bedford Whaling Museum (Boston: David R. Godine, 2013).
2 A substantial number of ornamental objects are known to have been produced by medieval European artisans out of walrus ivory and whale skeletal bone, notably carvings illustrating sacred and mythological subjects. The failure of some old European museum records to distinguish cetacean and pinniped ivory and bone, on the one hand, from elephant and other analogues, suggests that there may actually be a much larger body of such works than has hitherto been identified: an indeterminate number of pieces may have escaped detection as such by curators and collectors unfamiliar with the distinguishing characteristics of various species of ivory and bone. Even the existing inventory of identified objects suggests an extensive trade with the Norse hunters, subsidiary to the export of whale meat and oil mentioned in the Norse Sagas, the King’s Mirror, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Between the 10th and 14th centuries, monasteries in East Anglia and Denmark produced fabulous votive artworks, most notably the so-called “Confessor Cross” or “Bury St. Edmund’s Cross” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and numerous panels and boxes made of walrus ivory relief-carved with religious scenes. Artisans in Paris and Cologne made walrus ivory gaming pieces (discs 3-4 inches / 7-10 cm in diameter); chessmen were carved out of walrus ivory in Spain, England, and elsewhere, including the famous Lewis Horde (British Museum); handles for swords and daggers were produced in Persia and Byzantium (Turkey), boxes of various kinds in Russia, and so on. There are major collections in the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum (London), Merseyside Museum (Liverpool), The Hermitage (St. Petersburg), the national museums of Norway and Denmark, the Vatican museum, the Metro- politan Museum of Art (with votive ivory largely gleaned from the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection), and the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore).
3 John R. Bockstoce suggests that “demand for walrus ivory probably ceased during the fifteenth century,” likely as a result of post-Crusade advances in trade with Africa and the Levant that “might have made elephant ivory more accessible, reducing the value of walrus tusks” (High Latitude, North Atlantic, p. 94).
4 More than a handful of such boxes of slightly later vintage, both oval and cylindrical, survive in the Netherlands and the East Friesian Islands of Germany, the birthplace and home of many commanders of Dutch whaleships. Another type of implement made contemporaneously out of skeletal bone by whalemen is the mangle or mangle board (mangelplank or mangelbrett), a common household article used for folding cloth. Like the kapdoos, it was intended for domestic use by womenfolk back home and, like whalemen’s scrimshaw in the 19th century, it was usually made as a gift. Some of these objects were votive offerings, of which examples are held in the treasuries of East Friesian churches as well as in the collections of the local museum on the island of Fyr and in the Flensburg Museum on the mainland.
5 All of the other species of other great whales are mysticetes, which in place of teeth have plates of keratin called baleen, with which they filter rather than chomp or chew their food.
6 Nantucket expatriates were the principals in the short-lived whaling trade of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and figured prominently in founding and prosecuting the South Sea whale fisheries of Milford Haven, London, Bordeaux, and Le Havre.
7 Quoted from family papers formerly belonging to Emily Reynolds Baker of Omaha, Nebraska, reported by Mary Malloy, Boston Men on the Northwest Coast (1998), later acquired by Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Mass.
8 David Porter, Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean… in the United States frigate Essex, in the years 1812, 1813, and 1814………… (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815 and 1822). Not to be confused with the Nantucket whaleship Essex, later
famously stove and sunk by a whale in 1821.
9 Documented in my article originally titled “‘Haberdashing’: The Origins of Engraved Pictorial Scrimshaw,” The Magazine Antiques, October 1992, adapted on this website as a separate article on “Origins.” See also my article “Scrimshaw: Occupational Art of the Whale-Hunters” in Maritime Life and Traditions (London, March 2000).
10 J.F. Beane, From Forecastle to Cabin: The Story of a cruise in many seas, taken from a journal kept each day, wherein was recorded the happenings of a voyage around the world in pursuit of whales (New York: Editor Publishing Co.), 1905.
11 Private communication, Captain Albert Veldkamp, former chief mate of the Dutch floating-factory whaleship Willem Barentsz and Willem Barentsz II, 1946-60; aboard R/V Professor Molchanov at Jan Mayen Island, June 2003.
