Scrimshaw: A Man's Medium

Marina and I shared lobster rolls and mimosas a few times during my trip to Massachusetts.

I met Marina Wells at a design shop in Cape Cod and we instantly hit it off. Marina is working on her PhD in American and New England Studies and is really interested in gendered materiality throughout history, studying artistic media like scrimshaw and how homosocial male environments affect the creative work that is produced within them.

Before I met Marina, I had heard of scrimshaw but didn’t really know much about it. I asked her to write a few words about scrimshaw, its history, and what’s so special about this unique and storied art form.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. oil industry was strong, but looked different from today’s: men took years-long, transoceanic trips aimed at butchering aquatic giants to boil them down. Their object of desire was whale oil, used at home to light lamps and lubricate machines. Yet satisfied sailors, having filled a ship with oil far out in the Pacific, turned to other pursuits. Namely, they gave new life to the old bones of their catch.

Scrimshaw describes the transformation of ivory and bone into art and other objects by whalemen’s hands. The process produced incredibly varied forms, attesting to the remarkable versatility of the men that created it, as well as the malleability of the medium itself. In both form and function it might be likened to media as varied as canvas, marble, and wood.

A typical piece of scrimshaw is a polished, embellished sperm whale tooth. These teeth tend to sit perfectly in the palm of a hand, making them a convenient canvas to caress and to carve. Artists sometimes scratched scenes from life – ports and seascapes – but more often their imaginations were outlined by the contents of the printed materials they carried aboard. In any case, the context of maritime homosociality framed what whalemen chose to carve, so that their sculptures often became performances of masculinity in material form.

Yet the bare surface of a polished tooth tells a story of its own. When filed down, its initially rough surface reveals waves of cemental rings that wander like a wood grain or marble. These qualities are often ignored by both carvers and their enthusiasts, but endure as one of the most beautiful parts of the medium. Much like scars or freckles under tattooed skin, they are inked over and forgotten.

While ivory’s scale was convenient for carving, whalemen saved jaw bones as well. A ship’s carpenter – aboard to assemble casks, repair the ship, and the like – was probably responsible for dividing a jaw bone into boards called panbone. Far wider and straighter, panbone lent itself to larger-scale works of scrimshaw, performing the work of canvas. It could also be turned on a lathe or cobbled together to create all kinds of sailor’s tools, canes, or other gifts for their terrestrial lovers.

Whalemen were not nearsighted. Their very profession was a long-term investment. However, they may not have considered how their bones would age. Patina often develops in beautiful, unexpected ways, and the shapes of thin pieces of panbone tend to take on a life of their own, too. Planes of panbone often curl, buckle, or split due to irregular drying. Like most things, these old bones succumb to the process of aging.

In addition to changing unpredictably, whalebone is gritty. A seemingly smooth surface features tiny dark marks, grooves called haversian canals. These channels once supplied the leviathan’s bones with blood, in the exact same process that keeps humans alive.

Just as whalebone can never be completely smoothed of the rough stuff at its center, neither can the history of the whaling industry. Scrimshaw needn’t be understood as the antithesis to the “save the whales” campaigns; instead, it must shift to be reexamined in a different light. After the 1859 Pennsylvania oil boom, illumination was produced through different means, and cartoons appeared where whales partied and praised petroleum. While the carvers and killers might have enjoyed scrimshaw as a trophy of a bloody masculine pursuit, we might also come to understand it as a tactile reminder of our – the market’s, the world’s – ability to change.

Grand Ball Given By the Whales in Honor of the Discovery of the Oil Wells in Pennsylvania. Source: Lehigh University | The Vault at Pfaff’s.

From Nolan:

This is the first of many pieces that will be written by guest contributors, and I’m thankful that Marina is the first. If you’re an expert in an interesting material or design/building technique and you’d like to write something about it, feel free to reach out.

Marina WellsSeptember 25, 2019