Scrimshaw is the folk art of the whaler and is particularly associated with the USA, certainly the largest number of pieces have their origin among the crews of the 19th century whaling fleets sailing out of the eastern seaboard of North America. Decorated sperm whale teeth are the most abundant items but there are also pieces made from whale jaw bone, baleen and walrus tusk. Confusingly, baleen, which was not bone but keratin (a horny substance like finger nails and hooves) was universally known to English language speakers as 'whalebone'. It is this substance, taken from the mouths of Biscay and Greenland Right Whales, which was used to make the earliest true scrimshaw in the 17th century. A number of very rare oval caskets or ditty boxes decorated with designs scratched on the surface originate among the whaling communities of the Netherlands and Germany.
In Europe there was no special name for carved and decorated whalebone or pieces of bone and walrus ivory acquired by the Arctic whalers, it was all just part of the long seamen's tradition of carving and whittling. This remained so well into the 19th century and Christopher
Thomson, reminiscing in 1847 of his voyage as a carpenter aboard the Hull whaler Duncombe at Greenland in 1820 simply refers to being 'often employed in what the sailors dignified by the title of "bone carving", which art consisted in cutting on the bone, with a penknife, divers ciphers of the initials of their sweethearts, with borders of diamonds, squares and Vandykes, or "tooth ornaments"; the interstices were filled with chalk and oil, which brought out the pattern; as in addition to the given round of ornaments, I could add panels of whales, ships, birds, and the Prince of Wales' feathers - the latter was a stock ornament at that period; besides, if it had not been so, what tar, in 1820, could be so disloyal as to forget the Prince Regent, afterwards George the Fourth, of "pious memory"?
Figure 8. Costume piece in the style of Moses Denning.
For these ornate decorations I received sundry mess-pots of grog.' This passage also tells us that scrimshaw was not necessarily an art universally practised among a whaler's crew but perhaps more likely, certainly aboard the Arctic whalers, to be executed by one of the specialists like the carpenter. He would have tools and particular skills, and, perhaps more importantly, more time at his disposal than the average crew man. The situation was rather different for the vessels prosecuting the sperm whale fishery in the south Atlantic and the Pacific. The voyages were more protracted and frequently involved a circumnavigation of the globe lasting two, three or even four years, during which everyone had long periods with little to do. Scrimshaw therefore became a pastime, for some almost an industry, to relieve the long intervals of tedium sailing between whaling grounds.
There are a handful of pieces which can be dated to the late 18th century, the earliest dated 17th October 1789, but there is a scarcity of pictorial sperm whale scrimshaw before the 1830s. The reason for this may be the high value the Pacific islanders attached to sperm teeth which were traded, often through Chinese intermediaries, until, with the increasing size of the overall catch by the ever expanding fleets, the market was saturated.
American whalers' logbooks are usually more informative about the activities of the crew than the staccato, routine entries, found in their British counterparts, and it is here we first find references to 'scrimson' (1837), 'scrimshorn' (1843) and even 'squimshon' (1861). Aboard the Orion, of Rochester, Mass, 14th March 1821 the log reports 'all hands aboard scrimshonting— no whales & hard times'. The publication of Herman Melville's Moby Dick in 1851, the saga of the hunt for the great white whale, brought scrimshaw into the literary domain and knowledge of the whaler's pastime to the reading public. He used the form 'skrimshander' to describe the 'lively sketches of whales and whaling scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on sperm whale teeth, or ladies' busks Whalebone and other like skrimshander articles'. It was much later, in 1897, with the publication of the Cruise of the Cachalot by Frank Bullen, that the modern form 'scrimshaw' was finally established, though it is found in logbooks of the 1880s. The word and knowledge of the folk art spread universally through one of the most popular seafaring books of all time, which remains in print to this day.
The origin of the term is still disputed but the answer probably lies in Joseph Wright's The English Dialect Dictionary (1898 etc) which lists the word 'scrimption' (also 'scrimtion', 'scrimshin', and 'scrimshuns') meaning a very small piece, a miserable pittance. This relates directly to scrimp, to stint or dole out in scanty measure. Wright records 'scrimption' from Ireland and North America and the sense of the word 'scrimshaw' and its variants can therefore reasonably be derived from the way in which scraps and otherwise unwanted pieces of whalebone and ivory were doled out to the crew at the discretion of the master and his officers. The master of the Henry, 1820-3, (New Haven, Connecticut), was very upset when two of the crew sawed a piece of a jaw bone he was hoarding and it is clear from George Attwater that scrimshaw was well established in the whaling fleet, and says 'other ships make a good many trinkits out of jawbone'; references in this journal are to jaw bone and the baleen of the Southern Right whale, rather than teeth. On 30th May, 'the boatsteerers & most of the ships company are employed working bone every opertunity they can get. This scrimpshawing buisiness gose by fits and starts but I think the jagging falk [fork] feavour has not raged so strong as it does at present.' This is the earliest recorded usage and the scrimp element is unambiguous. Elsewhere the master, Capt Coffin, is said to have scrimped us on our provisions', as he had earlier with a jaw bone he was reserving for himself, though at one he is described as 'grinding fancy shell' from the California coast, rather than joining in the scrimshawing. It may be noted that there is no connection with the surname of Scrimshaw, which is simply an English variant of the Scottish Scrimgeour.
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