New Bedford, on the southern coast of Massachusetts, was the most important commercial whaling center in the mid-nineteenth century. American whaleships crisscrossed the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic, forging connections with diverse communities via trade, crew recruitment, and settlement. This history shaped the collections of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which aside from photography, fine and decorative arts, global material culture, rare books, and natural history specimens, contains the largest collection of scrimshaw in the world, as well as an impressive trove of other Pacific and Arctic carvings.
While New England scrimshaw is the most familiar craft to make use of byproducts of the whale hunt, it is just one of many marine ivory–carving practices from across the Pacific world. Until November 11, the Whaling Museum is presenting The Wider World and Scrimshaw, an exhibition that demonstrates the rich interconnectedness between scrimshaw and other forms of Pacific material culture in the 1800s. Putting scrimshaw in conversation with other forms of carving allows us to ask questions about influence, exchange, and tradition. Who were whalers and who made scrimshaw? How did cross-cultural encounters influence the items produced? How do people relate to one another through carved material culture and marine mammals?
Many Native communities around the Pacific—Oceania, the Pacific Northwest, and the Arctic—have cosmologies related to whales, distinctive traditions involving marine mammals, and vibrant carving styles. They were also affected by colonization—specifically American cultural influence—and commercial whaling. Starting in the 1830s, far-flung peoples came into direct contact with whaling vessels from New Bedford traversing the Pacific to New Zealand and Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, to harvest toothed and baleen whales, seals, walrus, and other marine animals. The whaleships stopped at regular locations within this vast territory, establishing colonies, whaling stations, and trade networks, and picking up supplies, materials, and crew. As a result, the crews, from harpooners to greenhands, were exceptionally diverse. In the exhibition is scrimshaw made by Black, Cape Verdean, Azorean, New England, Māori, and Australian Aboriginal makers depicting Arctic or Pacific Island landscapes or identifying where whales were taken, as in “near the Galapagos” or “near Juan Fernandez.”
A rather common whale baleen busk opens the exhibition (Fig. 3). Installed with an Austral Islands paddle, and a Marshall Islands navigation chart, and another busk in chip-carved wood, the baleen busk raises questions about who we think made scrimshaw. Busks are intimate items inserted at the front of a corset to stiffen it. They are often carved, decorated, or inscribed with messages, and traditionally given by men to women. This particular baleen busk is incised with a house, tree, and anchor—rather conventional motifs for such creations. However, it also includes an inscribed Pacific islands navigation chart, in the form of curved and diagonal lines denoting ocean swells and wave patterns. Navigation is a treasured form of cultural knowledge, and integral to life in the Pacific. Navigators memorized charts when they went to sea. By the mid-1800s, 20 percent of crew members on New Bedford whaling vessels were Pacific Islanders. The name “John Gibbs” is inscribed on the back of this busk. Was Gibbs the maker or was he given the busk as a gift? Was the maker from New England or the Pacific? How did he learn to carve and what traditions informed his design? Was the navigation chart from his own culture, or is it a record of cultural exchange? While the answers to these questions will likely never be known, it is tantalizing to consider how maritime mobility made scrimshaw a truly global art form practiced by individuals of wide-ranging origins.
The piece in Figures 2 and 4 demonstrates how a maker’s biography can complicate straightforward expectations about scrimshaw. It was engraved by Manuel Enos, who was born in 1826 in Pico in the Azores. At the age of twenty-two, like many Azorean crew, he joined a whaleship, the Sheffield, out of Cold Spring, New York,1 when the vessel stopped in Pico for supplies. Returning to the US at the end of the journey, Enos married, started a family in Cold Spring, and shipped out on whaleships from there and New Bedford. Traveling to Talcahuano, Chile, in 1886 as first mate on a New Bedford vessel, he resigned, changed his name to Manuel Ignacio Enos de Macedo, took over captaining a Chilean-owned former Massachusetts whaleship, married again, had nine children, and died in 1915.2
While aboard the New Bedford bark Java off the western coast of Australia in 1862, Enos engraved the biblical story of Rebecca at the Well on a sperm whale tooth that had been scraped and polished to make a smooth surface for decorating, much like the elephant ivory sections used for portrait miniatures. Born on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, finding employment whaling, and forging a new life on the western coast of South America, Enos serves as an example of the mobility of individuals from coastal communities in the 1800s.
Engraved whale teeth like the one Enos decorated are considered the iconic scrimshander’s artform and the pinnacle of whaling art. Some teeth had multiple owners and were used as tabua—ceremonial objects in Fijian society.3 Fijians did not hunt whales; the only way they acquired teeth was by finding a beached whale or trading with whalers. One tabua demonstrates the syncretism of traditional Fijian beliefs with Christianity; inscribed in its cavity is the Lord’s Prayer (Figs. 5, 5a). Others adapt traditional Māori tā moko tattoos, reproduce the engraving of “A New Zealand Chief” from Captain Cook’s first voyage, or show views of Huahine in Polynesia or Honolulu.
The tooth in Figure 6 was likely executed by an Australian Aboriginal whaler, perhaps from Eden on the South Coast of New South Wales. Whaling ships operated around Eden starting in 1791, and in 1828 the first shore whaling venture—in which whaleboats were launched from land-based whaling stations rather than ships—employed local Thawa Aboriginal people. The tooth illustrates six men sailing a prau, a type of traditional deckless boat in the Pacific. One wields a harpoon, as a sperm whale lurks beneath. On the other side, a man stands aloft with a boomerang in flight. The outlines are distinctively patterned, recalling dreamtime imagery, through which Aboriginal artists seek to represent nonlinear and anachronistic dreamtime stories. Does this tooth represent the artist’s dreaming, or a lived experience? Together the tabua and “Dreamtime tooth” demonstrate how whalers traveled across the Pacific, highlight individual exploits or identities, and—in their material form—remind us of the physical being of the whale.
Crew members also made utilitarian objects like fids and needle cases from whalebone. A fid, or rope-working tool, was an integral part of any sailor’s work kit, along with sail-making needles, hooks, marlinespikes, and needles and thread for mending clothing. One unusual fid likely had at least two makers (Fig. 8). Fashioned plain from a skeletal whalebone by a sailor, the fid was then decorated with design elements typical of the Marquesas Islands, making it a rare example of cross-cultural hybridization and suggesting either a shipboard collaboration between crew members from diverse backgrounds or an island trade. Another popular trade good was the sewing kit. One example, consisting of three pieces of walrus ivory carved by an Iñupiaq craftsman in the shape of a seal on one side and walrus on the other, was sold to Captain William Allen around 1905 on Alaska’s North Slope. Allen brought it home to New Bedford as a souvenir of his time in the north (Fig. 7).
The first American whaleship crossed the Bering Straits to hunt bowhead whales in the Arctic in 1848. By 1890, East Coast fleets heading to the western Arctic began overwintering in San Francisco, Utqiagvik, or at Herschel Island in Canada to await the spring whaling season. The native Iñupiaq engaged in brisk trade with whaling crews, helped supply fleets with food, and were actively recruited as whalemen. Iñupiaq had been carving on walrus ivory for thousands of years, often using a bow drill to make circular impressions and other marks as seen on tools, armor plates, drills themselves, and a collection of small animal figurines (Fig. 10). Walrus tusks with a hole drilled through the tip for ease of carrying were acquired by whalers from Iñupiaq hunters and carved on shipboard. One carved with floral motifs and blooming roses belies the harsh climate of the Arctic environs (Fig. 9), while another includes scenes of Rio de Janeiro.
Items made for the souvenir trade in Nome, Alaska, for settlers and tourists drawn north during the 1898 gold rush developed from these earlier adaptations. They demonstrate creative modifications to traditional forms to meet changing market conditions. The Nome school of Iñupiaq carvers incised walrus tusks with figurative imagery of arctic animals, along with quirky decorative motifs such as over-sized houseflies, human hands, and non-native species, such as Indian elephants. Their works make sly commentary on the illusionism of carving through the use of heavy shading, and include components done in relief and pieces that project outward. The carvers also make reference to their works’ material support by picturing living walruses and elephants, along with seals and whales, and hint at the trade in Native souvenirs that supported the Iñupiaqs’ livelihood by inscribing the location where each piece was made on maps of the coastline. Angokwazhuk, known as “Happy Jack” and one of the most skilled carvers in Nome during this period, was introduced to the art of scrimshaw by New England whaling captain Hartson Bodfish (1862–1945), who met him on Little Diomede Island and invited him onto his whaleship.4 By 1900, when he settled in Nome, Angokwazhuk was familiar with US scrimshaw techniques, merging them with his Iñupiaq traditions to create dynamic and visually arresting imagery for the burgeoning tourist market (Figs. 11, 14).5
Cribbage boards, carved timepieces, letter openers, salt and pepper shakers, and umbrella handles made in Nome speak to tourist interests and highlight how artisans adapted to demand as tastes shifted. Likewise, jagging wheels, or crimpers designed to run around the perimeter of a pie before it went into the oven, often included materials acquired at sea, like abalone, ebony, tortoiseshell, or the bones, teeth, and baleen of marine mammals. The small example in Figure 13, made of both whale and walrus ivory, suggests a walrus head surfacing on the water, evoking Arctic fauna far from New England.
Ladles made from coconut husks were another common form of scrimshaw found across the United States in the 1800s, where they were used in both domestic and industrial settings. Coconut dippers were simple—half a coconut shell attached to a handle—but their construction and materials varied widely. Along with the coconut shell, dippers in the exhibition include walrus ivory, whale ivory, and elephant ivory; whale bone; abalone; tortoiseshell; rare woods; baleen; and copper and silver. They were made by whalers, sailors, Iñupiaq carvers, and Pacific Islanders, underscoring the history of colonialism and imperialism in the region, as well as the extent of maritime trade. One with a coconut shell bowl overlaid with a band of silver at the rim, a heart-shaped mounting washer of tortoiseshell, and a turned walrus ivory handle vividly showcases the global circulation of materials in the 1800s (Fig. 12). Who participated in the collection and trade of these various materials? Who carved the ivory, fitted the silver, and shaped the coconut shell? Who hunted the walrus and the sea turtle? Could these items be collaborations between growers, harvesters, and carvers, each bringing different cultural knowledge to the production of an item for trade, personal use, or sale?
Featuring more than three hundred items, The Wider World and Scrimshaw encourages audiences to see scrimshaw as one of many active carving practices that emerged in cultural contact zones across the Pacific world between 1770 and today, and to better understand the rich traditions that developed, collided, and were shaped by various forces during this dynamic period.
1 “Manuel Enos” entry in the database at whalinghistory.org. 2 Stuart Frank, “The Many Mysteries of Manuel Enos,” The Bulletin from Johnny Cake Hill, Fall 2009, pp. 16–19; Breaking Boundaries, at cshwhalingmuseum.org. 3 Maggie M. Cao, “Maritime Media and the Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal18, vol. 12 (Fall 2021), at journal18.org. 4 “Chasing the bowhead, as told by Captain Hartson H. Bodfish,” New York Public Library, General Research Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections, digitalcollections.nypl.org, accessed May 24, 2024; Deanna Paniataaq Kingston, “Arctic/Subarctic” tab on online exhibition webpage for Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, at americanindian.si.edu. 5 Christopher Green, “Angokwazhuk (Happy Jack) and Guy Kakarook,” edblogs.columbia.edu.
NAOMI SLIPP is the Douglas and Cynthia Crocker Endowed Chair for the Chief Curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
