Looking at scrimshaw from a Pacific perspective.
Scrimshaw on Nantucket
Nantucket, in cultural memory, will always be the island of whaling. But in spite of Herman Melville’s panegyrics, it was the center of the whaling world for only a brief historical moment.
Curiously Carved: Pictorial Sources of Scrimshaw
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Contrary to persistent stereotypes characterizing seamen in the Age of Sail as a barbaric rabble-unruly, illiterate ruffians devoted to the pursuit of disreputable vices-nineteenth-century Yankee whalemen were characteristically literate and, as a class, avid readers. Whaling voyages were matters of two, three, or even four years’ duration, including months at sea between landfalls; …