Scrimshaw: "Ingenious contrivances… in the hours of ocean leisure"
by Stuart M. Frank (New Bedford Whaling Museum)
Originally prepared for AntiquesAmerica.com.

Definitions
Scrimshaw is one of those odd, indigenous seafaring terms that came ashore and waxed generic. On shipboard in the middle nineteenth century, scrimshaw referred to 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 rope fancywork, woolwork, ship models, and other sailor arts – scrimshaw referred to objects made 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, shell, and coin silver.

To a modern, twentieth-century factory-ship whaler, scrimshaw usually conveyed a much narrower meaning, limited to the scratching or engraving of pictures on sperm-whale teeth: in this context the term would have excluded carving or relief-carving of ivory or bone, for which there were other words in English and Norwegian; and it would certainly have excluded work on sea shells or tortoise shell. Nowadays, scrimshaw is often loosely used to refer to any kind of scratching or carving on found materials – not only marine ivory, bone, and baleen, but also tortoise shell, antler, and even cow horn and cow bone.

But it is the original shipboard genre that is the focus of most private and institutional collections – the classic Yankee whaling era, the age of Moby Dick. In this context, scrimshaw (and its many variants, and misspellings) came broadly to refer to the decorative and practical creations of whalemen and other sailors in their leisure hours at sea, using the hard byproducts of the whale hunt. Nobody knows for sure where the term came from: lexicographers disagree, etymologists are stumped, and a few hilariously implausible theories have been propounded. The pages of the whalemen’s shipboard journals are silent on the subject and provide no meaningful clues. In any case, by 1850 Rev. Henry T. Cheever could accurately claim that

Since Cheever’s time, the mux part seems to have become extinct even in the whalers’ vocabulary (mux is rarely if ever encountered even in sailors’ journals). As Cheever himself remarks, "Had Noah Webster 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 very presence and ultimate disappearance in sailor parlance, mux illustrates the transient and evolving character of any such semi-technical term in nautical jargon. In fact, in its first manifestations on Yankee whaleships in 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, and sheeve blocks for use on the ship and boats. By and large, aside from the odd hand tool, these became the property of the ship and the owners; that is, they were not personal souvenirs for the seamen to take home. Sperm whale panbone (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 plentiful supply on shipboard. On the twentieth-century 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 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" (Captain Albert Veldkamp, former chief mate of the floating-factory whaleship Willem Barentsz of Amsterdam, 1946-60).

Prehistory of the Scrimshaw Genre
Scrimshaw is a younger art than many people suppose: for market reasons, it did not arise full blown until after the Napoleonic Wars. Whales were vigorously hunted for meat and oil by Norse ("Viking") and Basque mariners in medieval times. Pelagic, deep-sea whaling, pioneered by the Basques in the sixteenth century or earlier, emerged as an organized commercial "fishery" in Dutch, British, German, and Scandinavian hands in the early seventeenth century; the Dutch, who acquired their whaling technology directly from Basque hirelings, soon became dominant. The principal species hunted was the right whale, both the northern variety found in Arctic and sub-Arctic waters off Norway, Spitsbergen, Jan Mayen, Greenland, and the Davis Strait; and the kindred southern variety, encountered in the Bay of Biscay and all the way across to Labrador. 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 by this time that it was mostly discarded in the process of flensing). A secondary object was baleen – the burly plates of carotin that the toothless mysticete or so-called baleen whales have in their mouths in place of teeth. Baleen had myriad commercial uses in fashion and industry; meanwhile, walrus ivory retained commercial value even for the Dutch and English whalers. But the bones of whales and walruses were characteristically drained and boiled for the oil, then discarded as worthless.

In medieval and Renaissance times, walrus tusks were a viable byproduct of the Norse hunt. (Whale and walrus skeletal bone, too crude for export, was often turned to practical domestic purposes by the Norse themselves.) Walrus ivory was distributed throughout Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East as a cheaper but satisfactory substitute for elephant ivory, and was used by artisans not only for such practical implements as tool handles and crossbow veneers, but for decorative inlay and notably for game markers, chessmen, and ditty boxes. The center of production of such secular articles was Cologne, but walrus ivory dagger hilts from Turkey and Persia, chessmen made in Spain and Britain, household implements from Scandinavia, boxes from Russia, and virtu objects from Venice also survive in significant numbers. Even more notable among medieval uses of walrus ivory and marine-mammal skeletal bone are votive works – altar pieces, crosses, panels, and miniatures depicting the Crucifixion or Lives of the Saints, carved in relief or in full round. Most of these sacred objects appear to have been made in monasteries of East Anglia and Denmark in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. [Outstanding among the great collections of medieval ivory today are the British Museum (London); Victoria and Albert Museum (London); Merseyside Museum (Liverpool); The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); also the national museums of Norway and Denmark, the Hermitage (St. Petersburg), the Vatican Museum, and the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore).]

As marine ivory and bone retained a certain commercial value throughout this early period, these materials were not casually available to sailors for their hobby work. Likewise baleen, prized for an even wider variety of practical applications since classical antiquity. Writing in Latin about right whales in 1572, the great French naturalist, physician, and founder of modern dentistry Ambroise Paré succinctly characterizes some of the already age-old uses of baleen; and his English translator (1678) epitomizes the etymological source of the universal English misnomer for baleen, whalebone (which in German is fischbein, "fish bone"): "The Fins [sic] that stand forth of their mouths, which are commonly called Whale-bones, being dried and polished, serve to make Busks [quae Busta vocant] for Women, Whip-staves, and little Staves, as also to stiffen garments" (Opera, English translation [1678] of the Latin edition of 1582). The value of baleen was perpetually subject to dramatic fluctuations in ladies’ fashion and the market pressures of persistent surplus. Efforts of the Dutch and English whaling companies to develop additional uses for baleen to consume the inflow met with little success and were all but abandoned by 1641; thus, as it was of declining commercial value, baleen became intermittently available to mariners for their casual, personal use

Accordingly, the first objects that may justifiably be called whalemen’s scrimshaw are made of baleen. Two oval ditty boxes by an anonymous Rotterdam whaling commandeur, with tops and bottoms of wood, and baleen sides incised with images of ships, trees, and buildings, are dated 1631 (Kendall Whaling Museum, Sharon, Mass.; and Rijksmuseum Zuiderzeemuseum, Enkhuizen, The Netherlands). Several sailor-made baleen mangles, plaques, and boxes, a few other oval baleen boxes, and various decorative objects from North Holland and East Friesland (Germany), circa 1640-1740, are also known. Many of these were votive offerings in Friesian churches. But whaling voyages to the Arctic grounds were comparatively short, a single season at most, not inspiring or requiring the kinds of time-filling activities that emerged in the Yankee whale fishery of the nineteenth century (when the typical whaling voyage to the Pacific was a matter of two, three, or even four years). Thus, in this early era of European Arctic whaling, the making of such scrimshaw precursors was comparatively infrequent, seems to have transpired on shore (rather than on shipboard), and never achieved the kind of florescence that the sailor arts underwent in the nineteenth century.

Scrimshaw Genesis
In was sperm whaling, an indigenously American phenomenon, that ultimately occasioned the advent of scrimshaw. But even this was not immediate. The sperm whale is the only large odontocete, i.e., the only great whale that has teeth. 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 other secondary products. Hitherto known primarily from carcasses stranded on North European beaches, sperm whales were not known to inhabit the waters off New England until the early eighteenth century. Tradition ascribes the discovery to Captain Christopher Hussey of Nantucket in 1712: during a conventional right whaling cruise, he was blown out to sea and encountered sperm whales. The Nantucket colonists soon exploited the stock, tuning their already highly evolved whaling methods to accommodate the feisty sperm whale. Locals in Massachusetts and Rhode Island perfected sperm oil refinery and spermaceti candle manufacture (America’s first industry), developed thriving exports, and dominated the industry worldwide for the next 200 years. Whaling thus evolved into a full-time occupation for a discreet caste of whaler-mariners on Nantucket and adjacent parts of New England and New York. Scrimshaw would become an integral component of the distinctive whaling culture that resulted.

But it took a century and more for the right circumstances to congeal before scrimshaw could result. At the beginning, sperm whales were plentiful in the Atlantic, so the whaling grounds were comparatively nearby – off the Azores Islands, the coasts of Brazil, Patagonia, and southern Africa, and so on. Whaling voyages were a matter of weeks, perhaps 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), then, later, around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. This is the point at which 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 enough oil to render a long voyage profitable (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. Overmanning 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 whalers would have benefited from being encouraged to make scrimshaw out of the teeth and bone – other factors of Pacific navigation intervened. China traders wanted whale’s teeth for barter in Polynesia to obtain goods that could be exchanged in Canton for tea, silk, ceramics, and other high-value merchandise. As had been the case with baleen in the previous century, in the late eighteenth century teeth were a commodity integral to profitability of the hunt. The whaling merchants could sell large quantities of good-sized teeth to China trade merchants in Salem, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; the teeth were too valuable to let the whalers just keep them for their own frivolous diversions. Shipboard journal-keeping, recreational drawing, and transcribing of songs and poems flourished in the whale fishery of the 1790s on a larger scale than ever before, spurred by idle time. The moment was right for scrimshaw too, but teeth were not yet available.

Scrimshaw did not come about until the need for it was riper still, with whaling voyages even longer and ships even more overmanned. Just after the Napoleonic Wars, the commercial viability of whale’s teeth crashed. The publication of David Porter’s narrative of his War of 1812 exploits in the U.S. Frigate Essex in the Pacific, inadvertently revealed the closely-held secret about the value of whale’s teeth in Polynesia, also how to obtain them in the Galapagos Islands; and the market was soon saturated (see S. Frank, "The Origins of Engraved Pictorial Scrimshaw," in Antiques, 142:4 [October 1992], 510-521; and "Scrimshaw: Occupational Art of the Whale-Hunters," in Maritime Life and Traditions, #7 [March 2000], pp. 42-57).

Scrimshaw – The First Generation
Unfortunately, documentation of whaling in the post-Napoleonic era is murky and little is known about the earliest engraved scrimshaw. Contrary to what has often been written, it appears that the first pieces were of British, not American origin. The authenticity of a nicely engraved baleen busk dated 1816 (recently added to a private American collection) has not been substantiated. The earliest date on a piece that has been definitively authenticated is 1817 – an uncommonly large specimen inscribed, "This is the tooth of a sperm whale that was caught near the Galapagos Islands by the crew of the ship Adam [of London], and made 100 barrels of oil in the year 1817" (Kendall Whaling Museum #S-xxxx). (Happily, a contemporaneous sailor-made watercolor of the same vessel in almost the identical pose corroborates the veracity of the scrimshaw). Two smaller teeth with ship portraits and nautical scenes, one inscribed "Elizabeth / London / Packer" and signed "J. King," the other signed "J K," are attributed to a South Seas whaling captain J.S. King of London and Liverpool, active circa 1817-23 (Kendall Whaling Museum #xxxx and #xxx; S. Frank, Dictionary of Scrimshaw Artists, 1991, 79).

Also contrary to popular supposition, the famous scrimshaw pioneer, Frederick Myrick (1808-1862) of Nantucket, was not the first American to master the engraved scrimshaw genre. However, he was the first of any nationality to sign and date some of his scrimshaw (a practice that, unfortunately, was never universally adopted among scrimshaw artists, the overwhelming majority of whom remain anonymous). On his second whaling voyage, in the ship Susan of Nantucket during 1826-29, Myrick produced at least 36 engraved teeth, each bearing two highly proficient portraits of a single ship on the whaling grounds or homeward bound. Since the publication of Everett U. Crosby’s little treatise Susan’s Teeth and Much Ado About Scrimshaw in 1955, these have been collectively known as "Susan’s Teeth": 30 depicting the Susan, one of the Barclay of Nantucket, two of the Frances of New Bedford, and two of the Ann of London. Of these, the majority of those depicting the Susan are signed and 27 are dated. Today, Susan’s Teeth are regarded by collectors the benchmarks of any collection and are the most desirable and costly works of scrimshaw art. (See D. Ridley, Frederick Myrick Catalogue Raisonné, in press, Sharon, Mass.: Kendall Whaling Museum Monograph Nº 13, September 2000.)

It was actually a fellow Nantucketer, Edward Burdett (1805-1833), who is the first known American scrimshaw artist and is considered instrumental in founding and popularizing the genre among whalemen. He did his first scrimshaw around 1824 (when Frederick Myrick was still in high school), on his second whaling voyage, at the likely vortex of scrimshaw genesis, Honolulu. There a large community of American and British whalemen gathered informally and exchanged ideas during layovers between cruises; their cross-fertilization is the only feasible explanation of why British and American scrimshaw appeared virtually simultaneously. As an artist, Burdett was every bit as proficient as Myrick, but worked in a wholly different, bolder style; and while he did not date any of his pieces, many are explicitly inscribed; most are specific depictions of actual vessels and events. His scrimshaw manifests greater variety and versatility than the comparatively redundant work of his younger colleague; and in building a scrimshaw collection, only Myrick’s work is more desirable than Burdett’s. (See Joshua Basseches, Edward Burdett, 1805-1833: America’s First Master Scrimshaw Artist, Sharon, Mass.: Kendall Whaling Museum Monograph Nº 5, 1991).

Scrimshaw – The Next Generation
Reverend Cheever’s inventory of typical scrimshaw productions – "boxes, swifts, reels, canes, whips, folders, stamps, and all sorts of things, according to their ingenuity" – while not exhaustive, nevertheless gives an accurate picture of the diversity of sailor-made scrimshaw. Melville puts in another way in Moby-Dick (1851), and places the emphasis where most modern collectors, and most nineteenth-century whalemen, would have placed the emphasis: on the high art of engraving pictures on sperm whale teeth and corset busks:

The conventional whaling scenes and ship portraits pioneered by J.S. King, Burdett, Myrick, and their mostly anonymous contemporaries became the stable standard of the genre: whaling scenes and ship portraiture were permanent fixtures on scrimshaw throughout its history. A stellar polychrome tooth produced anonymously aboard the whaleship L.C. Richmond of Warren, R.I., circa 1834-37 (Kendall Whaling Museum #S-425) demonstrates how the original concept was cherished and even improved by the second wave of whaleman-artists. In the wake of the pioneers, in the 1830s and ’40s, pictorial scrimshaw exploded into a profusion of diversity, a tidal wave of innovation by American and British sailor-practitioners, most of them whalemen. This was the Golden Age, in which the lion’s share of the best scrimshaw of all kinds was produced. A wide variety of forms emerged, conventions solidified, traditions developed, and individual styles emerged; meanwhile, engraving techniques and themes that originated on pictorial teeth and corset busks were enthusiastically adapted for decorating walrus tusks, ditty boxes of ivory, bone, and baleen, slabs and plaques of panbone (sperm whale jawbone), and a multiplicity of other pictorial manifestations.

As might be expected from the all-male pool of seafaring labor, female portraiture was another popular theme (though sailors’ scrimshaw was only rarely prurient or pornographic). Favorite subjects included direct copies of woodcut fashion plates extracted from magazines. Unusually proficient artists could produce actual likenesses of wives, sweethearts, and female relatives back home, and delightful representations of the exotic female types encountered in distant ports-of-call. One whaleman-artist, George Hiliott, produced at least a five or six large polychrome teeth with, on one side of each, a half-naked Hawaiian wahinee in grass skirt under a palm tree, and on the other side a demurely-gowned New England lady in elegantly furnished circumstances. His work thus echoes the age-old dichotomy, probably genuinely felt by many young whalemen, between the State of Nature, represented in an idyllic Polynesian paradise, and the State of Civilization, epitomized in the staid Victorian setting of Puritan New England.

Patriotic subjects were perhaps only slightly less prevalent. These were pioneered in the first generation: some form of American spread-eagle appears on every Susan’s Tooth; while Burdett, and at least one anonymous British scrimshaw artist whose work resembles Burdett’s, engraved the Union Jack shield and figures of Britannia and Hope (e.g., Basseches, Fig. 12). Now, in the next wave of Yankee scrimshaw artists, emerged the symbolic figure of Columbia, naval cannon, military devices, Continental soldiers, national heroes (especially Washington and Lafayette), the American Union shield, and endless permutations of the American eagle. Nor were their British counterparts shy about celebrating their own national pride in scrimshaw images of navy ships and symbols, heraldry, and flags and pennants galore. Two brothers named Hill, William and Edward, whose work is indistinguishable whenever it is not signed, produced a string of teeth featuring HMS Victory, naval cannon, and ensembles of flags and shields. The individual teeth are as unyieldingly similar as the Susan’s Teeth, but all on a strictly patriotic naval theme. A British practitioner known only as E. Mickleburg made panbone plaques depicting Royal Navy warships at Portsmouth. An anonymous Scot crafted beautiful arrays of intertwining thistles, the symbol of Scotland. Scenes of smoky, heroic naval engagements, with battered hulls and broken spars, were rampant on both sides of the Atlantic.

In addition to patriotic portraits, whalemen gravitated to public figures of other kinds. Napoleon appears fairly often; and because whalers were among the few who ever had occasion to visit the remote South Atlantic Island of St. Helena, where Bonaparte was exiled (1815) and interred (1821), scenes of the Emperor’s house and tomb continued to appear on scrimshaw long after his actual corporeal remains were transplanted in Paris in 1840. Where an American might present a vignette of Cotton Mather, Osceola, or Davy Crockett, his English counterpart might have John Wesley, a tattooed, naked Pict, or a Scottish Highlander in full regalia. Theatrical personalities – famous actors playing major roles in full costume – were also common, their visages typically lifted verbatim from pictures in popular magazines of the day. A much later tooth – in fact, an elephant seal tooth stipple-engraved in 1906 by João da Lomba – bears the unidentified portrait of a black man in a full-dress military uniform of French style. Lomba, first mate on the celebrated voyage of the New Bedford brig Daisy chronicled by Robert Cushman Murphy in Logbook for Grace, was an naturalized American from Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa. In the absence of direct evidence, the scrimshaw is taken to be the portrait of an officer in the Haitian Revolution against Napoleon, thus comprising a kind of racial pride in the heroic liberator-founders of that first-ever Caribbean island republic.

Bible subjects were not common, highly religious ones even less so (except among the large contingent of Portuguese Catholics who served in American whaleships). But of the few Biblical scenes that made it onto scrimshaw, Rebecca at the Well and the Garden of Eden seem to have been particular favorites. In most scrimshaw treatments the callow artists take a rather Song of Solomon-like view of their sacred subjects, expressing piety in the language and trappings of carnal knowledge – in the case of Rebecca displaying ample cleavage barely covered by skimpy garments. Adam and Eve, of course, provide an occasion for ecclesiastically-sanctioned nudity, no apologies. Even the splendid, ethereal rendition of Rebecca by Manuel Enos – a mature master mariner in the 1860s – romanticizes the figure to a kind of willowy transcendence, but not without the earthy sexuality that must have the future patriarch to make her his bride.

There were no rules of scrimshaw; and left to their own proclivities and imagination, sailors often created charming sidelights to nineteenth-century life and culture. A smallish tooth in the Kendall Whaling Museum uniquely portrays a woman working a console sewing machine: it can scarcely have been created any more than five years after the sewing machine was invented in the 1840s. Another, carved into the shape of a powder horn, lovingly reproduces an image of a dancing black man from a book illustration of the 1830s. Part of the scrimshaw phenomenon is that the pictures seem to capture the young practitioners themselves in the process of exploring the wide world, at an age when most of their contemporaries were still in school, or were indentured apprentices in the trades. One gets elephants, Arab warriors on horseback, cityscapes actual and fanciful, sweeping views of Polynesian harbors, European castles, a whole series of Connecticut colleges, street scenes in the Azores, views of the Thames, and all manner of things practical, geographical, sentimental, literary, and romantic. All too rarely, one gets pictures of individual common sailors themselves. Tellingly, these tend toward exuberant poses of dancing, skylarking, and joy-taking. Even making allowances for the fact that most of these were likely produced – as most scrimshaw was produced – with the expectation that they would ultimately be presented to loved ones back home, nevertheless they bespeak a kind of youthful ebullience that emerges as refreshingly wide-eyed and hopeful.

Within only a few years, scrimshaw had become epidemic on many vessels. John Martin, homeward-bound on his second whaling voyage in the ship Lucy Ann of Wilmington, Delaware, in 1844, frequently remarked on the scrimshaw productivity of all hands. On the Lucy Ann, the most favored product seems to have been canes (walking sticks): "Fresh breezes and rain from the N[orth]. Co[urse] E[ast] by N[orth]. Scrimshawing. There are enough canes in this ship to supply all the old men in Wilmington" (Kendall Whaling Museum #xxx).

Various tools were used for cutting, scratching, and engraving; however recent forensic examination has corroborated Melville’s observation that the common sailors’ knife – universal tool of the mariner – predominated even among the very best scrimshaw artists:

We have the whalemen’s own testimony that entire ship’s companies were sometimes engaged in the production of scrimshaw souvenirs. Harvey R. Phillips, mate and journal-keeper aboard the ship Minerva of New Bedford, reports: "Friday Jan. 27th [1860]... Pleasant weather Old ship going 7-1/2 Knots & every body Scrimpshonting as the term goes... that is makeing Caines & Corset boasks & getting out whale boan hoops for presenting for their wives & sweet hearts" (Kendall Whaling Museum #xxx). An important feature of the scrimshanders’ art is that it was integrally incorporated into the daily routine and generic operations of the whale fishery; that is, it was intrinsically occupational:

Sailors who were particularly good hands at scrimshaw tended to be respected as such by the crew. Many of the best were ship’s carpenters, coopers, and blacksmiths – men who had trained in the trades and whose livelihood depended on manual dexterity and some degree of artistic, or at least mechanical skill:

Aboard the New Bedford bark Kathleen during 1861-64, an anonymous balladeer immortalized two of his shipmates for their scrismhandering skill (Elizabeth Marble Papers, Kendall Whaling Museum):

It was not uncommon for sailor-artists to produce scrimshaw for one another, either as gifts or on some kind of commission. The work of unusually skilled men, like Frederick Myrick, seems to have been in particular demand (else why would he have produced 36 nearly identical pieces?). Myrick bequeathed us no words about this, but whaleman-artist Joseph Bogart Hersey of Cape Cod, writing in 1843 as third mate of the Provincetown schooner Esquimaux, modestly explains his own situation:

Above all, one gets a sense of the tremendous satisfaction that scrimshaw practitioners achieved in pursuit of their art, a contemplative, peaceful kind of satisfaction that perhaps only the arts can provide. In a quiet hour aboard the whaling brig Isabella of New London in 1868, seaman Ambrose H. Bates was a canny, firsthand witness to a scrimshandering shipmate:

Frank, Stuart M. More Scrimshaw Artists. Mystic Seaport Museum, 1998.

Vita
Stuart M. Frank, is Director of the Kendall Institute and Senior Curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, a member of the Editorial Board of The American Neptune, and past President of the Council of American Maritime Museums. From 1981 to 2001 he was Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Kendall Whaling Museum in Sharon, Massachusetts, until the Kendall and New Bedford whaling museums merged. He is the author Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery, Dictionary of Scrimshaw Artists, More Scrimshaw Artists, The Book of Pirate Songs, and Fakeshaw–A Checklist of Plastic "Scrimshaw," as well as numerous monographs, articles, encylcopedia articles, and chapters on maritime art, history, literature, and music. With Joshua Basseches and Donald Ridley he co-authored biographies of scrimshaw artists Edward Burdett and Frederick Myrick. He has served on the Vetting Committee of the New York Winter Antiques Show, the Editorial Advisory Board of The American Neptune, the Secretary of the Interior’s Advisory Committee on Maritime Preservation, and the Advisory Board of Antiques America, has been an advisor to museums on four continents, and has held executive office in several national and international professional organizations and guilds. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies, he holds an M.A. from Yale University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University, and has been an American Friends of Canada Fellow, an Australian Bicentennial Fellow, a Lowell Lecturer in Boston, and a Vaughan Evans Memorial Fellow in Fremantle, Western Australia.