The annual Scrimshaw Weekend, founded in 1989 and held at the Whaling Museum each June, is the world's only regular forum in which collectors, curators, antiques dealers, history buffs, and enthusiasts from all over the country gather to confer about the whalers' distinctive and evocative occupational art form. Thanks to good-natured camaraderie and a genuinely collaborative spirit, these weekends have made significant advances in connoisseurship and forensic examination, occasioned the discovery of several important but hitherto unknown Old Master scrimshaw artists, and inspired a ground-swell of enthusiasm about the historical and contextual aspects of collecting. Together, we've invented new techniques for authenticating genuine historical pieces and debunking fakes, and have re-invented methods from art history, ethnology, questioned-document science, and crimelab forensics to deepen our understanding of the surface characteristics, physical properties, aesthetic qualities, and technical conventions of scrimshaw art as it was practiced on shipboard. We're also keeping track of the marketplace, monitoring record-setting auction prices, the frequent appearance of fakes and forgeries, and the emerging interest in antique scrimshaw among folk art collectors. Our purpose has been to nurture enlightened appreciation of scrimshaw as an art form, as an historical phenomenon, and as an avocational pursuit, and we've been gratified and much rewarded by the enthusiasm participants have expressed, and the sheer fun we've all had doing it.