What Did Whalers Do With Four Years at Sea? Carve on Teeth

The materials came from the catch, chiefly the teeth of sperm whales and the jawbone and skeletal bone of several species, all of which take a fine polish. A tooth was first scraped and rubbed smooth with sharkskin, pumice and finally ash and the palm of the hand, which took days. The design was then incised with whatever sharp tool was available, most commonly a sail needle or the point of a knife, cutting shallow lines into the surface. Lampblack, soot or ink was rubbed into the lines and the surface wiped, leaving the design dark against the pale material.

The subjects are consistent across decades and across crews:

• •The ship itself, usually in careful and accurate rigging detail
• •Whales, boats and scenes from the hunt
• •Women, frequently copied from magazine illustrations aboard
• •Patriotic emblems and flags
• •Portraits and memorial inscriptions
• •Practical objects, including tools, boxes and walking sticks

The conditions of the trade explain the art almost completely. Voyages lasted three or four years, and the great majority of that time was spent sailing and waiting rather than hunting, so crews had enormous quantities of unstructured time with nothing to do. The raw material was free and otherwise worthless, since teeth and bone had little commercial value compared with oil. Tools were to hand. Alcohol was restricted on many vessels, removing the usual alternative. And the finished objects had real value ashore as gifts and as evidence of the voyage, which gave a reason to take trouble. Merchant sailing had shorter voyages and busier crews and produced nothing comparable.

The objects are treated as documents as well as artefacts, and they answer questions the written record cannot. Ship portraits are frequently accurate enough in their rigging to identify the vessel and to record details of fitting out that are otherwise unrecorded. Inscriptions give names, dates, positions and the numbers of whales taken, which can be checked against surviving logbooks. The choice of subjects records what crews thought about and what pictures they had access to, since many designs are traceable to specific magazine engravings that circulated aboard. And pieces made by crew members from Cape Verde, the Azores and the Pacific islands record the international composition of the fleets.

The practice declined with the industry itself, as petroleum replaced whale oil from the 1860s and the fleets shrank, and it effectively ended with commercial whaling. Surviving pieces became collectable, which produced a substantial trade in forgeries, some of them cast in plastic resin and aged, and museums now test suspect pieces. Trade in the genuine material is heavily restricted, since sperm whales are protected and the international convention on endangered species controls movement of the material, so antique pieces require documentation to cross borders. Contemporary practitioners work on legally sourced fossil ivory, on bone and on synthetic substitutes.

Teeth and bone from the catch were polished for days, incised with a sail needle and darkened with soot rubbed into the lines. Voyages of three or four years spent mostly waiting, free raw material of no commercial value and objects worth something ashore together explain why this trade produced folk art and others did not. Petroleum ended the industry and the practice, and forgery is now common enough that museums test pieces.