Scrimshaw
There are many things I like doing that I’m not very good at. Bowling, archery, singing, most board games, chess, pokemonGo, and many would say sword fighting.
It rarely stops me. If I think it is fun and have the time, then I’ll do it. Lots of folks will tell me how to get better at it, but I’m just having fun.
One of the oldest of these past times is scrimshaw. Growing up I spent a lot of my summers in an old fishing village on the south coast of Massachusetts. It’s much more of a tourist town then it was, but 50 years ago there were still a lot of folks who worked the sea there.
In the town next door they had a museum on whaling. My grandmother loved Moby Dick and would take us to the museum to show us all the things from that book. I didn’t get along with my grandmother, but I did like going to the museum.
Technically whaling was still going on in the US until I was 8. But, New Bedford wasn’t the center of it as it had been a century before.
The thing that fascinated me was the scrimshaw. I was never a fan of killing whales, but I liked the art the folks stuck on the ship made with their remains.
Some of it was very good, but some of it was what you’d expect from folks sitting around bored on a boat. I liked all of it and the museum had quite a bit.
One day we were there and one of the folks working there did a presentation on the history of it and mentioned that in the gift shop they sold kits to do your own scrimshaw on plastic replicas of teeth or tusks.
I wanted to try it myself.
I asked for a kit and was told “no, it costs too much.”
I noted the price and started to save. My brother did the same as if I wanted something, he wanted it too.
At the end of the summer we had enough. We asked to go back to the museum. My grandmother took us and we each bought a kit.
I bought the one of a whale tooth, my brother bought one of a walrus tusk.
We got home and my mother was furious.
“How dare you buy that!” she shouted at me. “You knew your aunt wanted to give that to your brother for his birthday next month and you did this just to keep her from being able to give him a nice present!
“She’s very upset that you’d steal this present out from under her!”
It didn’t matter that my brother had bought his own. It didn’t matter that no one had even hinted that anyone planned to get either of us one of these kits as a present.
It was my aunt’s cottage we stayed at those summers. This is the aunt I still visit in the retirement home. I’m very fond of her and was upset I had done something she thought was to hurt her.
I brought my unopened kit over to her the next time we saw her.
“I hear you wanted to give this to Ted for his birthday,” I said. “You can have this one to give him. That way you’ll get to give it to him liked you planned.”
Two months later, my brother’s birthday arrived. He got many presents. Not a scrimshaw kit.
I thought that maybe they relented and were going to give it to me on my birthday a month later. Even if I had paid for it myself, I would happily take it as a present.
No kit was there on my birthday.
Christmas? Nope. No kit for either of us.
Eventually my brother asked why we hadn’t made our kits. He had been waiting for me to make mine so we could make them at the same time.
I explained I had given mine away and why.
“They didn’t give it to either of us,” he said.
“True.”
“And, they didn’t pay you back the money you had saved to buy it.”
“Also true.”
“Let’s build mine together.”
There aren’t a lot of times my bother and I worked together on something. And building that fake walrus tusk scrimshaw is one of the very few exceptions.
Given it was being made by kids 12 and 10, it came out OK. The filling it with plaster to make it weight the right amount didn’t work well and most of it leaked out, but it looked good.
Whenever we’d visit my aunt and I looked in her spare room, I could see my kit sitting there on a chair, slowly disappearing under other things. (My aunt and I had similar housekeeping styles.)
When the second of my brother’s birthdays passed and it didn’t show up, I asked my aunt when she was going to give it to him.
“Why would I give him that, it’s yours?” she asked.
“I was told you were mad I bought it when you wanted it give it to him as a present,” I said. “I gave it to you so you could give it to him.”
“Who told you that?”
“My mother. She said you were upset because I had bought what you wanted to give him and you thought I did it to make you angry.”
“I don’t know where she got that idea. I knew you had bought the kits, so I got him something else for his birthday. No big deal.”
“I’m going to take it back then.”
“You paid for it, it’s yours.”
I did not tell my mother I took it back. I did that one mostly on my own, but my brother did help with the plaster. We had learned from the first and this one held much more of the plaster than the first.
I kept it on my dresser the remaining few years I lived there. No idea what happened to it. It might still be there for all I know.
Over the years I’ve tried to do more. When we went to Antarctica my wife bought me a kit. I did my best to do some while we were sailing across the Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica.
I do try to get back to that town on the coast I spent my summers at least once every year. One year a while ago we went into one of the shops there and found a bunch of scrimshaw for incredibly low prices.
Turns out there was some guy in town who had bought an old piano that couldn’t be fixed and took the ivory off the keys to make his own scrimshaw. He made enough his wife made him get it out of the house and so he was selling it off at this shop for ridiculously low prices.
We bought a bunch and gave it as presents to folks who came a long distance to perform at our ren faire we put on in 2011. Some of them had never even heard of it, but still seemed happy with the gift.
Back when I wore a tie most days to work my wife got me a mammoth ivory tie clip made into a scrimshaw oval tie tack. I didn’t wear it all that often as I worried about it. But, I did bring it out for special occasions.
Threemeninaboat wrote a while ago about making some with boar’s teeth. I got ahold of some and was trying it at the ren faire these last few weeks. It seems a much harder surface than the other things I’ve tried.
It took going to my better daggers to make a mark in it at all. Fortunately I had a new stiletto that seems to work quite well at it. Even if it is still tough to make marks in it.
Then, when we got home from the faire this weekend I found Threemeninaboat had sent me two pieces of real (old and not badly sourced) walrus ivory!
Real pieces like that simulated kit I did with my brother half a century ago!
I have to admit when I unwrapped them I just sat there holding them in my hands for… Well, I’m not quite sure how long.
No idea what I’ll do with them. But, I am extremely happy to have the chance to make something with them.
And, profoundly grateful for that gift.