Scrimshaw: The controversial art form on the brink of extinction

As Moby Dick turns 175, some of the last American scrimshanders grapple with the legacy of maintaining one of the US's oldest art forms.

Jade Gotauco spent her childhood among the skeletons of giants. Her father, Chet Gotauco, was a scrimshander – an artist who etched images onto the ivory of hunted whales. In pensive moments, she would slip under the arched jaw of a whale in his Rhode Island garden and sit atop a massive vertebra, watching insects scrabble across the porous bone.

"My favourite smell in the world is the sandy aroma of ivory dust," said Gotauco, now an artist herself. Whale teeth adorn the walls of her studio in New Bedford, Massachusetts; she engraves them with nautical scenes in which sperm whales thrash the ocean to foam and whalers hurl barbed harpoons from minute boats.

Ask Americans about the cultural legacy of whaling, and many will point to Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick, which turns 175 next month. Yet for all the book's brilliance, it's scrimshaw – the practice of artistically carving whale teeth and bones, which is considered one of the US's earliest homegrown art forms – that offers a true insider's view of the industry.

Today, there's hardly any of those teeth and bones left on the legal market. Some scrimshanders, including Gotauco, believe the art form should disappear with them. "When the ivory is gone, this is over," she said.

Scrimshaw was developed by sailors whose lives unfolded on whaling grounds around the globe as the industry expanded into a 19th-Century behemoth. They strove to depict a culture that, for a few lucrative decades, made New Bedford North America's wealthiest city per capita.

"They saw their experiences as important," said Marina Wells, an assistant curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which is home to the largest scrimshaw collection is the world. "You see that in their commemoration of whaling scenes, in all their meticulous detail."

Some of the carvings throb with yearning, depicting homey scenes of faraway families. Others capture sailors rowing fragile, open boats dwarfed by the whales they pursued. They're communicating "the dangerous, faraway world of whaling", Wells said. "You have the bloody spouts of the whales after their lungs have been punctured… the intimacy of whalemen interacting with whale bodies that's really hands-on."

To modern eyes, the scenes evoke the heartbreaking impacts on species hunted to the brink of extinction; yet the whalers, too, were often broken by the industry. At the Seamen's Bethel, an 1832 mariner's church located across the street from the museum in New Bedford (and which features in the opening chapters of Moby Dick), such risks are on poignant display. Lining its whitewashed sanctuary are marble cenotaphs commemorating those lost at sea.

"After fastning to a whale, was carried overboard by a line and drowned," reads the tomb of Captain William Swain. Three sailors from the whaleship Cowper, aged 19, 22 and 24, share another memorial: "All lost by the upsetting of their boat, July 15, 1854, in the Ochotsk Sea."

They died as American whaling reached a short-lived fever pitch. In 1857, more than 10,000 men worked aboard New Bedford whaleships, half the city's population at the time. Two years later, petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania and the ensuing oil rush flooded American cities with kerosene – a comparatively cheap fossil fuel that would eclipse the whale oil used in lamps around the globe.

By the turn of the century, American whaling was all but over.

Scrimshaw lived on, however. The massive scale of the whaling industry produced a glut of teeth and bones, a byproduct that, at the time, had little commercial value. They gathered dust in attics and warehouses.

"When I was a kid they had barrels of whale teeth down at the wharves and sold them for a couple of bucks apiece," recalled Michael Vienneau, a scrimshander on the nearby island of Nantucket, Massachusetts – another onetime whaling hub. Former homes of whaleboat captains surround his small shop, Scrimshander Gallery, in the heart of the island's historic district. A few blocks away is the Nantucket Whaling Museum, whose own significant scrimshaw collection includes pieces by Nantucket whalemen – and famed scrimshanders – Frederick Myrick and Edward Burdett.

In the 1960s, scrimshawing surged in popularity, part of a folk-craft revival. (It even got a boost from US President John F Kennedy, an avid collector.) That's when Vienneau got his start, rummaging for cheap whale teeth as a teenager while visiting the island with his family.

"Back then, everyone was a scrimshander," he said. "Now I'm one of the last."

In part, that's because of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, which tightly restricted the sale of marine ivory. Today, scrimshanders engraving whale teeth and bones must work from the dwindling supply of teeth and bones that remain from before the act was passed – Vienneau has a stash in the back of his shop. "You'll pay several thousand dollars for a raw tooth now," said Vienneau.

On a recent afternoon, he was sitting at his workstation squinting at a sperm whale tooth he was engraving with a scene of a sailor brandishing a harpoon at the tail of a diving whale. More teeth were piled in a nearby filing cabinet. His dog, Petey, grabbed a tooth and began to chew on it. Vienneau laughed. "Any dog that gnaws on a sperm whale tooth is a scrimshander's dog," he said, not getting up.

As whale teeth grew scarce and expensive, some scrimshanders innovated, carving on cow bones and deer antlers. Even comparatively tooth-rich Vienneau experimented. Once, he flew to Alaska on a tip and spent three days digging a 30,000-year-old mammoth tusk out of permafrost near a remote copper mine.

Yet, many purists insist that while such projects are both art and craft, they are not true scrimshaw, since the authentic form relies on the byproducts of historical whaling. Gotauco is one of them. Like some of her peers, she believes this means that scrimshaw is on the brink of extinction.

Gotauco works exclusively on pre-1973 ivory and bones. Nearly a century ago, her grandmother emigrated to Boston from Newfoundland, and among her few belongings was a collection of whale teeth and bones she'd inherited from her family of seal hunters, cod fishermen and whalers. That's what Gotauco carves in her New Bedford studio, etching images onto the physical remains of her ancestors' legacy.

Along with the whale teeth, Gotauco's grandmother passed along stories of what she said were Mi'kmaq roots. Whales factor into traditional Mi'kmaq stories, and the First Nations community hunted the animals sustainably long before the arrival of Europeans in North America. With her own deep reverence for whales, Gotauco has, at times, felt deeply uneasy about working with ivory.

In the years since she learned how to carve scrimshaw by sitting beside her father in his workshop, Gotauco often wondered about the ethics of using materials pulled from the sea with such violence. Commercial whaling was an environmental disaster and a cruelly dangerous job; the beauty of the art form it spurred still catches at her heart. In the end, she embraced it as a form of remembering, calling it "the best way to honour the whales and whalers", albeit one that will likely fade in her lifetime.

"When I run out of teeth along with everyone else, I'll raise a cup to the story's end," she said. "May we never get more."

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