Whale-tooth carving of the presidential seal for Kennedy

The Whale-tooth carving of the presidential seal for Kennedy was intended as a Christmas gift for John F. Kennedy in 1963, but it became a funerary object instead: his widow placed it in his coffin on the night before his funeral. Its passage from an example of scrimshaw to a presidential keepsake, and finally to a burial amulet, binds the material culture of whaling to the memory of a president who collected whale teeth and cherished maritime New England.

Scrimshaw and the Whaling World

The carving belonged to a tradition formed aboard long whaling voyages. Crews spent much of their time idle, and whale teeth gave sailors a surface on which to record scenes from daily life or images from their imagination. Teeth could be as long as ten inches; sailors soaked them in brine to keep them workable, polished them with sharkskin, and etched them with needles or knives. They then rubbed soot from the ship’s try-pots into the incisions to bring out the designs.

Scrimshaw ranged from rough marks to carefully composed scenes. Some works borrowed illustrations from Victorian periodicals or imagined classical subjects; others pictured the ships themselves. The designs could be erotic, comic, or celebratory, recording both the experiences and desires of men at sea. The whale tooth was not merely a keepsake of the hunt: transformed by a sailor’s hand, it became a small, portable record of the industry and the life it sustained.

The craft reached its height during the great South Seas voyages of the 1830s and 1840s, when whale bone was also shaped into delicate trellis-like yarn winders and pastry cutters. As whaling’s cultural standing receded, these objects languished in attics, neglected and undervalued. Their later revival gave the whale tooth a new setting: it could be collected and admired not as a useful remnant of the hunt, but as an artifact of a vanished maritime world.

Kennedy as Collector

John F. Kennedy’s interest in scrimshaw grew from his attachment to maritime New England. The Kennedys were closely associated with Hyannis and its family compound, and before becoming the thirty-fifth President of the United States, Kennedy had moved to protect Outer Cape beaches from urban development by declaring them a National Seashore. His collecting extended that interest in the region’s maritime inheritance.

His collection grew to thirty-four whale teeth. He kept favorite examples on the Oval Office desk, where they became intimate objects within the machinery of national power: pieces of carved ivory close at hand as he occupied an office in which decisions could affect the world. The collection also helped restore scrimshaw’s standing. The book presents Kennedy as a particularly important figure in the late-twentieth-century rediscovery of objects that had once been left aside in attics.

The Gift That Became a Relic

In 1963, the First Lady ordered a whale tooth engraved with the presidential seal as a special Christmas present for her husband. Kennedy would never receive it. Shortly before his death, he hosted Greta Garbo for a private dinner at the White House and gave her a different piece of scrimshaw. That earlier gift shows the practice as part of his personal collecting life; it was not the presidential-seal carving later placed in his coffin.

On the night before the funeral, his widow put the still-undelivered Christmas gift into the coffin. The gesture changed the tooth’s purpose and audience. Commissioned to be given and possessed, it instead accompanied its intended recipient in death, carrying the official emblem of the presidency into a private act of mourning. The carving became a keepsake that could no longer be used or displayed by Kennedy, yet its placement made it a concentrated token of his identity and of the grief surrounding his death.

Meaning and Afterlife

The book presents the burial as a ritual charged by the history of the material. Whale ivory had once been fashioned by sailors during voyages that made whale products the basis of trade and craft; now a carved tooth bearing the presidential seal was laid with a modern political leader. Its significance comes from this crossing of scales and eras: a small fragment of an animal, shaped by hand and marked with a state emblem, becomes a personal relic at a public moment of national loss.

The burial also recalls the book’s account of royal anointing with whale oil, where a whale product is tied to the authority of a ruler. The Kennedy carving is not an instrument of office, but its seal and its destination in the coffin give it a related symbolic charge. The text imagines the amulet as reserved for the possible return of the heroic figure, looking out across the Atlantic for whales to reappear. In that image, the object holds together absence and expectation: the president is gone, the whales have receded, and the tooth remains as a compact reminder of both.