Nantucket Whaling Museum

Nantucket Whaling Museum brings the material traces of whaling into close relation: sperm-whale bones face harpoons and lances, while upstairs galleries display scrimshaw on glass shelves. The arrangement sets the instruments of the hunt beside objects made during its long pauses, making visible both the industry’s demands and the forms of expression that grew within it.

The Whale and the Implements of the Hunt

In the refurbished museum, the bones of a sperm whale look across at a wall arrayed with harpoons and lances. The opposing display places the animal’s remains beside the tools used to hunt whales. Rather than presenting whaling only through its equipment or only through its quarry, the arrangement holds both in view: the whale’s physical presence and the means by which the trade pursued it.

Scrimshaw and Life at Sea

Upstairs, fine examples of scrimshaw stand on plate-glass shelves. The objects were made during long voyages, when the large crews needed to occupy hands left idle for much of the time. Whalers worked whale teeth, which could reach ten inches in length: they soaked them in brine to preserve their suppleness, polished them with sharkskin, and etched designs with needles or knives. Soot from the ships’ try-pots supplied ink for the finished patterns.

The images range from simple marks to scenes drawn from Victorian periodicals, imagined classical subjects, and depictions of the ships themselves. Some record the work of whaling; others turn toward fantasy, desire, or the everyday. Together, they make the teeth more than decorative products: they preserve something of what occupied the crew’s thoughts during voyages spent waiting as well as hunting.

An Industry’s Personal Objects

Scrimshaw’s place in the museum gives a human scale to an industry organized around the whale’s body. Whale teeth became surfaces on which sailors recorded experience and imagination, while the whaling ship supplied both the material and, through its try-pots, the soot used to finish the designs. The museum’s juxtaposition of scrimshaw with bones and hunting gear therefore connects personal handiwork to the larger enterprise that made it possible. The objects’ delicacy does not erase that context; it makes the industry’s reach legible in a different register, through the small things its workers carried and made.