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Whale Teeth and the Pirate Princess
15 Plays1 year ago
This week on our Curious Objects podcast, host Benjamin Miller is joined by Marina Wells to discuss scrimshaw. Whalebone, teeth, and other products of the sea adorned with nautical scenes and remembrances of home, scrimshaw is a portal into the lives and daydreams of whalers confined for months at a time aboard bobbing, blood-and-blubber-spattered boats. Under discussion in this episode are a pair of sperm whale teeth bearing depictions of what look like female pirates.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Curious Objects' and Scrimshaw
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:11
Speaker
This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
00:00:19
Speaker
Now, think back with me for a minute to when you were in grade school, maybe 10 years old.
00:00:24
Speaker
It's a sunny afternoon, you're back from recess, and your teacher is hopelessly trying to get the class to pay attention to the lesson.
00:00:33
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Your head is in the clouds, you're bored to tears, and you just want that bell to ring so you can go home.
00:00:39
Speaker
You've got to pass the time, and I bet I know what you're doing.
00:00:44
Speaker
You have your notepad out and your pencils and you're doodling.
00:00:50
Speaker
Maybe it's random scrolling or maybe it's little messages.
00:00:54
Speaker
Maybe it's that funny little S symbol we all learn to make.
00:00:57
Speaker
Or maybe you're drawing a picture of something.
00:01:00
Speaker
Now, if you've ever been in that situation, potentially even more recently than grade school, then you already understand a lot about today's curious object.
00:01:10
Speaker
We're talking about Scrimshaw.
00:01:12
Speaker
And if you don't already know what that is, it's basically the antique maritime version of your doodles.
00:01:18
Speaker
Sailors onboard whaling ships would take primarily whale bones and teeth and engrave them with designs and illustrations.
00:01:26
Speaker
And they had a lot of time to do it, so some of them got very good at it.
00:01:31
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Today, those pieces of scrimshot can be extremely collectible, and you can find them in museum collections and at auction houses and with high-end antique dealers.
00:01:40
Speaker
And in some cases, they can actually tell us a lot about the sailors who carved them and what they were thinking about.
00:01:46
Speaker
And today we're going to be exploring one especially interesting piece of Scrimshaw.
00:01:51
Speaker
It does what the very best curious objects do, which is to expand our idea of what people were like at certain moments in the past.
00:02:00
Speaker
How in some ways they were so relatable to us and in other ways so alien.
Interview with Marina Wells on Scrimshaw's History
00:02:05
Speaker
And this particular piece of scrimshot is going to open up questions about gender and sexual identity that, as you might imagine, were especially potent out on the open sea.
00:02:16
Speaker
And they might not have used those exact terms at the time, but yes, I promise, gender and sexual identity were real things in the 19th century.
00:02:24
Speaker
In fact, it's a great example of something that's tough to investigate through written records because it wasn't often openly discussed.
00:02:33
Speaker
But that's where decorative arts are so important.
00:02:36
Speaker
With me to talk about scrimshaw, but of course, first to answer some rapid fire questions, is Marina Wells.
00:02:42
Speaker
Marina is a curatorial fellow at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and a doctoral candidate at Boston University.
00:02:49
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Marina, thanks for joining me.
00:02:51
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me.
00:02:52
Speaker
It's wonderful to be here.
00:02:55
Speaker
What's the oldest object that you personally own?
00:02:58
Speaker
Is it a t-shirt from middle school?
00:03:02
Speaker
Probably.
00:03:03
Speaker
It might be a family ring, maybe.
00:03:08
Speaker
One that belonged to my step-great-grandmother, I believe.
00:03:14
Speaker
Can you remember the first time you saw a piece of Scrimshaw?
00:03:17
Speaker
Ooh, yeah.
00:03:19
Speaker
I can't remember it, but it was probably around, I don't know, fourth grade or something going on a trip to the Provincetown Pilgrim Monument Museum where there is Scrimshaw.
00:03:33
Speaker
And I can imagine that's around the time that I was struck for the first time with what that was.
00:03:38
Speaker
That's right.
00:03:39
Speaker
Because you grew up on Cape Cod, right?
00:03:41
Speaker
That's right.
00:03:42
Speaker
Yes.
00:03:42
Speaker
Marina Wells, maritime kind of watery name.
00:03:46
Speaker
That's exactly right.
00:03:49
Speaker
So Scrimshaw is kind of deep in your bones then.
00:03:52
Speaker
Yes, in my bones, if you will, definitely.
00:03:55
Speaker
Okay, so here's
Discussion on 'Moby Dick' and Masculinity at Sea
00:03:56
Speaker
a time travel question for you.
00:03:57
Speaker
What historic voyage or historic ship would you join the crew of?
00:04:02
Speaker
I mean, not to be so stereotypical, but I think sailing with Melville in 1841 would be pretty cool.
00:04:10
Speaker
You know,
00:04:12
Speaker
at least a few interesting conversations happened on that trip.
00:04:16
Speaker
So that would be maybe a top one.
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:19
Speaker
First thing that comes to mind, at least.
00:04:21
Speaker
Sounds like a strong choice to me.
00:04:22
Speaker
And actually, speaking of Melville, what did Moby Dick get most right and most wrong about whaling?
00:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think, yeah, the first thing that comes to mind and related to my interests is about just this sort of expansive understanding of masculinities and different kinds of guys' bodies and relationships and strange, unexpected ones in that context and the sort of literal slipperiness that happens in relationships between men at sea.
00:04:49
Speaker
I think that's something that it gets right in a right way.
00:04:53
Speaker
Interesting.
00:04:54
Speaker
And wrong?
00:04:56
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:04:57
Speaker
I mean, Melville just gets some things wrong within his own universe, which is really interesting.
00:05:03
Speaker
Mary Kay Burkaw Edwards often draws attention to the fact that there are just differing numbers of sailors on the Pequod, according to Melville's own accounts.
00:05:14
Speaker
And sometimes Ahab has lost his left leg and sometimes it's his right.
00:05:19
Speaker
You know, there are different things going on there.
00:05:21
Speaker
But yeah, it's kind of like, you know, leaving the Starbucks coffee cup on the table in the Game of Thrones set, you know.
00:05:28
Speaker
Sure.
00:05:29
Speaker
Yes, precisely.
00:05:30
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Continuity problems.
00:05:31
Speaker
Were 18th century or 19th century sailors, were they as gruff and, you know, and hardy and hairy as we think they were?
00:05:41
Speaker
I think it depends on the guy.
00:05:43
Speaker
You know, some people went to sea and rioted when they couldn't access sex workers at the port that they happened to be stopping in at the in the Pacific.
00:05:55
Speaker
And other men go to sea to be reformed and reformed.
00:06:00
Speaker
Margaret Creighton has written about this, but I think it really depends on the person.
Marina's Career Transition and Book Recommendation
00:06:04
Speaker
And there are definitely diverse approaches and types of masculinity at sea in that period, definitely.
00:06:13
Speaker
And it changes over time, of course.
00:06:15
Speaker
Okay.
00:06:15
Speaker
So Marina, you've been banned from your current field and you're being forced to pick a new specialty.
00:06:23
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:06:24
Speaker
But like in general, I
00:06:26
Speaker
In general, you can no longer study maritime decorative arts, material culture.
00:06:33
Speaker
You can't work at the Whaling Museum anymore.
00:06:35
Speaker
I'm not going to speculate as to why, but it's up to you to figure out something new to do.
00:06:41
Speaker
What is it going to be?
00:06:42
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
00:06:44
Speaker
I think I'm destined to grow into an old man who runs a tea shop, like an herb shop.
00:06:56
Speaker
shop that seems like a space for me to create cocktails of different medicinal herbs and things.
00:07:06
Speaker
That's my future, I can imagine for myself.
00:07:10
Speaker
From the decorative arts to the potable arts.
00:07:13
Speaker
Yes, yes, indeed.
00:07:16
Speaker
What's one book that a newcomer should read to start to learn about the material culture and of the age of sale?
00:07:24
Speaker
Oh, that's a really tough one.
00:07:26
Speaker
But I think an important, impactful one for me that I think is also just kind of a beautiful, enjoyable book to thumb through is Stuart Frank's publication on Scrimshaw, which is called Ingenious Contrivances Curiously Carved, which is a quotation from Moby Dick, of course.
00:07:49
Speaker
And it's sort of, it is kind of an account of the New Bedford Whaley Museum's collection, which is the largest collection of American scrimshaw in the world.
00:07:58
Speaker
And he does an interesting job, just a wonderful job of sort of accounting for the different types of scrimshaw that I think...
00:08:07
Speaker
is a great sort of scholarly source.
00:08:11
Speaker
Pictorial source can also be a wonderful coffee table book.
00:08:15
Speaker
So I think that's a, that's, it's got everything, you know?
Marina's Favorite Museum Pieces and Cultural Connection
00:08:21
Speaker
Okay.
00:08:21
Speaker
So water world is happening.
00:08:24
Speaker
You know, the planet is flooding.
00:08:26
Speaker
Kevin Costner is off doing his thing and you Marina are rushing off to a rescue boat.
00:08:32
Speaker
What one object are you bringing with you to save?
00:08:36
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:08:38
Speaker
Well, I have been working with the daguerreotype collection here at the museum and I'm sort of obsessed now with the fact that these objects are sort of the only record of so many people during this era and they're just so magical and have these kind of
00:08:56
Speaker
energetic resonances, I feel like I would, I've thought about this in terms of, you know, there were a natural disaster, I would feel compelled to, to, to snag a few diaryotypes, because they're so special.
00:09:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:10
Speaker
What's your favorite museum to visit?
00:09:13
Speaker
Of course, aside from your own?
00:09:15
Speaker
Ooh, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum is a favorite.
00:09:21
Speaker
They always have something fun and exciting that spans all different styles and eras, largely 20th century, but...
00:09:30
Speaker
They've done a lot of great work with, you know, abstract expressionists who spend time in Provincetown, Motherwell and Frankenthaler and others.
00:09:38
Speaker
Okay.
00:09:40
Speaker
I'm going to release you from the torture of the rapid fire questions.
00:09:44
Speaker
Thank you.
00:09:49
Speaker
We'll be right back with Marina Wells.
00:09:52
Speaker
If you don't know already, we always post images of each episode's curious object at thememagazineantiques.com slash podcast, and today's is no exception.
00:10:00
Speaker
Now, there should be a picture in your podcast app too, but if you go to the website, you can see bigger and often more pictures.
00:10:08
Speaker
So if you'd like to have a better mental image while you listen, that's
Female Pirates in Scrimshaw and Mythology - A Question
00:10:12
Speaker
how to do it.
00:10:12
Speaker
If you have questions or comments for me, you can reach me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:10:20
Speaker
If you're listening right now using a podcast app, chances are you're using either Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and both those apps support ratings and reviews for your shows.
00:10:30
Speaker
It's a little different for each app, but if you go to the Curious Objects show page, you'll see an option to give us a star rating and write a little review.
00:10:38
Speaker
And I really enjoyed reading some of these on the air, so to speak.
00:10:42
Speaker
So here's one someone recently left on Apple Podcasts.
00:10:46
Speaker
Fantastic show, much fun.
00:10:48
Speaker
Curious Objects hits all the right notes for me.
00:10:51
Speaker
It's well-produced, good listening, full of interesting facts and historical notes all revolving around Curious Objects.
00:10:57
Speaker
Even when I don't think I'll be terribly interested in an episode, I will find that it captures my interest.
00:11:02
Speaker
Thank you so much to the person who wrote that, and to all of you who have taken a second to help us out by leaving a review of your own.
00:11:09
Speaker
And by the way, I know what you mean.
00:11:10
Speaker
Sometimes objects that seem dull at the outset turn out to have the most interesting stories.
00:11:15
Speaker
I happen to think today's is totally fascinating, so let's not put it off any longer.
00:11:20
Speaker
Let's get back to Marina Wells.
00:11:22
Speaker
Music
00:11:25
Speaker
Our curious object today is a sperm whale tooth in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum that was intricately carved in the 19th century with an illustration of a figure described as a female pirate.
00:11:41
Speaker
Now, I have a lot of questions for you about female pirates, but for starters, let's figure out what this object is.
00:11:48
Speaker
And the kind of decoration, the style is called scrimshaw.
00:11:52
Speaker
And I'm wondering, Marina, if you can just give us a quick crash course on scrimshaw.
00:11:56
Speaker
You know, what is it?
00:11:57
Speaker
Where does it come from?
00:11:58
Speaker
Who was doing it?
00:11:59
Speaker
What does it look like?
00:12:00
Speaker
All of that good stuff.
00:12:02
Speaker
Yes.
00:12:03
Speaker
Okay.
00:12:04
Speaker
So scrimshaw is a kind of 19th century practice of carving whale bone, ivory, and baleen, which is a kind of substance that is in
00:12:18
Speaker
non toothed whales mouths.
00:12:20
Speaker
And it was performed traditionally on shipboard after a whale ship had successfully captured a whale and it's processed for oil that is used for kind of lighting and lubrication.
00:12:41
Speaker
Huge industries in the U.S. in this period.
00:12:47
Speaker
But there are these byproducts, these physical byproducts and kind of gross materials left over.
00:12:54
Speaker
And for a while during 18th century whaling, often these would either be discarded or traded.
00:13:02
Speaker
But
00:13:03
Speaker
Later on, you know, as American commercial whaling sort of develops in the 1820s or so, there's a kind of burgeoning art where sailors take these byproducts in order to make scrimshaw.
00:13:17
Speaker
So rather than sort of tossing sperm whale teeth into the ocean as trash, they take them on shipboard.
00:13:26
Speaker
They're incredibly bored on their way home.
00:13:28
Speaker
This is kind of how this is often framed and they fill their time.
00:13:32
Speaker
by carving and inking bone ivory baleen with scenes, pictures often drawn directly from print materials that they also carried on board and would either keep these or give them as gifts, maybe exchange them with each other.
00:13:50
Speaker
And it's created a really interesting sort of archive of what American whalemen were up to in this era.
00:13:58
Speaker
and the different materials they were interacting with and different imagery that they had interests in.
00:14:06
Speaker
So did they have any functional purpose or are these purely decorative objects?
00:14:11
Speaker
So it depends on the object.
00:14:12
Speaker
There's a whole category of useful utilitarian scrimshaw.
00:14:18
Speaker
Sailors would carve objects for themselves that they used in sailing, like fids, which were used for working with rope.
00:14:28
Speaker
And they would also create gifts that were useful for other people.
00:14:31
Speaker
So for their ladies back home, they would carve things like
00:14:36
Speaker
sewing bodkins and yarn swifts for winding yarn, knitting needles and pie crimpers, things like that.
00:14:46
Speaker
But there's also an incredible amount of just kind of decorative work that I think it takes a little more speculation to figure out what its exact use, whether cultural or otherwise might be.
00:15:04
Speaker
Yeah, so it depends on the piece.
00:15:05
Speaker
Okay, so we need to picture a bunch of absolutely mind-numbingly bored sailors.
00:15:12
Speaker
They're on these months-long voyages.
00:15:14
Speaker
They have nothing to do a lot of the time other than singing sea shanties, I guess.
00:15:19
Speaker
And so some of them decide to get creative and draw these pictures onto the body parts of the animals that they're hunting.
00:15:28
Speaker
I mean, is this more or less an accurate picture?
00:15:30
Speaker
That's basically the image that I get from Moby Deck, right?
00:15:35
Speaker
Yes, I think it's accurate.
00:15:36
Speaker
I also like to put myself in this conversation a little bit by arguing, you know, yes, they're incredibly bored, but this isn't a passive process, right?
00:15:46
Speaker
They're not just kind of tossing whatever imagery they want on here.
00:15:52
Speaker
I like to say, you know, of course, there's significance to each and every one of these men in this situation are sort of having a lot to say about their identities.
00:16:03
Speaker
Okay, so...
00:16:05
Speaker
The curious object that we're talking about, this particular example of scrimshot is really fascinating in part because it has this figure carved on it that is labeled a female pirate, but that label is a little misleading,
Cultural Fascination with Female Pirate Imagery
00:16:21
Speaker
isn't it?
00:16:21
Speaker
Because doesn't the actual original inspiration for this figure come out of sort of an ancient mythology?
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah, so there are a couple of major figures that come out of the print culture of this era that give inspiration to this particular tooth and a lot of other designs that are related.
00:16:46
Speaker
So the first major one, there are two major ones.
00:16:50
Speaker
The first major one
00:16:52
Speaker
is Alwilda, the female pirate, as this character is called, by Charles Elms, who produces the pirate's own book in 1837.
00:17:01
Speaker
He is a Boston publisher, kind of copying and pasting stories, compilations of things like pirate stories or
00:17:14
Speaker
you know, oceanic disaster stories into these books that sell quite well in this period.
00:17:19
Speaker
And so this story about Owilda actually takes up like less than a page in his Pirate's Own book.
00:17:29
Speaker
And it comes from a significantly earlier story about the fifth century princess and how this character is framed by the marital conventions of the time, is set up
00:17:44
Speaker
with King Al, who has a lot of power, and Awilda, this person, goes to sea sort of dressed as a man.
00:17:53
Speaker
Awilda basically is running away from these cis heterosexual conventions and goes to sea with a group of women, is my understanding, primarily.
00:18:07
Speaker
And Alf sort of attacks this ship, eventually beats Wilda in this maritime battle and wins over her hand is how it's framed.
00:18:19
Speaker
So it's an interesting thing that, yeah, and in the same sentence, basically, they get married on shipboard.
00:18:28
Speaker
What a courtship.
00:18:30
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:18:31
Speaker
So the figure on this screenshot, is that, do you think the person who carved that meant for it to be Elwilda specifically, or is it more of a generic idea of a female pirate?
00:18:43
Speaker
This is a great question.
00:18:44
Speaker
So Elwilda is very similar in this illustration to the frontispiece of a book, a sort of dime novel novel.
00:18:55
Speaker
a few years later in 1844 called Fanny Campbell, the female pirate captain.
00:19:00
Speaker
It's a tale of revolution about the Revolutionary War, but this figure appears very, very similar to Awilda.
00:19:08
Speaker
And sometimes there is a sort of lack of naming in general, and there is a sort of just a label, the female pirate captain, which could be either of them.
00:19:20
Speaker
according to the sort of framing of the time.
00:19:22
Speaker
So if you look at them individually, you can kind of discern which image they're based off of, if any.
00:19:30
Speaker
There are a few where it looks like, okay, they really just had an idea in their head and they weren't even really looking that closely.
00:19:36
Speaker
at the sources, but there are some that are clearly actually traced.
00:19:41
Speaker
And you can see the stippled marks of a needle probably going through paper where they were actually traced directly.
00:19:50
Speaker
But it depends on the piece.
00:19:52
Speaker
And I will say there are over 30 of these
00:19:56
Speaker
that have circulated, you know, that you can find across different museum collections and auction houses, private collections, that kind of thing.
00:20:03
Speaker
So at least 30 plus whalemen were very taken with the story.
00:20:09
Speaker
Unless all 30 were carved by the same whale man.
00:20:13
Speaker
Which I would find hard to believe just given how very different the hands are that carve the different imagery.
00:20:21
Speaker
Okay, but there actually were some quite famous women who engaged in piracy, right?
00:20:27
Speaker
Yeah, there are, I mean, in the same era, Charles Elms, in the very same book, brings up a couple of these characters, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, from a little bit earlier in history.
00:20:43
Speaker
And there are some interesting approaches to how these characters are described, how they are kind of mythologized.
00:20:51
Speaker
I mean, these stories of piracy are just told over and over again.
00:20:55
Speaker
And I find most interesting how the representations of them change over time or are sort of highlighted because clearly there's cultural interest in them and they are a sales point.
Gender Roles and Queer Themes in Maritime Culture
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00:21:36
Speaker
To come to terms with, like, you know, as this carver is going to town on this sperm whale tooth and is thinking, gosh, you know...
00:21:47
Speaker
I could carve a picture of a really beautiful ship that I love, or I could carve some, you know, dashing heroic scene of me harpooning a whale or something really narrative like that.
00:22:01
Speaker
But instead thought, no, you know, I want to do a depiction here of a female pirate.
00:22:09
Speaker
What is going on in this person's head as they're doing that?
00:22:13
Speaker
I realize that's a wildly speculative question, but just based on your research and your exposure to this art and to the people around it, what do you think is going on there?
00:22:24
Speaker
Well, this is one of the big questions, and this is what I love to speculate about.
00:22:27
Speaker
Whaling ships are gone for months to years at a time.
00:22:31
Speaker
The longest whaling voyage clocks in at around 11 years from Northeastern port.
00:22:38
Speaker
So there's this really interesting aspect of temporality and sort of social isolation from these ships.
00:22:47
Speaker
New England ports that many whale ships are leaving from.
00:22:52
Speaker
So you can imagine that there's an aspect of proxy of personhood or a figure, especially these so-called female figures present on a whale ship by proxy.
00:23:05
Speaker
And so I would say there's a way of reading these so-called female pirates as doing a similar thing in a queerer way
00:23:16
Speaker
Yeah, wait, so hold on.
00:23:17
Speaker
So because I've been using the word female pirate, but now you just said so-called female pirate.
00:23:25
Speaker
So that's it.
00:23:26
Speaker
That feels to me like an important distinction.
00:23:28
Speaker
Could you play that out for me?
00:23:29
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:23:30
Speaker
We can talk about this.
00:23:31
Speaker
So the female pirate captain is kind of how these are labeled by their contemporaries.
00:23:38
Speaker
I put it in quotes because I think that there's a complicated relationship to gender here, right?
00:23:45
Speaker
So
00:23:46
Speaker
The people pointing that out by deliberately saying female are suggesting something about actual gender and
00:23:56
Speaker
as if it's something immutable or natural.
00:23:59
Speaker
And I just like to throw that into question that of course there's a queerness, a transness happening, a transing of gender, if you will.
00:24:08
Speaker
And that's a term I borrow from Jen Mannion and others before them.
00:24:13
Speaker
There's a transing of gender as a kind of act or way of living that I think is taking place even in these fictional lives.
00:24:24
Speaker
Okay.
00:24:25
Speaker
So, I mean, is it fair to say that gender roles were a bit more fluid in maritime culture in this period than they were, you know, on land?
00:24:36
Speaker
Sometimes there's a distilled conception of how maritime culture was incredibly sort of masculine in these very specific ways.
00:24:47
Speaker
And
00:24:48
Speaker
It is complicated by a number of factors of sexual contact, even exploitation, often of indigenous women between American sailors and people in the Pacific imports that they're touching down into.
00:25:03
Speaker
And then there are also women on shipboard
00:25:07
Speaker
After about the 1820s or so, it becomes more commonplace for captains to bring their wives and sometimes small children aboard.
00:25:14
Speaker
So, I mean, zooming back into our scrimshaw, our curious object for today, what does this whale tooth and the representation on it, what do you think this can reveal to us?
00:25:28
Speaker
about those sort of complicated questions of gender identity and roles being played on board these 19th century ships.
00:25:40
Speaker
Well, I think at the very least, we can all agree that there's an interest, a fascination, perhaps even an obsession with gender in this way.
00:25:50
Speaker
And we can extrapolate that in a number of ways to sort of sexuality and how that was playing out, especially as it relates to the presence of different genders on shipboards.
00:26:03
Speaker
So, of course, homosexuality is not...
00:26:07
Speaker
a very accepted thing in mainstream culture at this point.
00:26:12
Speaker
But there is a kind of playfulness in these characters.
00:26:16
Speaker
And especially if you look at the kind of texts that are associated with them, there's an interest in relationships between men.
00:26:25
Speaker
That maybe took place on ships as well.
00:26:30
Speaker
And we have very little evidence, unfortunately, of this kind of thing, except, of course, you know, most commonly in sort of court records and things like that.
00:26:39
Speaker
Court records involving what, accusations of homosexual conduct or activity or...
00:26:46
Speaker
Right.
00:26:46
Speaker
And once in a while, you know, you get in a ship blog, some kind of comment about someone being punished, you know, flogged for activities that are too terrible to mention.
00:27:00
Speaker
can assume different things.
00:27:02
Speaker
So there's one case of a sailor in the Navy, actually, but whose name was Philip C. Van Buskirk, who is a sailor who writes in his journals.
00:27:13
Speaker
He writes very explicitly about sexual activities going on in a way that throws into question any assumption that
00:27:21
Speaker
sexual relationship between men wasn't normal the way that he talks about it.
Connections to Maritime Records and Gender Narratives
00:27:28
Speaker
So it's a big question that right now I don't personally have answers to, but maybe someday.
00:27:35
Speaker
So this is really interesting because we've just done an episode with the Independent Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, which involves a watercolor by a boy named Cornelius Van Buskirk, who was studying navigation at the time.
00:27:54
Speaker
And I wonder if there's a family connection there between the Buskirks.
00:27:59
Speaker
Oh, I would love that.
00:28:00
Speaker
So you mentioned that there are quite a few examples, you know, around 30 examples of this subject matter depicted on Scrimshaw.
00:28:10
Speaker
And I have to imagine that there were probably many more that didn't survive for whatever reason.
00:28:16
Speaker
You know, in the larger context of Scrimshaw production in the 19th century,
00:28:22
Speaker
you know, there are, I mean, huge, huge quantities of material that was produced in this format, right?
00:28:29
Speaker
So what sort of prevalence would you say these depictions of potentially gender challenging or gender bending subject matter, like how popular of a subject would you say it was really?
00:28:43
Speaker
That's a good question.
00:28:46
Speaker
And it's something that I would like to have a firmer hand to love.
00:28:50
Speaker
But I think, you know, if I'm being completely honest, I don't think they're a massive presence in Scrimshaw practice at large, but they're significant enough in the maritime museum world.
00:29:05
Speaker
You know, each kind of major institution that has a Scrimshaw collection has one of these.
00:29:12
Speaker
I will just say if there are this many of them, I forget how many exactly, I've found 36 or something like that.
00:29:19
Speaker
It's significant enough to indicate a cultural interest.
00:29:22
Speaker
There are also other, I found a few other illustrations of pieces from the Pirate Zone book and other stories by Charles Elms.
00:29:33
Speaker
that are on scrimshaw teeth, but not too, too many and actually a busk as well.
00:29:40
Speaker
But actually now come to think of it, there's a box that I've seen and a walrus tusk as well with this image on it.
00:29:49
Speaker
I mean, does this scene possibly in some instances relate to these stories that certainly I've heard about in terms of women dressing up as men in order to be allowed onto a ship, which was restricted to male crew only?
00:30:08
Speaker
Is there an idea of a kind of maybe this person was sort of flying under the radar?
00:30:13
Speaker
And I don't know.
00:30:15
Speaker
Tell me about that.
00:30:16
Speaker
The best documented example of this that I have found is surrounding a person named George Johnson.
00:30:23
Speaker
And this takes place in around 1848, 1849 on the Nantucket ship Christopher Mitchell.
00:30:31
Speaker
And this is an example of a story that takes place off the coast of Peru.
00:30:37
Speaker
And then the newspapers in Nantucket, New York, New York,
00:30:43
Speaker
then spread to the Midwest.
00:30:44
Speaker
The story goes all the way to Australia, I think is the farthest I've found.
00:30:48
Speaker
But a story of this kind as a news story is really a big deal.
00:30:56
Speaker
And so I think it probably spread among whale ships at sea.
00:31:03
Speaker
There are folks who it's called gamming.
00:31:05
Speaker
when whale ships would meet at sea and kind of exchange letters maybe that they were carrying, but of course, verbal news, maybe even gifts between captains, that kind of thing.
00:31:16
Speaker
Okay, well, so I think we've jumped around quite a lot, which I apologize for.
00:31:20
Speaker
It's kind of the nature of the story and the context around it, right?
Cultural Value of Scrimshaw Artifacts and Conclusion
00:31:25
Speaker
I guess it is, yeah.
00:31:27
Speaker
Anyway, but before I let you go, you mentioned seeing quite a few of these examples are scattered around.
00:31:33
Speaker
And for listeners who are interested, our curious object, of course, is at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
00:31:38
Speaker
But where else might an interested listener look to find another example of this kind of scrimshot?
00:31:45
Speaker
Oh, there are a number of collections.
00:31:50
Speaker
I've seen examples of this imagery at Mystic Seaport.
00:31:55
Speaker
The Providence Public Library has a pretty solid collection of whaling materials.
00:32:02
Speaker
And they have an example.
00:32:04
Speaker
The Peabody Essex Museum has one.
00:32:07
Speaker
Nantucket Historical Association, you know, you can see them in a variety of maritime museums.
00:32:12
Speaker
And you'll also see them come up at auction relatively frequently.
00:32:15
Speaker
So yeah, keep your eye out for the female pirate captains.
00:32:21
Speaker
One of these could be yours.
00:32:24
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:32:26
Speaker
Well, Marina Wells, this has been such an interesting adventure.
00:32:29
Speaker
Thanks for navigating us through it.
00:32:32
Speaker
Of course.
00:32:33
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me.
00:32:35
Speaker
I hope that listeners learn something interesting here.
00:32:41
Speaker
Today's episode was edited by Julian Minerva and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
00:32:47
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:32:50
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:32:52
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.