Leviathan or The Whale

heathens and monsters.

    In Nantucket’s refurbished whaling museum, the bones of a sperm whale look across to a wall arrayed with harpoons and lances like medieval hardware in the Tower of London. Upstairs, the galleries are filled with the more delicate by-products of this bloody business. Standing on plate-glass shelves are fine examples of scrimshaw, a craft which in itself was an expression of an industry of excess.
    On long voyages, the large crews required to hunt whales were idle for much of the time. To occupy hands that might be otherwise engaged, they were given whale teeth on which to record images of their fancy or everyday life. Soaked in brine to preserve their suppleness and polished with sharkskin, the teeth–which could be up to ten inches long–were etched with needles or knives, creating patterns to be inked with soot from the ship’s try-pots. Some were little more than graffiti; others were traced with illustrations snipped from Victorian periodicals, or imaginary classical scenes. Often, they portrayed the ships themselves.

    Decorated with bosomy women or fey-looking youths or feats of whaling endeavour, these were folk artefacts of an industrial age. Ishmael compared their ‘maziness of design…full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness’, to engravings by ‘that fine old savage, Albert Durer’. Tactile lumps of creamy-smooth ivory once gripped in a seaman’s fist, they are imbued with a sensual, primitive significance akin to tattooing, ‘or
pricking
, as it is called in a man-of-war’. As their designs resembled tattoos on a sailor’s biceps, so tattooing instruments, themselves distinctly tribal, were made with whale-ivory handles, while other sailors assembled ‘little boxes of dentistical-looking implements’, custom-made for scrimshanding. They were direct records of the whalers’ experiences and desires, journals for illiterate men. Some were decorated with pornographic cartoons, or were carved into phalluses.
    The most artful pieces mark the pomp of whaling; the peak years of scrimshaw were those of the great voyages to the South Seas in the 1830s and 1840s, when whale bone was also turned into delicate ‘flights’–trellis-like structures for winding yarn–or carved into pastry-cutters to be sold in fancy-goods stores or given to loved ones. But as history moved on, these macabre objects languished in attics, unloved, unvalued; only in the late twentieth century were they seen anew, and one man in particular was responsible for their revival: John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
    The Kennedys are synonymous with the Cape and its islands, an American aristocracy convened around the family compound at Hyannis. Even before he became thirty-fifth President of the United States, John F. Kennedy had moved to declare the Outer Cape’s beaches from Eastham to Provincetown as National Seashore, sacrosanct from urbanization. And it was as an extension of his love of maritime New England that Kennedy began to collect scrimshaw. Soon his collection stood at thirty-four whale teeth, favourite examples of which he kept on his Oval Office desk, to be turned in the same hand that held the world in its balance.
    In 1963 the First Lady ordered a special Christmas gift for her husband–a whale tooth engraved with the presidential seal. He would never receive it. Shortly before he died, the President threw a private dinner for Greta Garbo at the White House, when he gave the actress a piece of scrimshaw. ‘I might believe it a dream,’ Garbo wrote to Mrs Kennedy afterwards, ‘if I did not have in my possession the President’s “tooth” before me.’ Two weeks later, on the night before his funeral, his widow placed her husband’s Christmas present in his coffin. It was a potent act: the king of Camelot interred with the talisman of a heroic age; a relic invested with the power of its original owner. It was a ritual as charged as Ishmael’s claim that the British monarch was anointed with whale oil–
    Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

    –while the President’s amulet was ready for the moment when this Arthur was needed anew; as if he might yet scan the Atlantic horizon with his pale blue eyes, waiting for the whales to reappear. It was on Nantucket that modern whaling began; on its narrow shoulders lies the glory. In 1659 nine new citizens acquired the rights to the island, Quakers such as Thomas Macy, Tristram Coffin