This English watercolor of the ship Iona in its original frame is one of many consigned and donated nautical antiques in the Scrimshaw Weekend's Benefit Auction on May 14 at 8pm, proceeds to benefit the New Bedford Whaling Museum. None of the items are from the Museum's collections. (Photo by Richard Donnelly)

Scrimshaw experts, collectors and fans from around the world have another reason to look forward to the 22nd Annual Scrimshaw Weekend at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, May 13-15. It features three days of new presentations and activities, including a first-ever public auction of consigned nautical antiques on Saturday, May 14 at 8:00 p.m. in the Cook Memorial Theater.

The world’s only forum dedicated to the indigenous shipboard art of whalemen, Scrimshaw Weekend attracts enthusiasts from four continents to share the enjoyment of collecting and researching this remarkable artwork at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, home to the world’s largest collection of scrimshaw.

The weekend kicks off at noon on Friday, May 13 with a Marine Antiques Show and Swap Meet, expanded by popular demand. On Friday evening, the keynote address titled “‘Built’ Scrimshaw: Types, Tools, and Construction Methods” is presented by James Vaccarino, J.D., and Sanford Moss, Ph.D. at 8:00 p.m. in the Cook Memorial Theater. A full day of special programs devoted to scrimshaw on Saturday will wrap up with a cocktail reception at 5:00 p.m. and gala banquet at 6:00 p.m. The banquet will be followed by a public auction of consigned and donated nautical antiques at 8:00 p.m. in the Cook Memorial Theater, with proceeds to benefit the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Special exhibitions and an optional fieldtrip on Sunday are also planned.

Marine Antiques Show and Swap Meet

On Friday, May 13, from noon to 5:00 p.m., the second annual Marine Antiques and Swap Meet will feature for sale high quality marine antiques including scrimshaw, nautical instruments and tools, whaling logbooks, ship models, photos, paintings, prints, New Bedford memorabilia, and more in the Jacobs Family Gallery. Entry fee for the Antiques Show and Swap Meet only is $5, or free with museum admission or membership.

Scrimshaw Plenary Sessions

On Saturday, May 14, plenary sessions from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. will include, “Care and Feeding: Taking Care of Your Scrimshaw – Expanded,” with Conservator and Curatorial Intern, D. Jordan Berson, M.A., M.L.S.; Scrimshaw Preservation and Conservation Q&A Session; “Pictorial Sources of Scrimshaw in Institutional and Private Collections” with Jack H. T. Chang, M.D.; “Pictorial Sources of Scrimshaw in the New Bedford Whaling Museum,” with Stuart Frank, Ph.D., Senior Curator, NBWM; “Scrimshaw in the McDowell Collection”; “Pirates and Female Pirates on Scrimshaw,” and more.

Sessions will also include a Scrimshaw Market Report and Q&A with marine antiques dealer, Andrew Jacobson; an update on “A Comprehensive Catalogue of Scrimshaw in the New Bedford Whaling Museum,” with James Russell, Museum president; Richard Donnelly, book photographer, and Sara Eisenman, designer; Nautical Antiques Auction overview with Richard Donnelly, and a Collectors’ Show-and-Tell.

Public Auction of Consigned Nautical Antiques

On Saturday, May 14 at 8:00 p.m., guest auctioneer Ron Bourgeault of Northeast Auctions, LLC, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, will preside over the public auction of a wide array of consigned nautical antiques including scrimshaw and whale craft, marine paintings, engravings and lithographs, log books, charts, antique photos, nautical instruments and more in the Cook Memorial Theater. A featured expert on the popular PBS series, Antiques Roadshow, Ron’s career in the antiques business spans four decades. He established Northeast Auctions in 1987, now ranked among the largest auction houses in the United States.

The public auction will consist of consignment and donated items only, with proceeds to benefit the New Bedford Whaling Museum. No items are from the Museum’s collections.

Approximately 150 lots will include many fine examples of scrimshaw, including whales’ teeth, whale bone busks engraved with various subjects, whale bone fids, a whale ivory pie crimper, fine inlaid sewing box from the Nye family, five canes including lady’s leg and fist examples, cribbage board, carved whale’s tooth amulet, lady’s leg pipe tamper, hand & cuff bodkin, whale bone clothes pin, large whale bone carved spoon and more. Auction listings and photos are online at www.auctionzip.com.

Preview of auction items in the Resource Center begins Friday, May 13 from noon to 5:00 p.m. and on Saturday, May 14 from 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. The public is invited to attend the preview and auction at no charge. Left bids will be accepted. No phone or online bidding. Payment: cash, check and major credit cards accepted. There is a 15% buyer’s premium and Massachusetts sales tax is applicable to buyers without a valid resale certificate.

The fee for Scrimshaw Weekend, including admission to the Museum, all open galleries, Scrimshaw & Marine Antiques Show, scheduled meals, all plenary sessions and refreshments: $335 (Museum members $295) before May 1. After May 1 the fee is $370 (Museum members $330). Tickets to Saturday’s banquet only: $75 each.

On Sunday, May 15, an optional all-day fieldtrip will head to Nantucket Island and its Whaling Museum for a “behind the scenes” tour of its outstanding scrimshaw collection, including the museum’s off-campus storage facility. A special visit to an extraordinary private whaling collection will include a reception hosted by the owners. The bus will leave at 7:30 a.m. from the New Bedford Whaling Museum, returning by 8:00 p.m. The price is $235 and includes luncheon at the famed Jared Coffin House, all motor coach and ferry transportation.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Northeast Auctions, LLC of Portsmouth, NH, and the Maine Antique Digest, who have helped make Scrimshaw Weekend possible year after year.

To register, contact: Visitor Services, (508) 997-0046, ext. 100, or frontdesk@whalingmuseum.org

Definition and Etymology:
These days, “scrimshaw” is taken to refer to all kinds of carving and engraving on ivory, bone, sea shells, antler, and cow horn. However, in its original context as a traditional shipboard pastime of 19th-century mariners, scrimshaw refers to the indigenous, occupationally-rooted art form of the whalers, the defining characteristic of which is use of the hard byproducts of the whale fishery itself – sperm whale ivory, walrus ivory, baleen (erroneously called whalebone), and skeletal whale bone, often used often in combination with other “found” materials. The origin and etymology of the term scrimshaw is unknown and has been disputed, but various forms of it – such as scrimsshander, skrimshonting, and skrimshank – began to appear in American whalemen’s parlance in the early 19th century. The term originally referred to the production of sailors’ hand-tools and practical implements, such as seam rubbers, fids, belaying pins, and thole pins, mostly made for the ship during working hours; but it soon came to signify objects made by whalemen–and, to a lesser extent, by tars in the naval and merchant services– primarily for their own recreation and amusement, intended mostly as mementos for folks at home.

Materials:
“Hard byproducts” of whaling were flotsam and jetsam of the fishery – parts of the whale that had little or no commercial value and thus could be given over to the sailors for their own pleasurable diversions. Sperm whale teeth could be polished to a high gloss, then engraved with pictures to which lampblack and colored pigments could be applied. Or they could be carved in relief or in full round, to produce sculptural forms, human and animal figures, finials, handles, tools, inlay, and all manner of ornaments for wooden boxes, canes, and other objects.

Likewise walrus ivory. The walrus hunt had been associated with whaling since medieval times, and even where the whalers did not take walrus themselves (as was typically the case in the 19th century), tusks were obtained by barter with Northern peoples in Canada, Siberia, and Alaska, and were often utilized to scrimshaw. Virtually anything that could be made of whale ivory could also be crafted from walrus ivory.

The characteristics of whale and walrus ivory are similar. The advantages of sperm whale teeth are (in especially fine specimens) its milky smoothness, homogeneity of texture, breadth, and rich color. However, a length of 20 cm (or 8 inches) is uncommonly large for a sperm whale tooth; 28 cm (11 inches) is just about the record. Walrus tusks, on the other hand, frequently range up to 70 cm (about 27 inches) or longer: they not only provide a larger surface for pictorial engraving, but can be cut and sliced and combined into larger objects or larger ornaments, including the slats for swifts (yarn-winders), shafts and handles for pie crimpers, even the bars and slats for elaborate birdcages.

Baleen is the keratin plates in the mouths of the odontocete or so-called baleen whales, which includes all of the great whale species except sperm whales. Biologically, these keratin plates are larger manifestations of the same material as human fingernails, animal hoofs, and bovine horn. As applied to scrimshaw, baleen tends to be sinewy, brittle, and in many ways difficult to work; it is also vulnerable to larvae parasites. But it is also reasonably pliable, which is the basis of its commercial viability for corset stays, umbrella ribs, and skirt hoops. Properly handled, it is ideally suited for corset busks (staybusks) or bent-sided round and oval ditty-boxes. A deft artisan can also incise it effectively with pictures.

Through the centuries, each of these products had commercial value from time to time, and so were only intermittently available to whalers for their own hobby work. Baleen had many commercial applications, but a baleen surplus in Holland in the 17th century eroded its commercial value, affording mariners an opportunity to obtain pieces of baleen for their own use. Skeletal whale bone was used for architecture and artisanry by Norse and Basque whaling pioneers in medieval times; but, beginning in the 17th century, pelagic whalers – who were primarily concerned with oil and secondarily with baleen – discarded the bones as worthless deadweight. So eventually bone, too, came into the hands of whaleman-artists.

Whalemen often used the basic materials that define scrimshaw – sperm whale ivory, walrus ivory, baleen, and skeletal bone – in combination with other “found” materials, typically bits and pieces of wood, metal, sea shells, tortoise shell, and cloth. Latin American coins, in wide circulation in the Pacific, could be fashioned into finials and fixtures. The characteristic basic black pigment was lampblack, a suspension of carbon in oil, the product of combustion, easily obtained from the shipboard tryworks (oil cookery) or from ubiquitous oil lamps. (The notion that whalemen used tobacco juice as a pigment for scrimshaw is purely fanciful: it isn’t black, it doesn’t work, and not even a single example has been documented.) Colored pigments for polychrome (multi-colored) works included verdigris (a tenacious green deposit naturally forming on copper and brass), various homemade fruit and vegetable dyes, and commercially-produced india or china ink.

Scrimshaw Precursors
Whale ivory, bone, and baleen precursors to whalemen’s scrimshaw appeared almost from the beginning of medieval European whaling: domestic implements carved out of skeletal bone by Vikings in Norway, game pieces and chessmen made at Paris, Cologne, and elsewhere, and an impressive inventory of 11th- and 12-century votive carvings produced in English and Danish monasteries. Walrus tusks from Norway became a cheaper substitute for elephant ivory (which was imported to Europe from Africa by Venetian and Genoese merchants), and found its way into the hands of artisans in Central Europe, England, Turkey, Russia, and Spain. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Dutch and German whaling captains occasionally used baleen to make oval boxes, mangles (for folding cloth), and votive objects commemorating a family event or a successful hunt.

The Advent of Whalemen’s Scrimshaw
It was not until after the Napoleonic Wars that the meteoric rise of whaling, resulting in longer voyages, larger crews, and over-manned ships, created an atmosphere for scrimshaw to flourish on a large scale. A few bone swifts, straightedges, and hand-tools survive from the 18th century; but the earliest known works of engraved pictorial scrimshaw date from circa 1817-21. Contrary to popular belief in many quarters, which ascribes the origin of pictorial scrimshaw to American hands, the first practitioners to adorn sperm whale teeth were British South Sea whalers, a few of whose pioneering works survive in the Museum collection. The first piece to bear a date is elaborately but anonymously inscribed from the whaleship Adam of London, date 1817. The first known American scrimshaw artist, and one of the best, was Edward Burdett (1805-1833), who began scrimshandering circa 1824. The first American piece to bear a date is a recently-discovered tooth engraved by Edward Burdett aboard the ship Origon of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in 1827. The most famous early scrimshaw artist is Burdett’s fellow-Nantucketer Frederick Myrick (1808-1862), who produced 36 or more so-called “Susan’s Teeth” aboard the Nantucket ship Susan during 1828-29: he was the first ever to sign and date some of his work. These pioneers were the vanguard of a tremendously productive generation of American, British, and Australian scrimshaw artists who followed in the 1830s and ’40s, the Golden Age of scrimshaw.

Pictorial Scrimshaw
From the orthodox ship-portraits and whaling scenes pioneered in the 1820s, the pictorial repertoire expanded dramatically in the 1830s to include virtually every kind of image and theme. Sedate female figures and family groupings were persistent favorites. Patriotic subjects, naval scenes, symbolic figures like Britannia, Columbia, and Hope, and portraits of Great Men and Women – George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Napoleon, Josephine Bonaparte, and Jenny Lind – abounded. The scrimshanders’ eye took in all subjects and themes, Biblical, mythological, and theatrical, zoölogical and botanical, urban, rural, religious, and ecclesiastical, domestic, foreign, exotic, and banal.

Diversity of Scrimshaw
It is the remarkable diversity and intricate ingenuity of shipboard scrimshaw that drew the comments of contemporaneous observers. Reverend Henry Cheever remarked that “skimshander” is a term for “the ways in which whalemen busy themselves when making passages, and in the intervals of taking whales, in working up sperm whales’ jaws and teeth and right whale bone into boxes, swifts, reels, canes, whips, folders, stamps, and all sorts of things, according to their ingenuity” (The Whale and His Captors, 1850). Herman Melville, a veteran whaleman, if not actually a scrimshaw artist himself, describes the genre as “lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material in the hours of ocean leisure” (Moby Dick, 1851). There were indeed many types, produced primarily as mementos and souvenirs for the whalemen themselves, and especially as gifts for loved ones at home.

The swift (an elaborate yarn-winder), a distinctively American form, was an early and persistent manifestation. Pie crimpers and kitchen implements proliferated. Corset busks (staybusks) and canes (walking sticks) were epidemic: whaleman John Martin, homeward-bound with a full catch in the Lucy Ann of Wilmington, Delaware, in 1844, wrote whimsically in his journal , “There are enough canes in this ship to supply all the old men in Wilmington.” Ditty boxes, workboxes, and tabletop chests could be extremely simple or highly ornate, made entirely of baleen or bone, or a combination of materials and inlays, sometimes surmounted with a human or animal figure carved in full round. Aromatic boxes of precious Polynesian sandalwood, often exquisitely inlaid with ivory, abalone, and silver, were constructed by many painstaking seamen. Among the most elaborate creations were “architectural” or “architectonic” forms: pocketwatch stands, usually shaped like miniature “grandfather” clocks (tall clocks), a nighttime resting place for dad’s gold timepiece. Sewing boxes, typically built of wood or bone, often lavishly fitted with drawers, spools for thread, pincushions, and other accessories, were characteristically ornately decorated with inlay, finials, fobs, and fixtures of marine ivory, sea shell, tortoise shell, and silver. A skeletal-bone and or wood-and-bone birdcage could consume countless months of work at sea. Banjos and violins with ivory and bone fittings were also in the inventory of the musically inclined and manually skilled.

In fact, many whalemen were quite skilled – ship’s carpenters and coopers perhaps especially so. Having been trained in the trades, their dexterity and technical competence would have been substantially better honed than average; certainly their per capita scrimshaw productivity was disproportionately high. Nor was scrimshandering limited to the whalers themselves. Wives and children, who sometimes accompanied whaling captains to sea, also produced scrimshaw in significant numbers. Some of the women – like Sallie Smith, wife of Captain Frederick Howland Smith of Dartmouth, Massachusetts – produced work to as high a standard as their male counterparts.

The defining characteristic of scrimshaw is the occupational context of process, materials, and personnel. Its aesthetic, iconographical, and technical characteristics, exhibiting trends and tendencies that mostly followed fashion ashore, place it foursquare within the decorative mainstream. But its vivacious florescence within a single, sequestered occupational group render it unique able to impart insights into the life and times of sea labor in the Age of Sail. The scrimshaw itself was produced in large measure with the artist’s mind fixed on the people back home, not only as the intended recipients of scrimshaw gifts, but also as the beneficiaries of his newly-acquired sailors’ vision of the wide world. The genre, born of the sea, constantly looks homeward to shore.

Join us on Jan. 29th for ‘Scrimshaw 101′ . Tweet this one day course with this hashtag: #scrimshaw101

This video posted to Youtube on May 14th by SouthCoastToday.com.

Scrimshaw experts, collectors and fans will come together May 14–16 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum for the 21st annual Scrimshaw Weekend, a three-day international event that has something for everyone, from the curious-minded to the serious collector.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum is the scrimshaw capital of the world, and the annual Scrimshaw Weekend is the world’s only forum dedicated to the indigenous shipboard art of whalemen. Founded in 1989, this event attracts enthusiasts from four continents, all gathering to share the enjoyment of collecting and researching this beautiful artwork.

New this year is a Scrimshaw & Marine Antiques Show, which will include a Swap Meet & Sale with multiple dealers’ booths showing scrimshaw, marine antiques, books and more on Friday, May 14, from noon until 5 pm.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum is the scrimshaw capital of the world, and the annual Scrimshaw Weekend is the world’s only forum dedicated to the indigenous shipboard art of whalemen. Founded in 1989, this event attracts enthusiasts from four continents, all gathering to share the enjoyment of collecting and researching this beautiful artwork.

New this year is a Scrimshaw & Marine Antiques Show, which will include a Swap Meet & Sale with multiple dealers’ booths showing scrimshaw, marine antiques, books and more on Friday, May 14, from noon until 5:00 pm.

The Friday evening lecture, “Scrimshaw…Through the Collectors’ Eyes,” will be presented at 8:00 pm by Nina Hellman, marine antiques dealer and author of “A Mariner’s Fancy, The Whaleman’s Art of Scrimshaw.”

On Saturday, May 15, a full schedule of events and activities will include two informative three-hour sessions. The morning session includes talks on “Distinguishing Characteristics of Scrimshaw by the Ceres Artisans,” “The Life and Adventures of the Ceres Scrimshander,” “The Four Ceres Artists Identified,” and “More about the Ceres Artists.” Respectively, speakers include Stuart M. Frank, Ph.D. (New Bedford Whaling Museum), Kenneth R. Martin, Ph.D. (former Director, Kendall Whaling Museum), Donald E. Ridley, P.E. (Volunteer Assistant Curator Emeritus, Kendall Whaling Museum and New Bedford Whaling Museum), and Judith N. Lund (Advisory Curator, New Bedford Whaling Museum).

whale ivory pie crimper

The afternoon session will include a talk by the dean of scrimshaw collectors, Judge Paul E. Vardeman, titled “Recollections of an old time collector and the recent discovery of new artists.” Other presentations include “The Sam McDowell Scrimshaw Collection,” “Recent Adventures and Discoveries at the Forensics Lab,” and a Collectors Market Report. Speakers include Dr. Frank, Richard Donnelly, and Andrew Jacobson. Mr. Donnelly is a long-time volunteer at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and a collaborator on a forthcoming catalogue of the museum’s scrimshaw collection.

A gala banquet on Saturday evening will conclude with two entertaining and informative programs, “Mystery Man of the Fake Susan’s Teeth” (about art fraud) and “Rugs and Floor Coverings on Scrimshaw,” and an ad hoc “Collectors’ Show-and-Tell.”

On Sunday, May 15, an optional fieldtrip will visit important private scrimshaw collections in Newbury and Lincoln, MA. The bus will leave from Fairhaven at 8:00 am, and from New Bedford at 8:15 am, returning by 6:00 pm. The price is $125 and lunch is included.

The fee for Scrimshaw Weekend, including admission to the museum and the Scrimshaw & Marine Antiques Show, scheduled meals, and all plenary sessions is $315 (Museum members $275) prior to May 1st. After May 1st the fee is $370 (Museum members $330). Saturday banquet and evening program is $65.

For the full schedule of events and program updates, please visit the museum website at www.whalingmuseum.org. For logistical information or to register, please contact visitor services at (508) 997-0046, ext 100 or email: frontdesk@whalingmuseum.org

Scrimshaw Weekend is supported in part by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, NH, and the Maine Antique Digest, which have generously helped to make this event possible.

Mr. Barthelmess organizes a tri-annual whaling history symposium in Cologne, and for the 2009 event, he wrote about and exhibited whaling memorabilia connected with the fleet of Aristotle Onassis. This piece, entitled “The Arts and Crafts of OLYMPIC CHALLENGER: Souvenirs, company gifts, and whaler folk art from the Onassis whaling venture, 1950 – 1956″ describes the exhibit curated by Mr. Barthelmess.

Tooth by the Onassis flag painter: Dedecke Whaling Collection

by Stuart M. Frank, Ph.D., Senior Curator

This article is reprinted from the recently published Bulletin from Johnny Cake Hill, Fall 2009

In any genre of the arts there are always a few individuals whose work and reputations stand out as exceptional, setting a standard by which the achievements of others are measured.  There also tend to be a few whose work has been overlooked or underappreciated and may deserve wider recognition.  When it comes to scrimshaw, the incidence of such Unsung Miltons (to paraphrase the poet Thomas Gray) is disproportionately high, in part because the genre itself is so little known and in part because so much of it is anonymous.  Thus, in addition to such celebrated scrimshaw masters as Edward Burdett (1805-1833), Frederick Myrick (1808-1862), Henry Daggett (1811-1873), and N.S. Finney (1813-1879), we have whalemen-practitioners who are known only by their work and have been given epithetical monikers to distinguish them from the crowd – Albatross Artisan, Banknote Portraitist, Lambeth Busk Engraver, Naval Engagement Engraver, Pagoda Artisan, and so on.  Certainly, the Ship Java Artist – now known by name as Manuel Enos – deserves to be listed among the select few, as one of the outstanding scrimshaw makers and arguably the greatest Azorean whaleman-artist of all time.

A remarkable pair of sperm whale teeth scrimshawed aboard the bark Java of New Bedford in 1862 came into the Kendall Collection many years ago but, despite the elaborate inscriptions on the backs, the artist had not been identified.  They are gloriously engraved.  On the fronts are brilliantly colored female figures.  One is Rebecca at the Well, an Old Testament matriarch in full flower of youth, dressed in sumptuous Middle Eastern garb [Fig. 1]; the other is a patriotic image of Columbia, a classic nude majestically and demurely draped in an American flag [Fig. 2]. The inscriptions specify the whens and wherefores of the voyage and the whale but fail to name the artist: “Captured / Bark Java / of / New Bedford / Capt. E.B. Phinney” and “Jan. 25th / 1862 / Off King Geo[rge] Sound / Western Coast / of / Australia” [Fig. 3].  Only after close scrutiny of the crew lists and comparison with examples of scrimshaw in other collections did it become evident that the perpetrator was Manuel Enos, one of the most colorful, one of the best known, and at the same time one of the most mysterious celebrities in the whaling annals. [1]]

Enos was a curious fellow.  There are several not entirely harmonious aspects of his elusive biography that dominate any view of his character; and these, in the end, turn out to provide only an incomplete picture.  An Azorean immigrant who ascended to the top of his profession as the master of New Bedford whaleships, he was well-regarded and generally well-liked both as a shipmaster at sea and as a local man-about-town on Long Island.  His career was unique and intermittent, he was cheerful and gregarious but his actions were equivocal, his motives fraught with mystery, and he seems never to have written down anything that would help reveal the inner man.  Even after a half-dozen biographers have made the attempt to penetrate the mystique, the outstanding features remain the superb quality of his art (which we knew going in) and his erratic and eccentric activities at sea and ashore, which remain enigmatic.  Several mysteries linger, and of those that have been solved, the solutions are less than satisfactory, raising as many questions as they answer.

First there is the matter of his birth.  There has never been any doubt that he was born in the Azores Islands, but according to Robert Farwell[2] (and hence my own More Scrimshaw Artists[3]) he was born on the island of Graciosa circa 1827; the 1860 U.S. Census for Huntington, Long Island, has him born on the island of Fayal circa 1826; and Donald Warrin[4] turned up family sources indicating that Enos was born in Lajes, on the island of Pico, on 22 May 1826, one of eleven children of José Inácio Macedo and Maria Carmo.[5] The latter is almost certainly accurate.

Manuel’s early years are almost completely unknown.  However, the details of how he came to be a whaleman and to settle on Long Island can be partly reconstructed by working backwards from the few documented shards of his career.  He was third mate in the whaleship Huntsville of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, during 1851-54, and he was also on the immediately previous voyage of the same vessel during 1849-51.  That he was a mate on that second Huntsville voyage indicates that he must have been at least a boatsteerer (harpooner) on the previous voyage, which indicates that it could not have been his first.  One did not become a boatsteerer without prior experience: too many shipmate’s lives, incomes, and morale depended upon the harpooners’ seasoning and skill.  In order to qualify as a boatsteerer in 1849 he must have made at least one prior voyage as ordinary seaman or green hand, perhaps in the Sheffield, as Richard C. Malley suggests.[6] Also, that first Huntsville voyage does not account for how Enos came to America in the first place.  Enos sailed in the Huntsville from Cold Spring Harbor on both occasions, so he must have been there already; therefore, he must have been to sea at least once before, on the voyage that ultimately brought him to New York – probably, like so many of his fellow islanders, signing articles or stowing away on some American whaler calling at the Azores; perhaps the Sheffield.  On that first voyage he would have acquired the experience that might qualify him for a boatsteerer’s berth on the Huntsville.

Once having landed on Long Island, he settled in the hamlet of Cold Spring Harbor, part of the town of Huntington.  Warrin’s speculation is almost certainly correct that Enos must have met his future wife, Susan Brush, while he was ashore briefly between voyages in 1851, because he married her shortly after he returned in the Huntsville three years later.  He arrived in April 1854, celebrated his 28th birthday in May, was naturalized a U.S. citizen in June, married Susan in July, and sailed again in September, this time as a boatsteerer in the Sheffield (1854-59).  This was in itself an unusual reversion after having already made a successful voyage as third mate.  On the Sheffield, “‘Big Manuel’ is said to have been a member of ‘the heaviest whaleboat crew in the history of American whaling,’ numbering, in addition to Enos, three Cold Spring Harbor men, a Hawaiian, and a Montauk Indian, who in the aggregate ‘supposedly averaged 225 lbs. [93 kg], a keel snapping total of 1,350 pounds [558 kg] for the six men in the boat’s crew!’”[7]

His next voyages were the ones for which Enos is best remembered in history, literature, and the arts: first mate (1860-64), then captain (1864-69) of the New Bedford bark Java. A young sailor named Joshua Fillebrown Beane was on both Java voyages and later published an articulate narrative in which, in an excess of literary license, he conflated the two voyages into one, mixing up many of his shipmates’ names, combining two or more into a single character, and leaving out others entirely.[8] Thus, while Beane’s is one of the most literate, colorful, and informative of all American whaling chronicles, and provides an insightful assessment of the captain in action, as well as what may be the only likeness of Enos – a small ink drawing by the author himself [Fig. 4] – it is not strictly factual and perpetrates some misimpressions.  One is that Enos was the captain on both voyages: Beane makes no mention of Edward B. Phinney, the real captain during 1860-64 – the voyage on which Enos was actually the first mate and did the scrimshaw of Columbia and Rebecca.  Another is the speed and efficiency with which, under Enos’s patronage, Beane rocketed from green hand to second mate in the space of a single voyage.  That it actually happened over the course of two voyages is remarkable enough, but it would have been an incredible achievement in only one.  Meanwhile, it is clear that celestial navigation and logbook-keeping were not Captain Enos’s strongest suits; and that Washington Fosdick, ship’s steward, a fellow scrimshaw artist who was thirty years older than any other member of the crew, regularly assisted the captain with his calculations and also taught the young, well-educated Beane celestial navigation.  But Fosdick was ailing (he died on the voyage at age 60 in 1869, and was buried in a shallow grave on the Okhotsk seacoast of Siberia).  In the meantime, all along, Captain Enos had increasingly come to rely upon his young protégé, Joshua Beane, whom he elevated to second mate.

Figure 4

Enos and Fosdick were hardly the only scrimshaw-makers on the Java.  Beane speaks about scrimshaw in some detail, as though just about everyone on board were doing it.  There was evidently plenty of “scrimshoning” going on:

Another, and very interesting way of passing dull hours on board a whaler is “scrimshoning.”  This word, coined by the whaling fraternity for their private use, encompasses the making of everything from a plain ivory bodkin to the most elaborate inlay work imaginable.  Boxes of fancy woods of different kinds inlaid with other woods, with pearl cut into diamonds, squares, crescents, and leaves, with silver, ivory, and bone, in designs simple or elaborate, as the taste of the maker might suggest… Canes were made of ebony or other wood, of white bone from the jaw of the sperm whale, and of ivory from the teeth of the same animal… Swifts were manufactured of bone and ivory, riveted with silver wire, designed especially for a sweetheart or wife… Whales’ teeth were ornamented with etchings and engravings in colors, many of them of more than ordinary merit.

Oddly, Beane never mentions Enos in this context.  In fact, he refers specifically to only one of the crew in connection with scrimshaw, and never by name but only as “the carpenter” and as “Chips” (the sailors’ universal nickname for ship’s carpenters).  From crew lists it is clear that he was William Martin from upstate New York, age 29 at the beginning of the voyage – thus a good bit older than most of the men.  Beane calls him “the best workman we had on board, and the most industrious,” but also an example of a rare compulsion among some whalemen to rid themselves of the fruits of their labor as soon as they arrive on shore, regardless of the time and energy expended in producing them: “‘Old Chips’… made it a rule to sell everything that he had manufactured during the season at the first port entered.”  Beane reflects in greater detail upon another, unnamed shipmate afflicted with the same syndrome:

I have known the labors of a six months’ cruise to be disposed of for a few dollars or even shillings, and the proceeds spent in drink, in [fewer] hours than the months required to make the articles sacrificed.  One case, I remember, where a very ingenious fellow worked all his spare time during a three years’ voyage in making an ivory ship.  The hull was ten inches [25 cm] long, modeled from a walrus tusk.  The spars and sails were carved from whales’ teeth.  Every block and boom was in its proper place.  Altogether it was a nearly perfect piece of workmanship.  At the last port before sailing home his appetite for drink got the better of him and he sold this specimen of his handiwork for three pounds ($15.00) and before the day was gone had spent the last farthing.

After the two Java voyages Enos retired from whaling – temporarily, as it turned out – and spent a few years ashore.  Warrin has catalogued his various business activities during 1859-77: storekeeper; master of the coastwise schooner Flyaway; and manager of a tannery and kid-leather factory.  According to Farwell, he was also master of the schooner Francis Smith.  In all of these Enos was presumably the sole owner or principal shareholder.  Accordingly, in light of Enos’s chronic restlessness and evident unhappiness in these ventures, it is difficult not to agree with Farwell’s compelling assessment, which is also quoted by Warrin: “Behind the façade of success … lay Captain Enos’ permanent failure to cope with life ashore, and real inability to transfer his skills as a whaleman to the supervision of other businesses.”[9] Subsequent events suggest that this may have applied equally well to his marriage and homelife.

The biggest mystery of his life – now ostensibly solved – concerns misimpressions likely created or encouraged by Enos himself about the endgame of his career and what was hitherto believed to be his death.  Dissatisfied ashore, he pulled up stakes and went to sea again in 1877 as first mate in the New Bedford bark George and Susan (1877-80).  A family genealogy insists that he died at sea in 1878,[10] which would have been on this voyage; but it is clear that he sailed again in 1880 as first mate in the New Bedford bark John and Winthrop, and that he resigned from that berth in 1882 at Talcahuano, Chile, to accept an appointment as captain of the former Dartmouth, Massachusetts bark Matilda Sears, now renamed in Chilean ownership.  The usual story is that in 1882 Enos sailed off on a whaling voyage as captain of the Matilda Sears, now renamed Machias Bramas, and neither ship nor captain was ever heard from again.  As Warrin puts it, “Even the most exacting historians of Cold Spring Harbor and its whaling industry have insisted that Enos … disappeared on the high seas with the vessel and crew.”

Warrin has now uncovered convincing evidence that the old story is a complete fabrication.  It turns out that Machias Bramas was a garbled misnomer for Mathieu y Brañas, namesake of the firm of Chilean whaling agents who took over the Matilda Sears; and Warrin cites a Chilean source for the claim that the vessel “continued to form part of the small Chilean whaling fleet operating out of Talcahuano until it was finally retired at the port of Paita, Peru, in 1905.”[11]

Meanwhile, Enos himself had a name change and was reborn into a new life.  “Manuel Ignacio Enos de Macedo – as he became known in Talcahuano” evidently “continued to whale out of Talcahuano on vessels owned by Mathieu y Brañas well into the next decade,” and he “met and eventually married a young local woman, María Petronila Araneda, with whom he had six children and thus ended his days as the scion of a Chilean Enos family,” though they did not actually marry until after Susan’s death in 1904.  He died in bed two months short of his 89th birthday in March 1915.  Warrin also provides the coda:

Today there is a street in the town [of Talcahuano] named in the honor of “Capitán Enos”… Both the name of Manuel Enos and the seafaring tradition continued with Big Manuel’s son, Manuel I. Enos Araneda and the latter’s son, Manuel Enos Sosa, who, beginning in 1939, spent almost sixty years at sea, many of them as master of merchant vessels.[12]

[2] Robert D. Farwell, “Manuel Enos: Cold Spring Whaleman,” Long Island Forum (June 1981), 108f.

[3] Frank, Op. cit.

[4] Donald Warrin, So Ends This Day: Portuguese in American Whaling, 1765-1927 (forthcoming, Fall 2009).  The book is a comprehensive overview that also provides excellent biographical sketches of Manuel Enos and others.

[5] Rafael Enos Aguirre, “Orígenes e historia de la familia Enos,” private document; Rafael Enos Aguirre to Donald Warrin, email, 18 Mar 2009.

[6] Richard C. Malley, Op. cit., p. 24.

[7] Frank, Op. cit.; quoted from Farwell, Op. Cit., p. 108, who indicates that the yarn may be apocryphal.

[8] Joshua Fillebrown Beane, From Forecastle to Cabin: The Story of a cruise in many seas, taken from a journal kept each day, wherein was recorded the happenings of a voyage around the world in pursuit of whales (New York, 1905).

[9] Farwell, Op. cit., p. 109.

[10] Ancestry.com. awt.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=viccork&id=I6021

[11] Sandoval Hernández, “Talcahuano y los últimos balleneros” [Talcahuano and the Last Whalers], n.d.

[12] For these clarifications of Enos’s latter-day circumstances, Warren cites: Rafael Enos Aguirre to Warrin, email, 29 Sept 2007 and 18 Mar 2009; Aguirre, “Orígenes e historia de la familia Enos” (private document); and “El Mar fue mi universidad,” Manuel Enos Sosa, interview by Macarena Rojas Gómez, in the digital magazine La Columna, 19 Sept 2004.

MAY 15, 16, 17 2009

The Annual Scrimshaw Weekend, founded in 1989 and held at the Whaling Museum each June, is the world’s only regular forum in which collectors, curators, antiques dealers, history buffs, and enthusiasts from all over the country gather to confer about the whalers’ distinctive and evocative .

For more information visit www.whalingmuseum.org/prog/scrimshawWeekend.htm.

Members Preview and Curator’s Tour: Thursday, February 26, 200, 6PM

Here’s a sneak peak at what’s going on in the Gratia Houghton Rinehart Gallery:

gallery model (constructed by intern Evan Price)

Preparator Scott Benson, (photo by volunteer Herb Andrew)

Preparator Scott Benson (photo by volunteer Herb Andrew)

Stay tuned for more!