Scrimshaw began on 19th century whaling ships, where men endured months of empty horizon between hunts. Carved from sperm whale teeth, bone, baleen, and sometimes walrus tusks, it started in the late 18th century as practical tools and grew into detailed art made by scrimshanders. The word’s origin is unknown, and its first written appearance is an 1826 entry in the logbook of the brig By Chance. Ship’s wood was a costly, counted resource, while whale teeth and bone were free waste after the oil was rendered. The spark came in 1815, when US Navy Captain David Porter’s published journal exposed where whale teeth came from and how plentiful they were, and their market value collapsed so ordinary sailors could keep them.

The earliest authenticated pictorial sperm whale scrimshaw dates to 1817, inscribed as a tooth from a whale taken near the Galapagos that yielded 100 barrels of oil. Sailors carved with sail needles and scrap iron and rubbed lamp black, soot from the try-works, or tobacco juice into the lines, often copying illustrations from books and newspapers. Many pieces survived because they were stored in barrels of whale oil. Today collectors who fill teeth with baby oil and car wax clash with conservators, who warn that oils oxidize and yellow the ivory and instead control light, humidity, and temperature.

• Sailors made jagging wheels for crimping pie crusts, corset busks, and children’s toys for the women and families at home.
• Herman Melville described whaling sketches carved on sperm whale teeth and busks cut from right whale bone in Moby-Dick.
• Scrimshaw falls under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act, and CITES.
• Legal marine ivory scrimshaw must predate 1973, and elephant ivory pieces must predate the 1989 ban.
• Modern scrimshanders work in fossil mammoth ivory, Alaskan walrus tusk carved by Indigenous Alaskans, micarta, and polychrome inks.