Fascinating! Stunning! Eye-Opener! It has been years since I visited the New Bedford Whaling Museum and I was “blown out of the water!” to use an old maritime cliché. Two new exhibits, Courtney M. Leonard’s “BREACH: Logbook 24 | Scrimshaw” and the “The Wider World of Scrimshaw” were the reason for my visit, but it was the main collection itself that immediately intrigued me.
Visitors are greeted by two enormous whale skeletons hanging ominously overhead, suspended from the ceiling. If those giant bones don’t get your attention, underneath them is a strange large pink object about five feet high with round cylindric openings pointing in every direction. It is a plastic replica of a real blue whale heart, made in Australia, weighing 660 pounds, installed in 2018.
If your museum is housed in a set of small rooms in a small building, make every wall-inch count. Pulling myself away from whale heart and bones I found the elevator and searched for the “Scrimshaw” exhibit. But the museum is so densely organized that I found myself admiring 19th century American cut-glass punch bowls and was intrigued by an exhibit of machines for recording whale sounds. I got lost in a gorgeous wood paneled room for the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, saw 19th century American paintings, an exhibit about “coal,” and whales, whales, all about whales, everywhere.
Finally, I found the scrimshaw exhibit and it was just as densely packed as the rest of the museum. What bored sailors, stuck for months on an ocean voyage waiting for the call “Thar she blows!” couldn’t do with sperm whale leftovers of bones, teeth and walrus ivory! A partial list of the amazing objects includes the famous decorative carvings on whales’ teeth, but also canes, women’s corset stays, furniture, spools for thread, needles, yarn spindles, forks and spoons, kitchen tools, chests of drawers, kids’ toys, carriage springs, fishing poles and umbrella ribs. As Wikipedia states, it was “the plastic of its day.”