Scrimshaw: The controversial art form on the brink of extinction

As Moby Dick turns 175, some of the last American scrimshanders grapple with the legacy of maintaining one of the US's oldest art forms.

Jade Gotauco spent her childhood among the skeletons of giants. Her father, Chet Gotauco, was a scrimshander – an artist who etched images onto the ivory of hunted whales. In pensive moments, she would slip under the arched jaw of a whale in his Rhode Island garden and sit atop a massive vertebra, watching insects scrabble across the porous bone.

"My favourite smell in the world is the sandy aroma of ivory dust," said Gotauco, now an artist herself. Whale teeth adorn the walls of her studio in New Bedford, Massachusetts; she engraves them with nautical scenes in which sperm whales thrash the ocean to foam and whalers hurl barbed harpoons from minute boats.

Ask Americans about the cultural legacy of whaling, and many will point to Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick, which turns 175 next month. Yet for all the book's brilliance, it's scrimshaw – the practice of artistically carving whale teeth and bones, which is considered one of the US's earliest homegrown art forms – that offers a true insider's view of the industry.

Today, there's hardly any of those teeth and bones left on the legal market. Some scrimshanders, including Gotauco, believe the art form should disappear with them. "When the ivory is gone, this is over," she said.

Scrimshaw was developed by sailors whose lives unfolded on whaling grounds around the globe as the industry expanded into a 19th-Century behemoth. They strove to depict a culture that, for a few lucrative decades, made New Bedford North America's wealthiest city per capita.

"They saw their experiences as important," said Marina Wells, an assistant curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which is home to the largest scrimshaw collection is the world. "You see that in their commemoration of whaling scenes, in all their meticulous detail."

Some of the carvings throb with yearning, depicting homey scenes of faraway families. Others capture sailors rowing fragile, open boats dwarfed by the whales they pursued. They're communicating "the dangerous, faraway world of whaling", Wells said. "You have the bloody spouts of the whales after their lungs have been punctured… the intimacy of whalemen interacting with whale bodies that's really hands-on."

To modern eyes, the scenes evoke the heartbreaking impacts on species hunted to the brink of extinction; yet the whalers, too, were often broken by the industry. At the Seamen's Bethel, an 1832 mariner's church located across the street from the museum in New Bedford (and which features in the opening chapters of Moby Dick), such risks are on poignant display. Lining its whitewashed sanctuary are marble cenotaphs commemorating those lost at sea.

"After fastning to a whale, was carried overboard by a line and drowned," reads........

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