In the era of whaling on sailing ships, voyages could last up to four years, so leisure time on board was often spent practicing “scrimshaw,” a carving technique where designs are etched into ivory with a cutting tool and then pigmented. The raw materials used were teeth and jawbones of sperm whales, on which evocative representations of distant love or national pride were made, as well as portraits of episodes from the hard work at sea. This piece of scrimshaw, which meticulously reproduces a model from the magazine Moda Ilustrada — then highly popular — is notable for having been crafted on a walrus tooth, bringing to us the distant cold of the Arctic, where many of our whalers once sailed.
