34 S DISCOVERY REPORTS 



the water washes out the oil saturating the bone. The use of scrimshaw in Azores whaleboats has 

 already been mentioned (p. 311). The decorative articles are rather more sophisticated and show more 

 use of the lathe than those made in whaleships. The teeth provide cigarette-holders and pipes, 

 perfume jars, egg-cups, and cups with stems like liqueur glasses, darning-mushrooms, paper-knives 

 and chess sets, seals, signet rings and crucifixes. The chess sets are particularly fine. Articles made 

 from pan-bone include rosary boxes and trinket boxes, walking-sticks, and decorative panels for 

 mandolines. There is a photograph showing a selection of Pico scrimshaw in Figueiredo (1946, 

 p. 188). The amount of finished scrimshaw work is very modest, and is sold across to Fayal where it is 

 mostly bought by visitors on the fortnightly steamer. 



The most characteristic scrimshaw articles of the old whaleship days were neither carved nor 

 turned, but were simply engravings or graphics (the best being of high artistic accomplishment) done 

 on polished sperm teeth and depicting a variety of scenes, usually violent moments in the whale hunt 

 or sentimental subjects of home and affection. I have seen none of these graphics in the Azores, but 

 I found recently in London a scrimshaw tooth, shown in Plate XVIII, which seems to be a direct link 

 with the days when Portuguese islanders sailed in the American ships and learned their present trade of 

 Sperm whaling. As scrimshaw the tooth is undistinguished, the subject being conventional and the 

 execution crude. Above a whaling bark flying the American flag, there is a dove of peace (a common 

 motif in scrimshaw) clutching in its beak a streamer bearing the name Manuel Ballrros. Manuel may 

 be Portuguese, but it is the surname which is arresting, because so unlikely. The suggestion is that 

 this tooth was engraved at sea during the last century by an illiterate Portuguese whaleman, either 

 Azorean or Cape Verder, who was assisted by his messmates to inscribe, with indifferent success, their 

 phonetic rendering of his spoken Manuel (dos) Baleieros, ' Manuel of the Whalemen '. 



Sometimes the unworked bones of Sperm whales are put to homely and everyday uses. Figueiredo 

 (1946, p. 190) shows sections of jaw-bone used as gate-posts to a field of maize. I have seen door 

 lintels of sperm bone, and also comfortable stools made from upturned vertebrae furnished with 

 wooden legs and back-rest. 



On the island of Pico, but not elsewhere, the skin of the Sperm whale is made into leather. In other 

 parts of the world the tough skin of the penis of the great Whalebone whales is sometimes saved 

 because it can be tanned to a handsome leather; and there is a regular industry for making leather from 

 the skins of the Beluga or White whale (Vladykov, 1944, p. 149) since the skin of this dolphin is well 

 supplied with longtitudinal fibres and, in fact, makes the strongest shoe laces obtainable. But leather- 

 making from the skin of the ordinary body surface of a great whale seems to be practised nowhere 

 except in Pico and possibly in Japan, where they tan a certain amount of whale skin from some un- 

 specified part of the body. In Pico the craft is apparently indigenous and not a relic of American 

 whaling, for I have seen no mention of the tanning of whale's skin in the old narratives. Sperm whale 

 blackskin when fresh is soft and friable, and to the ordinary eye appears quite unsuitable for leather- 

 making, yet I find the finished material to be a brown, tough and durable leather, resembling unworked 

 shoe-leather from cows' hide, although perhaps a little less pliant. 



Senhor Joaquim Jose Machado of Lagens do Pico has kindly described how the sperm leather is 

 made. The skin is mostly selected from the head because here it can be stripped with the least attach- 

 ment of underlying blubber. The strips of blackskin are first steeped in a tub of lime which loosens the 

 adhering blubber and makes removing it easy. Tanning is the next stage, the skin being placed in an 

 infusion of bark from the fay a, z beech-like shrub, Myricafaya, which gave Fayal its name and which 

 is also common in Pico on the foothills and near the coast. After tanning, the skin is pressed through 

 rollers to remove moisture, and then placed in the sun to dry. The leather so produced is about 6 mm. 

 thick, which means that the skin does not diminish in thickness during the conversion into leather. 



