Bones, teeth and scrimshaw: what whalers did with the rest of the animal

Once the oil had been rendered and the baleen torn out, what remained on the deck was a carcass of several dozen tonnes. Whalers threw away almost none of it. What was done with that remainder says a great deal about the economics of whaling, and it left behind a singular art.

Bones: fertiliser, char and building frames

The skeleton of a large whale is spongy and soaked with oil, which gives it two successive uses.

It was first boiled to extract the residual oil, known as bone oil, of lower quality but perfectly saleable. What was left was then ground into bone meal, a phosphate and nitrogen fertiliser sought after by agriculture, or into cattle feed. Part of it was calcined to produce bone char, used in particular in sugar refining.

The large pieces, jaws and vertebrae, served locally as building material. In the Faroe Islands, in Iceland, in Shetland and in the Arctic, one still finds enclosures, arches and frames built on whale mandibles, for want of timber.

Teeth: sperm whale ivory

Only odontocetes carry them, and only one industrially hunted species had really large ones: the sperm whale, whose lower jaw holds some twenty pairs of conical teeth that can exceed twenty centimetres and weigh a kilo.

This dentine works like elephant ivory: it can be sawn, polished and engraved. It gave tool and knife handles, buttons, games, chess pieces and walking sticks.

The teeth of the narwhal belong to another story. The narwhal’s long spiralled tusk, which is a canine and not a horn, circulated in Europe for centuries under the name of unicorn horn, sold at enormous prices as a universal antidote. Several royal treasuries still hold some.

Scrimshaw, an art born of boredom

A whaling voyage lasted two, three, sometimes four years. Most of the time was spent waiting. It was from that waiting that scrimshaw was born.

The technique is simple and demanding. A sperm whale tooth or a plate of bone is polished, the design is engraved with the point of a knife or a sail needle, then the surface is rubbed with lampblack, lamp soot or ink, which lodges in the lines and brings them out.

The subjects are those of men who saw nothing else: ships under sail, hunting scenes, portraits of women copied from engravings, patriotic motifs. The output, essentially American and concentrated in the nineteenth century, is today a collector’s and museum item, and one of the few forms of folk art born at sea.

The word itself is of uncertain etymology, attested in logbooks from the 1820s onwards.

Tendons, skin, glands

The rest followed. Tendons, very long and very strong, made cordage, sewing thread and bowstrings in Arctic cultures. Skin, tanned, gave straps and leather goods. In the beluga and the narwhal it is eaten, under the name muktuk, and is an important source of vitamin C in Arctic diets.

Glands and organs supplied a pharmaceutical industry in the twentieth century: pituitary extracts, insulin, heparin drawn from the liver and the lung. Gelatine obtained from the waste went into glue and photographic film.

It is this whole-animal processing that explains the profitability of the factory ships: one animal taken yielded about ten distinct commercial streams, and not just one.

Today

International trade in teeth, bones and objects made from them is prohibited under CITES for protected species. Antique scrimshaw pieces circulate under an exemption for goods predating the convention, with a burden of proof that falls on the seller, and the market is regularly crossed by fakes, in resin or in ivory from other species.

Skeletons, for their part, have taken on another value. Hung in natural history museums, they have become the very image of the animal for the public, and a resource for research: bones record age, pathologies, ship strikes and the traces of the animal’s life.

This page is part of our feature on whale products, which sets out the six main uses that drove commercial whaling.