ahoy!

If everything goes right, we're going out on a whaleboat on Monday morning!!! This is thanks to a letterboxing friend, Denise, who is a member of one of the whaleboat groups in Oakland.

And to clarify, this is the kind of whaleboat that Nineteenth Century whalers pursued whales in, not the kind that nature-obsessed geeks (like us) go whale watching in.

What an adventure to have, before even going to work! (Boy am I glad to be finally feeling better...)

The pictures are of historic scrimshaw, which was made of whales' teeth and bones. On the left is a "bodkin" which is a fancy way of saying a device for poking holes in things.

On the right is a busk, which would be a stiffener for the center of a corset, if I'm not mistaken. "Boning" in corsets was actually made of baleen, which is the filtering "teeth" of certain species of whales.

The image below is a detail of a scrimshaw pie crimper. My sister Martha owns one of these.