Antiques In New England Seaport Towns (Part 1 Of 2)

( Orginally published 1950 )

One finds many antiques of a nautical character in the old seaport towns of New England. They are relics of the days of sail, when every other man you met in the street could properly be hailed as shipmate, skipper, or captain, and men spoke of the remotest places in the world as if they were neighboring towns.

The sea played an important part in the cultural development of these places. Almost every home had its cabinet or whatnot of treasures, its shelves laden with sandalwood and lacquer boxes, pieces of carved ivory and jade, shell and bead necklaces, queer bracelets, chopsticks, sets of chessmen, and many other odd things.

Lucy Larcom, writing of her girlhood in Beverly, Massachusetts, during the second quarter of the last century, said:

The women of well-to-do families had Canton crape for shawls and Smyrna silks and Turk satins, for Sabbath-day wear, which somebody had brought home for them. Mantel-pieces were adorned with nautilus and conch-shells, and with branches and fans of coral; and children had foreign curiosities and treasures of the sea for playthings.

The first collectors and the first museums were in the coastal towns. Salem was noted for its collections of natural and historical relics. The motto of the town was "The wealth of the Indies to the uttermost gulf" and many of the grand old houses were full of rare and valuable things. One of the best museums in the country, a storehouse of antiquarian and artistic interest, was established here during the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Nantucket likewise had its collections. The museum connected with the Nantucket Athenaeum contained a large number of curiosities, consisting chiefly of weapons, dresses, and utensils from the Pacific Islands.

Even the inns in seaport towns had collections. Herman Melville described an old hostelry near the water front in New Bedford when that place was a whaling center. The walls of the entry were hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears and rusty old whaling lances and harpoons, some of them storied weapons. On one side of the public room, with its ponderous beams and wrinkled floor planks, stood a long, low, shelflike table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities from the ends of the earth.

Today in the antique shops of these old ports one gets interesting glimpses of the past. The imagination is stirred by the sight of such things as spyglasses, compasses, barometers, ships' wheels, navigation lamps and lanterns, seamen's chests, charts, ship models, bottled and otherwise, ships' bells, curious shells, name boards, carved sternpieces, occasional specimens of scrimshaw work, ship paintings and prints, weathervanes, and similar objects.

Some of these things you are also likely to find in old ship chandleries which have degenerated into marine pink shops, and the prices asked are apt to be less than in the antique shops. Dealers, of course, frequently visit these places, but in one harborside place on the coast of Maine, which was filled with secondhand anchors, lengths of chain, coils of cordage, blocks, and miscellancous marine hardware, I was given my choice of half u dozen old pine sea chests at six dollars apiece, which was reasonable enough. No two were identical, but they were all plainly painted, save in a few instances, with the former owner's name or initials. Each was equipped with rope handles and had a small compartment at one end which served the sailor for a ditty box. The lids were loose and the locks were either broken or the key was missing, but these were minor defects easily repaired. Dealers sometimes buy old chests to fix up and decorate. One I saw had been painted a Chinese red, with ships and compass cards and other sea symbols in black and white.

In another marine junk store a man I know purchased a tall binnacle, complete with compass and oil-burning copper side lamps. There was no telling from what ship it had come, but the compass bore the name of an English instrument maker. What does a landlubber do with a secondhand binnacle? The person who bought this one made effective use of it as a garden ornament, placing it in a spot where ordinarily you would expect to see a sundial or a bird bath. It became a strong point of attraction and interest.

Once, on a wharf, I bought the carved fashion piece of an old vessel. It was a graceful strip of scrollwork six or seven feet long, beautifully designed and carved in relief from a single plank. Traces of gilt still showed on the raised parts of the design. Exposure to the salt air had aged and dried out the wood until it was a silvery gray and seemed to weigh nothing at all. I placed it over the mantel in the seaside house where I was then living and few things have given me more pleasure.

It was undoubtedly the work of a carver of ship figureheads. A figurehead was, of course, the most outstanding part of a ship's decoration, but the sternpiece was also important, and some of the best work of the ship carvers was expended on the after end. The American eagle was a favorite motif. It was usually a fiercelooking bird, beaked and membered yellow, with outspread wings. It was generally shown supporting a shield or clutching a ribbon. or olive branch which streamed gracefully across the stern. The color combination commonly used to set off the carving was gilt on black.

The most popular subject for a figurehead was the full-length female figure in flowing robes. Sometimes the person depicted was Columbia in a liberty cap, but more often it was a likeness of the person for whom the vessel was named, perhaps the wife or daughter of the owner.

Pioneers, Indians, statesmen, and merchants were also frequently represented. On small vessels it was the practice to use busts instead of full-length figures. But in any case the figurehead was almost always placed on a scrolled pedestal.

The ship carver had to serve an apprenticeship. He was as a rule a youth who had shown an aptitude for whittling. At first he merely roughed out the figure, which was then finished by the master carver. Pine was the wood generally used. Fortunately, the work of these ship carvers was not confined to the decoration of vessels and for this reason it is not unusual to find in old shipbuilding towns furniture, mirrors, hanging shelves, ship models, and architectural ornaments carved by these men. This is notably the case along the Maine Coast.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote as follows of Shem Drowne, the figurehead carver of colonial Boston, who was the first American known to have attempted this art:

From his earliest boyhood he had exhibited a knackfor it would be too proud a word to call it genius; a knack, therefore-for the imitation of the human figure in whatever material came most readily to hand. The snows of New England winter had often supplied him with a species of marble as dazzlingly white, at least, as the Parian or the Carrara, and, if less durable, yet sufficiently so to correspond with any claims to permanent existence possessed by the boy's frozen statues. Yet they won admiration from maturer judges than his schoolfellows and were, indeed, remarkably clever, though destitute of the native warmth that might have made the snow melt beneath his hand. As he advanced in life the young man adopted pine and oak as eligible materials for the display of his skill, which now began to bring him a return of solid silver, as well as the empty praise that had been apt reward enough for his productions of evanescent snow. He became noted for carving ornamental pump-heads and wooden urns for gate-posts and decorations more grotesque than fanciful for mantel-pieces. No apothecary would have deemed himself in the way of obtaining custom without setting up a gilded mortar, if not a head of Galen or Hippocrates, from the skillful hand of Drowne. But the great scope of his business lay in the manufacture of figure-heads for vessels. Whether it were the monarch himself or some famous British admiral or general or the governor of the province, or, perchance, the favorite daughter of the ship-owner, there the image stood above the prow decked out in gorgeous colors, magnificently gilded and staring the whole world out of countenance, as if from an innate consciousness of its own superiority. These specimens of native sculpture had crossed the sea in all directions and been not ignobly noticed among the crowded shipping of the Thames and wherever else the hardy mariners of New England had pushed their adventures.

Considering the great number of figureheads made in New England in the days of sail, very few have survived. Some were washed away during storms, or were lost with the ships to which they were attached, while others were removed and permitted to perish from neg lect when the old ships were dismantled and converted Into barges. The best of those which were saved are now in museums, though every now and then you come across a good specimen outside an antique shop, where, like the cigar-store Indian of old, it serves the useful purpose of attracting interest and trade.

The infinite patience of the old-time New England sailors, especially on the whaleships, is seen in the wonderful pieces of small carving in wood and bone which were done as a pastime during long voyages. Seamen the world over have for centuries indulged in this hobby, hut none has ever equaled the "scrimshaw" work of the Yankee whalemen. Exhibitions of it may be seen in the nautical museums at New Bedford, Nantucket, and Salem. Specimens are also to be met with in seaboard antique shops.

Throughout the Pacific [Herman Melville wrote] and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy.

Among the most delightful scrimshaw pieces were the many objects made in miniature. One of these was a small urn-shaped container with a cap that screwed on tightly. They were fashioned as a rule from the tooth of a whale on a homemade lathe operated by foot power and youthful whalemen bound to sea used them to catch and preserve the tears of their sweethearts when they bade them good-by. These sentimental trinkets were often made by the old hands on a ship and given to the youngsters going on their first voyage.