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

( Orginally published 1950 )

Patience and skill went into the making of earrings, necklaces, bracelets, combs, and other articles of feminine adornment, while Grandma was perhaps remembered with a snuffbox. Nor were the children forgotten. For these there were numerous doll-size objects, particularly tiny cups and saucers.

It took an experienced hand at scrimshaw work to make a "jagging wheel." These small wheels, which were beautifully made and more often than not fitted with a whale's-tooth handle, were used to cut cookies or to crimp or press the edges of piecrust together. Looking at one today, it is difficult to believe that anything so carefully wrought was used as a kitchen utensil.

Even more intricate and difficult to make was the collapsible wheel for winding yarn called a "swift." The delicate whalebone spokes of the wheel worked like the ribs of an umbrella and could be opened or closed. Fastened to the edge of the table by an ivory clamp whittled from a whale's tooth, a swift required more skill and perseverance in its making than almost any other piece of scrimshaw work. Women prized swifts highly.

Although not technically scrimshaw work, because not executed as a rule by mariners, mention may be made here of the carved and decorated powder horns which were generally rural or backwoods productions. As much patient work was bestowed on these necessary and significant implements of war and sport as on any scrimshawed article, and they show perhaps an even greater variety of subject matter. Alice Morse Earle, who knew a collector of powder horns, a man who owned or had examined some three hundred specimens, says, "Maps, plans, legends, verses, portraits, landscapes, family history, crests, dates of births, marriages, and deaths, patriotic and religious sentiments, all may be found on powder horns."

The making of ship models was another handicraft which whiled away endless days at sea. The miniature model in a bottle has puzzled many people. How did the ship get inside? Some have concluded that the glass must have been blown around the model, but this is incorrect. ' r he ship was actually inserted through the mouth of the bottle with the masts and spars neatly folded on top of the hull. Then by means of threads which had been attached to them the masts were raised and stepped in place. It was the work of days to make and bottle one of these tiny ships.

Many hours of work also went into the making of the larger unbottled models. The rigging alone took a lot of time. The first model I recall seeing was a large clipper ship in a saloon window. Ship models were almost as popular with saloon keepers as was the picture of Custer's Last Stand. In the earlier days, nautical signboards with painted ships often hung outside salt-water taverns. They were used, of course, to attract seafaring trade.

Years ago, in Norwich, Connecticut, I bought a fairsized model of a whaler. Several generations of boys in the family from whom I acquired it had played with the old thing and it was a wreck. Some of the spars were broken and the rigging was in a tangle. But it had a hollow hull of excellent lines. Like many peaceful old ships, it had painted gun ports to give the impression that the vessel was armed. Some youngster had tried to make these sham ports realistic by cutting through them with a jacknife. It was a crude job left unfinished. I thought the damage could be easily repaired, the spars mended, and the ship rerigged, but I never got around to doing anything with it, and finally sold it for much less than it cost me.

The old shipbuilders worked from models, but these were half models of the hull only. It was easier for them to take the lines of a ship from a model than from a plan. By looking at a model they could size up a ship and tell what she would be like and how she would behave when built, whether fast or slow and whether she would throw a lot of water and be a wet ship or a dry one. These things were more difficult to determine from a plan. Many of the old half models have been identified by name by taking the scale measurements and then searching the local custom-house records for the registry of ships of the same dimensions. Lincoln Colcord did this with some of the models in the Penobscot Marine Museum at Searsport, Maine.

Pictures of ships hold a strong fascination for many people. The old-time sailor frequently tried his hand at painting them and sometimes achieved a fair measure of success in a primitive way. Correctness of detail is important in these pictures, and however lacking in painting technique the old salt may have been, he had the necessary technical knowledge to picture ships properly. But the best work was done by the professional marine painters, who had an eye for the beauty of a ship's line and knew how to capture it. Before 1830 they generally worked in water colors. Oil paintings of ships are seldom older than that date.

While there were a good many native artists who specialized in ship portraiture, Yankee skippers also liked to have pictures of their ships made in foreign ports, and some that turn up are alien productions. A good many were the work of Chinese artists, as is evident not only from the background of the oriental ports in which they were done, but also by the technique used. Chinese waves, for example, usually have conventionalized lacy edges. These Far Eastern artists haunted the water fronts, soliciting business from the Yankee sea captains when they came ashore.

One of several ship pictures which I have picked up at different times in different places shows a tall ship standing out of a harbor under full sail past a headland on which is a lighthouse. It may not be a portrait of any particular ship, but I have always felt that it was and hoped to identify her or the line to which she belonged by the house flag she is flying, a blue, white, and blue burgee, with a red ball on the central white stripe. But no list of house flags I have consulted has that special private ensign. It would add to the interest of the picture if I knew the ship, but even without a name it is a fine, spirited painting in a good old-fashioned frame.

A much older and more dramatic painting shows a pirate vessel attacking a merchantman. There is no mistaking the pirate craft, because she is of the traditional low and rakish type and is flying the black flag with skull and crossbones. It is a fanciful production, but the ships are correctly represented as the pirate vessel closes in to board. It is painted in oils on homespun. The waves are rather primitively done, but there is depth to the water, and the ships themselves show native genius.

The influence of the sea is seen in the seaboard weathervanes. Wooden ones were often whittled by sailors on shipboard, and the figurehead carvers made many. Shem Drowne, the eighteenth-century Boston ship sculptor, made the famous grasshopper vane for the Old State House in Boston and the quaint Indian with bow and arrow that adorned the colonial-government administration building. Both these old copper vanes are now museum pieces.

The strictly maritime weathervanes took the form of ships, whales, fishes, and sea birds, though the eagle was as popular a subject on land as it was on the sea. Seaside churches sometimes had a ship or whale vane. Metal vanes were usually the work of the village blacksmith. I saw a large painted wooden fish which for years had been the signboard of a fish market successfully converted into a weathervane by simply mounting it on an iron rod, but I do not know what kind of a fish it was supposed to be. Today the swordfish is the most popular of the piscatorial vanes. There is one on the post office in Provincetown.

On some old New England houses brass whales are hung by the tail for doorknockers. Dolphins are also sometimes similarly used.

The old banjo-style barometers in rosewood, mahogany, or walnut are never American, but generally English. A good example in working order, with a broken arch and inlay, is worth from a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

The antique shops along the coast have been a happy hunting ground for those interested in old wooden duck decoys. An artist I knew used to buy all he could find and after painting them sold them in pairs for gardenpool ornaments. He soon found, however, that it was easier and cheaper to order new ones from Sears, Roebuck. He bought pintails, to which he sometimes added fantastic combs and tails. This made them topheavy, but by experimenting with them in a bathtub he learned how to weight them so they did not tip over in the water.

The American China trade was inaugurated as far as New England was concerned in 1787, when the Grand Turk, owned by Elias Hasket Derby, a Salem merchant, returned from a two-year voyage to the Orient. She was the first of a long succession of vessels which plied between New England ports and the East. Counting the Grand Turk, Salem alone had thirty-five ships engaged in the China trade, which brought back mixed cargoes of tea, coffee, spices, silks, embroidered shawls, nankeen, feathers, fans, chinaware, lacquer, gongs, and curiosities of all kinds. The net was spread wide, for the Yankee captains went by way of Cape Horn and returned by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Outward bound they called at the North Pacific fur ports and Hawaii. They visited Canton, the Philippines, the East Indies, and heading homeward stopped at Mauritius and various European ports of call. During the course of a voyage a vessel's cargo might be turned over a dozen times. It was an immensely profitable business in which many fortunes were made.

The Yankee shipmasters and crews brought home to their families a rich assortment of foreign things. Corner cupboards were filled with beautiful sets and pieces of china for which the women of New England had a natural feminine partiality.

Nor was the importation of tableware confined to that of far Cathay. Much was also brought from Europe. The courting glass, a small mirror not more than twelve by fourteen inches in size and often smaller, which is found in old seaport towns, is believed to have originated in China and first to have reached New England late in the eighteenth century. Pieces of painted glass were set into the crested frame, which usually has a picture or design under glass at the top. These curious mirrors were usually placed in a shallow box, from which they could easily be removed, and were hung, box and all, on the wall.

Another outlandish glass also found in New England seaports is the Balboa or Bilbao mirror, which sailors from Marblehead are supposed to have brought from Spain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The frames were wood and marble, with a top double scroll and gilt ornaments.

Although Chinese lacquer was easily damaged by salt water, a good deal reached New England safely. Toleware in the form of candlesticks, tea caddies, and boxes from China still turn up in Salem, Newburyport, and Portsmouth. Like the lacquer which inspired it, this toleware is often painted a brilliant red on-lamented in gold.

Objects of oriental pewter are also to be found in these places and elsewhere along the coast. Incense burners seem to have been especially popular. Old Chinese pewter was generally so heavily leaded as to be unfit for dining-room use.

The fabulous days of sail helped to build up the stock of New England heirlooms with numerous quaint and curious things.