Located above a café – which is really a pub, famous for its gin and tonic – on the island of Faial, in the municipality of Horta, in the Azores archipelago, right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, this tiny museum displays the creation of whalers who decorated and carved whale bones and teeth. Herman Melville describes similar creations in Moby-Dick: “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 jackknives 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”.
Images: Courtesy of Peter Café Sport
