Scrimshaw, Whale's Tooth

One of the main sources of lighting fuel in the colonial period and well into the nineteenth century was whale oil. Consequently, hunting for whales was an important part of the economy. The long ocean voyages that characterized this enterprise afforded the sailors a great deal of free time, during which they sometimes made crafts out of unusable parts of the whale such as the teeth. In nautical slang, scrimshaw denotes any precision mechanical work.