I got to the pub at eleven.  I had four cups of coffee in me and I was going to get that interview.  Samuel Bingo Burdett waltzed in with the bartender from the night before under his arm around twelve thirty.

Scrimshaw Kid I

Scrimshaw Kid II

Scrimshaw Kid III

They seemed to be doing quite well indeed.  He kind of waved at me as they walked by and went straight to the back- where the bathrooms were located.

I sat and waited.  I lit a cigarette and ordered two pints of the stout that Burdett had devoured the day before.  I figured it was a terrible idea, but in order to get the interview, I had to get them.  I had to become a friend.  An equal.  I ordered another pint for myself, poured an inch off the top into my empty coffee mug and slid the mug down the bar, out of sight.

When they returned, I gestured towards the pints and pushed them their way.

“Too early,” Burdett said, “I need some coffee.”  His lady friend nodded in agreement, and gazed at him as if he were the most responsible man in the world.

I could not believe it.

They ordered coffee and I proceeded to drink twelve dollars worth of stout.  I can’t win.  The good news is, he talked.  Here’s what I got after going over the recording for a week.

Once a toddler, Burdett was known as Bingo.  After the age of seven, his first time off the ocean, he was known forever more as the Scrimshaw Kid.  His first journey to land was not a vacation.  The young Burdett wandered into a curio shop and didn’t leave for six hours.  He had never seen the art held within this shop.  The fleet had stopped at a port in Osaka, and almost left Burdett in Japan.  His mother found him just before the fleet left them both, whittling away at an elephant tusk with the shop owner.

That’s how it started.  He was so interested in the scrimshaw at the shop that the owner let him try one out.  A few hours later, when his mother busted in fuming mad, Burdett avoided a good “ass-whoopin’”.  He had carved his mother’s beautiful face into the ivory and was inking the etching when she grabbed his arm, furious.  The art dropped to the floor, cracking.  When his mother realized what he had done, she was moved.

Burdett has been doing scrimshaw ever since.  The fleet would give him whale bones to work on, and when they stopped at a port they would sell whale, Burdett would sell scrimshaw.  Having scrimshanders in the family dating back generations, they whole fleet was very supportive.  One month Burdett claims to have made enough money from selling scrimshaw to keep the fleet fed during a slow period.

The Scrimshaw Kid did not hunt whale.  He was very adamant about that fact.  He said it about fourteen times.  He saw himself as an artist, and his family and fleet as hunter-gatherers.

He did not learn that the mammals they were killing were endangered species, some now extinct, until three days before our first meeting.  That’s why he sought us out.  To tell the horror that he as an artist cannot condone.

to be continued…

right here:  Scrimshaw Kid V