New Hours For Accessing the Collections!

Along with a New Year, comes a new set of hours that we will be open to the public. Beginning Wednesday, January 5th, the new hours are:

Wednesday 2:00-5:00
Thursday 10:00-5:00
Friday 10:00-3:00

Robert Louis Stevenson and Mystic Seaport

A number of objects belonging to Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and numerous other well-known works, came to the Museum in the 1950's. Stevenson spent his last years in Samoa, dying there of a probable cerebral hemorrhage in 1894 at just 44 years of age.

Stevenson speaks frequently of drinking kava (or ava) in numerous letters written while in Samoa and kava appears in some of his novels as well. He describes the process of making this "intoxicating" drink from the root of a pepper plant, where the root is chewed by "fair damsels" to soften it and then it is combined with water and strained in a wooden bowl. That wooden bowl is known as a kava bowl. The kava bowl pictured here is from Stevenson's household in Samoa. It is carved from a single piece of wood, has eight legs and is four and a half inches deep. Kava was a ceremonial drink and Stevenson writes of making speeches to, and listening to speeches by, chiefs in Samoa before imbibing. To drink kava, one traditionally used a kava bowl or a cup made from a coconut. Our collection also contains one of Stevenson's coconut cups and numerous other objects from his years in the South Pacific.

A Frightful Sight

No, this is not part of the skeletal remains of some maritime ghoul, but something far more scary to those that have had experience with such things. It is a kidney stone. And not just ANY kidney stone. It is fully eight inches across and weighs in the neighborhood of five pounds! The poor soul who suffered with this stone was not a lonesome sailor drifting on the high seas, but a pained mammal making their way beneath the waves. It is a kidney stone from a whale.

The stone came into the Collection in the Museum's early days in 1939. In 1965, a Museum member, Chief of Urology at a New York Hospital, spotted the stone in an exhibit and was granted permission to make a study of it. His findings concluded that, unlike a human kidney stone which is made primarily of calcium, this stone is chiefly made of magnesium. His conclusion was that the whale's diet of creatures with high magnesium content caused the unusual growth.

So this Halloween, be grateful that your night-time visitors are pirates and aliens and not, luckily, a five-pound kidney stone.

Mystic Seaport selected Patrick O'Brien's "Great White Fleet in the Straits of Magellan" as its Museum Purchase Award at the 31st Annual International Marine Art Exhibition held at the Museum's Art Gallery.

Mr. O'Brien's extraordinary painting shows the pride of the American Navy in the first decade of the 20th century as it navigates its way through the Straits of Magellan and around Cape Horn. While the Museum often picks a painting with a modern commercial seafaring aspect to it, this painting spoke so strongly to the Museum's charge as the "Museum of America and the Sea" that it was just too difficult to pass up. The fact that the largest vessel, and flagship of the fleet, was the U.S.S. CONNECTICUT made this a tailor-made painting for the Museum's permanent collection.

Congratulations on a fine job, Patrick.

Scrimshaw Treasure? Think again....

While visiting a flea market or a small antiques shop off in the middle of nowhere, you come across a hidden treasure...an old walrus tusk with the image of a whaling scene on it and the name of a famous whaling ship, the CHARLES W. MORGAN...you grab for your wallet, shell out your cash and call Mystic Seaport to tell them you've found a treasure that you are sure they will want....unfortunately, they already have about a dozen of the same piece! How could this be? Yours is the original, so how did they get a copy? Well, the answer is easy...Fakeshaw, as it has been termed.

Over the years a number of companies have created pieces of "scrimshaw" by forming molds that resemble walrus tusks or sperm whale teeth and embedding information in them to make them look and feel like real scrimshaw. Unless you have a piece of real scrimshaw in your hand with which to compare it, the fake can seem quite authentic.

Pictured here is a MORGAN tusk, showing both sides, and cut in pieces to show that it is indeed plastic..so, if you find one of these pieces, you may still want to buy it to decorate your home, but don't expect any collectors or Museums to come knocking at your door...For more information on fakeshaw, visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum's webpage on the subject where you can find numerous pieces described.
Visit the following page. http://www.whalingmuseum.org/explore/databases/fakeshaw

Flying the Colors

Flying the Colors is Mystic Seaport's newest book about the unseen treasures of nineteenth-century American Marine Art.


America has a long and distinguished history of notable marine art and artists such as James Buttersworth, Robert Salmon, and Fitz Henry Lane, whose special genius was to put down on canvas truly memorable representations of such marine themes as the sailing ships and yachts that plied oceanic waters. Often some of the best of these paintings have not been readily accessible to the general public. Now a compendium of those marvelous paintings have been compiled in "Flying The Colors: The Unseen Treasures Of Nineteenth-Century American Marine Art" by the team of Alan Granby and Janice Hyland. Beautiful images flawless reproduced in full color are enhanced with an informative essay by Stuart M. Frank. Readers are also provided with succinct biographical descriptions of the artists whose works are represented. The result is a coffee-table art book that is a pure delight to browse through and which is unrestrainedly recommended for personal, academic, and community library American Art History reference collections.

Midwest Book Reviews

New Book on J.E. Buttersworth

Mystic Seaport recently published a 2nd edition of Rudolph J. Schaefer's comprehensive book, J. E. Buttersworth: 19th-Century Marine Painter. With the advice of Janet Schaefer, the new volume includes the details of Buttersworth's life, full-color reproductions of more than 150 works, and a listing of nearly 1,200 known Buttersworth paintings.

The son of a British marine painter, James E. Buttersworth (1817-1894) was among the most prolific marine artists of the nineteenth century. His clipper ship views many of which were published as popular lithographs by N. Currier and his America's Cup race paintings are widely respected for their combination of artistic and documentary qualities. Like his contemporary "luminist" and Hudson River School artists, Buttersworth excelled in the dramatic renderings of sea and sky, elevating the precisely detailed renderings of ships beyond document to art. The completely revised image section, with new or augmented captions, contains more than 200 examples of Buttersworth's work illustrated in full color, more than half of which were not included in the first edition.