Information

"SHIP WANDERER" ENGRAVED PANBONE PLAQUE BY WILLIAM PERRY
The panbone has an engraved rope work border around the perimeter. at the center of the bottom side the rope border ends with two engraved knots with the title "SHIP - WANDERER" at the center. The work depicts an active whaling scene with a whaleship, five whaleboats, a surfaced sperm whale, a waifed whale, and distant vessels and whales. Signed "WP" several times throughout the composition. Marked on reverse "Taken by Wanderer Aug 1905" indicating that the Panbone used to make the plaque was from a whaling voyage of the Ship Wanderer in 1905. Although it is known that William Perry engraved pan bones they are very rare and this is the only example we have examined. (SC1297)
Condition: Excellent
Dimensions: Height 7 1/2" x Width 11.5".
William Perry Bio by Judith Lund
DARTMOUTH, MASS. – Scrimshaw originated as the occupational art of the whalemen. With both time and whale products available on board their ships, the whalers filled the long hours between sightings of whale by crafting and decorating skeletal bone and sperm whale teeth, baleen, and occasional other materials found during the voyages. They made useful objects such as tools and a variety of decorative objects, many of which were intended gifts for loved ones at home.
William Perry was one of the first, if not the first, of a new breed of scrimshanders who worked in the materials and style of the earlier whalemen to make useful and decorative objects from whale parts, principally for sale in the marketplace. One tends to think of John F. Kennedy as fueling the scrimshaw collecting interest in the 1960s, but many collections now in museums: the collection at the Kendall Whaling Museum; the Snow, Hathaway, and Howland collections at New Bedford Whaling Museum, for example show us that the market for scrimshaw existed long before pubic interest inflated prices. So, from the time of whaling, there was a market, and it was natural that someone would come along to satisfy it in the 1920s through the 1950s.
William Perry was born in Oakland, California in 1894, the son of a New Bedford-born whaleman, Frank Antone Perry. Perry the father served a brief part of the voyage on the bark Morning Star of New Bedford from 1883 to 1888, (He deserted in Brava a month into the voyage) and on the bark Sea Fox of New Bedford, 1887-1889. Perry’s mother, Emily was described as “a very young girl from the Azores.” Shortly after their marriage Frank Perry and his wife went to Oakland, Calif., the location of a large Azoriean expatriate community, looking for work. Their son William was born in Oakland. The family soon returned to New Bedford where the father found work as a weaver in the cotton mills. Though William Perry neither was born nor died in New Bedford, he spent essentially his entire life in the city.
He was artistically talented as a youth, decorating the schoolroom blackboards for holidays, and winning a prize for a painting at age 13. When he finished school, Perry wanted to follow his father, to go whaling, but his mother did not want him to risk the dangers and uncertainties of the business. With his artistic talent, he tried his hand at the Pairpoint Glass factory in New Bedford, cutting glass. He says in an interview published in The American Neptune in 1952 (the only source of information on Perry heretofore published) that a Portuguese son of a whaler was not welcomed in the cutting shop, and so he left. A study of glass workers as listed in the New Bedford city directories for this period indicates there are few people with Portuguese names working in the glass industry at that time.
His formal employment as listed in the above-mentioned interview and in the city directories shows Perry pursued a number of menial jobs over his career – cook on a lightship, gardener, janitor, watchman, for a while watchman on the Charles W. Morgan when it was berthed at Round Hill in Dartmouth. In his later years, Perry worked as a watchman for Aerovox, a few blocks from his home in a three family tenement north of the center of city. Perry produced scrimshaw in his off-hours.
Perry was also a tattoo artist. His son says he was known as “Perry, the tattoo artist.” Collection notes from Mystic Seaport’s Registrar’s Office show two Perry pieces in their collection described as “A good example of modern work done by a tattoo artist in New Bedford.”
Over time many pieces made by William Perry have found their ways into public collections. Nantucket Whaling Museum holds the largest public collection of Perry’s work. Pieces can also be found in the collections of Mystic Seaport Museum and New Bedford Whaling Museum, among others, as well as in private collections of scrimshaw.
Most of his pieces are signed, either with “Wm Perry,” “Perry,” or the initials “W and P.” One sometimes has to look hard to find where he hid his initials within the design. His son relates that, at first, Perry didn’t sign his work. Soon he began to develop a reputation for fine work, and so he was proud to sign his pieces. It was then suggested to him that whalemen didn’t sign their work, and so therefore Perry’s work didn’t appear “real.” After this time, Perry began to hide his initials in the work, in order to sign them without appearing to have done so.
Bold careful work, familiar scenes from prints, “The Capture” in particular, Charles W. Morgan and Wanderer, adorn Perry’s work.