Between 18, the Jernegan family traveled around the treacherous Cape Horn of South America and throughout the Pacific. Supported by NEH grants totaling $218,550 and produced by Martha’s Vineyard Museum, the website tells the story of nineteenth-century whaling through the real journal of a young girl from Edgartown, Massachusetts, who spent three years at sea on a whaler captained by her father. Showing images of animals and fish on one side and a village on the other, this walrus tusk features a cribbage scoreboard and appears in the online exhibition “Laura Jernegan: Girl on a Whaleship.”
Another tradition of sailors, especially in the nineteenth century, is scrimshaw, the art of carving on whale bones and teeth or walrus tusks.
