As a child in Florida, I used to wonder what the old people who walked the beach every day, tricked out with metal detectors and shelling buckets and rakes, thought they would find in the endless sand. Amid the seaweed and washed-up carcasses of horseshoe crabs one might occasionally locate an intact spotted junonia or fighting conch shell, but treasure of some kind? Unlikely. Beachcombing seemed like a waste of time.
Many decades later, on a still, hot day in August, while walking a rocky beach on Great Cranberry Island in Maine, I spied something odd: a fragment that was not a rock or a shell or a piece of glass, with an intricate scrolled pattern of deep blue-black, embedded in an off-white material. It was a piece of scrimshaw, carved into what was most likely whalebone.
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