Haul on the bowline

Because my brother and I couldn't make it to the vintage Ferraris, and our substitute car show was rained out, my family packed up this afternoon and went for a badly needed hit of art and culture at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. It was marvelous.

So far as I can determine, the museum was founded in 1799 by the East India Marine Society, an association of ships' masters and merchants who had collected foreign curiosities on their travels around the world and needed somewhere to house them. Hence, eventually, the East India Marine Hall, now one of the museum's galleries, wherein I found my favorite item in the entire museum—a pair of eighteenth-century knuckledusters. No, I'm serious. I loved the sections on maritime art, ships' portraits and models and scrimshaw, maps and sextants and sketches of sea serpents, but I'm looking at a metallic, four-ringed item in a cabinet full of recognizable nautical artifacts and thinking: Did they even have brass knuckles in the eighteenth century? To which the answer is, yes. And they belonged to the ship's captain. This is awesome for a number of reasons. But mostly because knuckledusters are the kind of random material culture that doesn't often make it into museums, even the kind that collect octants and whale teeth and cats-o'-nine-tails. The exhibit Painting Summer in New England wasn't bad, either.

Not inappropriately, this evening also brought Sirenia Digest #8. The illustration for "The Cryomancer's Daughter (Murder Ballad No. 3)" might itself be worth subscribing for. (And whoever thought to pair "The Depth Oracle" with Gustav Doré, thank you.) Come on. Each to each.