“Spread a Rainbow Over His Disastrous Set of Sun”: The Comedy of Colonial Enlightenment

“Spread a Rainbow Over His Disastrous Set of Sun”: The Comedy of Colonial Enlightenment

by Arielle Xena Alterwaite Many sperm whale teeth can be found on the island of Nantucket. It is hard to say just how many silver-scaled bodies and tentacular masses once slipped through their widths. Hard, too, is determining their origin; whether it was droplets from the Pacific or the Atlantic that once fell from these teeth as wrought-iron hooks and hemp-woven ropes chafed away at their cementum to expose ivory beneath. One tooth, in particu…