In tracking some of my past travels on Google Earth recently, I noticed that New Bedford, Massachusetts, which I visited several times in my youth, had been virtually ignored by the GE community.
Considering the importance of the place to the world in the 19th century, and remembering how important it was to me in the 1960s, I set about correcting this with an entire history of the American whaling industry (which was based there) in general, and Herman Melville (who set “Moby-Dick” there), in particular.

The project turned out to be quite a Nantucket sleighride, because the whaling story is truly riveting and Melville’s life was pretty amazing too. There are excerpts from the GE post below.

My take on Ishmael, finding myself in New Bedford, was the highly fortunate result of having an uncle living there. Bill Pounder was in fact my mother’s dearest cousin, and though much older than she, was a pillar of support to our family all his life.
Uncle Bill, who I first met when I was about a year old (he took some rather embarrassing nude snapshots of me – it was summer and I wouldn’t be bothered with clothes), was an endlessly fascinating guy, all the moreso as I grew older.

At the big old house he and Auntie Annie had in Bedford was a massive attic absolutely jammed, museum-style, with curious curios from ages past, my favourites being his World War I helmet and gas mask. Despite being born and raised in England, he’d emigrated to the States ahead of the Great War and did his time in the trenches in 1918. Alas, it was no easier prying war stories out of him than my dad; both men were quite reticent about their respective world wars, leaving me early on with the certainty that War is Not Fun.

My family’s summer-holiday visits to Bedford were chock-a-block with interesting stuff, if not larking about at a beach out on Cape Cod then soaking up some great history, like climbing around the replica Mayflower docked at Plymouth and viewing with gullible keenness the alleged Plymouth Rock.

This is me and my Auntie Elsie on the Mayflower II. She was visiting from England and wondering what was so bad about it that the Pilgrims had to winch themselves into this tiny little boat to try their luck a whole ocean away. With all due respect to my beloved late aunt, the English spent a good couple of centuries sailing around the world making people run away from them.

This is Dad and my sister and me with Plymouth’s statue of the first Indian to see the Pilgrims when they arrived. He wasn’t the first Native North American to see a white guy, of course, but surely he shares some of the responsibility for making this particular batch feel at home.

There were, of course, also millions and millions of tragically cheap lobsters in the sea that had to be boiled and eaten fast in great quantities lest they crawl up on the land and try to murder us in our sleep.

I personally saw to it that no such threat was likely from the once-dangerous swordfish. Oysters were pretty safe from me back then, though clams died by the bargeload in the interest of a damned fine chowder.
We used to hit a fishmonger’s on the way out of town and fling some specimens into the well-iced cooler, then Dad would drive like the wind up two turnpikes and across three states to ensure a late supper of fresh crustacean and swordfish steak.

Somehow we never got to Boston, but even back then my family shared a disdain for big cities, and Uncle Bill, whose age the entire three decades I knew him also seemed to be “about 80″, was an appalling driver, of the type who talks a lot while driving and uses the gas pedal to punctuate sentences.
So my history monkey never got to Boston for a Bunker Hill fix, but it saw harbours enough to readily imagine the Boston Tea Party. One marine excursion took us to Martha’s Vineyard, which is certainly a pleasant place, though predictably stand-offish. I didn’t care about not seeing any of the celebrity residents because Uncle Bill had promised to show me the bridge at Chappaquiddick where Ted Kennedy veered crazily off the presidential path and lurched, sopping wet, into dark legacy.
But what a great swimmer – he’s still afloat!

Long after the last family trip to Massachusetts, my buddy Sam and I borrowed Dad’s car to see it for ourselves, as teenagers must see the world separately. That was a whole ‘nother adventure, sans whales, that’s coming up next.

Far beyond Martha’s Vineyard, too far for Uncle Bill and the family back then, lay Nantucket, and I would have loved to go, but it had already been one hellishly boring boat ride and, anyway, I figured I’d already seen the best of whaling back in Bedford. To this day I don’t think I was wrong.

I was probably around nine or 10 when Uncle Bill took me to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I loved museums, but this one was something special.

There was a scale-model-yet-nevertheless-huge whaling ship replica, right there inside the place, and an actual skeleton of a blue whale.

Awe abounded.

We went to the Seaman’s Bethel next door too, and it looked just like the chapel in the movie “Moby Dick”, with Richard Basehart’s Ishmael shivering in a pew and a stentorian preacher forecasting doom from a bow-shaped pulpit.

But, best of all, I got me a whale tooth. And I still have it. A yellowing incisor from a sperm whale, about four inches long. Man, that was a major mojo for me when I was growing up, a genuine shaman’s utensil for evoking, as needed, all the mysteries of the deep, the evil of the big bite, just sheer imagination, whatever you required.

I could take that whale’s tooth in my hand, show it to the sky and say the magic words: “Call me Ishmael!”

The richest city in the world, literally shedding new light on an industrialising America. Mythic leviathans fought to the death in all the world’s oceans. The greatest of the early American novels. The strange case of Herman Melville, born wealthy, raised poor, lifted to fame and died forgotten. The even stranger voyage of the Pequod. And, of course, the Great White Whale.

It was all here, 150 years ago.

In these politically correct times, even the city fathers might be understandably reluctant to finance nostalgia in the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, where big business once squeezed so much money from so many defenceless sea mammals. “Big oil” isn’t even an admired term any longer, regardless of whether it means petro-dollars or the slick of a cetacean.

But there are a lot of people who live here today who won’t have the past forgotten. Somehow the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park came into being in 1996, covering 34 acres and 13 city blocks that were not just the centre of the whaling industry in their time, but headquarters of the wealthiest industry on the planet, and one of the most cosmopolitan too.

Melville

Herman Melville, born in lower Manhattan on August 1, 1819, set sail at age 22 aboard the whaler Acushnet from Fairhaven, just across the inlet from New Bedford, on a three-year whaling voyage.

He jumped ship in the South Pacific’s Marquesas and spent four weeks among the natives before heading to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), then joined the United States Navy and returned to New York, no more clear on his future occupation, but filled with marvellous stories.

Mr Steadfast

The large brownstone eagle glaring at cars from the side of Highway 18 is actually welcoming people to explore the scene of what had been, in the years before the Civil War, the planet’s money-spinning capital.
This is Mr Steadfast, and his avian frown might be forgiven considering how high the whaling business soared and how far it’s fallen.

The bird wasn’t yet born when Herman Melville rolled in from New York in 1841 and said something like, “Call me Ishmael.” When the eagle did fledge, he first perched atop the original New Bedford Post Office, but ended up in the arms of the city fathers.

Settled in the early 1700s, New Bedford galloped in the course of a century from small-time farming and fishing to being the world capital of big-time “fishing”.

The established Boston-Newport-Providence whaling cartel was swept aside when whaling merchants from little-league Nantucket moved to the mainland. By 1823 New Bedford had eclipsed Nantucket in the number of whaling ships leaving harbour, and the new railroads brought the markets of New York City and Boston that much closer.

Melville’s Ishmael told of his arrival in the city: “Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.”

“The Spouter Inn”

While her own husband was away at sea, Charlotte Dunbar took in men of colour at her home at 66 South Second Street. It may well have been the sort of place that inspired Melville’s “Spouter Inn”, where Ishmael finally finds a place to stay the night and encounters the mightily tattooed Queequeg brandishing a tomahawk.
The Spouter Inn reminds Ishmael of the bulwarks of some condemned old vessel, and in a painting on the wall, a hovering black mass looks like some gigantic fish, yet in fact it’s a ship in a hurricane. His innkeeper’s name was Coffin.

The Whaling Museum

Established by the Old Dartmouth Historical Society in 1907, the museum boasts an extensive collection of art, artefacts and manuscripts on the industry that was Big Oil before the Big Oil we know today.
Among the attractions are the 65-foot-long skeleton of a 45-tonne adolescent blue whale that was found beached off Great Point, Nantucket, in 2002, and a half-scale model (the largest ship model anywhere) of the whaling bark Lagoda, completed in 1916.
The original, built in 1826, spent six decades at sea, and in its whaling days earned a net profit of $651,959 for local merchant Jonathan Bourne, making it “very greasy” indeed.

The Seamen’s Bethel

Immortalised in “Moby-Dick” as the Whaleman’s Chapel, the Seamen’s Bethel was built in 1832 by the New Bedford Port Society “for the moral improvement of seamen”. In a town of “saloons, dens of iniquity and houses of ill-repute” – many of them right across the street where the Whaling Museum now stands, in fact – it became a tradition to visit the chapel before setting sail.
“Few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot,” Melville’s Ishmael said. “I am sure that I did not.”
Here the narrator of “Moby-Dick” heard Father Mapple’s memorable sermon on Jonah. “Mapple” was doubtless based on the Rev Enoch Mudge, the chaplain here when Melville visited in December 1840. The pew is marked in which Melville is said to have sat gazing at the 31 black-framed memorial stones on the walls.
“What despair in those immovable inscriptions!” he wrote a decade later. Typical of what he saw: Sacred To the Memory of Robert Long, Willis Ellery, Nathan Coleman, Walter Canny, Seth Macy and Samuel Cleg, forming one of the boats’ crews of the Ship Eliza, Who were towed out of sight by a whale, On the Offshore Ground in the Pacific, December 31st, 1839.
The pulpit in the form of a ship’s prow may have been Melville’s fancy, but a chaplain here at the turn of the last century surmised that it did exist until a 1866 fire. A Norwegian consul visiting in 1916 helped raise money for a recreation, but the one installed looked more like a masthead than the “ship’s bluff bows” and it was dumped, only to be replaced by a more prow-like pulpit in 1961. It bears a plaque honouring the writer.

The waterfront

The Wharfinger building served as the auction house for the New Bedford fishing industry and doubled as the harbour master’s office. It was converted into a park visitor centre and the New Bedford Office of Tourism in 1994.
This is still a working waterfront, as much as it was in Melville’s day: “At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet River. On one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled on her wharves, and side by side her world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye.”

The Acushnet

While whaling schooners were generally out for six months at a stretch, the brigs and barks like Melville’s ship, the Acushnet, planned on three or four years. History’s longest whaling voyage is believed to be the 11-year odyssey of the Nile, from 1858 to 1869.

Rather than wages, a whaleman received a “lay”, which was a proportionate share in the proceeds of the voyage. The share awarded depended on his position and duties. The agent of the ship maintained the controlling interest, and profits of up to $20,000 from a single voyage were not uncommon, yet a simple seaman might pocket only $25 at the end of his long journey and thus be obliged to sign up for another stretch, and another.

Ishmael came to call the Pequod his Harvard and his Yale.

Accommodations on board the whaling ships weren’t exactly plush. The captain and his mates enjoyed small but comfortable quarters in the stern. The crew of two dozen or so lived in the bow, “before the mast” in the foc’s’le (forecastle), where conditions were cramped, dark, smelly and usually unhealthy.
Discipline on board was strictly enforced by the officers, which, along with the often harsh weather, led to an understandably high rate of desertion.

Nantucket

“Nantucket is a mere hillock and elbow of sand,” Ishmael says in “Moby-Dick”, “all beach without a background.”
Nantucket, the “faraway land” in the language of the Wampanoag natives, the “Nation of Nantucket”, as Ralph Waldo Emerson called it, started launching whaling forays in the 1690s, when the pioneers set out in little boats to kill right whales migrating close past shore. (They were “right” because they were small and slow-moving enough.) Deep-sea whaling began here around 1715, soon after the first sperm whale had been taken by a sloop blown out to sea in a gale and was found to contain a high-quality oil.
“Thus have these … Nantucketers overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders,” Melville wrote.

Tropic spring

Days out from Nantucket and still no sign of Captain Ahab. Ishmael, forewarned about his skipper’s demonic ways, finally sees him as the Pequod reaches “the bright Quito spring”. He appears to be made of solid bronze but for the “brand” on his face and ivory leg fashioned from a sperm whale’s jaw. But by night Ahab would lay into the ropes with the crew, showing a “touch of humanity”.

Melville carried on due south from this point and rounded Cape Horn to chase whales in the Pacific. Ishmael’s Pequod headed for the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Indian Ocean before reaching the Pacific.

Mocha Dick

Ahab paces the quarterdeck, leaving dents in the planks with his pegleg that become deeper and deeper. Stubb says “the chick that’s in him pecks the shell. ‘Twill soon be out.”
The captain tells the men that whoever sees a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw will earn an ounce of gold. Tashtego asks if he means Moby Dick. So he does, and he admits that it was Moby Dick who took his leg. “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.”

Twelve years before Melville produced his novel, a US naval officer wrote an article entitled “Mocha Dick: The White Whale of the Pacific”, a real-life account in which a great whale “white as wool” was captured towing 20 harpoons in his body from previous attempts to kill him.

Tempest at the turn

Ishmael renames the ferocious Cape of Good Hope “Cape Tormentoto”, yet Ahab spends hours gazing silently out. Another ship, the Goney (Albatross), hoves into view, bleached like bone, and Ahab asks its skipper if he’s seen Moby Dick. The answer goes unheard as the Goney’s captain loses his hailing trumpet in the wind, effectively underscoring the unspeakable isolation of the sea.

The Town-Ho’s tale

Off Madagascar, Ishmael relates the saga of the Town-Ho, whose crew gave the Pequod vivid news of Moby Dick.
Speared by a swordfish and taking on water, the Town-Ho’s men fought over the best course of action, and a full-scale mutiny was at hand when the white whale intervened, crushing the would-be skipper in his jaws.

A factory at sea

After a haunting false alarm – a gigantic squid (nevertheless a great danger to the ship) – a mighty sperm whale is finally taken. Here Melville relishes in describing the arduous task of hauling the animal to the ship and aboard, and rendering it down.
Ishmael compares the whale’s construction to that of the dome of St Peter’s cathedral, its white, beheaded body flashing like a marble sepulchre as it floats away to be gnawed by sharks in a “most doleful and most mocking funeral”. In life “the great whale’s body may have become a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to the world”.

The primary focus of American whaling was the lamp oil made from the fat. The whaling ships carried equipment to render this, and as soon as the job was done, the carcass was thrown back into the sea.

Skirmish off Sumatra

Having battled the crew of the German whaler Jungfrau (Virgin) over a sizeable whale, only to see the usually buoyant beast sink as soon as it was killed, the Pequod reaches the Javan Sea and pursues a large pod, using ball-and-chain-style “druggs” to maim as many as possible while, just beneath the surface, the nursing mothers of young whales watch them. The men, entranced by their spectators, manage to capture only one animal.

What happened to the rich goo from the sperm whales’ massive head? It went home in barrels to begin the complicated, weather-dependent process of converting it into spermaceti candles.
Factory workers began by boiling the cranial tissue to remove impurities and water, then storing it in casks until winter congealed the remnants into a spongy, viscous mass.
On a warm winter day this was shovelled into woollen bags and placed in a spermaceti press to extrude a fine, clear “winter-strained sperm oil” that would burn long and purely (and expensively) in lamps.
Anything left in the bags reheated and moulded into 40-pound “black cakes”, which in the spring would begin to show the presence of oil. Bagged and pressed again, it produced “spring-strained oil” of lesser quality.
Again cakes were made from the leftovers, stored until summer, then ground into flakes, bagged and pressed a third time. What remained after this pressing was brown spermaceti, the shavings from which were liquefied and mixed with water and potash to clarify and whiten. Once all residue from the water and potash was removed and beeswax added to prevent granulation, the mix was turned into candles.

Stealth of the hunt

Off the Bashee isles (now the Philippines’ Batanes Islands), “we emerged at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue. There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.”
But Ahab is astir.
“Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified itself.”

Whales have acute hearing, so the hunters would row as quietly as possible alongside to avoid “gullying” them – spooking them into a dive.
Once close, the boatsteerer in the bow rose and thrust a barbed harpoon into the whale’s back that was attached by a half-mile of rope to the boat. All hands immediately began furiously rowing backwards – the whaleboats were pointed at either end for this purpose.
The whale would either dive, playing out the line to as much as 600 fathoms, so fast that it smoked against the rail, or it would try and flee on the surface. A sperm whale can swim 25 miles an hour, and would take his clinging predators on a foamy “Nantucket sleighride” that might last hours and haul them three miles from their ship.
All that distance had to be retraced by rowing, and if the catch was good, of course, there would be a mighty load to tow back too.

A paean to lost souls

Somewhere south of Cambodia, the Pequod pays in fate for having tricked the French ship Bouton-de-Rose out of its valuable taking of ambergris when popular ship’s boy Pip becomes alarmed on his first whale hunt and jumps overboard, only to be nearly crushed in the ropes.
Warned that he’ll be left at sea if his shows cowardice again, Pip nevertheless does so again and is abandoned. A nearby boat rescues him, but the episode, says Ishmael, “drowned the infinite of his soul”.

The call of the sea

The ship, at last nearing the Equatorial fishing grounds, where just before dawn, by a cluster of rocky islets, the men on watch are “startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly” that debate ensues as to whether it’s the call of mermaids or of “newly drowned men in the sea”.
Ahab explains that the sound is that of young seals that have lost their dams or dams that have lost their cubs, “but the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning”.
At sunrise a crewman, perhaps “not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state)”, falls from his look-out into the sea. A cask is dropped for him, “but no hand rose to seize it … and thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep.”

A lance of lightning

The captain of the Rachel tells Ahab he’d seen the white whale the day before and lost a boat in the process, with his son aboard it. Asked to help in the search, Ahab refuses for fear of losing track of Moby Dick.
Then the Delight appears, carrying the shattered planks of its own whaleboat after an encounter with the leviathan. No harpoon has been forged that could ever kill Moby Dick, the Delight’s skipper asserts. Ahab wields one “tempered in lightning and blood”.

Moby Dick

Ahab spies his nemesis and takes charge of the lead boat chasing the gently joyous monster with its halo of white herons. Moby Dick seems to anticipate his every move, however, sinks his boat, and lives to see another day.
On Day 2, the whale charges its pursuers and even breaks the ivory leg that replaced the one Ahab gave it on their first encounter. The harpoon man Fedallah is entangled in the line and dragged underwater, and the boats return to ship, Ahab scolded by a mate for his “impiety and blasphemy” in resuming the chase.

Day 3, and Moby Dick is “combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven”, hauling along the corpse of Fedallah. Ahab’s harpoon makes the whale writhe in pain, but he tips the boat and then mortally rams the Pequod. From a second boat Ahab finds his mark with another lance, becomes entangled in its line and is dragged along.
The Pequod, which like Satan “would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her”, descends into the Pacific depths along with the white whale and her captive.

“And I am escaped alone to tell thee,” Ishmael pronounces, afloat a day and a night, untouched even by the sharks, until the Rachel’s “retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan”.

Where this all began for me: The Comics Illustrated version of Melville’s tale.

LINKS: Read “Moby-Dick” online here.
Find a comprehensive New Bedford Area Visitors Guide here.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum is both here and here.
Read about the Seamen’s Bethel and the adjacent Mariner’s Home here.