Over the recent holiday
break, my husband, Gerry, and I toured the New Bedford Whaling Museum on the
south coast of Massachusetts.
We’ve developed an appreciation for New Bedford, a city
that has been undergoing a cultural Renaissance in recent years - much like
that of Providence, RI, and Worcester, MA. New Bedford claims to
have had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world during its
whaling-capital heyday in the 19th Century.>>
New Bedford now boasts some of the best community theater in the
country. A visit to its cobblestone streets and views of
its long wharves along the Acushnet River should be on anyone’s list of
New England trips.
We discovered at the Whaling Museum that New Bedford and
Nantucket were important hubs of sperm whale hunting. 20% of the
entire whaling force in the world sailed from New Bedford and over ten thousand
men manned the ships leaving from New Bedford.
Going to
sea on a whaling ship was a romantic thought for young men in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Life along compatriots seeking adventure on the ocean and among
native young women in South Sea islands of paradise had an allure that many of
us today can’t imagine.
Celebrated American author, Herman Melville, was one of
those young men. After spending a few years at sea on merchant vessels,
21-year-old Melville signed up on the whaling ship, the Acushnet, leaving from
Fairhaven in New Bedford harbor. Eighteen months into the journey, he abandoned
the vessel before the expedition was completed. He had reason to jump ship –
the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific offered tropical temperatures and a
hospitable welcome. Melville stayed for several months and wrote about it in
his first very successful books, Typee, and Omoo. They were fictional accounts based on his
adventures. On the islands, Melville listened to the legends, tales and lore
from the whalers he encountered. He studied everything about the whaling trade
– the ships, the islands, the oceans, and most importantly, the whale.
Both
Typee and Omoo put Melville on the map as a writer and both were the origins of
his most well-known novel, Moby Dick. The Whale was published in England in
October 1850. It was released as Moby
Dick a month later in America.
Melville
was never successful with other writing; he actually never really
knew the achievement of his American classic, one of the most studied books in
the world. His book had only sold just
over 3,700 copies by the time of his death in 1891.
I added
‘reading Moby Dick’ to my bucket list this year, especially after visiting the
whaling museum. Two essential DVDs are available in the Minuteman Library
Network. One is the “Melville Legacy –
Moby Dick” which is part of the Masters in American Literature Series. The other,
Herman Melville: Moby Dick” was produced by Films for the Humanities &
Sciences. Both are wonderful introductions to the Melville, but also include
motivating suggestions for how to read the book. Many of the scholars who
appear in the DVDs have read the book many, many times but they make clear
that the most important thing to do is to take the book in chunks, digesting
this whale of a tale one bite at a time. (They even suggest
leaving out chapters during the first read and returning to read them another
time.)
A
perfect way to achieve this is to read a simpler version of Moby Dick available
at our library. With the help of the whaling museum, several scholars published
an abridged (original writing but with chapters removed), illustrated
and annotated edition edited by Tamia A. Burt and others in 2002. Another
excellent way to take a bite is to read Matt Kish’s Moby Dick in Pictures, One
Drawing for Every Page (2011). Graphic novels illustrate the story, too, and
there are several adult and children’s versions available at our library and in
the others in Minuteman and our digital catalogs.
Many
authors have written about the importance of reading Moby Dick. Joyce Carol
Oates includes an essay, “Moby Dick – An American Book of Wonders” in one of
her collections: Woman Writer, Occasions and Opportunities. Author and
adventurer, Tim Severin, traveled to the Marquesas Archipelago and other
islands in the South Pacific to research his book, In Search of Moby Dick
(1999). He hunted not only for the Great
Whale but for the facts and fiction he could absorb from the islanders he
encountered there.
Author,
Philip Hoare, was also inspired by Moby Dick. In The Whale, In Search of the
Giants of the Sea (2010), Hoare recounts his visits to whaling towns and cities
around the world, spending time, of course, in Nantucket and New Bedford. It is
interesting to note, the Melville never visited Nantucket, yet, he described it
in minute detail. Hoare compares and contrasts the town of the 18th and 19th
centuries (one that you could smell as you sailed into port) with the Nantucket
of today. Like Melville, Hoare also includes many descriptions of the biology
of the sperm whale and the ocean that it lives in.
Perhaps
the best book for inspiration was written by Nathaniel Philbrick: Why Read
Moby-Dick? (2011). Philbrick has read Moby Dick at least a dozen times and he
claims that Melville’s tome is the greatest American novel ever written. In
this short book, Philbrick’s passion for Moby Dick is convincing.
Each
year during the first days of the month of January, people gather from all over
New England and beyond to participate in a marathon reading of Moby Dick. The
19th annual reading occurred just weeks ago. Besides the twenty-five hours of
non-stop reading, the weekend also includes lectures, dinners, and other events
at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
The
Oxford Companion to English Literature has called the marathon reading “the
closest approach the United States has had to a national prose epic”. There is
no doubt that reading some version of Moby Dick, America’s prose, should be on
every American’s bucket list.
(Of
note: Nathaniel Philbrick’s bestseller, In the Heart of the Sea, recounting the
fatal voyage of a real whaleship, the Essex, will be released as a feature film
on March 13, 2015. The book has also been adapted for middle-school readers and
is titled Revenge of the Whale.)
