Coastal Landscapes
There is a passage early in Moby-Dick where Ishmael arrives in New Bedford on a cold December night, looking for a place to sleep and finding instead a town steeped in the business of whales. "It is a land of oil," he says, "and the wharf is paved with the bones of whales." Standing on the same cobblestones nearly two centuries later, I understood what he meant. The bones are gone, but the weight of them remains — in the granite warehouses, the iron bollards worn smooth by hawsers, the names of ships carved into stone.
I had come to New Bedford for a specific reason: to read Moby-Dick in the place that made it possible. Not just the town where Melville shipped out, but the town that supplied the oil that lit the world, that drew men from the Azores and Cape Verde and the hills of New England, that built the fortune that built the library where I sat on the first morning, a borrowed copy open on the table in front of me.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum is not a small place, but it feels intimate, the way a ship's cabin feels intimate. The skeleton of a sperm whale hangs from the ceiling of the main hall, and beneath it, in glass cases, are the tools of the trade: harpoons, lances, try-pots, the small carved scrimshaw that sailors made in their idle hours. I spent a long time looking at a logbook from the 1840s, the handwriting careful and cramped, the entries mostly weather and position and the occasional notation of a whale sighted or a boat stove.
What struck me was not the violence of the industry — that is well documented — but the ordinariness of it. This was a job. Men went to sea for three or four years at a time, leaving families behind, because the pay could be good and the alternative was farming or factory work. The museum does not shy away from the brutality, but it also does not reduce the men to villains. They were workers, and the sea was their workplace, and it killed many of them.
I walked from the museum to the Seamen's Bethel on Johnny Cake Hill, the same chapel where Melville sat and listened to Father Mapple preach. It is a small, plain room with a pulpit shaped like a ship's bow, and the walls are lined with plaques commemorating sailors lost at sea. I sat in a back pew for a while and read the sermon scene from Moby-Dick, the one where Jonah is swallowed and the congregation listens in silence. Outside, a gull cried. Inside, nothing moved.
Moby-Dick is a strange novel — digressive, funny, tragic, encyclopedic. It failed in its own time and was rediscovered decades later, and now it is a monument. But in New Bedford, it is not a monument. It is a local story, written by a man who had been here, about men who had been here, about a sea that is still here, just over the hill.
I finished the book on my last evening, sitting on a bench overlooking the harbor. The fishing fleet was in, and the lights were coming on, and somewhere out past the breakwater the Atlantic was doing what it has always done. "The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open," Melville wrote. They still do, if you know where to stand.
