On trail of author of ‘Moby-Dick’ in three New England towns
IF YOU were to read “MobyDick” straight through - from “Call me Ishmael” to “It was the devious- cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan” – it would take about 24 hours.
That’s what I did, beginning at noon on Monday, July 31, the day before Herman Melville’s 198th birthday, on the sole surviving wooden whaleship, the Charles W. Morgan.
Noonish Tuesday, I reached the last page. Swallowing a square of chocolate cake with buttercream frosting the colour of the title character, I stepped out into the waterfront museum village called Mystic Seaport.
I hadn’t tackled the tome alone. And, to be honest, I’d slept for five hours, if lightly. Most participants in this 32nd annual “Moby-Dick” readaloud marathon bedded down after midnight; a few kept the narrative going, reading by a rigged-up lantern.
A Connecticut-bred literature buff, I made a point this summer of traversing New England’s Melville Triangle: Mystic Seaport, the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the author’s Berkshire farmhouse, Arrowhead.
Mystic Seaport’s tag-team reading of “Moby-Dick” - in which monomaniacal Captain Ahab pursues the white whale that “dismasted” him - is the longest-running and probably the most down-to- earth endeavor of its kind.
It felt like Melville karaoke. Whoever wandered onto the ship could sign up for a chapter and take the plunge.
We marathoners were living in three realities at once: The virtual one Melville had conjured in 1851; a maritime version of “Night at the Museum”; and, outside the gates, the Connecticut hamlet on the Mystic River (not the one in the Clint Eastwood film).
An actor portrayed Melville at the marathon’s start and finish; the rest of us - 30 or 35, counting drop-ins and staffers - were amateurs, though some had participated in the marathon readings for five or even 10 years running.
The language of “Moby-Dick” - in 135 chapters and an epilogue - is an ocean of sailors’ slang, intentionally over- embroidered rhetoric, play- script-like episodes, pseudoscientific categorising and stream- of-consciousness monologues. Its echoes of Shakespeare and Milton help turn a tale of adventure into high and tragic art. But, like Shakespeare, Melville was also fond of low comedy.
The first chapter I read aloud, Chapter 16, in which Ishmael boards the Pequod to sign on for his fateful voyage, felt like a vaudeville routine starring Peleg and Bildad, the ship’s owners. I got a laugh reading Ishmael’s description of the Nantucket captains: “They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.”
Much like the sermonising Father Mapple in Chapter 9, Melville is a dazzling entertainer with a somber purpose. I decided the best way to get through the booby traps - words like “ferule,” “fossiliferous” and “forecastle” ( pronounced FOCK- sill) - was to channel the thrill of being “onstage.”
The 113-foot, black- andmustard ship being a counterpart to the fictional Pequod - and to the Acushnet, a New Bedford whaleship on which Melville sailed - the narrative took on a tangible quality, enhanced by our crew’s attempts to sleep on deck as the temperature dropped below 60 degrees. About 15 of us spent the night.
I signed up for my fourth
A Connecticut-bred literature buff, I made a point this summer of traversing New England’s Melville Triangle: Mystic Seaport, the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the author’s Berkshire farmhouse, Arrowhead.
chapter ( I ended up reading six) at 5.45am. The sun had come up off the port side, casting shadows of the hull, the masts and a hanging whaleboat on the olive- green water. Hearing a motor, I looked over the Morgan’s starboard side to see a man in a boat, hosing her down.
Young Seaport staffers in blue caps, blue shirts and khaki shorts arrived just after nine to hoist the sails for the day’s visitors.
Throughout the morning, families streamed aboard to tour the ship and take part in whaleboat demos and chantey singing, oblivious to us and our bedrolls.
The arrival of the Morgan in 1941 put Mystic Seaport on the map, spurring its growth into a picturesque living-history park with dozens of relocated historical structures, museum displays, boat rides and a shipyard currently restoring the Mayflower II.
Mystic itself ( population 4,000) was never a whaling port, unlike New London to the west, home of the Coast Guard Academy.
A historic village with the charm turned up, it’s not much like the town in “Mystic Pizza,” though you can visit the restaurant that lent its name to the film.
Also nearby are Mystic Aquarium and (you may have heard) two of the largest casinos in the hemisphere.
The Charles W. Morgan was built in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1841.
Eight decades and 37 voyages later, she was saved by the son of “Witch of Wall Street” Hetty Green and eventually towed to Mystic to became the Seaport’s stationary centerpiece.
The Morgan made her 38th voyage in the summer of 2014 after a multi-million- dollar restoration, visiting New London, Newport, Boston and her former home port on Buzzards Bay.
In Chapter 2 of “Moby-Dick,” Ishmael arrives in New Bedford on a gloomy December night.
He rooms at the Spouter-Inn with Queequeg, a headhunter turned harpooner, until they sail to Nantucket. ( You can now take a high- speed ferry, Seastreak, from New Bedford to Nantucket, an island adjunct to the Triangle.) Writes Melville/ Ishmael: “nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.”
It isn’t like that now. Rich in the whale- oil era, sustained for another 50 years by textile mills, New Bedford, however fascinating, is far from flourishing.
The bright spots: The highestvalue catch in the nation, sea scallops ( US$ 322 million in 2015); golf balls (the parent of Titleist is across the Acushnet River in Fairhaven); and cultural tourism.
On Johnny Cake Hill, at the centre of the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, is the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Across the street is the 1832 Seamen’s Bethel, which inspired the Whaleman’s Chapel in “Moby-Dick.”
Though the unsavoury boardinghouses that lined the former Bethel Street are gone, the Bethel itself and the adjacent Mariners’ Home, now a museum space, were preserved and recently restored by the New Bedford Port Society.
The Whaling Museum houses thousands of artifacts and documents; first editions of Melville’s works; a half- size ship model you can board, the Lagoda; and four whale skeletons.
Three hang overhead in the atrium, including a 66-foot blue whale, KOBO, for King of the Blue Ocean, struck by a ship in 1998 and still leaking.
(“He’s gonna drip forever,” said docent Carolynn Curcio.) In the gallery titled “From Pursuit to Preservation” is the skeleton of a 48-foot male sperm whale that washed ashore in Nantucket in 2002.