The life and work of Herman Melville (1819-1894) coincided with the rise and fall of the whaling industry, and in 1841 he set sail from Fairhaven in the whaler Acushnet on a quest for sea-going experience that later in 1850 would launch the nautical narrative Moby Dick as a most prodigious novel in American literature.
Before his departure, he stayed in New Bedford, which he described as the dearest place on Earth to visit, going to church at Seamen’s Bethel to hear the legendary Reverend Mudge preach from his bowsprit pulpit about dangerous encounters with monsters of the deep.
The sperm whale was known to fight back with fury, to ram the ship to stove it in, actually sinking the whalers Kathleen, Pocahontas, Ann Alexander, and the Essex out of Nantucket, the plot for Moby Dick and Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea.
At the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the most popular nexus to whaling is the annual Moby Dick marathon in mid January, taking 25 hours to read the entire masterpiece written in the winter of 1850/51 on his second-floor desk at Arrowhead residence in Pittsfield, MA, now a museum open to 6,000 visitors a year.
Out his window, he took inspiration from the view of the Berkshire Mountains that he and his contemporaries joked about exuding creative kinetic energy to fuel their writing. Particularly for Melville, there was Mt. Greylock, whose rising shape resembled the hump of a whale.
He took his publisher Every Doychinck, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes on a picnic to the top of nearby Monument Mountain where a thunderstorm with wind and rain crowded them under a rock shelter. But Melville, who had a literary fixation about man against the elements, stood out on the peak to entertain his guests by waving his arms and shouting ship commands, railing against the elements much like Captain Ahab on the Pequod.
Historian Judith Westland Rosbe wrote about whaling in her book Maritime Marion: “For many, the sea is a temperamental and dangerous mistress and the town experienced both great gains and loss of life and property.”
Fortunately, today we can enjoy a great historical wealth of local nautical heritage.
By George B. Emmons
