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Melville's
New Bedford
"The dearest place to live in, in all New England"
A
civilized town
When Herman Melville arrived in December 1840, New Bedford was
at the height of its prosperity. In his novel, Moby-Dick,
Melville wrote that ". . . nowhere in all America will you find
more patrician-like houses, parks and gardens more opulent, than
in New Bedford. Whence came they?. . . Yes; all these brave houses
and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian
oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither
from the bottom of the sea."
Whale profits for dowries
It was a city where a father might use profits from a whaling
voyage for his daughter's dowry and burn expensive spermaceti
candles at her wedding. Long avenues were lined with mansions
and magnificent elm trees. Near the waterfront, shipbuilders,
bankers, brokers, merchants, blacksmiths, masons, oil refiners,
and many other tradesmen connected with the whaling industry thrived.
"A
cannibal on every corner"
The streets offered visitors frequent surprises. Melville wrote
that, ". . . actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners;
savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy
flesh." Melville may have based the character of Queequeg, a harpooneer
on the Pequod in Moby-Dick,
on Pacific Islanders he saw in New Bedford. They often shipped
out as hands on American whalers that stopped at their islands.
Whaleman's
chapel
Melville visited the Seamen's Bethel before shipping out on
the whaleship Acushnet in January 1841. When Ishmael, narrator
of Moby-Dick,
enters the chapel, he notices black-bordered marble tablets
set into walls on either side of the pulpit. These cenotaphs
are memorials to men who died at sea. "It needs scarcely to
be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage,
I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of
that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who
had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine,"
Melville's narrator thought.
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The
Seamen's Bethel, as seen here from the New Bedford Whaling
Museum, is across the street and open to visitors.
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