Early 20th Century Norwegian Whaling in Co. Mayo, Ireland
Opened: October 21, 2016
Closed: September 12, 2017
Famine, Friends and Fenians Exhibition
Famine, Friends and Fenians Bulletin
article by Peter F. Stevens and Catherine B. Shannon, Ph.D.
At the beginning of the 20th century, whales were prized for both their meat and oils. Norway imposed a ten year ban on whaling in their waters in 1904 due to their own depleted stocks. As a result, Norwegian whalers wished to expand their operations in other areas.
In 1908, attempts were made by two Norwegian businessmen to set up a station on the Shetland Island off the Scottish coast. When this attempt failed, a second one was made on Arranmore in Co. Donegal, Ireland. Opposition from local commercial fishing interests scuppered both bids. However, thanks to a man from Youghal, Co. Cork, a station would be built at Rusheen, on South Inishkea, Co. Mayo. The Norwegians maintained the Arranmore Whaling Co trading name.
The station at Rusheen, was beset with problems, as the company had to contend with some militant islanders. Around 30 local hands were employed on Rusheen. All the men were from South Inishkea as the islanders refused to allow strangers from the mainland to work at the station but also the inhabitants of the neighboring North Island. The foreman and timekeeper, Johnny O’Donnell, was the ‘king’ of the island and enjoyed the distinction of owning the only dwelling on the island with floorboards. The station had its best catch of 102 whales in 1909, with blue whales, fin whales and sperm whales among the haul. The whales’ blubber and oils were exported primarily to Scandinavia and an on-site mill ground down the whale bones to be used as meal. However, by 1912, the number of whales caught dwindled to just 26. By 1914, the company was heavily in debt and on January 4, 1915, the Arranmore Whaling Co. officially ceased to exist.
Another Norwegian, the charming and shrewd business man, Captain Lorentz Bruun, who had a temporary involvement with the Arranmore Whaling Company had obtained a site for a station as early as 1908 on the east side of the Mullet Peninsula in Blacksod Bay. Whaling got underway in the summer of 1910.
The regular staff at the station comprised about 20 Norwegian and 30 Irishmen from 1911 onward who took over from the Norwegians as they developed their skills. Local workers were treated to coffee for the first time. The local men, who would not have had extensive wardrobes, were taken aback that the Norwegians would change into fresh clothes for their evening meal.
Like at Inishkea, when a whale was brought in, it was moored at a buoy until the men were ready to deal with it. It was then towed to the bottom of the slipway by a rowboat. A steel-wire rope dragged the whale up the incline onto the flensing plane. Once in position, the whale was stripped of its blubber ‘blanket’ a job assigned to two Norwegians, but later given to local workers once they had acquired the necessary skills. Once the blubber was peeled off it was divided into more manageable blocks and then fed into a boiler.
The outbreak of World War One was the death knell of whaling in North Mayo. All fishing stopped in August 1914, and the Norwegians left for home. The station was taken over in 1915 by the British Admiralty who used it as a petrol base until 1918. When the war ended, Bruun sought to recommence whaling at Blacksod. He died on Christmas Day 1924, and in his absence, the Blacksod Company had no driving force. The company faltered due to the lack of demand for whale oil and poor management and was dissolved in 1932, bringing to an end Mayo’s short-lived and turbulent association with whaling.
A Photographic Exhibition
Article by Denis Strong, Divisional Manager, National Parks & Wildlife Service, Ireland
Mapping Ahab’s “Storied Waves” – Whaling and the Geography of Moby-Dick
Herman Melville Room
Opened: January 8, 2016
Closed: July 16, 2017
Throughout Moby-Dick Melville gives clues as to how Ahab managed to actually locate one whale in all the planet’s seas.
These clues had their basis in actual whaling practice. They include practical navigation, the development and use of cartography, the study of accrued whalemen’s knowledge as compiled in logbooks and journals, lists of whales seen and taken, owner’s instructions to masters and other forms of shared knowledge among whalemen. The fiction of Ahab’s search in Moby-Dick reflected a reality that actually culminated in Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Wind and Current Charts.
These charts were the first publicly defined maps showing the habitats of whales worldwide and were compiled completely from whaler’s logbooks and journals. We have several of the very logbooks read by Maury in the collection. This exhibit examined the tools, techniques and resources mentioned by Melville and demonstrated their practical application to real 19th century whalers.
Inner Light: The World of William Bradford
Wattles Family Gallery and Braitmayer Family Gallery
Opened: July 1, 2016
Closed: May 31, 2017
Available for purchase at the Museum store The White Whale
Highlighting the Whaling Museum’s extensive collection of William Bradford's (1823-1892) oil paintings, watercolors and sketchbooks, Inner Light was a retrospective exhibition of this important regional artist’s life, career, connections, and influences.
A New Bedford native son, Bradford’s affiliations with some of the most prominent artists, collectors, and thinkers of his time placed him in an influential role at the center of culture and fine art in the mid-19th century. A highlight of the exhibition was the debut of Bradford’s oil painting Schooner Ellenor, Boston, a recent gift from Herbert and Patricia Pratt. The painting is an important addition to our Bradford Collection, which is one of the world’s largest. Newly conserved objects from the collection were also on view.
Inner Light explored Bradford’s connections and influences within 19th century America. His family owned the whaling ship Acushnet, which carried Herman Melville on his inspirational whaling voyage. Bradford studied with Albert van Beest, who shared Bradford’s studio in Fairhaven and brought the Dutch marine tradition to New Bedford. Bradford was also influenced by the work of Fitz Henry Lane, one of America’s most important Luminist painters. Work by these artists was characterized by effects of light in landscapes, poetic and often sublime atmosphere, and aerial perspective. As a teacher, he and van Beest gave instruction to a young R. Swain Gifford and later inspired the studies of Lemuel Eldred. Bradford also had a close friendship with Albert Bierstadt and his painting New Bedford Harbor at Sunset was included in the New Bedford Art Exhibition organized by Bierstadt in 1858. Bradford painted alongside his friend in an adjoining studio space in New York City and later followed Bierstadt to Yosemite Valley.
Other connections include Transcendentalist Daniel Ricketson and poet Henry David Thoreau who visited Bradford’s studio and the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier who dedicated poems to the artist, lines of which are inscribed on Bradford’s grave in New Bedford. Bradford was even commissioned by the Royal family to produce the painting The Panther in Melville Bay for Queen Victoria after the Queen saw Sealers Crushed in Ice on display in London. Bradford’s “great paintings,” such as the Museum’s Sealers Crushed in Ice, belonged to a new tradition forged in the mid-19th century age of spectacle, when cycloramas, panoramas and World’s Fairs vied to entertain audiences with the wonders of man’s innovations, adventure and nature.
Like many others of his time, Bradford was an artist-explorer. He made six trips to the Arctic between 1861 and 1869 and ventured to California and the great West on the heels of Bierstadt. Other artists of this genre included Frederic Church, who traveled to South America and the Arctic, and Martin Johnson Heade, who went to Brazil. These efforts looked towards an “alternative past” that glorified nature in a pre-industrialized and almost exclusively American experience. Their empirical realism and wordless dialogue with nature were the hallmarks of luminism.
An exhibition at the Museum organized by John Wilmerding, in 1969, was instrumental in bringing attention to William Bradford’s work and career. This exhibition traveled to the DeCordova Museum and included 53 oils and 33 in other media drawn from all phases of Bradford’s career. William Bradford: Sailing Ships and Arctic Seas, curated by Director Emeritus Dick Kugler, celebrated the centennial of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society in 2003. In 2013, the Arctic Regions exhibition focused on the Arctic paintings and photographs by the artist, curated by Michael Lapides.
Inner Light included Bradford works from the Museum’s collections along with works by Bierstadt, Eldred, Gifford and others who were integral parts of his story. An accompanying exhibition of important manuscripts, sketchbooks, and works on paper was also on display in the Museum’s Grimshaw-Gudewicz Reading Room.
Inner light ran concurrently with the New Bedford Art Museum’s exhibition Bierstadt: Nature & National Identity. The Bierstadt exhibition included several artifacts from the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection.
Exhibition dedicated to Richard Cory Kugler
Power, Performance, and Speed in 20th Century Yacht Design
Opened: December 9, 2016
Closed: May 29, 2017
The exhibition was a companion to two Museum publications, No Ordinary Being: W. Starling Burgess, Inventor, Naval Architect, Aviation Pioneer, and Master of American Design by Llewellyn Howland III and A Genius at His Trade: C. Raymond Hunt and His Remarkable Boats by Stan Grayson.
The Museum dedicated a premier exhibition space, the Jacobs Family Gallery, to this exhibition celebrating these two masters of American yacht design. The show highlighted each of these extraordinary innovator’s revolutionary and most notable contributions to the industry and looked to where their work continues to reverberate today in modern yacht design.
About the Exhibition
The exhibition highlights were actual boats designed by Burgess and Hunt as well as the outstanding photography of Norman Fortier, trophies, tank test models, and ship models borrowed from private and corporate collections.
One of the Museum’s greatest treasures is the 1/3 scale Concordia Yawl model by Tom Borges, with exquisite detailing and full rigging. Mystic Seaport loaned a c.1920 sailing canoe designed by Burgess, and private collectors loaned an early Boston Whaler and an exquisitely restored 110 series sailboat. These were complemented with ship models of Burgess and Hunt’s most iconic yachts, from America’s Cup J Boats to Hunt’s Deep V powerboat hull, one of the most impactful innovations in yacht design in the 20th century.
Videos and photographs of these and other yachts in action allowed visitors to fully appreciate the unprecedented beauty, power and speed brought to the industry by these two design masters and their continued influence on modern yacht design.
Starling Burgess, a man whose personal life rivaled the intrigue of his professional ingenuity, is the godfather of 20th century yacht design, influencing L. Francis Herreshoff, Frank Paine, and even Hunt himself. He developed the last design breakthrough for schooners in the staysail rig. Niña was one of the most beautiful examples of this innovation. Burgess created breakthrough powerboats, including the fastest motorboat in the word in 1903 and a 1/3 scale model of a destroyer, the prototype of which went 55 knots. The son of an America’s Cup champion yacht designer, Edward Burgess, Starling created three successive America’s Cup winners of his own: the Enterprise, Rainbow, and Ranger, all of which sailed in Buzzards Bay. Other achievements include the Yankee One Design yachts, which were ubiquitous on Buzzards Bay in their day and the Atlantic One Design. While the focus of the exhibition was on Burgess’s impact on yacht design, it was impossible to talk about this unique and talented innovator without acknowledging his remarkable work in hydro-aeroplanes with John Dunne and the charming Dymaxion car.
Ray Hunt is recognized as one of the most influential yacht designers of the 20th Century. While perhaps best known for Concordia yachts and the Boston Whaler, Hunt’s biggest impact was really in powerboats. He felt that there were not many innovations to be made in sailboats after the 1930s but there was endless potential in powerboats where his true genius came into play. His unique Deep-V hull, on which he briefly held a patent, was the basis for all high-speed, mono-hull powerboats that followed including the hulls of Grady White yachts, which are still designed by Hunt Associates of New Bedford. As a racing sailor, Hunt had few, if any equals. Amongst his many achievements, he swept the illustrious Cowes Week in 6 out of 6 races on his Concordia Harrier in 1955, and many of his personal trophies were featured in the exhibition.
These two titans of yacht design were each in their own way, true Renaissance men, and their continued influence on American yacht design is profound. Each of them was driven to push limits, debunk traditional assumptions, and think in entirely new and innovative ways to create some of the most iconic and groundbreaking designs the industry has ever seen. Their legacy in modern yacht design is all around us, and this exhibition drew attention to their accomplishments and unique contributions.
Oceanic Harvest
San Francisco Room and Harbor View Gallery
Opened: January 6, 2017
Closed: January 30, 2017
The Melville Society Archive housed at the New Bedford Whaling Museum has acquired original Moby-Dick artworks every year since 2009.
In 2016 the Archive acquired seven mixed-media prints by Robert Del Tredici, who created his first artworks in response to Moby-Dick in the mid-1960s. These seven new prints are among more than sixty Moby-Dick artworks that Del Tredici has created between 2013 and 2016. The passage from the novel that inspired each artwork is incorporated in the artwork itself.
After premiering at the 2017 Moby-Dick Marathon, seven new Archive acquisitions were exhibited alongside four new works of Moby-Dick art in the Elizabeth Schultz Collection at the Whaling Museum. Three of these were multi-media prints by Kathleen Piercefield: Queequeg in his own proper person, The Affidavit, and Women of New Bedford— Captain’s Wives. The fourth was another Queequeg, a sculpted bust by Monica Namyar.
From Pursuit to Preservation
This comprehensive multimedia presentation, developed with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, ECHO (Education Through Cultural and Historical Organizations) funding, and the generous contributions of Museum supporters, formed a new focal point for visitors experiencing the Whaling Museum.
From Pursuit to Preservation guided visitors through the story of humankind’s evolving relationship with whales, from the whale as a source of survival and symbolic power, through to its exploitation for commercial wealth, to the first groupings toward of scientific inquiry and contemporary methods of observation and study.
From ancient times, people have used the meat, oil, and bone of whales as important resources for their communities. The whale’s importance to humans’ physical well-being often fostered a symbolic cultural connection, a relationship that took many forms throughout the centuries and continues to evolve in contemporary art, literature, and popular culture. In From Pursuit to Preservation, the Whaling Museum took visitors on a journey across time and around the world, using many items from its vast collection including unique maritime artifacts and art, photographs and whale skeletons as well as a listening station, digital picture frames, and thought-provoking interpretive signs to involve visitors in the discovery of the symbolic, spiritual and cultural connections we share with these majestic and increasingly endangered animals.
Humans’ complex relationship with whales is told from the early harvesting of beached whales to the development of watercraft and weapons specifically to pursue the animals at sea. Once demand grew, an industry was born to hunt and process whales for the oil that would light the world for three centuries and the baleen that was the plastic of that age. While the Dutch and English led the way in the creation of this industry, by the early 19th century, the United States, led by New Bedford, had the most productive whaling industry in the world.
As the success of the industry began to threaten the survival of whales, new technologies made their oil less vital. And while whaling left New Bedford, the pursuit of whales continued in Europe and Asia at new levels of efficient slaughter hunting that enabled the harvest in one year to outstrip that of the previous decade in total. The move toward preserving whales came as humans hunters became so good at killing that international regulation was needed to keep whales from extermination.
Visitors to this New Bedford Whaling Museum exhibition came away with a new concept of the power of the whale in the human imagination — representing nature’s power, the lure of the unknown, a monstrous foe, and a once abundant resource. And the Whaling Museum exhibition also created a bridge of understanding about how the whale has come now to symbolize our emerging understanding of our place in the natural world and how profound our impact upon it can be. Our hunt now is for knowledge: the better to apply the lessons of the past to the challenges of the future.
Portugal and the Great War: Contexts and Protagonists (1914-1918)
Exhibition Opening and Great War and Azores Lecture
Opened: November 8, 2018
By going back to the origins, contexts, impact and memories of the First World War, the exhibition titled Portugal and the Great War: Contexts and Protagonists (1914-1918) examines the various aspects of Portuguese participation in this global conflict.
Political reasons, social mobilization, the role of women, life in the trenches, African and European fronts and the lasting impact of the conflict are all addressed and reflected by very detailed photographic documentation.
Interrogando as origens, os contextos, os impactos e as memórias da Primeira Guerra Mundial, a exposição Portugal e a Grande Guerra Contextos e Protagonistas (1914-1918) interpelam vários aspetos da participação portuguesa neste conflito global. A razão política, a mobilização social, o papel das mulheres, o mundo das trincheiras, as frentes africanas e europeias e os impactos duradouros do conflito são abordados, com recurso a uma criteriosa documentação fotográfica.
Cuffe Kitchen & Park
Opened: September 21, 2018
The Cuffe Kitchen was a multi-media experience providing an opportunity to ponder the social and racial issues faced by prominent merchant, philanthropist, community leader, civil rights advocate and abolitionist Captain Paul Cuffe (1759–1817).
The exhibition was installed in the kitchen gallery Museum members may remember as a recreation of an 18th century kitchen. Much of the wood in this room came from Cuffe’s home in Westport.
Born on the island of Cuttyhunk (off the coast of New Bedford) as the free-born son of a formerly enslaved West African and a free Native American woman, Cuffe became one of the wealthiest men of color in the nation, rising to national repute, even becoming one of the first black men to have a formal meeting with a U.S. President. Yet he struggled with the reality of the racial inequalities that have plagued America since its founding. Despite his successes, he was still stifled by segregationist and racist policies. Throughout his life Cuffe spoke out and worked for equality.
This exhibition posed questions about society in Cuffe’s time which has relevance to today in a thought-provoking, dynamic experience developed to promote contemplation and discussion by visitors.
From the Vault: Paul Cuffe Manuscript Papers
Paul Cuffe’s Manuscript Collection: Mss #10
Captain Paul Cuffe Park
The new Captain Paul Cuffe Park opened September 21, 2018. Learn more
Located at the corner of Union Street and Johnny Cake Hill, Captain Paul Cuffe Park is adjacent to the site where Cuffe operated his store, Cuffe & Howards.
Grand Maritime Paintings from the Permanent Collections
Maritime Fine Art Gallery
Opened: November 1, 2017
Closed: August 31, 2018
Among the great treasures of the New Bedford Whaling Museum are its collection of works by local painters of renown.
Artists like R. Swain Gifford, William Bradford, Lemuel Eldred, Clement Nye Swift, and Charles Henry Gifford achieved fame in their lifetimes for their vision, skill, and often documentary prowess. Lemuel Eldred and R. Swain Gifford in particular serve to capture the essence of actual events in so fine a fashion as to be used as historical sources, an application transcending their art as beautiful renderings.
The “Maritime Fine Art Gallery” is a space devoted to the fine arts and particularly their public appreciation and enjoyment.
Timeless Toys
Installation in Hallway on Main Level
Opened: October 25, 2016
Closed: September 19, 2019
The star attraction was an abstract painting by two of New Bedford’s most beloved residents: Asian elephants Ruth and Emily from the Buttonwood Park Zoo.
The 24” x 24” painting in bold primary colors was part of Timeless Toys, a special exhibition for children featuring antique and vintage toys, Punch and Judy puppets, books, comic books, games, and circus memorabilia.
Ruth and Emily’s colorful painting was a good fit for the exhibition, according to Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, Christina Connett, Ph.D. “We wanted to design an exhibit that children of all ages would enjoy as they make their way to the Casa dos Botes Discovery Center, our new family interactive zone. We had heard of the elephants’ work and thought it would be great fun to include, so we approached the Buttonwood Park Zoo. They were gracious enough to arrange a specially commissioned painting to be donated to the Museum.”
Connett said that the objects on display were selected with children in mind, “but so far, adults stop as often as kids do to comment on the items in the cases. We keep hearing, ‘I used to have one of those!’”
The Museum kept Timeless Toys fresh for visitors by rotating objects on display periodically, drawing on the Museum/Old Dartmouth Historical Society’s extensive collection of toys, games, books, comic books and childhood memorabilia.
