Leviathan. Philip Hoare

rigging and tall masts statements of industry and fortitude. Unlike her alter ego, she lacked bulwarks studded with whale teeth or a tiller fashioned from a whale’s jaw, embellishments that gave Ahab’s Pequod the air of a ‘cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies’. The Acushnet had her own disguise: false gunports painted on her side to ward off attacks from pirates or savages.

      She was owned by a syndicate of eighteen men, among them the agent, Melvin O. Bradford and his brother, Marlboro Bradford, both Quakers. Their captain, Valentine Pease Junior, was forty-three years old, a tall, stern, bewhiskered and sometimes profane man, not overwhelmingly blessed with luck. On his first command, the Houqua, his first mate, Edward C. Starbuck, had been discharged in Tahiti ‘under conditions curious and not fully explained’. Seven men drowned, two others died when their boat was stove in by a whale, and eleven crew deserted, leaving only three original members to return and claim their lays.

      This was not an unusual story. Of her original crew of twenty-six, only eleven would return on the Acushnet. The rest deserted or were discharged, discouraged by long and inhospitable voyages and strictures enforced by omnipotent captains. Contracts stated that men were not to leave the ship until her hold was full of oil, and that they must adhere ‘to the good order, effectual government, health and moral habits’ expected of them. ‘Criminal intercourse’ with women would be punished by the forfeit of five days’ pay; ‘intemperance and licentiousness’ earned similar penalties, if not the lash. To add insult to injury, wear and tear meant that they had to buy new clothes from overpriced onboard supplies. When the debt was deducted from their share of the ship’s profits, they were often left with nothing, or even found themselves owing money for their trouble. Given such conditions, it was hardly surprising that men jumped ship. In fact, two of the Acushnet’s crew had deserted even before she sailed. They had not signed up to be slaves, after all.

      There are some things a place will not tell you, as if it conspires with its past. To look at it now, you would not guess that New Bedford was once the richest city in America. This now incongruous town–at least, to anyone who has not been there–was the capital of a new economy, one that reached out across the world; the bustling industrial centre of a republic founded on the backs of whales.

      New Bedford’s roots lay in its sheltered harbour and good connections with the rest of New England, but, above all, strong ties with the Quakers of Nantucket–who had perfected the art of whaling in the early eighteenth century–contributed to the port’s unprecedented success. One of those Quakers, Joseph Rotch, developed New Bedford in the years following the Revolution. By the 1840s, when Melville arrived, the port had grown rich–more so since it was linked by a bridge with Fairhaven, its twin on the other side of the river.

      Route 6, the highway once known as the King’s road and which runs all the way to the tip of Cape Cod, still crosses the Acushnet by a nineteenth-century turntable bridge, a Meccano construction that pivots to permit more important traffic to pass. Here vessels still have precedence over cars. This is a working port. It smells of diesel and fish, and there are ships at the end of its streets. It is also a designated national park, not of rolling hills or woods, but of thirteen city blocks, all devoted to a memory.

      NEW BEDFORD–THE WHALING CITY

      Set next to the modern freeway, on a huge, block-like plant for refrigerating fish, is a giant mural of air-brushed whales swimming serenely in a turquoise-blue sea. The whale is imprinted on New Bedford: even the licence plates of the cars that drive through it are embossed with the sperm whale, the state animal of Massachusetts.

      In front of the Free Public Library is an outsize statue on a granite block. It resembles a war memorial, but it was set in place in 1913, and carved with a succinct epithet–

      A DEAD WHALE OR A STOVE BOAT.

      –a simple enough equation. Despite his square jaw and Aryan looks, there is something tribal about the idealized, muscular whaler balanced on a disconnected prow; he might almost be a Plains Indian. His spear is aimed at one inexorable point: we are the whale; this was the first human it saw, and the last.

      Modern New Bedford lives on in the shadow of such monuments. Brooks Pharmacy sells garish postcards of the Whaling City. Visitors can ‘Catch the Whale’, a downtown shuttle bus, or buy T-shirts from the Black Whale shop. Around the corner, the dark interior of Carter’s menswear store, est.1947, is piled high with workwear and fishermen’s caps for modern Ishmaels. The young assistants nod to their few customers on a Saturday morning, preferring to get on with talking about their Friday nights. Tomorrow, the church steeple over the way will summon sailors to the Lord, along with the sleepy guests from the Spouter Inn.

      In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.

      The Chapel, Moby-Dick

      At the entrance of the Seaman’s Bethel–which, with its clapboard and its square tower, resembles a ship sailing over the brow of Johnny Cake Hill–a veteran from the mission next door shows me inside, then steps out for a smoke, leaving me to wander around alone. The dark hallway opens into an airy space lined with box pews and white marble slabs set into the wall, each a witness to past mourning, ‘as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable’.

      In Memory of

      CAPT. WM. SWAIN Master of the Christopher Mitchell of Nantucket. This worthy man, after fastning to a whale, was carried overboard by the line, and drowned May 19th 1844, in the 49thYear of his age.

      Be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometh.

      The Bethel’s ministry was and is the sea; new names are added to these plaques as the port loses its sons to the ocean. Yet this place could be a stage set, and, for all I know, John Huston’s cameras might still be in the gallery, filming his 1954 version of Moby-Dick, while the high-ceiled chapel echoes to the plaintive hymn of Jonah’s plight,

       The ribs and terrors in the whale Arched over me a dismal gloom

      and Orson Welles, playing the fictional Father Mapple of Melville’s story, sermonizes to his sea-bound congregation on the same biblical story,

      Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

      Here Ishmael pays his respects to his maker, and here he listens to Father Mapple preach from a pulpit constructed to look like a ship’s prow. But Huston’s film–which received its world premiere in New Bedford’s State Theatre, after a parade through the town led by its star, Gregory Peck–was actually made in England, and the theatrical pulpit that stands here now was commissioned in 1961 from a local shipwright to satisfy movie fans who came here expecting to see it.

      Outside, the streets that Ishmael saw as dreary ‘blocks of blackness’ are empty of extras as I cross the road to the modern Whaling Museum, where I am greeted by the skeleton of a fifty-ton, sixty-six-foot blue whale hanging over the receptionist’s desk like a gigantic children’s mobile.

      Washed ashore on a beach on nearby Rhode Island in 1998, this specimen was, at six years old, just a baby, but it created a giant problem. Claimed both by the museum and by the Smithsonian Institution, a compromise was reached; a leviathanic judgement of Solomon. It was agreed that the museum could have the whale, on condition that it was put on public view, visible by day and night.

      In order to accomplish this feat, the whale first needed to be taken apart. The carcase was cut up into sections which were then lowered into the river in cages. For two years the minute denizens of the Acushnet ate away at the whale’s flesh, until its skeleton was picked as clean as a spare rib. The reassembled result now swims through an atrium built to satisfy the Smithsonian’s stipulation, an orphaned infant in a glass limbo. Incontinently,