Category Archives: Historical

Chapter 7: The Chapel

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seamensbethel

The real Seamen’s Bethel, still standing in New Bedford today.

Death was not unusual in the whaling business. It could come from a whale itself, as it smashes your flimsy wooden boat to pieces, or from a shipboard accident in the rigging, or from contaminated food. Whalers died from dehydration, from enraged or drunken shipmates, from angry Pacific islanders. It was a dangerous profession, for ordinary whalers as well as those obsessed with an albino nemesis.

Ishmael pays his respects to those who have lost their lives pursuing his chosen profession by visiting a Whalemen’s Chapel, based on the real life Seaman’s Bethel that still stands in New Bedford today.

Within the chapel, black-bordered marble tablets bear the names and places of death of New Bedford’s sons lost to the ocean. John Talbot, at the age of 18, lost overboard near the Isle of Desolation. Six men towed out of sight by a whale, in a nameless spot in the Pacific. Those who die at sea will never return to rest at home, and their families would never how they truly died.

Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trapping of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.

cenotaph1

Memorial inside of Seamen’s Bethel.

“A small scattered congregation of sailors, sailor’s wives and sailor’s widows” fills the chapel. Even Queequeg is here, despite his proud paganism. It is a doleful, sad crowd, in a doleful, sad place. But to Ishmael the chapel also embodies the hope of remembrance and the eternal life of the soul:

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick bundling of man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefor three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Ishmael has prepared himself for the death, and is ready for it if it comes. But that, of course, is not what God or Fate has in store for him.

Chapter 6: The Street

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John Avery Parker Mansion, one of the grand houses built with whaling money in 19th century New Bedford.

It is difficult for those of us alive today to understand the size and vast power of the whaling industry in 19th century America. We imagine it like a large scale fishing operation, generating good livelihoods but not necessarily fortunes. However, nothing can be further from the truth. The closest comparison to the New England whaling industry in the middle of the 19th century is, perhaps, the great oil boom taking place today in North Dakota. Chapter 6 reveals much about both the wealth the whaling industry generates in the towns that depend on it, and the type of people coming in to, with luck, take a piece of that whale money home for themselves.

The chapter opens with a description of the crowds that fill New Bedford’s streets. Not just American sailors, but men from around the world, including “savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.” But even stranger are the farmers and shopkeepers who’ve come to try their hand at whaling. “Green Vermonters and NEw Hampshiremen, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.” Yet these newcomers are all too likely to “burst their straps in the first howling gale”.

Yet beyond the crowds there are the great stately mansions that the whale fishery has funded. “A land of oil, true enough … a land, also, of corn and wine.” The whale fishery has transformed this isolated coast of New England into one of the richest places in the country:

In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales to their daughters for dowers, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.

Whale oil provided light in the cities of 19th century America, and didn’t power every aspect of civilization as petroleum does today. But imagine how much more light was worth in a world that otherwise relied on campfires and tallow candles, a world where lighting the house all night would be considered recklessly extravagant. It’s easy to see why so much money could be made, not just by the owners and captains of ships but by the crews as well.

Pay in the whaling world was based on a share of the final profits of a voyage. As we’ll see later when Ishmael and Queequeg take ship, a new sailor is promised a “lay”, or a fraction of the final profits. A captain could expect as much as 1/8 of the profits, while new sailors as little as 1/300. But a profitable voyage could provide good money to everyone involved, not to mention several years worth of free food and lodging, to anyone who wished to endure the hardships and life-threatening risks of a whale voyage. For many New Bedford men died in pursuit of the whales that provided their livelihood, as we shall see in the next chapter.