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New Bedford, MA 02740 www.whalingmuseum.org
Front Cover Image: Katy Rodden Walker, Community BLOOMS installation at NBWM, photo by Drew Furtado. Table of Contents/foreword: Murex shells, NBWM Collection.
Back Cover Image: Theodosia Potter Chase (1875–1972), Nonquitt Beach. Real photo postcard, circa 1900. The reverse reads in print, "Theodosia P. Chase, 299 Union St., New Bedford, Mass." NBWM 2000.100.4246.
President & CEO
Amanda McMullen
Photography
Emma Rocha
Managing Editor
Marina Dawn Wells
Editor
Naomi Slipp
Design and Production
Brian Bierig, Graphic Designer
Meandering
Theodosia
Foreword
Vistas: A Journal of Art, History, Science and Culture has now become required reading for the curious. Our volumes have a growing audience from fans of New Bedford history—including whaling and beyond to enthusiasts of art and devotees of natural history. In fact, in many ways Vistas mirrors a visit to the Whaling Museum. One moment you are imagining the courage needed to ascend a ship’s 100-foot mast to the crow’s nest. In the next gallery, you experience a fully immersive contemporary art installation of delicately floating jellyfish painstakingly constructed with marine debris. Then in flash, you get an upclose look of an adolescent blue whale skeleton with drippy, oily bones. Effortlessly, you float through spaces filled with history, art and science—and without even realizing it, your neurons are firing new pathways because you are learning.
This edition of Vistas delivers that same inspiring rush. While there are a number of insightful contributions on the following pages from a broad range of contributors, I want to highlight the article by Lee Blake, the President of the New Bedford Historical Society. Blake shares her work and the efforts of the volunteers from the New Bedford Historical Society to establish Abolition Row Park
and the Abolition Row Historic District. For nearly thirty years, the New Bedford Historical Society has been steadfast in their commitment to ensuring that the narratives defining our city’s history include the many contributions made by African American, Cape Verdean, and Native American communities. New Bedford was a center of the abolition movement and can count among its many citizens leading voices like Frederick Douglass. Appropriately so, the New Bedford Historical Society designed Abolition Row Park to lift up Douglass. The Park is now a celebrated and sacred place in our city, thanks to the tireless efforts of Lee Blake and the members of her volunteer corps.
While you enjoy this edition of Vistas and the Museum, I urge you to prioritize a stroll through New Bedford in search of treasures like Abolition Row. It will not disappoint.
Amanda McMullen President & CEO New Bedford
Whaling Museum
The Resourceful Basque Whalers
Charles R. Chace, Volunteer, New Bedford Whaling Museum, and President, Descendants of Whaling Masters
It is commonly believed that the processing of blubber by on-board tryworks originated after Nantucket whalers began hunting sperm whales in the deep ocean. This key development overcame the necessity to bring a whale or its blubber to shore for boiling. Figure 1 is a copy of an etching published in a French encyclopedia of fisheries in 1782 showing a Basque vessel with whalemen boiling blubber onboard and stowing oil below. Could Basque whalers have developed the tryworks separately from or even earlier than Nantucket whalers? Were the Basques hunting sperm whales? A brief look at their whaling history will show that the Basques made a number
of contributions to the techniques of whaling as they progressed from local shore whaling, to shore whaling at distant lands, to hunting whales in the open sea, cutting the whale up alongside, and finally taking the risks of on-board processing.
For centuries, Basques living along the coast of the Bay of Biscay conducted annual shore whaling upon arrival of right whales around the autumnal equinox. Basque whaling became increasingly commercialized, marketing whale products to inland Basques and neighboring countries. It was Basque fishermen, however, who first explored the North Atlantic using
Figure 1. Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (French, 1700-1782), Traité Général Des Pêsces (Paris: Veuve Desaint, 1782). Plate VII, figure 3. Engraving on paper, 13 ¾ x 9 1/8 in., NBWM 2001.100.6762.
rudimentary navigation, finding great numbers of codfish near Newfoundland and Labrador. Upon their return, they reported sighting large numbers of whales. Early Basque whaling off Newfoundland and Labrador was reported by French explorer Jacques Cartier, who noted encountering many Basque whalers on his first expedition in 1534.1
To sail across the North Atlantic in the spring, with a crew of sailors and whalemen, whaleboats, equipment and supplies and to return with casks of oil and bundles of baleen required strong, sizable vessels and navigational skills. The Basques built three-masted 200- to 300-ton vessels for this task, possibly being the first to implement a mounted rudder controlled by a helm.
A Spanish Basque galleon, which sank in Red Bay, Labrador in 1565 and was discovered in 1978, boasted a compass mounted on a binnacle, along with the sand glass and log lines necessary to navigate by dead reckoning.2
Development of a trading relationship with Indigenous people in North America, a work ethic that resulted in quickly filled ships, and a business savvy that built a ready and expanding market all contributed to Basque financial success. During the 1500s, the Basques expanded whaling operations from their massive station at Red Bay to a number of locations in Newfoundland, Labrador and the coast of the St. Lawrence waterway. Contact with Indigenous groups is evidenced by Canadian excavations that have occasionally turned up their copper kettles at Native sites, and by a number of Basque words that have entered Indigenous languages and place names in Quebec. Business practice allotted specific fractions of the profits from a voyage to owners, outfitters, and each crew member, based on his position. Basque cities that charted and profited from voyages took great pride in their whaling enterprise. Many even included whaling scenes in their coat of arms.
Basque whalers set the standard for shore whaling
1 Peter E. Pope, “Economic Activities; Basque Whalers,” in Canadian Museum of History: Virtual Museum of New France, https://www. historymuseum.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france/economicactivities/basque-whalers/, accessed October 30, 2024.
2 Ibid.
techniques. The chase boats (Chalupas) were manned by a harpooner, a boat-header steering, and four to six oarsmen. These boats were made of oak with iron fastenings, and smooth planking (carvel) below the water line for speed. Samuel de Champaign described a sleigh ride in his 1613 account, indicating that by that time, boats had become able to fasten directly to the whale, rather than using an external drogue to wear down the whale. Harpooners used double flued irons; the kill was with lances. Flensing could be next to a pier, or alongside the ship and the pieces brought to shore on boats for processing in copper trypots. Ovens were built around the pots with local granite, requiring frequent replacement as the rocks split from the hot fires. The cooper assembled casks from oaken staves from Brittany to store the oil after cooling.
Basque culture and prosperity were impacted by the rivalry of France and Spain, who found that the presence of a thriving and mostly independent entity at the junction of their borders could not be tolerated. The once ethnically united population gradually became separated into French Basques and Spanish Basques, a separation that would become permanent with the establishment of national borders by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. As wars continued throughout northern Europe, the large Basque fishing, trading and whaling vessels (up to 400 tons) were found valuable and commandeered, most prominently in support of King Phillip’s great Spanish Amada of 1588. As many ships were lost, Spanish Basque sailors became unemployed and eager to hire themselves out.
Dutch explorers landed on the far northern island of Spitsbergen in 1596, and shortly after by the English; both claimed ownership. Large numbers of whales were noted, but neither country possessed expertise in whaling. To capture whales and learn the art, they hired the experts. Whaling expeditions were soon conducted by the Dutch with their Basque whalemen, the English with their Basque whalemen, and soon thereafter, by the French and Danes with their Basque whalemen. A painting displayed in the New Bedford Whaling Museum's Turner Gallery shows Basque people working on a Dutch whaling expedition (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen (Dutch, 1577-1633), Dutch Bay Whaling in the Arctic, ca. 1620. Oil on canvas, 36 ½ x 58 ½ in., NBWM 2001.100.4503.
The Basques of Spain began sending their own vessels to Spitzbergen in 1613, but would soon be rejected by British or Dutch ships of war defending their whalers and their portions of the island. Basque vessels that continued whaling in the far northern waters, if caught, might be forced to surrender their oil and baleen, captured as prizes and brought back to England, or have their crew members impressed to serve in their captor’s navy. The Basques resented being turned away by their recent students and at least once found revenge, raiding the Dutch station at Jan Mayen Island, taking a large quantity of train-oil, whalebone, and equipment. The plunder was carried off to France, and sold at Rouen and elsewhere.3
With continued rejection from Spitzbergen, an attempt was made at whaling along the fjords of the northern coast of Norway, an endeavor that soon became costly as well. In 1614, the sheriff of Vardo, Norway began imposing a heavy fee for hunting and processing near that island. In 1615, the DanoNorwegian crown learned of three Spanish and two French vessels fishing at northern Norway. Warships were sent, confiscating much of the take along with one of the French vessels. Despite this loss, Basque whalers continued whaling in the northern fjords to as late as 1690, notably at Finnmark, where they would also have to pay a tax.
With no safe location for shore whaling, the Basques began hunting whales in the open ocean, notably in the Norwegian and Barents Seas, while continuing
3 W. Martin Conway, “Introduction to Van der Brugge’s Journal,” in Early Dutch and English voyages to Spitsbergen in the Seventeenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1904), 73-4.
to pay for the rights to try out blubber on shore. Disputes continued to haunt Basque whaling, particularly affecting the French whalers. In 1636 three towns in the Bay of Saint-Jean-de-Luz/Ciboure were attacked by the Spanish. Fourteen large vessels that had just returned fully loaded from Greenland were taken as booty.4 The following year a Ciboure vessel was forced to surrender its entire take to a Dutch warship. Beginning in 1640, the Dutch also began hunting in the open sea, bringing the rotting blubber back to Holland for processing.5
Around 1635, captain Francois Sepite of Ciboure proposed trying out blubber on-board at sea to avoid paying fees to other nations.6 It is uncertain when the Basques began trying out blubber on-board, but by the mid-1600s several reports from other nations noted the practice. On board boiling in that century is documented in a journal by Frederich Martens, who served as surgeon aboard a German whaleship in 1671, reporting that the “Frenchman (Basques) try up their train-oyl in their ships and by that means many ships are burnt at Spitzbergen; and this was the occasion of the burning of two ships in my time.”7 Ship registrations show that Spanish Basques were also whaling in the seas near Spitsbergen and Norway. These vessels were reported to have a smaller overall length than those sailing to Newfoundland, and had on-board tryworks for rendering blubber.8 On board processing posed an advantage to the Dutch practice of returning with the blubber by effectively increasing the size of the hold by one-third, overcoming the space taken by the tryworks.
4 Guillaume Millanges, VS ET Covstvmes De La Mer: Divisées en Trois Partie (Bordeaux, France, 1647), 152.
5 William Martin Conway, No Man’s Land: A History of Spitzbergen from its Discovery in 1596 to the Beginning of the Scientific Exploration of the Country (Cambridge, UK: The University Press, 1906), 186.
6 Millanges, VS ET Covstvmes, 152-153.
7 Frederick Martens, “Voyage to Spitzbergen,” in A Collection of documents on Spitzbergen & Greenland , ed. Adam White, Esq., (London, UK: The Hakluyt Society, 1904; rpt. New York, NY: Burt Franklin, 1970), 180.
8 Alex Aguilar, “A review of old Basque whaling and its effect on the right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) of the North Atlantic,” Report - International Whaling Commission, Special Issue 10, (Cambridge, UK: 1986), 197. https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/235407504_A_review_of_old_Basque_whaling_and_ its_effect_on_the_right_whales_of_the_North_Atlantic, accessed October 30, 2024.
Basque whalers sailed with a quantity of bricks, clay and earth to build a furnace on the lower deck. They built it up above the upper deck hatch to support the cauldron.9 Since they built the tryworks while underway, it is possible that they predated the practice popular amongst New England whalemen of tearing down the tryworks during the return to home port and tossing the bricks overboard. All hands were employed when using the tryworks; some managed the sailing while others did the boiling, and still others were spraying water on and around the framework at the bottom of the furnace using pumps specifically provided for that purpose.10
Nantucket whalers developed their tryworks around 1750 in order to hunt and process whales in the open ocean. This design soon spread throughout New England and to other whaling nations. Whether the Nantucket whalers knew of the Basque design or not, their design included a number of features that reduced the risk of losing the vessel to fire.
The added stanchions under the Basque vessel’s trypots and their placement on a lower deck (Fig. 1) may have been necessitated by the strength of the framing, whereas New England whalers were framed with live oak, allowing placement on the main deck. The raised deck shown in figure 3 from 1887 is over a tank of water, whereas the Basque installation required crewmen to continually spray water on the surrounding deck. In both eras cutting up was done alongside, and the “fritters” or blubber residuum was used as fuel; both minced the blubber before placing it in the trypots and both employed a cooling tank with water.11
The Basques were familiar with the sperm whale, which they called “Trumpa,” and knew that spermaceti and ambergris each had high commercial value. Whalers occasionally encountered sperm whales along their route to Spitzbergen and the northern whaling grounds, but in no recorded voyage were the Basques specifically targeting sperm whales. The whale most sought after was the bowhead,
9 Millanges, VS ET Covstvmes, 153.
10 Ibid., 154.
11 Sir Martin Conway, No Man’s Land , 68.
3. Herbert Lincoln Aldrich (American, 1860-1948), New England tryworks, 1887. Albumen print, 3 ½ x 4 in., NBWM 00.200.419.9.
known to the Basques at the “Bearded Whale,” and identified by J.T. Jenkins as the “Greenland Right Whale.”12 This whale was prized for the high yield of oil and the length of the baleen.
While for centuries, the Basques were masters of the sea and experts at fishing and whaling, they did not possess the military power of their neighbors and were forced to either work in service of other nations or use stealth and smuggling to hunt and bring home their catch. The Basques used on-board tryworks while hunting migrating bowhead whales in the Norwegian Sea simply to avoid any shores where they might be attacked or taxed. Frederich Martens’s journal confirms that the Basques were trying out on board a century earlier than Nantucket. It must have taken much more than pride in Basque heritage to undertake the risks and losses to fire. We can be certain that the endeavor often garnered considerable profits.
Credits: Michael Dyer, former NBWM Curator of Maritime History for providing much of the source material; Michelle Cheyne, Professor of Global Languages and Cultures, UMass, Dartmouth; and Naomi Slipp, Douglas and Cynthia Crocker Endowed Chair for the Chief Curator and Director of Museum Learning, for her review and guidance.
12 J. T. Jenkins, A History of the Whale Fisheries (London, UK: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1921), 83.
Figure
The Seaweed Gatherers:
Traditional Work and the Romanticization of NineteenthCentury Coastal Nature
By Christopher L. Pastore, Department of History, University at Albany, State University of New York
Christopher L. Pastore reflects on themes related to the NBWM’s 2023 exhibition “A Singularly Marine and Fabulous Produce”: The Cultures of Seaweed and its exhibition catalogue.
In a special supplement to the November 28, 1874 issue of the London Illustrated News English artist Edward Duncan (1803-1882) carefully engraved a scene of shore work titled Seaweed Gatherers. Spread across two pages, the image depicts a man forking seaweed onto a listing oxcart, while another wearing a wide-brimmed hat looks on from the water’s edge.
To the left, a third man adjusts his horse’s pack saddle, atop which sits another load of weed, while two women wearing peasant bonnets gather more nearby. To the right, a woman and boy lead a team of oxen toward the surf, while another mother-son pair drives the beasts from behind. High clouds obscure a setting sun, which casts its rays across the
ocean and into a glassy tidepool that reaches into the foreground. Long shadows hint of the day’s end. The image caption, which ran on a neighboring page, explained that Duncan’s print had been included in the national collection at South Kensington and “represents a scene of common occurrence on the shores of the Channel Islands and the coast of Brittany, where large quantities of seaweed, called vraik [wrack], are collected for the sake of its valuable alkali.” The oxen, the article continued, would soon make their way “across the slippery sands, amongst the scattered rocks, to the adjacent road on terra firma.” And “Women and men, too, with their baskets and bundles carried on the back or hugged in arms, will tramp sturdily to the neighboring village.”
sea-weed, known popularly as the ‘bladder-weed,’” referring to the algae’s air-filled pockets that buoy its fronds to the water’s surface. “This abundant weed is gathered in great quantities by farmers at low tide … to be used as a manure for their fields. It is also largely employed,” the article concluded, “in the manufacture of crude soda-ash.”2
In dramatizing seaweed harvesting Duncan and the magazine editors spoke to a contemporary fascination with coastal people and their work. On both sides of the Atlantic shore folk gathered at spring low tides to collect ocean algae. Long used to feed and bed animals and enrich garden soils, seaweed had, by the middle of the nineteenth century, also come to play
These were, the article concluded, “good, honest, hard-working folks as any that look upon the waves of the Atlantic from the shores of Western Europe ”1
So appealing was the image and so clearly did it evoke traditional coastal labor that Harper’s Weekly in New York reprinted it three weeks later (Figure 1). The American magazine neither attributed the image to Duncan nor identified its European setting, instead emphasizing the universality of seaweed gathering. “Along the rocky sea-coasts of all the temperate regions,” Harper’s explained, “is a coarse olive-green
1 “Seaweed Gatherers,” The Illustrated London News, November 28, 1874, 506. The “Special Supplement” with Edward Duncan Seaweed Gatherers is unpaginated but appears at page 520.
important roles in numerous industrial processes. As both magazines explained, coastal people dried and burned various kelps to produce alkali used in the production of glass, glazes, and soap, and to extract iodine, which was used both as a disinfectant and as a key ingredient in the new art of photography. Irish sea moss, or Chondrus crispus, a green and red tufted algae that colonized lower intertidal rocks, was used to produce carrageenan, a thickening agent in various foods and medicines. And wet rockweed, used for keeping whale oil casks cool and leak-free, had become essential to wharf operations in cities
2 [Edward Duncan's], Sea-weed Gatherers, Harper’s Weekly, December 19, 1874, 1056-1057. Titled “Seaweed Gatherers,” the article that followed the image appeared on p. 1058.
Figure 2. Clement Nye Swift (American, 1846-1918), Une charretée de goemon sur une plage de Bretagne (A Cartload of Seaweed on a Beach in Brittany), 1878. Oil on canvas, 41 x 93 in., NBWM, Gift of the Russell Memorial Library of Acushnet, Massachusetts, 2015.9.1.
like New Bedford.3 Seaweed also inspired scientific minds. Coastal naturalists mounted and pressed seaweed on paper, sometimes gifting their discoveries or binding them into books, which served as lasting testaments to their sociability and curiosity.4 Indeed, seaweed gathering and collecting was at once a symbol of time-honored practice and salute to the modern world.
So captivated by this tension between tradition and contemporary fashion were Atlantic audiences that seaweed gathering became an artistic genre unto itself. American painters like Clement Nye Swift (1846-1918) and Howard Russell Butler (18561934) produced large oils on canvas that dramatized the interplay of people, animals, technology, and algae (Figure 2). British artists like Duncan and Edmund Blampied (1886-1966) and Irish artists like Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957) (brother of the poet William Butler Yeats) likewise reveled in the charms of sea tangle. When the American artist Robert
3 Naomi Slipp, “Seaweed Gathering in American Art and Intertidal Economies as Coastal Culture,” in A Singularly Marine & Fabulous Produce: The Cultures of Seaweed (New Bedford, MA: New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2023), 8.
4 Carol Armstrong and Catherine De Zegher, eds. Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Molly Duggins, “‘Which Mimic Art Hath Made’: Crafting Nature in the Victorian Book and Album,” in Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists’ Books and the Natural World, ed. Elisabeth R. Fairman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 46-63.
Swain Gifford (1840-1905) carried his camera to the southern New England strand, he captured some of the most detailed scenes of seaweed harvesting to date (Figures 3 and 4). And with spirited prose literary artists like Henry David Thoreau, Victor Hugo, and John M. Synge, among others, extolled the virtues of seaweed and coastal folk on Cape Cod and along the coasts of France and Ireland.5 Explicitly, their work expressed reverence for nature and evoked the authenticity of hard work and hand knowledge. Implicitly, their art also critiqued the regimentation of time and fragmentation of families that had come to define industrial society.
In contrast to the automation that had come to dominate nineteenth-century life, seaweed gatherers appealed to an organic past that kept time to natural rhythms and held fast to older forms of family labor. When in 1829 Thomas Carlisle bristled at the effects of industrialization, he lamented that “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” And as a result, he explained, “They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind.”6 By the middle of the nineteenth century the
5 Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (Boston, MA: Ticknor & Fields, 1865); Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer [Toilers of the Sea] (Brussels, Belgium: Albert Lacroix et Cie, 1866); John M. Synge, The Aran Islands (Dublin, Ireland: Maunsel & Company, 1907).
6 Thomas Carlisle, “Signs of the Times,” in A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, ed. G.B. Tennyson (1829; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37.
Figure 3. Robert Swain Gifford (American, 1840-1905), Boy Forking Seaweed into Cart, undated. Glass dry-plate negative, 4 x 5 in., NBWM 1981.34.739.
urban population of England had surpassed that of the rural, marking “the first time in human history,” noted cultural critic Raymond Williams, “that this had ever been so, anywhere.”7 The ills of urbanization piqued monumental critiques of capitalism and urged the idealization of rural life and its informal economies.8 In their free movement and penchant for foraging, seaweed gatherers challenged modern systems of enclosure and exclusive ownership. And they paid little mind to the concerns of contemporary etiquette. Made hale and hearty by their contact with nature, shore folk, many city dwellers believed, were lusty, long-lived, and unencumbered by social hierarchies.9 Their speech unguarded and at times their bodies barely clothed, these old salts evinced the freedom of the seas.
In sum, seaweed gatherers embodied the benefits of working among the elements. In visual art and literature, the genre embraced the shared labor
7 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, UK: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 217.
8 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Frederick Engels (1848; Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1906); Leo Mark, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1964) and Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
9 Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (1988; New York, NY: Penguin, 1994), 211.
of families and communities, which implicitly challenged the modern drift toward social isolation. Seaweed gatherers smelled of sweat, wet wool, and the sea, and their work followed the flow of casual conversation. With oxen lowing, dogs barking, insects buzzing, and children crying, they raked and shoveled along the edge of a world in flux. City people with buckets and dredges would soon pick through their tidepools while others in bathing costumes soaked nearby.10 Their place of work would become a place of play. In search of a truly “pristine” nature artists like John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872) and Thomas Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910) would even begin to erase their presence altogether.11 But for a brief time before the tide began to flood and their tracks were washed away, the seaweed gatherers and their oxcarts commanded both the strand and the imagination of artists and a viewing public who looked back longingly at the type of vigorous work that left one sundrenched, windblown, and perhaps, as the London Illustrated News attested, even “good” and “honest.”
10 Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), especially chapter 4; Robert C. Ritchie, The Lure of the Beach: A Global History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2021), especially chapters 2 and 3.
11 Matthew McKenzie, Clearing the Coastline: The NineteenthCentury Ecological and Cultural Transformation of Cape Cod (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011), 161163.
Figure 4. Robert Swain Gifford (American, 1840-1905), Mr. Wood’s Ox Team - Man Forking Seaweed onto Wagon, undated. Glass dry-plate negative, 4 x 5 in., NBWM 41812.
Local Histories
Meandering Through Maps, Mattapoisett, and the Archive
By Christopher Bates, CHASE AHRC Funded Doctoral Researcher in American Literature, University of Sussex
Figure 1. Maker once known, Charcoal Production Map of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1800-1810. Pen and Ink on paper, NBWM 00.222.232
In July 2024, I travelled to New Bedford from the UK as the Herman Melville Society’s 2024 Walter Bezanson Fellow. As part of my PhD on timber economies and their social-ecological impacts in American literature, I was searching for ways in
which the wood and whaling industries intersected and how I might trace such intersections within Melville’s work.
Despite this focus, I remained open to serendipity
and two of the collection’s maps certainly delivered: the first was the Charcoal Production Map of Southeastern Massachusetts, produced sometime between 1800 and 1810 (Figure 1); the second detailed the infrastructure of Mattapoisett and was produced by Ansel Weeks in 1856 (Figure 2). Being fascinated by maps for their representation of the physical and social world as it existed at a given point in time, I spent numerous hours poring over their meticulously produced networks.
Given that I was seeking to understand the area’s nineteenth-century timber economies, the Charcoal Production map was a real boon.
On a superficial level, the map demonstrates a complex network of fuel production extending across Massachusetts, with rivers and roads being key to its distribution. The large numbers adjacent to the town names indicate their proximity to either
Boston or Taunton, perhaps as an indication for those looking to transport their product accordingly. Most significantly for my work, though, is the map’s implicit reduction of trees to a raw commodity, evidenced through the specificity of tree species (oak, yellow oak, white oak, maple, elm pine, locust, chestnut, and ash all make an appearance) and the labelling of these forests with their acreage and the subsequent tons per acre they would yield, as seen, for example in its representation of mixed woodland near Freetown (see Figure 2).1
Navigating away from charcoal, I’d targeted the infrastructural map of Mattapoisett (see Figure 3), as its cartographer, Ansel Weeks, was also the
1 It is not specified whether this is tons of timber or charcoal. Given it takes between 4-12 tons of timber to produce 1 ton of coal, I suspect it is the former. "About Charcoal” Charcoal Transparency Initiative, https://charcoal-transparency.org/page.php?idPage=1, accessed July 18, 2024.
Figure 2. Detail from Charcoal Production Map
Master Carpenter for the Acushnet, the ship Melville famously sailed on.2 I was initially disappointed with the map: despite its great size, it seemed conspicuously lacking in detail. However, the more I looked, the more excited I became. The meandering Mattapoisett River is present in thick black ink, and numerous mills along its banks are the only buildings marked. Moreover, the four docks of the harbor are likewise clear to see, with the furthest left belonging to G. Barstow & Son, the Acushnet’s builders (see Figure 4). Weeks also included the recently built Fairhaven Branch Railway and roads, some of which followed the river’s course. All of this pointed, like the charcoal map, to a commercial network that involved a significant amount of timber.
2 Biographical information about Weeks can be found in Diolinda Mendes Avila, Biography of Captain Ansel Weeks’ family of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, NBWM CS71.W395 1988. The Master Carpenter’s certificate can be found at the New Bedford Free Public Library.
I then cross-referenced Weeks’ map with a contemporary map of the area and was pleased to find that many of the same roads were still in existence. Promptly renting a car, I spent a delightful evening wandering between river and road to find any traces of the mills marked on Weeks’s map that might prove that the area was once buzzing with the sights and sounds of a thriving timber economy. Whilst many of the sites are now on private property, I was able to access some along the river, where the ruins of old stone walls, the possible remnants of mills, were visible beneath the overgrowth. Most excitingly, Tripps Mill, the most conspicuous on Weeks’ map, is still easily accessible. Now maintained as part of the Mattapoisett River Reserve by the Buzzard’s Bay Coalition, Tripps Mill was, according to the information board at the site, a water-powered box board mill operating from 1821 to 1930, using local timber to produce boxes for use in the local textile and fishing industries. Jackpot.
Seeing the ecological vibrancy of the rewilded Tripps Mill generated a powerful contrast to the charcoal map’s reduction of the forest ecology of New England to weights and measures, to Weeks’ sparse, utilitarian map, and to the other records I had been picking my way through in the archive. Such a contrast reveals much about our changing relationships with ecology and natural resources over time, relationships reflected through literature and other written materials. My time in New Bedford spent navigating the archive, its maps, and surrounding areas was vital
in showing me how both sides of this coin have interwoven over the past 200 years, lessons that will stay with me for far longer than just the next years of research.3
3 I’d like
take
...the more I looked, the more excited I became. The meandering Mattapoisett River is present in thick black ink, and numerous mills along its banks are the only buildings marked. Moreover, the four docks of the harbor are likewise clear to see, with the furthest left belonging to G. Barstow & Son, the Acushnet’s builders...
to
this opportunity to thank Madeline Smith, Marina Wells, Samantha Santos, Emma Rocha, Robert Rocha, and many others at the Museum who made my trip to New Bedford both possible and successful.
Figure 4. Detail from Weeks’ Map with docks, river, and mill.
Theodosia Potter Chase (1875 – 1972)
An Early New Bedford Woman Photographer
By Judith Lund, historian, author, and former curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum
All those familiar photographs of the South Dartmouth area taken in the early twentieth century can now be identified as the work of Miss Theodosia Chase. The discovery of a privatelyowned album of her real photo postcards confirms that these are her work.
Rev. David Rankin of the First Unitarian Church summed up the life of Miss Chase in his eulogy:
“Let it be known that she was a strange and beloved member of our community; and she was frank and honest and direct, that she was proud and independent, that she was a mystery to all who knew her.”
Theodosia Chase was born in Orange, Massachusetts on November 9th, 1875, but her family soon moved
to New Bedford. The family lived at the corner of Union and County Streets, in a house that was located in what is now the garden of the First Unitarian Church. William J. Potter, her mother’s uncle, was minister of the church at the time. She displayed early artistic talent which was fostered by her parents, Ephraim and Caroline Potter Chase. After high school, she attended Swain School, taking morning classes and spending her afternoons at John O'Neil's Photo Studio on Purchase Street learning to retouch photographs. While in that studio, she could also have learned the techniques of developing and printing photographs as well.1
About 1910 she took a job as librarian at the
1 Mary Jean Blasdale, Artists of New Bedford: A Biographical Dictionary (New Bedford, MA: New Bedford Whaling Museum/ Old Dartmouth Historical Society, 1990).
Figure 1. Theodosia Potter Chase (American, 1875-1972), Padanaram Harbor Showing “The Lobster,” undated. Real photo postcard, NBWM 1947.35.1.
Southworth Library in Padanaram, which was a private library from 1890 until 1927, when it became part of the town library system. That stone building continues today as an artists’ cooperative. She was certainly enterprising. While working there, she continued to pursue her growing love of photography. She posted a small sign on her desk in the library that offered her photographic services to the library clientele.
THEODOSIA P. CHASE
Is prepared to make Post Cards of Residences
Also of Children and Animals out-of-doors. Orders for Place Cards, Holiday Novelties, etc. taken. Southworth Library, South Dartmouth
The use of the term postcard/post card was first allowed in 1901. Initially only an address could be written on the back of the card, known by postcard collectors as the undivided back. Collecting picture postcards, generally printed in Europe, became a craze, as did collecting printed baseball cards decades later. In 1907, the rules changed: postcards could have a divided back, the left half for a message, and the right, for the address, as we know today.
Eastman Kodak Company saw this as an opportunity. The company patented the first roll film holder in 1885. In 1903, Kodak introduced to the market their folding portable camera, Kodak #3A. That camera took 122 film, conveniently producing negatives of postcard size. Kodak also produced a preprinted paper card back, allowing photographic prints to be directly created as postcards. Voila! Kodak could join the mania for postcards developing at that time.
It seems that Theodosia must have bought one of Eastman Kodak’s new portable folding 3A cameras. We also know that she had worked in a photo studio, where printing of photographs took place. It is a leap of faith to assume that Theodosia then was able to produce her own photo postcards because she understood the chemical process that went into creating them, learned while working for photographer O’Neil. The variety of her images existing in different formats, masked several ways in
the printing process, suggest that she was doing the printing herself.
In all over 400 different postcards made by Theodosia are known. The cards focus on the South Dartmouth area. Very few cards have been found documenting the city of New Bedford. Theodosia’s postcards are held in the collections of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society/New Bedford Whaling Museum, and in greater numbers in the collections of local postcard collectors. The number of views of Padanaram and South Dartmouth, 165, suggest Theodosia hoped visitors would want to preserve memories of their trip to the area. Views include commercial enterprises there such as the Tea Room at the Toll House and the Clambake Pavilions in Padanaram. Her clientele also included owners who wanted to record their properties: Grinnell, Schultz, Ricketson among others; also the members of Apponagansett Boat Club, young people who wanted to learn to race in small sailboats, boats too small for inclusion in the New Bedford Yacht Club. It appears Theodosia was a favorite of the residents of the Nonquitt community, where she took art lessons, because she made an inordinate number of views of that area (see rear cover of this issue). A quick survey of the list of her known postcards indicates that Nonquitters were good customers; 73 views have been found so far. Her views continue down the shoreline to the community of Salter’s Point, for which 43 postcard views have now been identified. There also exist scenes of other locations, some nameless, showing trees and water that Theodosia herself might want to remember as inspiration for later paintings.2
In 1934 Theodosia left the library and established her own studio on Hamilton Street behind the Whaling Museum. From this location, she sold postcards, ink sketches, and paintings, as well as portrait photographs. In addition to postcards, the Old Dartmouth Historical Society/New Bedford Whaling Museum holds in its collections several ink sketches and a few paintings created by Theodosia. Several more are to be found in private collections.
2 Beverly Morrison Glennon and Judith Navas Lund, Greetings from Dartmouth: A Postcard History (Dartmouth, MA: Garrison Wall Publishers, 1993); Margery A. Slade, “Theodosia Chase, a Classic Yankee, is Talented artist With Pen, Brush, Lens,” The StandardTimes (New Bedford, Mass., July 25, 1965).
Figure 2. Theodosia Potter Chase (American, 1875-1972), album page featuring two images of her dog Duffy, one “At Ricketson’s Point,” 1907-1919. NBWM, Gift of John B. Sherman and Pamela Sherman, 2024.23.
As the infirmities of old age intruded, she moved from her home on Newton Street to RolAnn Nursing home, where she continued to paint until the last two
years of her life. Theodosia Chase died on January 4, 1972 and was buried at Rural Cemetery in New Bedford.3
3 David, Branco, “Longtime city Artist, photographer, is buried,” The Standard-Times (New Bedford, Mass., January 7, 1972); birth and death dates are in error on Findagrave.com.
The use of the term postcard/post card was first allowed in 1901. Initially only an address could be written on the back of the card, known by postcard collectors as the undivided back. Collecting picture postcards, generally printed in Europe, became a craze, as did collecting printed baseball cards decades later.
Figure 3. Theodosia Potter Chase (American, 1875-1972), album page featuring “Nonquitt, Mass.” and “Nonquitt Bathing Beach,” 1907-1919. NBWM, Gift of John B. Sherman and Pamela Sherman, 2024.23.
Abolition Row Park
Lee Blake, President, New Bedford Historical Society
Abolition Row Park and the Abolition Row Historic District made their entrance to New Bedford in June 2023. A reclaimed green space at the edge of downtown, the site is focused on an important but under told part of New Bedford’s history in the nineteenth century when the city was a major center of opposition to slavery and a safe haven for freedom seekers escaping oppression. New Bedford was known throughout the Southern states for its tolerant racial attitudes and its support of freedom for African Americans.
The park is dedicated to telling the story of New Bedford’s significant role in the Abolitionist Movement and the Underground Railroad. It sits across the street from three buildings on the National Register of Historic Places: two houses owned by Black abolitionists and entrepreneurs Nathan and Mary (Polly) Johnson that are Underground Railroad sites, and the Friends Meeting House, both dating from 1820. Funds for the development of the park and the statue of Frederick Douglass located at the park’s entrance were raised by the New Bedford Historical Society with support from the Community Preservation funds, Wicked Cool Places, Community Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Funds, and the support of community members.
The historic district uses local history to define this historic residential neighborhood. Across the street from the park stands the Johnson House, at 21 Seventh Street, where Frederick and Anna Douglass lived during his first months of freedom after escaping enslavement in 1838. The house sheltered numerous freedom seekers and was where prominent African American abolitionist, novelist, playwright, and historian William Wells Brown settled his daughters while he was on the abolitionist lecture circuit.
The park serves as the cornerstone of the new Abolition Row Historic District that encompasses the four blocks on Seventh Street to Walnut Street. The district includes nineteen historic houses that were the homes of many of the city’s antislavery activists and several operators on the Underground Railroad. Residents of the neighborhood shared a social justice agenda through their deeds and actions as active voices against enslavement, employers of freedom seekers, and supporters of the small but growing national Abolition Movement.
Founded in 1996, the New Bedford Historical Society is a nonprofit, all-volunteer organization that has been a leading advocate for racial and ethnic inclusion to the historical narrative of the City of New Bedford, while preserving the history, historic structures, artifacts, and records related to the African American, Cape Verdean, and Native American communities. For almost thirty years, the organization has developed and presented educational programs that highlight the eighteenthand nineteenth-century contributions of these communities to the whaling industry, the maritime trades, and the Underground Railroad.
The preservation work of the Society complements and broadens the city’s historical identity as a seafaring, multicultural urban center that was a major hub of our nation’s antislavery struggle and was one of the great refuges for freedom seekers. The Society has created opportunities for the entire city to preserve and celebrate important elements of New Bedford’s history that enrich our collective heritage.
Readers are invited to visit https://awegmented.com/ nbhs/ to explore with the New Bedford Historical Society’s new walking tour app.
Figure 1. Statue of Frederick Douglass by sculptor Richard Blake in Abolition Row Park, courtesy of Lee Blake.
Lighting the Way
The contributions of women to domestic and civic life, to education and public institutions, to the cultural fabric of New Bedford and its neighbors, and to the political and social environs of the area is immeasurable. Lighting the Way, a museum-led public history project, published over 125 community-authored biographies of some of
1995.09.1202
the significant women in the region online between 2018-2023. Now, a 2024-2025 special exhibition carries the Lighting the Way project forward and looks inward to the New Bedford Whaling Museum collections made by and for women to share their stories.
Figure 1. Local artist Edna Lawrence studied drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design, became an instructor at RISD in 1922, and founded the RISD Nature Lab in 1937. Her lithograph shows women loading cargo onto a ship in the French Caribbean territory of Guadeloupe. Edna W. Lawrence (1898-1987), Loading Cargo, Gaudeloupe. Lithograph, 16 x 11 ½ in., NBWM
Lighting the Way: SouthCoast Women’s Lives, Labors, Loves
On view December 13, 2024 – May 4, 2025 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum
Figure 2. Norman Fortier (1919-2010), Hathaway Manufacturing Company, National Association of Cotton Manufacturers. Acetate negative, 7 x 5 in., NBWM 2004.11.58653.2.
Maritime Connections
Coded Criticisms of European Authority in Loango Ivory:
Can Scrimshaw Jab
Back?
Rufai Y. Shardow, Park Ranger, New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park
What comes to mind when you hear the word “scrimshaw"? Stories? Art? Craft?
The New Bedford Whaling Museum has the world’s largest collection of scrimshaw, and only a small portion is exhibited. Scrimshaw has been defined as the occupational art of engraving, decorating, carving, and building things out of sperm whale teeth and other by-products of whaling including baleen, walrus ivory, and other skeletal bone.1 However, historian, antique dealer and author, E. Norman Flayderman noted that it is a word that has never been accurately defined.2 Curator of the Arts of Africa, John Erickson, Jr. further stated that scrimshaw is an art as well as a craft, and it is the scribing of a design onto ivory, bone, horn, and can even include man-made materials such as plastics or polymers.3 What does this art and craft tell us? While it can be interpreted as many things, according to Joseph Frederick Caron, scrimshaw can be seen as a token of misery. It is a reminder of the oppressive conditions to which the whaleman or the oppressed were subjected.4
Curators in text for the 2024 Wider World & Scrimshaw exhibit at the New Bedford Whaling Museum noted that many communities impacted by colonialism had vibrant carving styles on different animal products. The Vili or Kongo people of Loango Coast in Africa are known for their spiral carvings on ivory. The Loango Coast extends from Cape Lopez in what is now Gabon to Luanda in Angola, and was a site of much economic activity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Z. S. Strother has written that the proliferation of images of Europeans and Americans in Central African art began in the 1840s.5 From that time to about 1900, Loango carvers practiced carving traditions that helped shape several “scrimshaw” teeth at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum has three Loango scrimshaw teeth in their collection and the one shown in figures 1 and 2 is the largest and finest. This Loango scrimshaw tooth (displayed in the Museum’s Scrimshaw Gallery) is approximately 8 and a half inches in height and 3 inches at the base. All three have a similar pattern, that is, the coil of life.
1 Scrimshaw By Candlelight, New Bedford Whaling Museum exhibit.
2 E. Norman Flayderman, Scrimshaw and Scrimshanders: Whales and Whalemen (New Milford, CT: E. Norman Flayderman, 1972).
3 John Erickson Jr., “Scrimshaw,” in Westview 16, no. 1 (1996): 13.
4 Joseph Frederick Caron, Scrimshaw and its Importance as an American Folk Art (Normal, IL: Illinois State University, 1976).
According to Nichole Bridges, the spiral pattern on these pieces echoes or visualizes the Kongo concept of life cycle or luzingu—literally the coil of life in Kikongo—connoting the spirit’s longevity
5 Z. S. Strother, Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016).
in many dimensions of the afterlife. Furthermore, the spiral form evokes a serpent that moves fluidly between water and the earth. It is rendered as a serpent through incised scale-like patterning along the spiral band. The head of the serpent emerges as the finial.8
This piece, according to the museum, had several collectors throughout the 1900s. It first appears in the E. Norman Flayderman book entitled Scrimshaw and Scrimshanders. 6 How the donor came about this piece is a mystery. Could it be a souvenir given to him since ivory tusk sculptures from Loango coast enjoyed great popularity as souvenirs for Westerners?
Like the questions posed in the Wider World & Scrimshaw exhibition, this piece asks, how did crosscultural encounters influence the items (scrimshaw) produced? How do people relate to one another through carved material culture? The plundering of Africa, its people, and its resources is over three centuries long. From human trafficking to slavery, from kidnapping to sexual assault, from forced labor to flogging, millions of Central Africans suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of Europeans and their agents between the midnineteenth century and the decline of colonization around 1960. How do Africans who were denied human dignity tell their stories or interpret contact and its catastrophic regimes of violence?
What Do You See? An Animal? A European? Native Africans?
There are six bands or spiral sides of the sperm whale tooth, or sperm whale tooth, or "Loango tooth," as it is known. Three registers on each side reflect the dynamic of artistic expression and social interaction among the colonizers and West-Central Africa. Bridges has written that Loango tusk imagery implicates its European authority’s identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power. Though in some pieces the gaze occurs quite literally, in this piece the clap-back is through the artistic work of
Figure 1. Maker once known, “Loango Tooth,” obverse, 1800s. Whale ivory, 3 ¼ x 8 ½ in., NBWM 2001.100.1393.
6 Flayderman, Scrimshaw and Scrimshanders, 32.
the carver. But perhaps more compellingly, Loango ivories literally bare their teeth. Pointed in both form and content, Loango ivories jab back.7
The top of the spiral (Figure 1) portrays two Native Africans, a woman lying down being looked upon by another figure who is probably a mid-wife, and a child being born, the beginning of life at the head of the snake. The child will be protected until towards the end of the story where another child appears—perhaps the same child, who has a chance of beginning a new civilization away from the colonizers.
On the reverse side, one can see colonialism and its civilizing taking place at top. Here the Vili or Kongo carver portrays a woman with her head down, reading a book in the direction of a European-looking figure. Perhaps she has been converted to Christianity, since she is holding a bible and is dressed differently from the other Native figures. Two dogs are also in this section of the spiral. Most animals shown in Central African art are either leopards, crocodiles, or elephants as symbols of power and leadership and sometimes as allegorical representations of the Vili carvers’ own ancestral legacy. Bridges noted that animals may play symbolically critical roles on Loango ivories, as they often do in folktales, and it is possible that this imagery invokes coded commentary through signifying techniques. One of the animals is on his hind leg looking straight into the eye of a European while the other is shown with his front legs on a Native.
In the second section of the spiral (Figure 1), there are five figures. A European has his back to the scene, while two women look down as a form of submission. This pose shows colonialism as a part of a process. Perhaps, the artist sought to understand the White man himself and to help contemporaries see the White man for what he really was.8
7 Nichole N. Bridges, “Loango Coast Ivories and the Legacies of Afro-Portuguese Arts,” in A Companion to Modern African Art, ed. G. Salami and M.Visona (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013): 51-73; Bridges, “Kongo Ivories.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 2009), http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kong/hd_kong.htm.
8 Strother, 6.
On the reverse side of the tooth, two Africans are in chokeholds by their country counterparts. This part of the ivory critiques contact and catastrophe by vividly addressing the social inequalities that are inherent in the contact zone. Such violence— sometimes including Africans in chains as slaves—is portrayed in many ivories designed by Loango people.9
Finally, in the third portion of the spiral (Figure 1), four figures are shown. They represent a European and three Native Africans, a child, a man holding a stick or staff on his shoulder, and a woman covering her face with both of her palms.
On the reverse side in the final register, two Natives stand with backs against each other. The man or woman on the left seems to be hugging or protecting a baby (perhaps the baby from the first section) from watching the second man on the right aiming a gun at a leopard. Is the protection of the baby from the figure with the gun the beginning of a new civilization, or carving a new way forward without European authorities?
For this artist, who probably saw certain parts of colonial violence, this scrimshaw was likely portraying the violent relationship with Europeans in West Central Africa. These images jab back, revealing deep insights into the psychology of power and violence that continues to operate in the region. The artwork becomes an expression of healing or has a mediating function. As Bridges argued in her seminal work, whatever the compositional principles at play, prominent spiral bands combined with reliefcarved figurative imagery demonstrate Loango ivories to be important manifestations of Kongo ideographic arts.10
I want to thank my work colleagues who helped me with editing.
9 Strother has detailed many pieces of such scrimshaw in Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art.
10 Bridges, "Loango Coast Ivories," 51-73.
Figure 2. Maker once known, “Loango Tooth,” reverse, 1800s. Whale ivory, 3 ¼ x 8 ½ in., NBWM 2001.100.1393.
Chasing a Devil Across the Sea:
Stephen Girard’s Philosopher Ships Cast a Shadow from Philadelphia to New Bedford
Alexander Lawrence Ames, Ph.D., Director of Outreach & Engagement, The Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia
Though separated by hundreds of miles, museum collections in Philadelphia and New Bedford hold whimsical artifacts of a famous whaleship, which commemorate a unique connection linking the two maritime cities in collective memory. The most remarkable of these artifacts sits in the Turner Gallery of the New Bedford Whaling Museum today: a large, handcrafted chest,
created from wood salvaged from the whaling vessel Rousseau (Figure 1). Designed and built in 1894 by New Bedford artist Arthur Gordon Grinnell (18541924) in an antiquated style evocative of early New England decorative arts, the object is adorned with detailed maritime carving. The chest evokes the long career and remarkable afterlife of the Rousseau, an “infidel ship” built by Stephen Girard of Philadelphia
Figure 1. Arthur Grinnell Gordon (American, 1854-1924), Chest, 1894. Wood, 31 x 19 1/2 x 44 in., NBWM, Gift of Waldo Howland, 2018.43
Figure 1. Bass Otis (American, 17831861), Stephen Girard, 1831. Oil paint on panel, 29 ¼ x 24 ¾ in., courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1954.1906.
Full page is 11 7/16 x 8 ½ in.; image is 5 ¼ x 7 15/16 in., courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library.
before joining the New Bedford whaling fleet years later. In the story of the Rousseau, we witness a vessel’s emergence as a resonant cultural symbol in the midst of shifting social, economic, political, religious, and cultural contexts.
The history of the Rousseau begins in Philadelphia, with the remarkable life and successful business enterprises of the French expatriate merchant, banker, and philanthropist Stephen Girard (17501831; Figure 2). Born near Bordeaux, France, at the height of the Enlightenment, Girard went to sea at a young age, first engaging in transatlantic trade with the slave-powered French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue before somewhat haphazardly establishing a merchant business in Philadelphia. Girard soon imbibed of the revolutionary, republican
fervor of his day. As his fortunes grew between the 1780s and 1810s, so too did his commitment to the ideals of republicanism and emerging market capitalism. Girard read deeply in the works of the French philosophes, became actively involved in civic life, and provided vital financial assistance to the United States Treasury during the War of 1812 that kept the federal government solvent during a perilous period of the conflict.1
Girard used his interest in French philosophy and culture to fashion an identity as a citizen and businessman, including the construction of a fleet of “Philosopher Ships,” which claimed his stake in the United States’ growing trade with Asia. The Voltaire
1 David J. Cowen, “Financing the War of 1812,” Financial History 104 (Fall 2012): 32-35.
Figure 3. J.T. Bowen (American, born England, 1801-1856), lithographer, “The Girard College” (Philadelphia: J.T. Bowen Lithographic & Print Colouring Establishment, 1840), bound in Henry Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, Now Deceased: Collected from Original and Authentic Sources… (Philadelphia: William Brotherhead, 1859), 416-1. A 859liv v.5.
was first, built in 1795 and weighing 300 tons.2 The Rousseau came next, weighing 300 tons and completed in 1801.3 The Helvétius followed, weighing 330 tons and launching in 1804. The Montesquieu was last, weighing 372 tons and completed in 1806.4 Girard equipped each Philosopher Ship with a William Rush-designed figurehead depicting the vessel’s namesake philosopher.5 By the time he died in 1831, Girard was probably the wealthiest man in the United States; he made history by becoming the nation’s first mega-philanthropist, donating the bulk of his fortune to open a school for disadvantaged children that flourishes to this day (Figure 3). A slaveholder, Girard stipulated in his famous last will and testament that his school only admit White male orphans. More than one hundred years later, the desegregation of Girard College formed a centerpiece of Philadelphia’s twentieth-century Civil Rights movement.6
After Girard’s passing, his estate sold the Rousseau to whaling businessman George Howland, Sr. of New Bedford, which set into motion a fascinating transformation of material culture and collective memory. Historian (and granddaughter of George Howland, Sr.) Mary Jane Howland Taber recounted the vessel’s arrival in New Bedford in remarks to the
2 John Bach McMaster, The Life and Times of Stephen Girard, Mariner and Merchant (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1918), 302-303; Receipt of payment from Stephen Girard to Isaac White, August 21, 1795, Mss.Film.1424, Series II, No. 317, Stephen Girard Papers, 1793-1857, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter referred to as Girard Papers).
3 McMaster, The Life and Times of Stephen Girard , 405.
4 Ibid., 302-303; Cheesman A. Herrick, Stephen Girard, Founder (Philadelphia: Girard College, 1923), 57-58; Receipt of payment from Stephen Girard to Isaac White for the building of the ship Helvétius, May 11, 1804, Mss.Film.1424, Series II, No. 131, Girard Papers.
5 Margaret C.S. Christman, Adventurous Pursuits: Americans and the China Trade 1784 – 1844 (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery / Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984), 36; Receipt of payment from Stephen Girard to William Rush for “carving head for Ship Montesquieu,” April 3, 1806, Mss.Film.1424, Series II, Box No. 327, Girard Papers; Receipt for Stephen Girard’s payment to William Rush for the carving of a figurehead for the Rousseau, November 10, 1801, Mss.Film.1424, Series II, No. 336, Girard Papers.
6 For more on the history of Girard College and the Civil Rights movement, see Hillary S. Kativa, “The Desegregation of Girard College,” Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia, https:// exhibits.temple.edu/s/civil-rights-in-a-northern-cit/page/whatinterpretative-essay, accessed September 2, 2024
Old Dartmouth Historical Society in 1904:
Our friend [George Howland] was particular about the names of his ships. … When he bought of Stephen Girard a merchant vessel named Rousseau, it was with the intention of fitting her for a whaler and changing her name. As soon as she arrived in this port he had the figure head of the “infidel” chopped off and thrown into the mud of the dock, where perchance it still reposes. While casting about in his mind for an unexceptional name he was told the name could not be changed. Once Rousseau, always Rousseau. He declared he was very much tried, which in worldly parlance might mean very angry or pretty mad, and talked of sending the ship back to Philadelphia, though of course he was aware that could not be done. This devil’s bark proved very lucky, and always made what the sailors call greasy voyages, but when her great catches were reported her owner puffed out his cheeks and emitted a contemptuous pooh! When he was obliged to speak the name he purposely mispronounced it, calling it Rus-o, and to this day you will hear people speak of the old Rus-o.7
Following a successful whaling career, the Rousseau was abandoned at port at the end of the century. The aging bark became a tourist attraction in the Acushnet River, and a popular scene for photographers, painters, and other artists to depict. A romanticized image of the Rousseau was an etched print by the New Bedford artist Lemuel David Eldred (1848-1921; Figure 4). The vessel itself—planks and all—took on an almost mystical quality for maritime enthusiasts. Numerous relics made from Rousseau wood figure in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum and other institutions, underscoring the cottage industry that grew up around the Rousseau and her treasured wood. All pale in comparison, however, to the greatest surviving relic of the Rousseau: the Howland family chest.
7 Mary Jane Howland Taber, “Friends Here and Hereaway,” Proceedings of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, December 15, 1904, New Bedford Whaling Museum, https://www. whalingmuseum.org/old-dartmouth-historical-society-sketches/olddartmouth-historical-sketch-no-8/, accessed August 6th, 2023.
The Rousseau chest was built by Arthur Gordon Grinnell of New Bedford.8 He crafted the object for William Dillwyn Howland (1853-1897) and his wife Caroline Thomas Child Howland (18551951) in 1894, a year after the Rousseau had been broken up and so many pieces of her salvaged for souvenirs.9 William Dillwyn Howland was a grandson of George Howland Sr. and doubtless took pride in his filial association with this Philadelphian vessel, which served for so many years in his family’s fleet. The object features carving in the eclectic, revivalist style that shaped late-nineteenth century decorative art. Indeed, the piece calls to mind Renaissance and Mannerist design, with its detailed ornament, geometry, pattern, and heavy, block-like construction.10 Underneath the chest’s lid, Grinnell inscribed the history of the Rousseau, linking the New Bedford and Philadelphia stories. Grinnell dated the piece July 6, 1894 and included the initials “WD & CT H,” for William Dillwyn and Caroline Thomas Child Howland (Figure 5). The Howland family crest appears to the left of the inscription; the Child family crest appears to the right.11
8 Mary Jean Blasdale, Artists of New Bedford: A Biographical Dictionary (New Bedford, MA: New Bedford Whaling Museum / Old Dartmouth Historical Society, 1990), 100-101.
9 Historical Note, “Inventory of the Howland Family Papers,” https://www.whalingmuseum.org/research/research-resources/ manuscripts/mss-176/, accessed August 26, 2024.
10 Rosemary Troy Krill, “Furniture in the Seventeenth-Century or Mannerist Style,” in Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860: A Handbook for Interpreters (New York: AltaMira Press, 2010), 21-33.
11 William M. Emery, “Howland Coat of Arms,” in The Howland Heirs (New Bedford, MA: E. Anthony & Sons, 1919), between pages 12 and 13; Elias Child, “Of the Coat of Arms,” in Genealogy
While the chest exudes filial pride, wealth, and connection to a glorious past, by the mid-1890s the young William Dillwyn Howland found himself navigating treacherous financial waters. On April 23, 1897, fewer than three years after Grinnell finished the Rousseau chest, Howland died, presumably by suicide. His body was found in New Bedford Harbor at the North Street dock nearly two weeks later.12 Upon discovery of the body, local press reported that the 44-year-old man had been called to task by a local bank the very day he seems to have taken his own life.13 He left behind his wife Caroline and two young children, Llewellyn Howland (18771957) and Edward Morris Howland (1884-1954).
A paper note appended to the interior of the top panel reads: “This Chest is to be given to LLewellyn [sic] Howland,” signed by Caroline T. Howland, revealing the importance Caroline attached to this symbol of her family’s maritime lineage—and her tragic marriage. The chest descended from Llewellyn Howland I to his son Waldo Howland (1908-1998), and then to the children of Waldo.14 The family donated it to the museum’s permanent collection in 2018.15
The Howland family chest commemorates the cosmopolitan Enlightenment culture of Stephen Girard’s Philadelphia, the heyday of the New Bedford whale fishery in the mid-nineteenth century, and the sentimentalized memory of the age of sail that took hold just a few decades later amid the business’s decline. Arthur Grinnell’s craftsmanship provides a material link between two great maritime cities, and
of the Child Childs and Childe Families (Utica, NY: Published for the author by Curtiss & Childs, Printers, 1881), 59-64.
12 “Howland a Suicide,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 7, 1897, Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
13 “Howland a Suicide,” Fall River Daily Evening News, Thursday, May 6, 1897, https://www.newspapers.com/article/fall-river-dailyevening-news-william-d/121987235/, accessed August 26, 2024; “Howland a Suicide!”, The Fall River Daily Herald, Thursday, May 6, 1897, https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-fall-riverdaily-herald-william-d-ho/121987427/, accessed August 26, 2024.
14 “Llewellyn Howland,” FamilySearch, https://ancestors. familysearch.org/en/LHZ5-5VV/llewellyn-howland-1877-1957, accessed August 26, 2024; “William Dillwyn Howland,” Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/80613759/williamdillwyn-howland, accessed August 26, 2024.
15 Deed of gift, Rousseau chest, September 17, 2018, registration file, 2018.43, New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Figure 4. Lemuel David Eldred (American, 1850-1921), “The Last Port” scene of Rousseau and Desdemona in the New Bedford wharf at Hillman Street, 1897. Etching on paper, 15 ¾ x 23 ½ in., NBWM 1999.24.
Figure 5. Arthur Grinnell Gordon (American, 1854-1924), detail of interior of top lid of chest carved of wood salvaged from the Rousseau, 1894. Panel with inscription measures 9 ½ x 15 1/8 in., NBWM, Collection of Waldo Howland, 2018.43.
the people who shaped their economic and social vibrancy across the generations. Broken up though she may be, fragments of the Rousseau are preserved forever in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum and beyond. The devil’s bark sails on, in American myth and memory.
This article is based on research for Ames’s two current book projects. Ships of Reason: The Atlantic Enlightenment of Stephen Girard, Mariner, Merchant, Banker, & Philanthropist of the Early American Republic is forthcoming from De Gruyter of Berlin in summer 2026. A biography titled Stephen Girard, Captain of American Enterprise and Philanthropy is forthcoming from Routledge of London in spring 2028, as part of the publisher’s Routledge Historical Americans series.
Thanks to Mike Dyer, Curator of Maritime History and Dr. Akeia de Barros Gomes, Senior Curator of Maritime Social Histories at Mystic Seaport, for sharing information with the author about the Rousseau chest. Thanks as well to Madeline Smith, Assistant Collections Manager and Dr. Marina Wells, Assistant Curator of History & Culture at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, for their expertise and assistance in studying the Rousseau chest and related manuscripts and artifacts.
Are you struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts? Help is available via the Suicide & Crisis hotline by calling 988. More information about Massachusetts’ suicide prevention initiatives is available at www.mass. gov/suicide-prevention-program.
Overheard Underwater : Perri Lynch Howard
What is natural quiet? How does sound affect marine life in the oceans? How do we truly listen to and experience our environment?
These are some of the questions asked by Perri Lynch Howard in her multi-media artistic practice. Howard creates immersive underwater soundscapes and visualizations from her field recordings that connect people to the life and shape of our oceans
and coastal waterways. At the Museum, Howard will transform the Center Street Gallery into an underwater vessel with an immersive soundscape using bio-acoustic recordings from the William A. Watkins Collection of Marine Mammal Sound Recordings.
Overheard Underwater: Perri Lynch Howard will be on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum May 17 - November 12, 2025.
Pictured: Perri Lynch Howard, Frequencies: Deeper Well, 2023. Acrylic and graphite on panel, 36 x 48 in., courtesy of the artist.
In the Galleries Community BLOOMS: Katy Rodden Walker
By Ymelda Rivera Laxton, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Community Projects
As an interdisciplinary museum, the New Bedford Whaling Museum supports and creates exhibitions and programs that often sit at the intersection of art, science, and history. This includes exploring the environmental and industrial histories of our region over time. In exhibiting these stories, it can sometimes be difficult to share information about the current environmental impacts of industrial pollution without being overwhelming, too technical, or intangible in nature.
How then can we provide an access point to learning these histories and thinking about the real change happening in our natural surroundings? How can we as a museum educate visitors about the changing environment and the real effects of plastic pollution in our community? How can we make the sometimes abstract or overwhelming data about pollution tangible to our visitors?
Some of the answers to these questions lie at the center of the current exhibition, Community BLOOMS: Katy Rodden Walker, a participatory art installation that includes a collaboration between interdisciplinary artist and educator Katy Rodden Walker, local environmental clean-up organizations, and the Museum.
In 2021, Rodden Walker set out to create an interactive community project that would raise awareness about the dangers of plastic pollution in our rapidly changing ecosystem. Community BLOOMS was born as a project that raises awareness about plastic pollution in our oceans, waterways, and food chains while also visualizing the natural phenomena of jellyfish blooms. Increases in blooms have been recorded across the world, with researchers
continuing to explore the connections between warming ocean waters and a rise in bloom events.
Between 2021 and 2024, Rodden Walker invited hundreds of community members to help her make upcycled jellyfish forms made from plastics recovered on beaches and in parks along the southern coastline of Massachusetts. Working with Be the Solution to Pollution—a local environmental clean-up and advocacy organization—she gathered hundreds of pounds of plastic debris to make the nearly three hundred jellyfish on view in the Center Street Gallery at the Museum. Undulating jellyfish forms move amid light projections, evoking an underwater environment that places visitors at the center of a jellyfish bloom. As a participatory art installation, Community BLOOMS asks you to think about where our trash ends up, how it affects the health of our planet, and how one person might help in the prevention and clean-up of plastics in our environment.
We hope that visitors who experience Community BLOOMS will leave with questions, awareness about the magnitude of plastic pollution, and an understanding about how they and others can make an impact with local organizations working toward a cleaner environment.
Community BLOOMS: Katy Rodden Walker will be on view in the Center Street Gallery through April 21, 2025. Interested in learning more about Be the Solution to Pollution? Visit their Facebook page for up-to-date information about upcoming clean-ups near you. https:// www.facebook.com/pollutionsolution/
Figure 1. Katy Rodden Walker, Community BLOOMS installation at NBWM. Upcycled plastic and filament, 2024. Photo by Drew Furtado.
Figure 2. Katy Rodden Walker in her studio preparing jellyfish forms for the Community BLOOMS exhibition, October 2024.
Rolling with the Rock Snail
Robert Rocha, Associate Curator of Science and Research
Sea shells are fascinating objects, catching the attention of people of all ages. The shapes, sizes, and colors are seemingly innumerable. Those who visit places far from home, like whalemen and some whaling wives, may encounter shells far different than those found on local shores. Some of these shells may become part of a personal collection. Eventually some become part of a museum’s assemblage of natural history objects. Such is the case for the majority of shells in our collection. Unlike a traditional natural history museum, the New Bedford Whaling Museum has never sponsored a shell collecting trip to distant shores.
Yet, because of the globetrotting nature of the whaling industry, we do indeed have an impressive collection of shells from around the globe, the majority of which are from the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This includes abalones, augers, conchs, cones, cowries, helmets, olives, scallops, thorny oysters, tops, turbans, and murexes. It is this last family that will be our focus.
All of these shells were once portable homes for living animals. The one-shelled animals, univalves, slide along the ocean bottom on a wide muscular foot. The two-shelled animals, bivalves, are mobile in their larval forms, and in the case of scallops, are also able to swim as adults. Some are vegetarians, some are omnivores, others are carnivores. The murexes, sometimes called rock snails, are most definitely meat eaters.
There are five murex shells on display in our new exhibit, Up from the Depths: Natural Selections from our Collections. They are cabbage (Muricanthus brassica ), Troschel’s ( Murex troscheli ), black (Muricanthus nigritus), regal (Hexaplex regius), and horned (Bolinus cornutus). There are two more in storage: giant or branched (Chicoreus ramosus) and snipe-billed (Haustellum haustellum). They are quickly distinguished by the projections, often quite spiny, around their shells. This body type makes them a challenging target for predators. It does not hinder them, however, from finding prey of their own.
As mentioned previously, these animals move along the ocean bottom, across both sand and rock, propelled by a muscular, undulating foot. This foot can create suction, enabling them to adhere to large rocks or other surfaces to fight against strong currents or potential predators. The suction action of the foot also makes it possible to grasp prey, such as other mollusks, to prevent them from escaping.
Figure 1. Muricidae in the NBWM collection, on display in Up from the Depths. Clockwise from top: black murex (Muricanthus nigritus), regal murex (Murex regius), horned murex (Bolinus cornuta), Troschel’s murex (Murex troscheli), and cabbage murex (Hexaplex brassica).
Figure 2. Muricidae in the NBWM collection, not on display in Up from the Depths. From left to right: Snipe-billed murex (Haustellum haustellum), and ramose or branched murex (Chicoreus ramosus).
Once they’ve secured their prey, the process of obtaining the nutrition within is a fascinating demonstration of adaptation and specialization. The prey animal's soft body is protected by a shell and some species have thicker shells than others. Thus, murexes have developed several methods to get past the shell to get to the food inside. These are shell grinding, edge drilling, wall drilling, or toxic insertion into open shells to anesthetize the prey.1
Some of the murexes will position the potential meal (e.g., a clam) so the edges of the shells are placed near the opening of the murex, where there are small, blunt, thick spines. The murex will wiggle the clam back and forth against these spines to wear away the edge of the shell. Once the opening is big enough, the murex can insert its flexible proboscis (feeding tube) inside the shells to slowly digest the clam.
If a murex drills through a shell, it will drip an acidic secretion onto the shell to soften it while working through the shell with its raspy radula. The radula is like a drill, covered in teeth made of chitin, the same substance as a squid or octopus beak. Once a hole is created, the proboscis is inserted. The other option is for the murex to inject a toxin between the shells before the clam can close them. This paralyzes the animal with its shells open, making it easy to eat.
Many murex species are edible, finding their way onto dinner plates in Europe and Asia. They have been an important human food source for centuries. One of those edible species, Bolinus brandaris, has an unusual historical significance. Pigments extracted from the hypobranchial glands of these animals were processed, in a time-consuming, deliberate manner to create Tyrian purple, a dye so rare and expensive that only the richest could afford to have clothing made with it. With the invention of synthetic dyes, clothes with this color became affordable and more common. Presently there are only a handful of individuals practicing this process.2 The Bolinus on display in our collection has a mucus that turns purple when it contacts the air and may also be used to produce purple dye.3
We encourage you to visit the Museum's Braitmayer Gallery to see the shells in the exhibit Up from the Depths: Natural Selections from our Collections, which is open until October 13, 2025. If you are interested in seeing a living, local member of the murex family (Muricidae), look for an eastern oyster drill (Urosalpinx cinerea) on one of our beaches. I can confirm that they live on the shores of Buzzards Bay.
We extend our gratitude to George Buckley and members of the Boston Malacological Club for their assistance with identifying or confirming several species in our collection and on display.
1 Gregory S. Herbert, Lisa B. Whitenack, Julie Y. McKnight, “Behavioural versatility of the giant murex Muricanthus fulvescens (Sowerby, 1834) (Gastropoda: Muricidae) in interactions with difficult prey," Journal of Molluscan Studies 82, no. 3 (August 2016): 357–365.
2 “Why Tyrian Dye Is So Expensive,” Business Insider (Mar. 17 2023), https://www.businessinsider.com/why-tyrian-purple-dye-soexpensive-2023-1, accessed November 11, 2024.
3 Guido T. Poppe & Philippe Poppe, Conchology, Inc., www. conchology.be, accessed November 11, 2024.
Water and the Grief of the Image
Alana Perino, Assistant Professor, Johnson & Wales University
Alana Perino is a photographer working out of Providence, Rhode Island. Their work Bay Isles Private Beach was included in the 2023-24 NBWM photography exhibition Reflections. Perino is currently working on the book project Pictures of Birds.
Many members of my family see ghosts or communicate otherwise between the world of the living and the world of the dead. This has never been a gift of mine. When she was alive, my stepmother had a photograph on her nightstand of her younger self dancing with her father. There is a strange artifact above his head, a figment of light. She always claimed that this “halo” only appeared after he died. I always believed her.
Despite their shared preference for pool water, my father and stepmother always choose to reside near a natural body of water. Eventually they retired on a barrier island off the coast of Florida on the Gulf of Mexico called Longboat Key. They moved there to live and to die. When my stepmother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, it became clear to me that the structure of our family, and our individual roles in that structure, were about to radically
Figure 1. Alana Perino (b. 1988), Bay Isles Private Beach, 2021. Pigment print, courtesy of the artist.
transform. This was when I began photographing my family, the island, and the creatures that live and die there in a project I call Pictures of Birds.
The 2024 exhibition Reflections was my first opportunity to exhibit my work amongst a historic collection. It felt particularly poignant to show this work, preoccupied with death and with water, with so many and of so many who have since passed, who have lived with attachments to people and places, and who simply wondered what mirrored, opaque, or otherwise transparent perceptions appear on water’s surface.
The daguerreotype was once called a mirror with a memory. This was not only because the image reflected a perfect likeness of its subject but because the daguerreotype itself, with its polished silver surface, was reflective. There were no images in the mirrors in ambrotype cases on display in this
exhibition until one remembered that the reflection of the self on the surface is, in itself, an image. My disbelief having been suspended, I still searched for a permanent memory of a past subject. Only seeing myself, I shudder - Barthes’ same shudder - at the irrevocable passing of the image’s referent. Roland Barthes wrote Camera Lucida (1980) while mourning his own mother who recently passed. He looks upon the “Winter Garden” photograph, an image of her as a young girl that he does not reproduce except in words. In her youthful face he sees the eventuality of her death, “a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.” The making of the daguerreotype, tintype, or ambrotype necessitates that the subject imaged is in the “room” with the printed substrate when the photograph is made.1 In this way the very light that reflected off the backs of
1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 96.
Figure 2. Attributed to Platt D. Babbitt (1822-1879), Niagara Falls, 1850s. Ambrotype, 4 ¼ x 5 ½ in., NBWM 00.175.15.
viewers on Platt D. Babbit's (1822-1879) image of Niagara Falls (Figure 2), and perhaps even the spray of the waterfall, also touched the glass plate which so recently sat next to the simultaneously imageless and imageful mirrors.
Pictures of Birds became a way for me to communicate with the dead, not just those who predeceased me, but also the many versions of myself that have been created, destroyed, and reborn within the confines of my familial and ancestral bonds. I encounter the inevitability of my father’s death, and in turn my own, when I encounter Longboat Key, even while he is still alive. Perhaps this is the primary function of photography, to experience something ghostly, something which is simultaneously here and not here.
The work I made in Florida began as an instinctual act of preservation: I knew that my stepmother’s
memory was fading, which signified that her body would be fading away as well. Since then, my goals have expanded to incorporate interrogations into the nature of spatial and material transformation. The work serves as a reminder of the cyclical nature of death and regeneration which incorporates not just acts of transubstantiation, but also psychological and spiritual adaptations. The photograph, “Bay Isles Private Beach” is of myself. The Gulf of Mexico, where my stepmother came most evenings before she died to watch the sun dip below the horizon, is unseen except on my skin and in the fibers of my clothes. The hole my sister and niece dug for me is simultaneously a bed, a womb, a grave, and a portal.
“Midnight Sun in Melville Bay in August,” too reads like a portal (Figure 3). John L. Dunmore and George P. Critcherson photograph the reflection of the sun in the still bay, which serves as a mirror for a timescape I have never imagined. The reflection
Figure 3. John L. Dunmore (1833-1902) and George P. Critcherson (1823-1892), Midnight Sun in Melville Bay in August, circa 1869-1873. Glass plate negative, 6 ½ x 8 ½ in., NBWM 2000.100.1893.29.
is a visual but also a temporal and celestial reversal: daytime in the midst of middle night. Here, at the meeting of my recognition and the surface of the image, I remember simple facts I often forget. That water itself is a mirror, one that we often turn to for a kind of cleansing. That somewhere it is midnight. That the sun glows regardless.
My father no longer lives on the island. He moved suddenly in March of this year. I don’t believe that I will return to Longboat Key to photograph, now that
the family has left and the house has sold. In early October, the island was struck by hurricanes, two in one week. I’ve wondered about Joanne Goulart’s family summer home, at the “End of Cottage Street,” where the home was located prior to the Hurricane of 1938 (Figure 4). I haven’t been able to find pictures of my family’s former home to see its condition. Most of the images I find are of the sand from the beaches displaced by wind and rain and deposited in hapless piles across the main road. Sometimes we are not given an image to grieve.
It felt particularly poignant to show this work, preoccupied with death and with water, with so many and of so many who have since passed, who have lived with attachments to people and places, and who simply wondered what mirrored, opaque, or otherwise transparent perceptions appear on water’s surface.
Figure 4. Attributed to Joanne Goulart, End of Cottage Street, Hurricane of 1938, 1938. Acetate negative, NBWM 1993.48.20.14.
Teaching Melville Moby-Dick and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age
Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Professor of English and Director of Maritime Studies, University of Connecticut
The third K-12 Teachers’ Institute, “MobyDick and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age,” a joint project of the Melville Society Cultural Project and the New Bedford Whaling Museum, was a great success. The Institute was co-directed by Timothy Marr (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Wyn Kelley (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Mary K. Bercaw Edwards (University of Connecticut) and funded with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The first week, June 23-28, 2024, was held online, and the last two weeks, July 7-19, were held in-person in New Bedford. The 25 teachers who participated came from as close as New Bedford and as far away as Louisiana, California, and Alaska. They encompassed high school, primary, and middle school teachers of English, History, Art, and Science as well as librarians.
We spent the first week on a close reading of MobyDick, working together each day from 9:45 am until 3:45 pm via Zoom, alternating between one large group and small breakout groups (“whaleboats”). Some participants were encountering Moby-Dick for the first time and others had wrestled with The Whale for many years. The week was intense and invigorating, suffused with the joy of being with others who cared about Moby-Dick as much as we do.
The two weeks in New Bedford included lectures by Jennifer Baker, Michelle Fernandes, Tony McGowan, Joe Roman, Christopher Sten, Robert K. Wallace,
Lenora Warren, Marina Wells, and the three codirectors. They also included a wide range of hands-on activities and field trips. The participants immersed themselves in the collections of the New Bedford Whaling Museum and wandered through the city, vividly imagining Melville’s presence there 184 years earlier. On July 9, the participants traveled to Mystic Seaport Museum, where they explored the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan, which is very similar to the whaleship Acushnet on which Melville served for 18 months. They helped set sails, watched the lowering of a whaleboat, then helped to raise it back aboard the whaleship with the use of a sailor’s work song, and tried whaleboat rowing for themselves. The day ended with a 40-minute performance of “Moby-Dick in Minutes,” followed by a Q&A, and a sea-music concert by ethnomusicologist Craig Edwards featuring songs specifically referenced in Moby-Dick.
A few days later, on July 13, the participants went on a whale watch. Despite threatened rain and thunderstorms, invoking “a damp, drizzly November in my soul,”1 the trip was a great success and many saw whales for the first time.
During the final week, participants made the long, hot trip to western Massachusetts to visit Melville’s home, Arrowhead, where he wrote Moby-Dick,
1 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in The Writings of Herman Melville 6 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988 [1851]), 3.
Participants in 2024 Teachers’ Institute. L-R, back row: Ed Bujak, Co-Director Mary K.
Mike
Brendan Berls, Andy Apperson, Mary Georgis; front row: Institute Faculty Michelle Fernandes, Rosa
Victoria
Bedford Whaling Museum), Digital Coordinator Erica Zimmer, Ben Bristol, Kelly Williams, Danny Fitzpatrick, Madeline Freitas-Pimental, Katie Canarecci, Institute Faculty Tony McGowan, Alicia DeMaio, Edward Benner, Co-Director Wyn Kelley, Co-Director Tim Marr, Laura Gallinari, Andrew Stairs, Mark Valentine, Wilson Taylor, Eric Genesky, Jessica Horwitz (seated), Doug Jones, Horst Rosenberg, Michael St. Thomas, Joyce Sheehey, and Liz Sobkiw-Williams. July 19, 2024. Photo by Drew Furtado.
to explore the Melville collection at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, and to re-enact the August 5, 1850, hike up Monument Mountain. On the 1850 hike, eight men and two women—Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Evert Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Cornelius Mathews, Harry Sedgwick, David Dudley Field and his daughter Jenny, and James T. Fields and his wife Eliza—climbed the mountain, and we followed in their footsteps. It was hot and steep, but the view at the top was stunning. In 1850, Melville “bestrode a peaked rock, which ran out like a bowsprit, and pulled and hauled imaginary ropes,”2 and we had great fun debating which of the
2 Jay Leyda, The Melville Log I (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), 384.
projecting rocks was the one that looked most like a bowsprit. In the distance, we could also see Mount Greylock, whose whale-like shape inspired Melville as he was laboring over Moby-Dick.
After the trip to western Massachusetts, high-school English teacher Michelle Fernandes, an alum of the first Institute in 2018, gave a stirring talk on how she teaches Moby-Dick to her students. The participants then presented their projects. The Institute ended July 19. In their evaluations, the participants called the Institute “transformative” and “life-changing,” noting that their “teaching will be forever changed because of the Institute.”
Figure 1.
Bercaw Edwards,
Wing,
Sousa,
Hughes (New
All the Leviathans of note 1:
Ronald Keller’s Cetology
Dan Lipcan, Ann C. Pingree Director of the Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum
Exhibition: Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick, Peabody Essex Museum, June 1, 2024 –March 29, 2026.
Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick at the Peabody Essex Museum is the first exhibition focused on creative interpretations of the classic novel using its original form: the book. Drawn almost entirely from the Phillips Library collection, the exhibition’s works represent decades of bookish engagement with the timeless themes of Moby-Dick. Their creators reimagine Moby-Dick’s content, recast its shape, and renew its relevance to our irrational world.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum Library’s copy of Cetology (Figure 1) by the fine-press book publisher Ronald Keller (1930–2021) features in a section of modern and contemporary book artists’ adaptations of Moby-Dick entitled all of these interpreters. 2 Keller depicts each species of whale Ishmael lists in Moby-Dick Chapter 32 with a two-color woodcut. He hand-set letterpress-printed text—excerpts from several different chapters that describe the whale’s anatomy and physiology—next to the part being defined (Figure 1).
1 Moby-Dick, Chapter 32. Direct quotations from the novel like this appear throughout the exhibition’s text as well as this essay.
2 Moby-Dick, Chapter 99.
He also scales his illustrations to Ishmael’s accounts, according to magnitude. 3 The right and sperm whales, two of the largest mammals on Earth, require foldout pages to contain their length. Ishmael professes scant knowledge of the two species shown in our second rotation, beginning in March 2025: we know now that the “Razor Back” is probably identical to the fin whale. The “Sulfur Bottom” is today’s blue whale, seen only at a distance by the narrator.
In the mid-twentieth century, book artists began to interpret and adapt Moby-Dick in more expansive ways. They used its elements as the inspiration, the raw material, and the tool set to create new work–repeatedly re-engineering the novel. Artists like Ronald Keller signal the novel’s importance by reversioning it into contemporary modes of expression. They recognize the layered richness of Moby-Dick and open up for us a multitude of visual translations.
Histories of Encounter: Retelling America’s Founding Mythologies
Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.
David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Reviewed by Hannah Muhlfelder, PhD student, Boston University
In this political moment, when the radical right evokes the history of America as grounds for White ethno-nationalism, This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by David J. Silverman and The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) are useful if not required reading. These works unseat White settlers as the heroes of American history. By retelling longheld stories, the authors re-center Native people to demonstrate them as active forces of political and social change in North America.1
Both books highlight Native history and underscore U.S. and Native nations’ sovereignty as intertwined, but they do so in divergent ways. This Land Is Their Land critiques colonialism through a retelling of the Thanksgiving story. Silverman calls for a more inclusive national culture, condemning previous Thanksgiving mythology as asserting that Native people consented to colonialism.2 The Rediscovery of America also undermines White supremacist American myth-making, that of “discovery.” Blackhawk offers an expansive continental history that dislodges predominant Eurocentric narratives of America. He calls the intertwined history of Native nations and the U.S. one of “encounter,” underscoring how the U.S. shaped its founding institutions around relationships with Native tribes.3 Examining both works together demonstrates how recent scholarship interrogates power and privilege in historical production.
1 Here, I use “Indigenous,” “Native,” and “Indian” interchangeably to describe a vast diversity of Native peoples on what is now the continental United States. These terms are imperfect and evolving constantly, so I use specific tribes wherever possible. For more, see Brooke Bauer and Elizabeth Ellis, “Indigenous, Native American, or American Indian? The Limitations of Broad Terms,” Journal of the Early Republic 43, no. 1 (2023).
2 David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
3 Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023).
This Land is Their Land furnishes its chronicle of Native and settler nations in New England with a narrative style that makes this book difficult to put down. Silverman describes North America before the Pilgrims as “an old world in motion,” a multinational landscape contested through sachems’ regional political leadership.4 He uses the history of European contact prior to the Pilgrims’ arrival to explain why Wampanoags responded with military might when they met Plymouth settlers. The Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts after a series of epidemics that decimated Indian populations, meaning they arrived not to a “virgin land,” but to a “widowed land.”5 The first several chapters of the book feature escalating clashes between Europeans and Indians. Throughout such conflicts, Silverman emphasizes the sovereignty and political strategy of southern New England tribes, particularly the Wampanoag tribe.
Chapter four of This Land is Their Land is the core of Silverman’s intervention. Silverman overthrows the Thanksgiving story many Americans were taught in school, seeking to “move beyond the stock characters” of the story.6 While all the “characters” gain more complexity, even the Pilgrims, Silverman maintains that such settlers were colonialists who desecrated graves and took Indian lands by coercion, bribery, and force. The author offers some nuance to conventional ideas of Samoset and Tisquantum as translators, though this multidimensionality is most cogently written in discussion of sachems and their families. Silverman shows how the Thanksgiving meal as articulated in the Puritan tradition more likely resembled a political summit between Ousamequin, a Wampanoag sachem, and the English. Ousamequin felt an alliance with the English would be a strategic advantage in political conflict with the nearby Narragansett tribe.7
Silverman shows radically different kinds of diplomacy and conflict between Native and settler political authorities over the centuries. In Chapters Seven and Eight, Silverman explains how
4 Silverman, 159.
5 Silverman, 96.
6 Silverman, 128.
7 Ibid.
Ousamequin’s son Pumetacom believed that alliances with the English would harm the tribe, unlike his father. The author’s assessment of Native political and military strategy, particularly in King Philip’s War, undermines previous historical distinctions of Native nations as savage. The book ends with a leap forward in time, offering analysis on some important Wampanoag writings, like William Apess’ “Eulogy of King Philip” and Jessie Little Doe Baird’s work in reviving the Wampanoag language. The epilogue calls for more education and discussion on the topic, as well as a charge to rewrite the narrative of the U.S.8 Silverman’s writing is timely, particularly with rollbacks in Mashpee Wampanoag territory under Donald Trump that have undermined their sovereignty over their lands.
Where Silverman’s book at times fails to problematize colonial sources in favor of narrative flow, Blackhawk’s book interrogates colonial documents prominently in the writing. The Rediscovery of America offers, according to Blackhawk, “an alternate American story that is not trapped in the framework of European discovery and … ‘greatness’.”9 Like Silverman, Blackhawk differentiates historical eras by conflict, collaboration and force through a lens that defines Native nations by their sovereignty rather than their relationships to European power. He moves more thematically than chronologically, demonstrating both Indigenous societies and early American colonies as dynamic. The book covers over five centuries of history, traveling across different regions of North America. The conceptual shift from “discovery” to “encounter” offers a compelling result. Blackhawk retells several famous historical events, illustrating how previous historical production has systematically erased Native people.
The first part of The Rediscovery of America chronicles instances of violence in the early period of American history. Like Silverman, Blackhawk discusses the history of Thanksgiving in the Native Northeast, but he is more interested in instances of conflict and conquest like the Pequot War. This first section offers the most compelling intervention in the book,
8 Ibid.
9 Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 6.
the role of a settler militia called the “Black Boys” in the American revolution. Colonists first shot British officers in March of 1765, well before the Stamp Act was passed. James Smith and the “Black Boys” called for an uprising against British trade and diplomatic agreements with Native tribes. Colonists feared the sovereignty of Indian nations.10 Blackhawk writes that “colonial resentments against Indians fueled ambitions for independence,” demonstrating how settler-Native relations shaped the U.S. in profound ways.11
In the second part of the book, Blackhawk maintains Indian affairs as “the center of early U.S. statecraft” into the colonization of the West and the Civil War.12 The author differentiates nineteenth-century colonialism from the two centuries prior, explaining that this kind of subjugation “threatened to extinguish the foundations of daily life” for Indians.13 The U.S. broke treaties rampantly and sanctioned violence under the Indian Removal Act. Blackhawk writes persuasively about how Native-U.S. relations around treaties and the Spanish colonization of Indigenous people in California like the Tongva became the bedrock of the U.S. Republic. In Chapter ten, the author explains how the U.S. government took Indian lands and children during the Assimilation Era. This followed the processes of the Reservation Era because the process of “Americanization” aimed to make Indian reservations look familiar to White people.14 Throughout stories of dispossession, Blackhawk underscores the resilience and adaptability of Native people.
Towards the end of the book, Blackhawk focuses more on instances of Native resistance and political activism. Blackhawk shows how activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resisted assimilation. He analyzes Society of American Indians (SAI) publications, highlighting Indigenous female contributions as a “defining
10 Blackhawk.
11 Ibid, 142.
12 Ibid, 10.
13 Ibid, 213.
14 Ibid.
feature” of activist thought.15 The book closes with the twentieth-century resurgence of Native visibility and political sovereignty. Blackhawk shows how the American Indian Movement (AIM) responded to the Termination Era with radical action like “fishins,” which worked to restore Native fishing rights, and the occupation of Alcatraz. The book ends in the 1990s, illustrating Native people as poised to take center stage in a new century.16 However, if Blackhawk expanded the vast timeline of the book just a few decades further, he might have offered a compelling inclusion of Indigenous-led movements of the contemporary era. This resurgence in Native activism has only escalated since the 1990s.
While Silverman offers a captivating retelling of the story of Thanksgiving, Blackhawk more ostensibly
15 Ibid, 380.
16 Ibid.
overturns the myths that have comprised the fabric of the nation’s founding. This is in part because it is so sweeping, and in part because Blackhawk aims at the major events in history textbooks. Silverman complements this intervention with beautifully crafted regional history that highlights the multidimensionality of Native communities throughout history. Both books together communicate an important message: Eurocentrism in American history is a fallacy. Such mythology undermines the role Native people have played in the formation of the U.S. and perpetuates dangerous white supremacist rhetoric that has pervaded this country since the first encounter between Europeans and Native North Americans. To appropriately deal with the pernicious effects of white ethnonationalism, it is the responsibility of the American people to unseat such one-sided stories and re-center Native people in history.
By retelling long-held stories, the authors re-center Native people to demonstrate them as active forces of political and social change in North America.
Looking Back
Ahab by Karl Knaths
Marina Dawn Wells, Ph.D., Assistant Curator of History & Culture
Karl Knaths (1891-1971) is one of many twentiethcentury artists who turned and returned to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) for inspiration. Some created series of artworks based on chapters, pages, or passages, or otherwise returned to the book throughout their life.
Wisconsin-born Knaths painted in Provincetown, Massachusetts for much of his life, creating at least a small handful of Moby-Dick-inspired pieces in the 1930s and 1960s. The NBWM’s drawing was likely a study for a larger painting of the captain, perhaps part of Knaths’ process of creating multiple sketches before turning to the easel. He was known to formulate his cubist compositions with careful geometry and would often put aside his paintings to return to them weeks later.
In Moby-Dick, Melville describes the phenomenon of repetition, of revisitation in the lives of “the worldwandering whale ships” in New Bedford Harbor, awaiting their next voyage: “that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”
In Ahab’s iterative motion—the stepping forward of an injured leg—we might read a similar intolerableness. Knaths himself surely experienced frustrations when moving forward with his art; in fact, he is said to have left his local art organization and returned again on numerous occasions.1 Whether it takes the form of re-reading Moby-Dick, returning to an unfinished artwork, or coming back home after we’ve left, such revisitation calls to mind a passage in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015): “… one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again— not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”
The New Bedford Whaling Museum revisits MobyDick in the exhibition “Entangled in the Lines”: Figuring Moby-Dick, on view November 8, 2024 –March 9, 2025.
1 Nat Halper, in an interview in August 1982, Guiliano’s Musings (August 5, 2024), https://giulianobooks.com/nat-halperaugust-1982/, accessed November 25, 2024
Wisconsin-born Knaths painted in Provincetown, Massachusetts for much of his life, creating at least a small handful of Moby-Dick-inspired pieces in the 1930s and 1960s.
Figure 1. Karl Knaths (1891-1971), Ahab, ca. 1935. Ink on casein, 24 x 18 in., NBWM, Gift of Elizabeth Schultz, 2011.92.31.
