Moby-Dick Bonus: Nantucket Whaling Museum
Yes, in lieu of this week's recap we're actually going to Nantucket
Look, we’re up to Chapter 86 in Moby-Dick and we are really in it. As a writer, I still find the novel to be enlightening—our slow read somehow expands the possibilities of what a novel can and should be. And some of the sentences alone are beautiful and profound. But there have definitely been recent chapters that are a bit of a slog to read, or that try my patience. I don’t think I would have given up on the book, but if I wasn’t doing this project, I might have put it down for awhile and not kept to this pace. Like, what really happened in this week’s readings? We get yet another chapter about the whale’s head, Tashtego falls into the whale’s head (but is dramatically saved by Queequeg), and then Ishmael goes on about the whale’s face, its skull, its sprout, and his near erotic fascination with its tail.
This week’s most exciting chapter was probably “The Pequod meets the Virgin” in which the Pequod meets a bunch of incompetent Germans in a ship called the Jungfrau, then compete with them to catch a whale that unfortunately sinks to the bottom of the sea. And oh yeah, there’s some more gory business with Stubb killing whales.
Anyway, if, like me, you’re getting a little restless with Moby-Dick lately, I thought I’d inject some energy by mixing up the Friday format. This has been my Moby Dick Summer and to truly have a hot Moby Dick Summer, I needed to go out to Nantucket and make a trip to the Whaling Museum.
Last Saturday, I took a ferry to Nantucket for the day, but unlike Ishmael and Queequeg, I left from Hyannis. From there, it’s about an hour’s ride to Nantucket, and there’s quite a crowd to get off the boat on a sunny summer’s day in early August. Whaling may no longer be an industry in Nantucket, but the island still has a dominant industry—tourism. I spotted a whole row of wardrobe cases being loaded off the ship. Visitors clearly stay for a long weekend, or more.
Once you get a few blocks away from the crowds, Moby-Dick references are everywhere. There are restaurants named Queequeg’s, and or, The Whale. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a real Try Potts Inn, but a quick Google search reveals there are many well-reviewed establishments to get clam chowder. It was 70 degrees out, so I didn’t really feel like consuming hot soup, but I’d love to return for a longer time in a colder season.
My true mission for this trip was visiting the Whaling Museum, run by the Nantucket Historical Association. If you’ve made it this far through Moby Dick Summer, it’s a must-visit. Much love and patience to my Nantucket travel companion, whom I have not only roped into reading Moby-Dick, but also had to follow me while I ran around this museum like a maniac, excitedly pointing at stuff and repeatedly saying, “Yup, read about that in Moby-Dick.” or “That Sprouter Inn sign is a Moby-Dick reference.”
The centerpiece of the museum is a 46-foot-long sperm whale skeleton. It looms (Loomings?) over a whaleboat, giving a real sense of scale for what our boys from the Pequod were up against when they went out in those boats.
You also get to see the scale of various harpoons and lances, which aren’t exactly small, but their modest size communicated the challenge it must have been to catch and kill whales with them.
Beyond that center room, several galleries contain information, diagrams, and illustrations on everything from the history of Nantucket, to its rise as the whaling capital of the world, as well as the factors that led to the industry’s decline (petroleum, gold, the Civil War, etc). As someone who works in tech, I was amused to hear Nantucket being called the Silicon Valley of its day. Its financial resources and technological inventions—all tied to the business and products of whaling—made it one of the wealthiest towns in the US. Remember Ishmael’s insistence “to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me.”
Parts of the museum do reference Moby-Dick directly, from a section about the Essex (the real-life tragedy that inspired Melville) to a wall that features paintings of the novel’s major characters by the artist Claus Hoie. A rooftop deck offers impressive views of Nantucket, but I thought it was a missed opportunity to not include a bar up there, lol. Imagine the cocktail names you could come up with!
Part of the building actually used to be a 19th century spermaceti candle factory and it houses many artifacts we’ve already heard Ishmael go into great, great detail about. We see actual containers and bottles of the spermaceti that they were looking to yield from the blubber in Chapter 68 “The Blanket.” Or remember back in Chapter 57, “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars” when Ishmael talked about “skrimshander articles” or scrimshaw? It’s something else to see these detailed engravings on actual whale teeth.
If it wasn’t already clear, I had an absolute ball at this place. Yes, I was happy as a clam in those two hours. I still find chapters like this past week’s frustrating, but seeing actual physical objects made the things Melville/Ishmael has been obsessing over for thousands of words feel a bit less abstract, and more concrete.
Moby-Dick is known to be a novel about obsession, but most people are thinking about Ahab’s obsessive quest for Moby Dick. What I’m most struck by is Ishmael’s obsession—to tell us every single damn detail about whaling. As exhausting and annoying as it occasionally can be, there is a little something that speaks to me about it. For writing almost any novel is a kind of obsession, and some of my favorite writers have advised following your obsessions as generative exercises, or stressed that the obsessive mind can be useful for writing, or creating any type of art, even if it’s not particularly useful for getting along in social or daily life.
At the Whaling Museum, around 3pm, we were all called to the main hall for a presentation by a wonderful man named Bob, who described how whales were hunted and brought back to the ship, using the life of a real-life sailor as a framing device. It all aligned with what I’d read about in Moby-Dick, and I got a little excited when Bob described the lay system for sharing the ship’s profits in lieu of wages. As the presentation concluded, he asked if any audience members wanted to take their photo with a harpoon. Obviously, I took him up on it.
