When we went down to my grandmother’s summer house in South Dartmouth, my dad always stopped in New Bedford at the Portuguese bakery and picked up a couple of loaves of sweet bread. I loved the bread, but I didn’t understand its significance. The only Portuguese guy I knew, down at the shore, was Manny Oliveira, a waterman, and the coolest thing about Manny was that he rowed backwards – he stood up in the boat, facing the bow, not the stern, and pushed his oars forward, instead of pulling them. I was fascinated by Manny’s technique, which he made look effortless.
Years later, when I lived in Provincetown, the Portuguese were a distinct culture, apart from the New Englanders, on one hand, and the summer people, on the other. They’d come with the whalers, in the 19th century. Portuguese had fished out of the Azores and the Cape Verde islands for years, in open boats. The story went that some of these guys would get lost, accidentally on purpose, so they’d be picked up, out in mid-ocean, by the New England whaling ships, and sign on as crew. This is probably apocryphal, but Portuguese got recruited nonetheless. A whaling voyage lasted up to two years, with crew shares apportioned. The skipper was awarded the lion’s share, but it added up to real money, by the time you came ashore. At the height of the industry, in the 1840’s and 1850’s, Provincetown was the third-largest whaling port on the Eastern seaboard, after New Bedford and Nantucket. Portuguese worked aboard the whalers, and over time, made up a large part of the population in their home ports, which accounts for their presence, still, in southeastern Massachusetts, Fall River, New Bedford, the Cape and Islands.
New Bedford has a whaling museum. So do Provincetown and Nantucket, but in New Bedford, they have a replica of a whaling ship, built at half-scale, inside the building. As a kid, I loved going there. You couldn’t climb the rigging, but you could handle the gear, harpoons, flensing knives, trying vats, and go belowdecks. It was immersive - a word not in fashion, then. New Bedford has fallen on hard times, in between, heroin a big problem, although they seem to be climbing out of that hole. Back in a more innocent time, it was a more provincial town. Moby Dick, the John Huston movie version, had its world premiere there. My dad scored us tickets – in the balcony, true, but it was a major occasion. Gregory Peck was thrown a big party, and the picture was shown in three downtown theaters, the screenings staggered a little apart, so Peck could show up onstage for each one and give us a little wave. The only thing I remember from the movie, looking back, was the St. Elmo’s Fire lighting up the masts. (And there was a fantastic souvenir program as part of the package.) Seeing it again, long since, I think it got a bad rap. Peck is nowhere near as miscast as people said at the time. The background, here, is that Huston needed a bankable name to get the picture greenlighted, and Peck took the bait. Afterwards, he was on the outs with Huston for years. Then there’s the military surplus dirigible they supposedly used to double the whale, but the FX are by and large pretty good. The best thing about it is the cinematography, by Oswald Morris, which is highly desaturated – they used some tricks in the lab with dye transfers, and silvering, to get the weathered surface of scrimshaw, but whatever they did, it works. And let’s just say that time has been kinder than you’d imagine.
Melville based his story, famously, on the sinking of the Nantucket whaler Essex, which was rammed by a bull sperm whale in the Pacific hunting grounds west of the Galapagos. What happened leaves room for a lot of exaggeration and embellishment, but it seems pretty clear the whale sank the ship on purpose. Melville himself, curiously, calls his whale a “fish,” not a mammal, and seems to suggest less an active intelligence, or even animal cunning, so much as a predatory malevolence. Owen Chase, first mate on the Essex, describes the whale charging them, his head half out of the water, and colliding full force with the bow. He stove in the hull, and the Essex heeled over and went down, with barely enough time for the crew to lower boats and abandon ship. The most shocking thing about the sinking, as it was later pieced together, isn’t only that the whale was bent on revenge – which in itself is poetic justice – but that the survivors, adrift in longboats, ate the weaker of their shipmates.
Melville did himself write about cannibalism, in Typee, his big early success, which was considered sensational, when it came out. A true-life Robinson Crusoe. (To be fair, Robinson Crusoe claimed to be true-life.) Typee was fictionalized, but loosely based on Melville’s time in the Marquesas, after he jumped ship there. Contemporary reviewers pointed out a lot of inconsistencies, both in Typee and its sequel, and Melville prefaced his third book with a note saying that since it was unapologetically fiction, maybe his readers would believe what he’d written, this time around. It’s a joke, but he sounds a little discouraged. He’s treading water. Something is just below the surface, rising to meet him.
New England whaling goes back to the late 1600’s, but industrial hunting came into its own in the mid-1800’s, in the years leading up to Civil War, with the demand for whale oil, spermaceti, and baleen. And just as soon, the market collapsed, with the refining of petroleum for lubricants and fuel. Lamps were now lit with kerosene; whalebone corsets fell out of fashion; spermaceti stopped being used for cosmetics and candles. In its time, though, whaling saw great fortunes won and lost, with little New Bedford, for one brief moment, the richest city in the world, before the candle blew out. Whaling, too, has been a continuing source of myth – we can, in part, thank Moby Dick. Melville fell out of fashion, as did New Bedford, but New Bedford came back. There wasn’t any second act for Melville, not in his lifetime.
Whales, now. Hunted by the Inuit and the Basques, off Korea and Japan, in Iceland and the Faroes. From prehistoric times, into the present day. The factory harvesting of the 19th and 20th centuries brought some whale species close to extinction, bowheads, grays, and right whales – the name right itself comes from whalers, the “right” whale for an easy kill, and high fat content. By the turn of the century, whaling ships were powered by steam, and the harpoons were shot from cannon. They moved on to other species, as the fisheries were depleted. Whale populations fell. Commercial whaling was banned in 1986, but the three largest whaling countries, Japan, Russia, and Norway, exempted themselves.
We’ve hunted many species, including our own. Some, like the passenger pigeon, have disappeared. Some, like the buffalo, have recovered slightly, because they’re cultivated, but in nowhere near the numbers that once covered the grasslands. Wolves are controversial; breeding populations reintroduced, livestock owners wanting them eliminated. You’d think that with whales – or elephants, for that matter – their hugeness, and their alien intelligence, and their mystery, would be protection enough. How can we be so incurious? It seems wasteful, in terms of a natural resource, to kill off an animal we’ve been on such intimate terms with, but know so little about. Simply in our own self-interest, you might imagine the whale to be exploited in ways that have nothing to do with candle wax. What could they tell us about the subsurface drag coefficient, on the noise signature of a stealth torpedo? Or perhaps on a higher plane, more in keeping with our place on the planet, what could they tell us about ourselves? A secret genealogy, in the bosom of the sea.