Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

Diversity of New Bedford’s Street Population and Seaport Comparisons

New Bedford’s street scene rivals or exceeds any major port city worldwide. While Water Street and Wapping display only sailors, New Bedford features actual cannibals, complete savages still bearing unholy flesh upon their bones, and wild specimens of the whaling trade wandering unheeded through thoroughfares. Mediterranean mariners occasionally jostle ladies on Broadway and Chestnut Street, and Yankees have startled natives at Bombay’s Apollo Green, but New Bedford surpasses all these encounters in exoticism and diversity.

Green New England Recruits to the Whale Fishery

Weekly arrivals of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men flood into New Bedford seeking fortune and glory in the whale fishery. These young recruits possess stalwart frames honed by forest-felling work, now seeking to exchange axes for whale-lances. Many arrive as green as their namesake mountains, displaying naivety that makes them seem mere hours old to seasoned observers—strutting in beaver hats and swallow-tailed coats with sailor-belt and sheath-knife, or donning sou’-westers and bombazine cloaks.

Comical Missteps of Country-Bred Dandy Whalers

No town-bred dandy rivals a country-bred bumpkin dandy—one who in summer heat would mow his two acres in buckskin gloves to prevent hand tanning. When such a country dandy resolves to distinguish himself in the great whale-fishery, comical missteps ensue at the seaport. In preparing sea-outfits, he orders bell-buttons for waistcoats and straps for canvas trousers—items destined to burst catastrophically in the first howling gale, carrying buttons, straps, and all down the throat of the tempest.

New Bedford’s Whaling-Funded Opulence, Customs, and Summer Scenery

Without whalemen, this land would remain as howling and bony as Labrador’s coast. Despite its scrubby origins, New Bedford has become New England’s most expensive place to live. The opulent patrician houses and lavish gardens derive entirely from Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean ventures—wealth harpooned and dragged from the seafloor. Local custom dictates that fathers provide whales as dowers and nieces receive porpoises a-piece, while spermaceti candles burn recklessly nightly. In summer, avenues of green and gold maples grace the streets, and August brings magnificent horse-chestnut blossoms rising candelabra-wise, with bright flower terraces superinduced upon once-barren rocks.

The Women of New Bedford

The women of New Bedford bloom like their own red roses, though unlike roses, their fine carnation complexions prove perennial as seventh-heaven sunlight. Such beauty proves matchless elsewhere except perhaps in Salem, where young ladies supposedly exhale musk detectable by their sailor sweethearts miles offshore, as though approaching the odorous Moluccas rather than Puritanic sands.

CAPÍTULO 7. The Chapel.

Ishmael describes his visit to the Whalemen’s Chapel in New Bedford on a stormy Sunday morning, where he encounters a small congregation of sailors, their wives, and widows sitting in isolated grief before marble memorial tablets honoring those lost at sea. The inscriptions, commemorating men killed by whales or lost overboard, provoke the narrator’s contemplation of mortality and the despair inherent in deaths without proper graves, yet he ultimately accepts his own fate as he prepares to embark for Nantucket.

Narrator’s Plan to Visit the Whaleman’s Chapel

The narrator recounts a Whaleman’s Chapel standing in New Bedford, a place frequented by moody fishermen shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific. He describes his intention to visit this spot, having returned from an initial morning stroll and again sallying out on this special errand before his voyage.

Journey to the Chapel Amid the Storm

The narrator describes a dramatic weather shift from clear, sunny cold to driving sleet and mist. Wrapped in a shaggy jacket of bearskin cloth, he fought his way against the stubborn storm to reach the chapel, shaking off sleet from his ice-glazed hat and jacket upon entering.

Chapel Congregation and Memorial Tablets

Inside, a small scattered congregation of sailors, sailors’ wives, and widows sat in muffled silence broken only by the shrieks of the storm. Each worshipper sat purposefully apart, as if each grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived, and these worshippers sat steadily eyeing several marble tablets with black borders masoned into the walls on either side of the pulpit. Three inscriptions memorialize: John Talbot, lost overboard at eighteen near the Isle of Desolation; six men from the ship Eliza’s boat crew towed out of sight by a whale; and Captain Ezekiel Hardy, killed by a sperm whale in Japan. The narrator notes several women present wore the countenance of unceasing grief.