Leviathan or The Whale

important traffic to pass. Here vessels still have precedence over cars. This is a working port. It smells of diesel and fish, and there are ships at the end of its streets. It is also a designated national park, not of rolling hills or woods, but of thirteen city blocks, all devoted to a memory.
    N EW B EDFORD –T HE W HALING C ITY

    Set next to the modern freeway, on a huge, block-like plant for refrigerating fish, is a giant mural of air-brushed whales swimming serenely in a turquoise-blue sea. The whale is imprinted on New Bedford: even the licence plates of the cars that drive through it are embossed with the sperm whale, the state animal of Massachusetts.
    In front of the Free Public Library is an outsize statue on a granite block. It resembles a war memorial, but it was set in place in 1913, and carved with a succinct epithet–
    A D EAD W HALE OR A S TOVE B OAT .

    –a simple enough equation. Despite his square jaw and Aryan looks, there is something tribal about the idealized, muscular whaler balanced on a disconnected prow; he might almost be a Plains Indian. His spear is aimed at one inexorable point: we are the whale; this was the first human it saw, and the last.

    Modern New Bedford lives on in the shadow of such monuments. Brooks Pharmacy sells garish postcards of the Whaling City. Visitors can ‘Catch the Whale’, a downtown shuttle bus, or buy T-shirts from the Black Whale shop. Around the corner, the dark interior of Carter’s menswear store, est.1947, is piled high with workwear and fishermen’s caps for modern Ishmaels. The young assistants nod to their few customers on a Saturday morning, preferring to get on with talking about their Friday nights. Tomorrow, the church steeple over the way will summon sailors to the Lord, along with the sleepy guests from the Spouter Inn.
    In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
    The Chapel,
Moby-Dick

    At the entrance of the Seaman’s Bethel–which, with its clapboard and its square tower, resembles a ship sailing over the brow of Johnny Cake Hill–a veteran from the mission next door shows me inside, then steps out for a smoke, leaving me to wander around alone. The dark hallway opens into an airy space lined with box pews and white marble slabs set into the wall, each a witness to past mourning, ‘as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable’.
    In Memory of
C APT . W M . S WAIN
Master of the Christopher
Mitchell of Nantucket.
This worthy man,
after fastning to a whale,
was carried overboard by
the line, and drowned
May 19th 1844,
in the 49thYear of his age.

    Be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye
think not, the Son of man cometh
.

    The Bethel’s ministry was and is the sea; new names are added to these plaques as the port loses its sons to the ocean. Yet this place could be a stage set, and, for all I know, John Huston’s cameras might still be in the gallery, filming his 1954 version
of Moby-Dick
, while the high-ceiled chapel echoes to the plaintive hymn of Jonah’s plight,
    The ribs and terrors in the whale
Arched over me a dismal gloom

    and Orson Welles, playing the fictional Father Mapple of Melville’s story, sermonizes to his sea-bound congregation on the same biblical story,
    Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

    Here Ishmael pays his respects to his maker, and here he listens to Father Mapple preach from a pulpit constructed to look like a ship’s prow. But Huston’s film–which received its world premiere in New Bedford’s State Theatre, after a parade through the town led by its star, Gregory Peck–was actually made in England, and the theatrical pulpit that stands here now was commissioned in 1961 from a local shipwright to satisfy movie fans who came here expecting to see it.
    Outside, the streets that Ishmael saw as dreary ‘blocks of blackness’ are empty of extras as I cross the road to the modern Whaling Museum, where I am greeted by the skeleton of a fifty-ton, sixty-six-foot blue whale hanging over the receptionist’s desk like a gigantic children’s mobile.
    Washed ashore on a beach on nearby Rhode Island in 1998, this specimen was, at six years old, just a baby, but it created a giant problem. Claimed both by the museum and by the Smithsonian Institution, a