Leviathan or The Whale

pitch’. It is a Sisyphean sign, both quickening and deadening: ‘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.’ This was a task as dreary as a container ship sailing predetermined distances, bringing stuff in, taking stuff out, heavy with oil and whalebone and human effort.
    Nordhoff too saw wharves laden with ‘harpoons, lances, boatspades, and other implements for dealing death to leviathan’. Beyond lay the inns and offices, chandlers and sail lofts, smithies and dining rooms, banks and brokers, all trading on the whale, directing every effort down to the river and the ocean beyond in an unremitting, profitable pursuit. Clapboarded and shingled, walled in wood like ships themselves, the five blocks tethered off Water Street–‘New Bedford’s Wall Street’–were said to be the busiest in New England. This main thoroughfare, running uphill from the waterside, was devoted to the outfitters’ shops and suppliers, while its side streets were home to boarding houses kept by whaling widows ‘for numerous youthful aspirants to spouting honors’. For other honours, they could visit a waterborne brothel, anchored offshore.
    Removed from this gritty business were the grand mansions of County Street, New Bedford’s most prestigious address. These houses still occupy block after block in every permutation of architectural style, their details picked out in contrasting colours, each wildly different, yet each the product of factories that turned out decorative trim by the yard. Like the millionaires’ ‘summer cottages’ in nearby Newport, Rhode Island, they vie with each other for extravagance. Most magnificent of all is the house built in 1834 for the whaling Quaker, William Rotch Junior, whose grandfather Joseph came from Nantucket to found New Bedford’s industry.
    Occupying a block of its own, this elaborate pile, with its verandahs and parterres, its reception rooms and bedrooms, seems incompatible with its owner’s austere face, long silver hair and plain black coat. Nevertheless, William Rotch presided over the world’s greatest whaling fleet from the glazed lantern that sits on the roof like a lighthouse, looking down on the waterfront and the source of his wealth. On a darkening winter’s afternoon, I climbed to this eyrie through the attic-like servants’ quarters, the sodium lights of the port already twinkling in the distance. ‘Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford,’ Ishmael declares. ‘Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?’ His answer lay with ‘the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion…Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged hither from the bottom of the sea.’ For every stoop and pillar on County Street, a whale died; each extravagance was bought at the cost of a cetacean. Oil for marble, baleen for wood, this was the rate of exchange from sea to shore.
    And down at the quayside late at night, where the fishing fleet lies tethered to rusty piles, hulls bumping gently and engines purring, I wonder how it must have been for these young men to ship out from this port, to leave these homely waters for uncertain seas. A sense of utter abandonment to fate, disconnecting from America, seeking escape wandering the oceans, orphans in search of a new home among a family of men, yet enslaved to the movements of the whale, man and animal forever linked.
    The next morning, as I leave, snow starts to fall, turning the mural over the highway into an impressionist canvas, flecked with white. As the traffic picks up speed, I look over my shoulder. The painted whales are fading from view, losing their shapes. A hundred yards more and they are gone, vanishing with the city into the flurrying swirl, to be replaced by the concrete clamour of the road ahead.

V
Far Away Land

    Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse…a mere hillock, and elbow of land; all beach, without a background…What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea