New Bedford Whaling Museum

The New Bedford Whaling Museum is presented as both a vast storehouse of whale imagery and a place where the limits of representing whales become visible. Its exhibits bring together an enormous blue whale skeleton, historical pictures of stranded whales, scenes of hunting, and a replica whaling ship. Across these displays, whales appear as scientific specimens, subjects of art, hunted bodies, and beings whose living form remains difficult to know.

A port museum and its public displays

The museum stands across the street from the Seamen’s Bethel, where Ishmael attends a service and hears Father Mapple preach from a pulpit shaped like a ship’s prow. The book contrasts that recognizable literary setting with the modern museum nearby. Its most immediate presence is a fifty-ton, sixty-six-foot Blue whale skeleton suspended above the reception desk, where its scale makes it seem less like a conventional specimen than an object moving through the building.

The skeleton had washed ashore on Rhode Island in 1998. At six years old, the animal had barely reached adulthood. Both the museum and the Smithsonian Institution claimed it, and the eventual agreement gave the museum the specimen on the condition that it remain on public view both day and night. The resolution made public display part of the terms under which the whale could be kept.

Preparing the animal for exhibition required a lengthy process. The carcass was divided into sections and lowered into the river in cages. For two years, small organisms in the water consumed the flesh; the remaining bones were then reassembled in an atrium built to meet the requirement of continuous public visibility. The result is at once a restored skeleton and the remnant of an animal whose body had to be dismantled, cleaned, and reconstructed before it could be seen. Oil still drips from it, and its presence reaches beyond sight into the surrounding hall.

Images of stranded whales

The museum’s collection is described as compendious, representing almost every known image of the whale. Among its notable works is Esaias van de Velde’s painting of a whale stranded between Scheveningen and Katwijk. The painting belongs to a history in which whales repeatedly came ashore along the Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such strandings were reproduced in engravings and on Delft plates and tiles, and were read as signs of the fortunes and dangers of a society undergoing change.

A particularly detailed image records a sixty-foot sperm whale stranded at Beverwijk on 19 December 1601. Its scale is conveyed through the visitors gathered along its belly: finely dressed people in doublets and ruffs, some standing or on horseback, while the artist sketches in the foreground. The people and the whale appear almost to occupy separate worlds. The picture turns a physical encounter into a composed scene, while the animal’s presence remains large enough to unsettle the human arrangements around it.

The museum’s historical images also carry meanings beyond natural history. In Jan Saenredam’s 1601 Beached Whale at Beverwijk, the whale is surrounded by imagery associated with disaster: celestial signs, a recent earthquake, and figures connected with time and death. The animal is thus made to signify public anxieties as well as its own body. In these pictures, the whale can be a specimen to observe, a portent to interpret, or a subject organized by human beliefs.

Representation and the limits of looking

The museum’s images include whales shown in the violence of hunting, whales overturned and struggling, and whales painted in a triumphant, cinematic style. The collection therefore offers not a single account of the animal but a succession of human visions. Ishmael’s criticism of imaginary whale portraits gives this variety a sharper edge: in his account, artists and naturalists repeatedly produced distorted forms, including Frédéric Cuvier’s 1836 sperm whale, which Ishmael dismissed as resembling a squash. The mistake arose in a climate of uncertain classification, when the French Academy was said to recognize fourteen sperm-whale species and artists supplied images shaped by those assumptions.

The difficulty, as Ishmael explains it, is not simply that individual pictures may be inaccurate. A whale is rarely seen whole while alive; a stranded animal offers one kind of evidence, but not a complete portrait of its movement and form in the sea. The book uses this problem to connect the museum’s abundance of images with the limits of what those images can establish. A gallery may assemble centuries of representations without resolving what a living whale looks like in its own element. The display becomes a record of attempts to know the animal as well as a record of the animal itself.

The ship and the labor behind the collection

The museum’s largest exhibit is a half-scale replica of a whale ship housed in a vaulted hall. Even reduced in size, its lower decks feel constricted. The book compares their spatial arrangement with that of slave ships: one vessel carried the harvested bodies of whales, while the other transported enslaved people. The parallel makes the ship more than an emblem of maritime adventure; it presents the whaling vessel as a working structure built around the collection, processing, and storage of its quarry.

A nearby cabinet contains a daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery dressed as a sailor in 1838 and arrived in the port. He lived and worked there for four years, taking jobs that included rolling casks, stowing ships, sawing wood, and sweeping chimneys. His presence connects the museum’s account of whaling to the social history of the place: the port’s maritime labor and its opposition to slavery existed in the same civic landscape. Read alongside the ship replica, the portrait draws attention to the different human histories gathered around the whale trade, and to the labor that its ships and industries required.

The museum’s significance in the book lies in this juxtaposition. Its specimens make the whale physically present, while its pictures show how people have repeatedly framed, classified, and interpreted that presence. The ship replica brings the commercial practice into view; the Douglass portrait broadens that history beyond the pursuit of whales alone. The collection’s scale does not end uncertainty. Instead, it allows the gap between a whale’s life, the images made of it, and the industries built around it to remain visible.