38Talk:

     A top-gallant salute to the Port of New Bedford, Mayor Mitchell, to the Captain, crew, craftsmen and staff of Mystic Seaport, and to anyone who has ever dreamt of the one of a kind voyage we have just been privileged to experience sailing on the Charles W. Morgan whaleship from Vineyard Haven back home to New Bedford Harbor.
 
     I am the great-great-grandson of Herman Melville, author of "Moby Dick".  He left this port, which in the 1840's was the richest city in the world, on the whaleship Acushnet like many a young man, going out to find work in the energy sector, as they do today in the shale oil fields of the Dakotas.  It has been the thrill of a lifetime to be among the crew sailing into this port, blood coursing in our veins like the singing of the rigging, with the joy of the creation filling our souls like the wind in the sails.  We did not catch sight of the great White Whale, but believe me, he's still out there. 

 

      Melville sailed in 1841, just four months before the Chas W Morgan was launched.  One might say the Acushnet of New Bedford launched the novel Moby Dick and the Morgan has given me an opportunity to return the story to its source on a "sister" ship.  I left New Bedford Tuesday evening on the SeaStreak, going to Martha's Vineyard at twenty-six knots and returned the next day, some 173 years earlier, so to speak, at an exhilarating six knots under eight square sails.  There were many descendants of former captains, crew and owners aboard and we all agreed the ancestors were smiling down on us all the way into port 
 
     You might think this a great opportunity for one of the family to plug the book Moby Dick as if we ever made a dime on your copy purchase.  The book sold 800 copies in Melville's lifetime, and was so panned by the critics of the day that the copyright ran out never to be renewed.
So please all of you from high school kids to ancient mariners who read Melville's epic, and who should be grateful for such open-source adventure and wisdom, read it twice at least and read it in your later years when the depth of the ocean and the depth of your soul is so much richer.  And if you've gained value from the journey, please send that dime and then some to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and to the Berkshire Historical Society's home at Arrowhead, in Pittsfield Mass where Moby Dick was written, and to the great people of Mystic Seaport whose hard work, with blisters and splinters to show for it, brought this great day to the Seven Seas. Please support these efforts to keep the literature and the sea alive.
 
     Oh Lord this madness and thy mysteries are so great and my brain is so small.  Give me the words of my ancestors that I might make us all see that Melville's novel "Moby Dick" walks these docks as we speak, day and night, walks the cobblestone streets of New Bedford and Nantucket and walks the halls of Wall Street and the corridors of Congress, calling us like Elijah the Prophet and Ishmael the Beholder, and Father Mapple in his sermon on Jonah, calling us to speak the truth to falsity.  We need not speak the truth to power because truth is the ultimate power, but we must speak the truth to falsity as we see the oceans fill with plastic and pollution, as we see whale fishing continue beyond any reason, and as we witness industrial enterprise crushing the American soul once so joyous in its freedoms.  Moby Dick still plies these waters calling us to wake up and smell the seaweed, breathe in the beauty and to step up and act to sustain our Earth. 

 

      Thank you Mystic Seaport, crew of the Charles W. Morgan and to those who love the sea and the life it has given us all. Thanks for showing us that we can rebuild and rededicate ourselves to a revival of the American spirit in view of a sustainable future for the seas that continue to feed the world.

 

Peter Gansevoort Whittemore

Cohasset MA

1-781-383-6568