New Bedford Whaling Museum
In 2006, Barbara and I began volunteering time at the New Bedford Whaling
Museum as docents. The New Bedford Whaling Museum is the museum of The Old
Dartmouth Historical Society, founded in 1903 to deal with the history of the
original town of Dartmouth, Massachusetts. In the latter half of the 18th
Century and the first quarter of the19th Century, Dartmouth was carved into the
existing towns of Westport, New Bedford, Fairhaven, Acushnet, as well as the original
Town of Dartmouth--now much reduced in size. The region fronts along the
northern edge of Buzzards Bay, which is deeply indented with a number of
excellent protected harbors. Since its founding in the 1600s, Old
Dartmouth has been a center of maritime activity, beginning with ship building
and a robust merchant fleet of coasting and trans Atlantic packets, in the 1600
and 1700s. During the late 1700s pelagic whaling was established in the
ports of Fairhaven, New Bedford, and Westport, and following the War of 1812 New
Bedford became the premier whaling port in the United States, and indeed, the
world. By1850 New Bedford had become the original oil boom town, and was
just about the richest city, on a per capita basis, in the country. That
wealth was expressed, in part, by an assemblage of craftsmen (shipwrights,
coopers, blacksmith, toolmakers) who built and outfitted whale ships, and
constructed marvelous mansions for the wealthy ship owners. The wealth also
drew writers (Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau), and artists (eg
William Bradford, Albert Bierstadt, Allen Van Beest, R. Swain Gifford, etc),
all of whom spent significant time here.
The founders of Old Dartmouth in the 1600s were largely Quakers
from Boston and Philadelphia, and that Quaker heritage persisted through the
whaling period, and helped establish in this region a more egalitarian outlook
than many other coastal communities in New England. The community
supported blacks, American Indians, Pacific Islanders, and others drawn by the
burgeoning whaling industry. In the 1850s Bedford welcomed former slaves
from the South, and became an important station on the "Underground Railroad".
Frederick Douglass, a prominent black abolitionist, spent three years here, and
got his legs under him as an orator and organizer of his movement. The
whaling business established close ties with islanders from the Azores and Cape
Verdes, which effected immigration from those islands, and by the close of the
Whaling Era (about 1900) Azorean and Cape Verdeans were a majority among whaling
crews, and a substantial number having become ship owners and officers.
Following the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in the late 1850s, the
prices paid for whale oil began to decline. For period in the late 1800s
the business was supported by a strong market for "whale bone" (really baleen,
from the filtration apparatus of Right and Bowhead Whales), which became more
valuable than the oil. But when that market disappeared, whaling was
finished in New Bedford, and its capital was directed into building and operating
textile mills. That business drew another wave of immigration, both from
the Portuguese speaking families of earlier whalers and from French Canadians to
the north. In the early 20th century, the textile business "went south,"
and New Bedford entered a new reincarnation. Drawing on its protected
harbor and easy access to some of the richest fishing grounds in the world, this
region became a major fishing port, specializing in ground fish and sea
scallops. Today, the port of New Bedford remains the number one fishing port
in the United States, in terms of the dollar value of its catch. The
prominence of its fishing activity continues to draw immigration from largely
Portuguese speaking peoples, with about 60 percent of the today's New Bedford
population sharing that heritage.
Against this historical backdrop, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, is a
wonderful place to do volunteer work. Barbara spends one morning a week
volunteering at the Museum's Research Library. She helps to read and
provide annotations about the log books from whaling voyages in the collection.
Because the library has a collection more than 2400 of these, there is a lot of
this work to be done. The library also has fabulous collections of
maritime books and journals, and extensive manuscript collections pertaining to
family histories of former whalers, and ship owners. I'm finding it to be
a valuable resource when looking for information about early toolmakers in the
New Bedford region.
My volunteer work is split into three areas. Most Sundays finds me
"walking the floor" of the museum, answering questions from visitors, and,
during the summer months, leading tours of visitors who arrive on cruise ships
making New Bedford a port of call. On Wednesdays I spend a good bit of the
day helping the Museum's registrar describe and catalogue the collection of hand
tools. These had gone untouched before the last couple of years, and
there is a huge volume of them. Featuring shipwrights', coopers', and
black smith's tools, there also are substantial numbers of planes and general
cabinet makers tools, as well as "whale craft" (harpoons, blubber spades,
lances, etc). Finally, most recently, I've been spending one morning a
week with an informal "scrimshaw study group" that meets, under the
leadership of senior curator Stuart Frank, to discuss and evaluate
examples of scrimshaw brought to the museum for analysis. This, to me, is
an interesting opportunity to look closely at all sorts of scrimshaw, mainly
with an eye to understanding what tools might have been used to produce it.
This "whaling experience" that I've enjoyed for the past couple of years has
opened my eyes to things other than just tools, when visiting flea markets and
antique shows. Accordingly I've made a few purchases of documents
pertaining to whaling and New Bedford history. And their analysis is, to
me, an interesting undertaking. From time to time I've written about my
little investigations, and have published them in a Museum 'inhouse' newsletter.
To share my little excitements more widely, I'll add these "stories" to this web
page, as they are finished. I hope someone will enjoy reading them.
The Ultimate Scrimshaw Exhibition
