New Bedford in Moby Dick

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New Bedford in Moby Dick

      The following excerpt from Herman Melville's Moby Dick; or, The Whale, describes the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S., in the mid-19th century.

      But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England....Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent....

      In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises apiece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles....

      In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel.Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows...and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side of the pulpit....The architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea....Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed beak.

      What could be more full of meaning?...Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

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