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Who aint a slave? Tell me that.

Loomings, Moby-Dick

Housed in its own vaulted, purpose-built hall is New Bedford’s grandest exhibit: a half-scale replica of a whale-ship. Even allowing for its reduced size, the confined lower decks of this vessel are intimidating. They resemble nothing so much as the slave ships of the age: the one designed to carry the harvest of dead whales; the other to convey living souls. In a nearby cabinet is a much smaller specimen: a framed daguerreotype of a handsome man with a sweep of sleek wavy hair, fine cheekbones and serious, querying eyes; he wears a dandy’s high-collared shirt and tie and an elegant dark coat. But this composed figure was the fomenter behind the campaign to abolish slavery–in a city that shackled men to the pursuit of the whale.

In 1838 Frederick Douglass, the son of an enslaved mother and a white father whose name he never knew, escaped from Baltimore dressed as a sailor. He arrived in New Bedford where, for four years, he lived and worked, rolling casks, stowing ships, sawing wood, sweeping chimneys and labouring at a blacksmith’s bellows till his hands were like horn. Ishmael claimed that ‘a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard’; for Douglass and his brethren, ‘the ship-yard…was our school-house’.

Like the rest of America, New Bedford is a place made up of other places. If more white Americans were descended from pickpockets and prostitutes than from the Pilgrim Fathers, then, as Ishmael informs us, ‘not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born’. While America’s railroads were built by Irish navvies, its dirty business of whaling was done by Africans and Indians or Azoreans and Cape Verdeans. The heroes of the harpoon were more likely to be men of colour than sons of the Mayflower.

By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, one in twenty New Bedfordians was black, a greater proportion than that of New York, Boston or Philadelphia. ‘In New Bedford,’ marvels Ishmael, ‘actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.’ The South End of town was known as Little Faial for its Azoreans; another downtown neighbourhood was named New Guinea after its inhabitants. On these shingled and clapboarded New England streets a dozen languages could be heard and dark figures seen, fellow countrymen of Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo, the Polynesian, American Indian and African-American harpooneers of the Pequod. Visiting in 1917, Mary Heaton Vorse saw an ‘illusion of the South’ about the port, with its ‘Bravas’ or Cape Verdeans and entire neighbourhoods in which white people were the foreigners; where children stared back, and ‘a splendid Negress with thin Arab features…checked her stride to wonder about us’.

Black sailors were engaged by owners who did not ask questions, or whose Quaker beliefs opposed slavery. Some rose to become captains or mates. Others succeeded in supply industries: Samuel Temple of New Bedford invented the toggle-iron harpoon, with its ingeniously hinged head. But below deck, bunks were still segregated and conditions were such that by the end of the century only men of colour could be persuaded to sign up; hence the preponderance of black faces in photographs of whaling crews. Charles Chace, one of New Bedford’s last whaling captains, kept two loaded pistols in his cabin in case of trouble–so his descendant told me–and when his Cape Verdeans were discharged with a suit of clothes and a ten-dollar bill, many gave up their African names and, like slaves, adopted their master’s, for the sake of conformity with their new home.

New Bedford owed at least part of its success to its communications with the rest of America; the same year that Frederick Douglass arrived, the city was connected by rail to the New England network. But for Douglass and for Henry ‘Box’ Brown–who was smuggled out of the South in a crate, emerging at the other end as a human jack-in-the-box–New Bedford was a vital stop on another network: the Underground Railroad, an invisible system secretly helping thousands of slaves to escape to the North and Canada. A port was the perfect place for such illicit trade; and whaling offered a tradition of disguise as well as employment. For Douglass and his fellow fugitives, New Bedford’s transience itself was a kind of liberty: ‘No coloured man is really free in a slaveholding state…but here in New Bedford, it was my good fortune to see a pretty near approach to freedom on the part of the coloured people.’

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whaling and slavery co-existed as lucrative, exploitative, transoceanic industries; while whale-ships sought to disguise themselves as men o’ war in order to forestall pirates (and sometimes harboured fugitive slaves themselves), slave ships seeking to evade Unionist blockades during the Civil War would masquerade as whale-ships. It was no coincidence that in 1850, as Melville began to write Moby-Dick, the issue of slavery was coming to a head. The stresses that would eventually sunder a nation also gave Melville’s book its symbolic charge.

That year, a new Fugitive Slave Law gave owners extraordinary powers to pursue their ‘property’ over state limits. To America’s great philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, it was a ‘filthy enactment’. Meanwhile, his Concord neighbour, Bronson Alcott–whose utopian, strictly vegan commune, Fruitlands, just outside Boston, was an early example of ethical living where the wearing of cotton was forbidden because it exploited slaves and where oil lamps were proscribed because they were the result of the death of whales–hid fugitives in a modern version of a Reformation priest-hole.

War between the states seemed imminent; and as the North and South argued over the right, or otherwise, to maintain their fellow man in chains, Melville turned the crisis into an elegant, cetological analogy.

Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by endless subdivisions based on the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.

Elsewhere, Ishmael describes a whale of ‘an Ethiopian hue’, hunted until its heart burst; while the whiteness of Moby Dick itself seemed a reflection on America’s preoccupation with colour. Determined to protect his fellow fugitives from ‘the bloodthirsty kidnapper’, Frederick Douglass began an unprecedented campaign, the first black man in America publicly to oppose such injustice. Historians like to imagine that Douglass and Melville saw each other in New Bedford’s narrow streets; in the same year that Melville sailed from the port, Douglass was ‘discovered’ lecturing on abolitionism in the Nantucket Athenæum. Four years later, the publication of his memoir, the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, attracted violent opposition. Some even questioned the author’s authenticity, turning on his fierce beauty–not quite black, not quite white–calling Douglass a ‘negro imposter’ and ‘only half a nigger’ (to which he retorted, ‘And so half-brother to yourselves’). In May 1850, Douglass’s appearances in the New York Society Library–the same building in which Melville was even then researching his story of the White Whale–were disrupted by ‘Captain’ Isaiah Rynders and his Law and Order Party, a gang that attacked abolitionists, foreigners and blacks, encouraged by one newspaper which demanded its readers

STRIKE THE VILLAIN DEAD.

When Douglass strolled up Broadway with his two English friends, Julia and Elizabeth Griffiths, passers-by uttered exclamations ‘as if startled by some terrible sight’. Worse still, when walking near the Battery, the trio were set upon by five or six men shouting foul language; Douglass was hit in the face, and the women struck on the head. It was a scene that had its counterpart in Melville’s autobiographical Redburn, published the previous year, in which the young sailor sees his ship’s black steward walking the Liverpool streets ‘arm-in-arm with a good-looking English woman’, and remarks: ‘In New York, such a couple would have been mobbed in three minutes; and the steward would have been lucky to escape with whole limbs.’

Douglass reacted to these assaults in his essay, ‘Colorphobia in New York!’, and later became Abraham Lincoln’s adviser on slavery during the bitter war that followed. Melville, whose father had been a friend of the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe, would invest Moby-Dick with the same blackness and whiteness, the same deceptively simple quandary. Strangely intertwined in history, slavery and whaling were both expressions of antebellum America; both doomed by their reliance on unsustainable resources, human and cetacean.

By the time Melville arrived, New Bedford was experiencing an unparalleled boom. In the 1840s, three hundred whale-ships–more than half of the American fleet–sailed from the port, often returning with two or three thousand barrels of oil and profits running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many New England boys, fired up by the heroism and glory it offered, volunteered for the chase. While their peers went to California in search of gold or the Dakota plains for buffalo, they found another wilderness: whaling was the Wild West of the sea.

Like a cowboy or a jockey, the experienced whaler was physically tailored for the job–or perhaps his job moulded him. ‘He is a rather slender, middle-sized man, with a very sallow cheek, and hands tanned of a deep and enduring saffron color,’ wrote Charles Nordhoff, who sailed from New Bedford soon after Melville, ‘…very round-shouldered, the effect possibly of much pulling at his oar.’ A vagabond cast in ‘this shabby part of a whaling voyage’–as Ishmael puts it–the well-travelled whaler bore

a singular air of shabbiness…His shoes are rough and foxy, and the strings trail upon the ground, as he walks. His trowsers fail to connect, by several inches, showing a margin of coarse, grey woollen sock, intervening between their bottoms, and his shoes. A portion of his red flannel drawers is visible, above the waistband of his pantaloons; while a rusty black handkerchief at the throat, fastened by a large ring, made of the tooth of a sperm whale, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, keeps together a shirt bosom…innocent of a single button.

The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner–an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth. Whale oil and whalebone were commodities for the Machine Age, and owners and captains adopted the same punitive practices employed in mills and factories, reducing pay and provisions to pursue a better profit.