Every winter, literary legend Herman Melville’s legacy becomes palpable in New Bedford.
“You start to see people dressed and looking like Melville with pipes and beards, and you just sort of get swept away with it,” said Amanda McMullen, president and CEO of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Fans flock to the museum in January for a 25-hour marathon reading of Melville’s epic “Moby Dick.” The event began in 1997 and has grown significantly since that inaugural year. More than 3,000 attendees this year visited the museum throughout the weekend, shattering the institution’s previous attendance record.
In front of a towering half-scale replica of a whaling ship, a volunteer rang the bell to kick off the literary marathon, and state Poet Laureate Regie Gibson read the novel’s iconic first sentence.
Call me Ishmael.
Cheers erupted from the crowd.
Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.Excerpt from chapter 1 of "Moby Dick"
The audience listened intently as they stood, or sat, surrounded by whaling artifacts like those Melville himself may have once used on his own sea voyage, right across the bay in Fairhaven.
“Not unlike a lot of folks who in the 1800s were looking for work heard about this crazy industry of whaling ... he was like many who flocked to the city of New Bedford and thought ‘a-whaling I will go,’” McMullen said.
Those three years aboard whaling vessels inspired Melville’s writing. Though he penned other texts, “Moby Dick” is by far the widest known. The book traces the path of Ishmael, a sailor and the story’s narrator, as he travels from New Bedford to Nantucket to board the whaling ship Pequod. Across 135 chapters and some 215,000 words, Ishmael and his crewmates follow Captain Ahab on his doomed quest for revenge against the titular white whale.
Gibson, one of 279 readers who took part in the marathon, said Melville’s style lends itself well to live reading.
“He uses poetic craft, repetition, alliteration, assonance, sibilance, [and] how he uses rhyme — which are in subtle places — I don’t think you really get unless you say it out loud,” he said.
At 1:30 p.m., the marathoners lucky enough to snag a wristband moved across the street to the Seamen’s Bethel, a small chapel where sailors often found respite before their departures, Melville included.
Volunteers handed out sheet music, and the Rev. David Lima led the assembled in the book’s beloved whaling hymn.
The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,
And left me deepening down to doom.
I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell—
Oh, I was plunging to despair.Excerpt from chapter 9 of "Moby Dick"
After the sermon ended, marathoners trudged through the snow-coated cobblestone streets in the “clear, sunny cold” of New Bedford, as Ishmael described it, to continue the marathon back at the museum.
As the hours wore on, people braced themselves for the most trying part of the event: the overnight leg. For some, spending the night is a big part of the experience.
There is an upstairs-downstairs dynamic at the museum. The sleepers go upstairs and settle in for the night, while the die-hards downstairs are in it for the long haul.
After they ran out of cups this year, people started using chowder bowls to hold their precious coffee — but caffeine only goes so far. By 3 a.m., college student Roman Mullins was three coffees deep and still exhausted.
“Feels like it’s been days,” he said. “I’m physically tired and mentally strained. I think if Ishmael gives on another rant, I might lose it.”
He said Melville gets sidetracked by vague thoughts, making the book far longer than it need be.
“You’re sitting there contemplating about the differences between two whales that may or may not exist,” Mullins said. “At this point in the night, it’s been 15 hours of sitting in an auditorium. I’m hoping something happens so that way I don’t have to think about the whale.”
Last year, linguist and author Adam Aleksic took a three-hour nap. This year, he wouldn’t let himself sleep.
“There’s something to experiencing the insanity of a slightly inaccurate argument about whales being fish while you’re delirious in a room of a hundred other people,” he said. “The book itself is our white whale.”
After the sun rose, the museum filled back up for the final stretch.
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!Excerpt from chapter 135 of "Moby Dick"
Twenty-five and a half hours after it all began, the Moby Dick Marathon was over. People hugged each other, shouted in celebration, even burst into tears.
Wyn Kelley, a Melville scholar, said the event builds upon one of the tenets of the book itself.
“People think of it as a conflict between this crazy captain and whales, but it’s also about what a community can do for other people, and the way people can extend themselves towards each other,” Kelley said. “I think the marathon does that, brings them together. And people come back year after year and feel connected.”
