Logbook of the Ship Lucy Ann, page 193. Henry L. King, master. John F. Martin, keeper. November 21, 1841 - June 15, 1844. New Bedford Whaling Museum Logbook Collection, Research Library, KWM 434. Image courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

For fans of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, the name New Bedford, MA, may ring a bell, since it’s where Ishmael, the main character, signs up for the whaling expedition. The city is also home to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which was founded as the Old Dartmouth Historical Society in 1903.

The museum and its library and archival collections focus on the history and culture of New Bedford and surrounding areas, including the city’s social and industrial history and family records. Many families in the area were involved in the whaling industry, which was still an active part of New Bedford life at the time of the museum’s founding. The last whaling ship left the harbor in 1924.

Since then, the museum has grown to house one of the largest collections of whaling history, expanding its holdings to include maps and charts, banking/insurance records, family collections, contemporary oral histories, and whaling science documents, such as specimens and research notes from scientific expeditions in the Arctic and Pacific. “It’s a local institution with a local collection, but that local collection is global,” explained Naomi Slipp, the museum’s Douglas and Cynthia Crocker Endowed Chair for the chief curator and director of museum learning.

FROM BANK RECORDS TO WHALE SKIN

The collection, which dates from the 15th century to the present, includes rare books, manuscripts, reference materials, and photography. The oldest title, from 1494, is the natural history text Physiologus Theobaldi Episcopi de naturis duodecim animalium, or The Natures of the Twelve Animals, by Theobaldus Episcopus. More recent acquisitions include the Common Ground oral history project focusing on the voices of New Bedford community members, completed in 2023. Slipp estimated that the collection, at approximately 4,200 linear feet, houses 200,000 photographs and over 2,500 logbooks, annotated with sailors’ commentary, and journals from 19th-century whaling voyages. Slipp explained, “During the first half of the 19th century, New Bedford was one of the world's most important whaling ports. At its economic height during this period, New Bedford was the wealthiest city in North America per capita.”

The archival records and ledgers from the Merchant’s National Bank, said Slipp, make up possibly the largest and most comprehensive suite of 19th-century banking records in any museum collection worldwide. One could study it to better understand the accumulation and growth of wealth and capital for any whaling family just by looking at the bank’s books, she added.

Initially, the collection concentrated on Massachusetts whaling history, but in 2001 the museum absorbed the Kendall Whaling Museum, formerly a private museum in Sharon, MA, which “transformed the regional focus into a global one,” said Slipp.

The William A. Watkins Collection of Marine Mammal Sound Recordings includes approximately 2,000 unique recordings of more than 60 species of marine mammals collected over seven decades, papers, data, and the William A. Watkins and William E. Schevill Collection of Images and Instruments—photographs, harpoons, and recording instruments. Some of the recordings are available online.

Whale skin found in logbook of the bark Newton. Collected and pressed by Captain Augustus Hale, 1846–1849. New Bedford Whaling Museum Logbook Collection, Research Library, KWM 1031. Image courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

The museum also has a formal partnership with the Melville Society, a community dedicated to the life and work of Herman Melville, and has housed its archives, rare books, and reference materials since 2002. It hosts the Melville Scholars program, which sponsors a Melville Fellow for two weeks each year to research topics related to the author and his work. Part of the collection contains Melville’s editor’s notes on his work, first editions of all his books, and a recreation of Melville’s private library.

Even whale skin makes an appearance in the archives. When Exhibitions and Collections Associate Emma Rocha was an intern, she was cataloging the logbook addenda files—“items that were found loose in our logbooks, which were then put into folders labeled with the logbook number and then into a manuscript box,” she explained. Rocha was looking at the addenda for the file titled Collected by Captain Augustus Hale aboard the whaling bark Newton of New Bedford, 1846-49; dried and pressed in his journal of the voyage, and discovered three pieces of dried whale skin.

“I had found some pressed flowers in other logbook files, but the whale skin is a much more immediate souvenir of whaling,” she said. “I’d love to know why the captain decided to take the time to dry and press the skin, if he was intending to show it to friends and family when he returned home, or for a personal reminder of the voyage.”

BEYOND WHALING HISTORY

While the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection spotlights materials related to the history of whaling, the archives also contain the records of a variety of local organizations, such as the Department of Children and Family Services, a social program started by local philanthropic women to help orphans and widows, dating back to the 1800s; the Association for the Relief of Aged Women of New Bedford, another social service for women that is still active today; the Garden Club of Buzzards Bay; and the archives of the local newspaper, the Standard Times—including its photographic records—since the 1880s.

The area saw significant Portuguese immigration during the mid­–19th century, driven largely by the whaling industry, and the archive holds a large collection of Portuguese immigration records. Part of the collection has been indexed through a grant from the Portuguese Consulate in New Bedford.

Other notable items unrelated to whaling include textile sample books from New Bedford textile factories—“I love opening them up,” Slipp said; “You can see the patterns and the dyes and all the samples of the work that they did”—and four original photographs of abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass. Douglass visited New Bedford shortly before his death in 1895 to be photographed by James Reed, a Black photographer with a successful practice. Two photographs are Reed’s work, and two are from earlier in Douglass’s life.

The Common Ground Oral History Project interviews locals, from members of the Wampanoag people to recent immigrants from Cape Verde and Latin America, about their lives in the region.

ANCHORS AWEIGH: A TREASURE TROVE FOR SCHOLARS AND STUDENTS

Logbook of the Ship Lucy Ann, page 229. Henry L. King, master. John F. Martin, keeper. November 21, 1841 - June 15, 1844. New Bedford Whaling Museum Logbook Collection, Research Library, KWM 434. Image courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Scholars from all over the country and the world use the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s special collections, most frequently the logbooks. Recently, Slipp noted, two economists consulted insurance records related to whaling. “They're interested in understanding risk and investment strategies related to 19th-century industry,” said Slipp, “particularly maritime industries, and what policy clauses were like and how payouts worked.”

The current Melville scholar, Chris Bates—a doctoral researcher in American Literature at the University of Sussex, UK—arrived this summer to study the collection’s 19th-century wood and forestry archives, with an emphasis on shipbuilding and the charcoal industry. Archivists also pointed him to records relating to the ties between Massachusetts and the American South in the pre–Civil War period. Some New Bedford families owned forest land in South Carolina during the Antebellum period, and were involved in the timber trade from south to north.

Christopher Pastore, associate professor at the University of Albany, is using the collection for his book on flotsam and jetsam titled A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things, which covers objects like the ship’s ballast, seaweed, blubber, and other slippery stuff. Other researchers are studying how 19th-century lighting technology was transformed through innovations from whale oil to petroleum and kerosene.

Caroline Ummenhofer, a climatologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and Timothy Walker, a maritime historian from the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, were working on a climate-based project using items from the collection. They extracted weather data from historical logbooks to extrapolate and project future models, Slipp said. Marine biologists and history of science scholars have used the archives to study the historical distributions of marine mammals and other creatures to understand how their populations changed over time. University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth Professor Timothy Walker used the collection to inform his work editing Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad, which explores how maritime networks provided a unique opportunity for people to self-emancipate from the South.

Multimedia artist Courtney M. Leonard, a member of the Shinnecock Nation, created an installation at the museum using the logbooks. “BREACH” is “an ongoing exploration of the historical and contemporary ties between place, community, whales, and the maritime environment,” according to the exhibit description. “The various iterations of the project, created for individual institutions and settings, investigate the multiple definitions of the term ‘breach.’”

Every year an undergraduate University of Chicago class, “The Whale: Biology, Culture, and Evolution on Nantucket Sound,” visits the archives. Classes from more local universities, such as University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth and Rhode Island School of Design, also use the collections for their studies.

The middle schoolers at Our Sisters’ School in New Bedford do annual research projects on local history, often focusing on whaling, visiting the collections several times and then producing an exhibition hosted at the Museum (see this short video of them talking about their projects). One student recently focused on Black sailors, another on Cape Verde immigration.

The museum is also actively working with social groups such as the Immigrant Assistance Center, a social work program, to deepen connections with various populations. The three-year high school apprenticeship program, Museum Learning Within and Beyond the Museum Walls, “supports students who live in New Bedford and are from low-income households through an intensive three-year internship aimed at college, career, and life readiness,” according to the New England Museum Association website. In 2017, the program received the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award for excellence.

More than 100 students have participated in this paid program, attending weekly meetings over nine months with a focus on a variety of topics that include ocean conservation and cultural history. Students also receive college counseling, public speaking training, and other areas of professional development. All of the students entered college or full-time employment after graduation, and more than three quarters are still in college or have graduated.

DRAWING A MAP FOR FUTURE COLLECTING

“We are really actively trying to expand the kinds of stories we can tell and the kinds of research we can support by growing the representation of our collection to include the full diversity and breadth of the people that have lived in this region,” said Slipp, “or that have participated in the industries and trades that are represented in our collecting scope and mission.”

In 2012, the museum instituted a new plan, “Pursuit to Preservation,” which “shifted our focus to whale biology, conservation, and ocean health,” Slipp said. “For over 12 years, we have launched permanent exhibitions on whale biology, scientific research, and conservation; and partnered with artists and scientists on public programs, travelling exhibits, and collections,” and partnered with organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution “to talk about whales and the threats they face.” The museum recently received $500,000 from NOAA to increase the its content around climate change and ocean health.

In 2023, the museum revised its collections development plan, outlining strategic collecting priorities. It also expanded collections with recent acquisitions that included “the Ash Street Jail collection, which outlines the history of criminalization in the region from the 1890s to 1960s, as well as increasing our collecting of Indigenous art and material culture,” Slipp said. An upcoming winter exhibition will build on Lighting the Way, a multiyear project that focuses on regional women’s history.

In addition these projects and initiatives, Slipp said, the museum leads a data-focused project, whalinghistory.org, in partnership with Mystic Seaport and the Nantucket Historical Association, “that employs data from our collections to make historical information about whaling freely accessible to researchers.”

The museum’s collections are currently open on Thursday and Friday. Anyone planning to visit should fill out an online form two weeks ahead to give staff time to find the requested items. They can answer inquiries via email as well.

“I do think that it’s helpful for people to understand that we are more than whaling,” Slipp said. “There are depths to the collection that I think often surprise people. If folks are interested in maritime history or happen to really have a passion for whaling, they should absolutely reach out and visit the collection.”