The upper school class “Moby-Dick Today” spends a semester immersed in the study of Herman Melville’s 1851 encyclopedic masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

The class has undertaken a multi-disciplinary engagement with the text, seeking to understand its many elements, whether they be existential, social, political or beyond. A recent field trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts provided an experience that further plunged them into history, science, art, and more. 

"Students love our trip to New Bedford for ushering them into the cultural and material world of Moby-Dick and whaling,” said upper school English teacher and Director of Student Life Wilson Taylor. “Its exhibits feature historical and contemporary art and artifacts, marine biology and oceanographic science, and literary and cultural elements in ways that both mirror and magnify our course content and concerns.”

Students met with several museum curators, including MB alum and Chief Curator Naomi Slipp '01. Naomi shared information about The Old Dartmouth Historical Society, which founded the museum in 1903, owners of the materials that chronicle the history of seven towns known for the whaling industry in the 1840s and 1850s. New Bedford was the wealthiest town, and busiest whaling port in the country at this time. The society's collection spans a million items and includes textiles, furniture, and materials from diverse periods. 

The class had a chance to take advantage of portions of this rich collection, carefully glancing at primary source journals, logbooks, paintings and drawings. Curators took students through exhibitions including "Complicated Legacies,” “Whales Today,” and “Entangled in the Lines,” and the research room featuring whaling logbooks. One logbook even referenced Herman Melville himself, which certainly helped to root the museum to their study of the book!

And the students didn’t just get to look at drawings of boats, they got to go on one and explore below decks of the half-scale model of the whaling ship The Lagoda. The original vessel was owned by Jonathan Bourne, a wealthy and influential figure from Sandwich, Massachusetts whose daughter provided the largest donation that led to the creation of the museum.

In one exhibit, students observed massive whale skeletons and other actual-size reproductions to get a sense of the size, biology and behavior of many types of whales, including North Atlantic Right whale, Blue whale, Humpback whale, and Sperm whale. To reinforce how real much of the exhibit is, one is so oil-rich that it has been weeping the fluid for more than 30 years and is collected in a cask underneath it (with a strong odor!).

They also had the opportunity to interpret contemporary Moby-Dick inspired artwork in an exhibit called “‘Entangled In The Lines’ Figuring Moby-Dick”, further connecting the museum to the novel, with the curator Marina Dawn Wells them through a series of discussions on interpreting art and close-reading these paintings.

As a project related to the trip, students each identified an artifact from the museum to research and present to their peers, finding yet more ways to connect their museum experience to Melville's text and to their course.

“Exploring New Bedford's cobblestone streets and observing its working harbor can ground an abstract text, and the Museum itself offers so much to discover about whales, whaling, and the history and culture of this region and the broader world,” Wilson said. "We had so much fun exploring this exciting museum and considering in new ways the many lenses and legacies of this novel."