Storyteller Len Cabral

Internationally acclaimed storyteller Len Cabral comes Museum on Thursday, July 28 at 7:30 p.m. for a free public program in the Cook Memorial Theater, titled “From Chasing Whales to Picking Cranberries; Stories of a Cape Verdean Raconteur.”

Cabral has been enchanting audiences with his storytelling performances at schools, libraries, museums and festivals since 1976. A great grandson of a Cape Verdean whaler whose grandparents immigrated to America from the islands off the coast of West Africa, Len’s strong Cape Verdean ancestry comes alive in his exuberant retelling of African, Cape Verdean, and Caribbean folktales as well as original stories and tales from around the world.

This performance is part of the Whaling Museum’s a yearlong focus on Cape Verdean American history and culture and its critical role in the American whaling industry throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in New England. The Cape Verdean Maritime Exhibit opened July 5 in the museum’s Bourne Building.

Len’s performance is free. Admission to museum galleries after 5:00 p.m. is “buy one get one free.” The galleries are open until 8:00 p.m. on July 28.

This program is funded in part through a grant from the Education through Cultural and Historical Organizations (ECHO), administered by the United States Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement.

The Museum’s Department of Digital Initiatives strives to keep up with electronic publishing and digitization trends.  While doing so we plan, as part of our ongoing website rebuild project,  to increase online access to the museum’s holdings, an idea which, if we follow Darnton’s thinking, puts us in the company of  Founding Fathers who wrote about  access to knowledge as an essential condition for a flourishing republic. It’s great to have a big idea to get behind.

Call me upstart.

When I show up every year to read in the annual Moby-Dick Marathon, I’m listed as a “Melville Aficionado,” for lack of anything more concrete, I guess. Not that I mind: it’s a classy moniker. Full disclosure? I’m a transplanted New Bedford-er, living in Manhattan (Melville’s adopted home), also a writer (often as dispirited as himself), bouncing back and forth as often as I can to my home in South Dartmouth. Even as a kid I was a frequent visitor to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, back in the 1950s when it was little more than a local rainy-day stop, and not a spectacular, world-class educational destination. I have made the four-hundred mile journey each year for the honor of having ten minutes to read from America’s greatest novel. This Saturday I’ll be wearing my scrimshaw whistle and my watchman’s cap, as usual, but I won’t be perusing my 22 different editions in my Moby-Dick collection beforehand, making the tortured decision of which one will get the nod to accompany me to the podium.

This year I’m going electronic. Call me nook.

For those of you who have missed the numerous Holiday Must-Have Lists, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, the ads and the publishing industry scuttlebutt, the e-reader – a device that downloads books electronically – has got a hot new contender in the category, and its name is nook. The remainder of my above full disclosure is that I work part-time as a Barnes & Noble bookseller – or, for the last couple of months, primarily, a nookseller. And I am a true believer.

I’ve spent more than three decades around the publishing industry. I’ve authored nearly twenty volumes myself. One way or another, I’ve spent my life making books. I thought that I would be the last holdout, e-readerwise. But I’m tired of lugging three tomes on the bus to New Bedford. I don’t want to carry a bigger backpack on the subway. I can’t afford to check in an extra bag at the airport. So I gave nook a try. And I love it.

Of course, not everyone is onboard. Scores of people have said to me, with much disdain, “Not me. I love my books.” Listen, everybody in a bookstore loves their books. The customers, the booksellers, and — I’m sure not just in my store — also the security guards and the maintenance crew. Moby-Dick is free to download on nook. So are Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and hundreds of thousands of other books in the public domain. Does it mean that I won’t cuddle up in front of a fire or hop into bed with a hardcover book? Of course not. A book is a book is a book, no matter how you hold it.

You’ll ask: “What Would Melville Do?” Are you kidding? Herman Melville, one of the greatest writers in our nation’s history, died a clerk, underappreciated, underread, underpaid. Any author will tell you that money is nice (and the majority of us don’t make a lot), but knowing that someone, somewhere, right now is out there reading your book? Oh, now that’s the stuff dreams are made of. I think Melville would approve of any “delivery system” that puts a book in a reader’s hands. Imagine if he could have enjoyed, in his lifetime, the place Moby-Dick has earned in America’s literary firmament. It’s all about availability. It’s nook, it’s Random House’s gorgeous Rockwell Kent edition, it’s my original $0.95 Collier edition (Skidmore, junior year), it’s Sterling Publishing’s beautiful pop-up version, it’s every permutation of the white whale out there. Melville would say, I’m sure, “As long as it’s read.”

Every time someone walks into Dartmouth’s wonderful Baker Books or up to the nook counter at my Barnes & Noble on 86^th Street, or any other store in between, and buys a book instead of a video game, we win. Melville wins.

So, I realize I may be blackballed in the chowder line at the Whaling Museum on Saturday because I’m going rogue. But the truth is, the very best way to enjoy and breathe in Moby-Dick – and all its verbal nooks and crannies – is to hear it read aloud, where it takes on a whole new vivid, lovely, rich life of its own. And at the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Moby-Dick Marathon, it comes complete with a real, live Ishmael, the tolling of the ship’s bell, the johnnycakes, the creaky organ in the Seaman’s Bethel, and all the wonderful surprises that the Museum adds every year.

So, I’m setting aside my beautiful Moby-Dick collection this year, and reading from my nook – and you’ll still be listening to Herman Melville. Call me what you want. But I’m just a “Melville Aficionado.”

New Year’s resolutions are a perennial topic this time of year. For most of us, following through on them is a perennial challenge. So it was for New Bedford’s first historian, Daniel Ricketson (1813-1898). A man of letters, Ricketson, hosted some of the great literary minds of the 19th century at his country estate, Brooklawn. These friends included Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and A. Bronson Alcott.

Last year marked the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Ricketson’s History of New Bedford. But of all his writings, the work he kept close at hand was a little booklet he apparently never published. Its 16 pages of well-worn blue paper were handwritten, which he bound with needle and thread. Ricketson titled it “Rules of Conduct, Hints,” Written in 1863, it is preserved among the 100,000 manuscripts at the Whaling Museum’s Research Library.

On the cover Ricketson also printed, “In hoc signo vinces I.H.S.”, the motto on the imperial standard of the Emperor Constantine, meaning “In this sign you will conquer,” and one of the earliest monograms of Christianity, I.H.S. In the pages that followed, Ricketson set down his “Rules: Imprimus” for personal goodness in 16 resolutions:

1. To invoke on rising, The Spirit of Truth as my guide, and support through the day.

2. To take whatever is set before me at table with thankfulness.

3. To guard my lips from all harshness, and to speak in a low, and gentle tone of voice, however earnest I may be.

4. To cultivate patience towards all and to remember in my efforts to reform, that the welfare of the evildoer is to be considered, as well as that of the sufferer, if possible.

5. In my religious communications, to keep close to the Spirit of Truth, and avoid extravagant expressions.

6. I fear that I am a poor listener, and I would thrive henceforth to be less eager to communicate knowledge then to receive.

7. In my ordinary intercourse with mankind, I must strive to be more silent, and reserve my communication for public occasions when I can address a larger number and spare myself and others the fatigue of a too excited conversation.

8. To endeavour more and more to live in the Spirit of Purity and Love and to keep my mind in as close a communication with our Heavenly Father as possible.

9. To govern my thoughts as well as my words and deeds.

10. To beware of over estimation of myself, and remember as a caution, that from self-examination for more than ten years past, I have been convinced that my sphere in life is a small one – that neither nature nor education has fitted me to occupy any very high position, nor does my calmer and better judgment lead me to choose other than a humbler walk in life.

11. Above all else, I desire to be a good man, for which end I must still strive, though now so far from the great description of success herein.

12. To forbear judgment upon the words and works of others until I have well established grounds for decision.

13. To cultivate a mild and genial demeanor towards all and to learn to listen more patiently.

14. To avoid all heated arguments, and particularly too earnest talks in the evening, which I always find productive of unpleasant excitement to my brain and consequent poor sleep and lassitude the next day.

15. To endeavour also, when I have honestly, though perhaps too fiercely spoken my convictions, to leave it in the hands of the Lord, and give myself no further concerns herein.

16. To avoid criticisms on others as much as possible, and to endeavour to make every possible allowance for the infirmities of human nature.

Over the years, Ricketson reviewed these resolutions and noted on the final page his desire to have done better to follow them:

Alas, how little have I improved these good intentions. Aug. 27^th 1869. D. R.

- Even to the present time. May 25^th 1871

- And until now. Dec. 9^th 1883

Ricketson’s famous friend, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”