In March, many members & friends nominated the Whaling Museum for inclusion on the Official List of 1,000 Great Places in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Their advocacy paid off. Today, the Governor’s Commission to Designate 1,000 Great Places of Massachusetts released its list, and the Whaling Museum is included! The Commission received some 12,000 nominations.

Press Release

( NEW BEDFORD, MA) – The New Bedford Whaling Museum will present the local premiere of Ric Burns’ new documentary, Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World, on Thursday, May 6 at 7:00 pm. in the museum theater. Burns, an award-winning writer and director, is scheduled to attend and speak briefly about his work. A co-production of Steeplechase Films, Inc., and WBGH Boston, Into the Deep will air nationally as part of the critically acclaimed history series, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on PBS, May 10 at 9:00 pm. The local première at the whaling museum is free to the public.

The film includes interviews with curator, Dr. Stuart Frank, and features many artifacts and images from the museum’s collection. In researching the film, Burns drew heavily on the expertise of museum staff and associates.

“We are very pleased to welcome Ric Burns back to New Bedford, and look forward to his new film, which will give Americans a greater understanding of whaling history, its impact on the growth of our nation and New Bedford’s pivotal role in that growth,” said museum president, James Russell.

Narrated by Willem Dafoe, Into the Deep examines 300 years of American whaling from its beginnings with shore-based operations off the coast of New England, to its zenith in the 1850s, and finally to its 60-year decline following the Civil War.

Mr. Russell noted that the documentary will weave together several narratives, connecting the whale oil trade with American capitalism and the young nation’s growing global presence. The business of whaling was inherently high-risk, high-gain. Filled with danger and adventure, it appealed to the popular imagination though literary works such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Whaling tested the limits of human endurance, both spiritually and physically, as the dark fate of the whaleship Essex revealed to a horrified nation in the 1820s.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum is credited in the film as a Principal Location, and several of its staff and associates contributed to the production, including Dr. Stuart M. Frank, serving on the film’s advisory board, with Michael Dyer, Michael Moore and Judith Lund, serving as project consultants.

Seating is limited. To RSVP, please call Pam Lowe, Visitor Services 508-997-0046, ext. 100.

Music by the Marcus Monteiro Quartet

Catering by The Celtic Coffee House

The soon to be opened “Old Dartmouth Historical Society Wattles Family Gallery” will be dedicated to the exhibition of fine and decorative arts of the Old Dartmouth region. It is located in one of the original exhibition spaces of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society (ODHS), what was once the main floor of the National Bank of Commerce building located at 35 [37] North Water Street.

In 1906 the ODHS bought the “imposing bank building of brick and brownstone” built in 1883/84 with the generous assistance of Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers (1840-1909), one of the original Board of Trustees members, and under the  auspices of one of the original founders of the ODHS, WilliamWallace Crapo.

The National Bank of Commerce, which went out of business in 1898, was the first bank in New Bedford. It stood at this same location. Its original name was the Bedford Bank (1803-1812) with merchant Thomas Hazard its first president and was originally organized to support the Bedford Marine Insurance Company. The bank was liquidated during the War of 1812 and in 1816 was resurrected under the name of the Bedford Commercial Bank (1816-1864), with George Howland acting as president until his death in 1851. In 1864 it was re-organized as the National Bank of Commerce, Thomas Nye, Jr. president.

In January of 1908 as the ODHS took full possession of the rooms and hung its sign, still there today, over the Water Street entrance. By the 1930’s the room was dedicated to the exhibition of nautical objects including ship models, paintings, prints, scrimshaw and curiosities. By the 1960’s the space had been converted to offices for curator Philip Purrington and whaling/biology scholar David Henderson. At that time library collections were also housed in the space. By the 1990s it had been converted to storage and other behind-the-scenes functionalities necessary for the growing museum. Today the museum is recapturing the elegant space to highlight its local history collections.

Steve Urbon, senior correspondent of The Standard-Times:

NEW BEDFORD — The Northeast Fisheries Summit drew almost 300 people to the city Monday, a veritable “Who’s Who” of the fishing industry, giving the new NOAA fisheries director an earful about what they view as the coming crisis in the Northeast fishing industry.

Eric Schwaab, just three weeks into his job as the assistant administrator for fisheries at NOAA, sat in the front row of the whaling museum’s packed auditorium and heard one speaker after another assail his agency for its policies, its attitude and its law enforcement.

Representatives of all kinds of players in the fishing industry were encouraged to put their cards on the table, and they did, in 10-minute presentations that were sometimes angry, sometimes emotional.

It was an outpouring of frustration at a federal agency many believe is trying to put them out of business when it isn’t treating them like children or criminals. The summit, organized by UMass and the mayor’s office, followed on the heels of a Capitol Hill “United We Fish” protest in late February, an inspector general’s report blasting fisheries law enforcement, and sworn congressional hearings in which it was revealed that NOAA’s top law enforcement official shredded documents while under investigation.

The summit was intended to clarify issues and show where everyone stands, said Mayor Scott W. Lang, who opened the conference. He enlisted former Mayor John K. Bullard as moderator, UMass School of Marine Science and Technology dean emeritus Dr. Brian Rothschild as organizer and lead scientific and policy adviser, and a wide-ranging cast of state lawmakers, boat owners, attorneys, fishing regulators, environmentalists, and fishing families as panelists and participants.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration became the prime target.

State Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante, D-Gloucester, drew applause when she announced, “I want to see the day when the agency respects the fishing industry.”

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., criticized NOAA and the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which he and many others believe needs amendment for being too rigid. “The problem is that the basic law is wrong,” he said. Regulators today are sticking with current law the way people in Medieval times believed the sun revolved around the Earth. Evidence mounted that the theory was wrong, but they kept making pained explanations, “but it was hard to maintain the theory. People don’t like to give up on their theories.”

But with Magnuson, “the fundamental basis is flawed,” Frank said. “People have tried to put certainty where it doesn’t belong.”

Later, Gov. Deval Patrick, who hadn’t heard the earlier comments, likewise assailed NOAA for ignoring this region’s request in spring of 2009 that the science behind the fishing regulations be re-examined.

Maine fisherman Jimmy Odlin, a member of the New England Fishery Management Council, joined those who accused NOAA of being “arrogant” by making policy based on flawed science and in doing so harming fishing families and communities. He drew applause when he said that he is angry at the idea that unsound science should be used to get people out of the business.”

Bud Walsh, who actually helped write the original Magnuson Act, defended the idea that “sectors” management is necessary to the health of the industry, but he expressed surprise that the rules have become so complex. “I have never seen such Byzantine regulations,” he said. He suggested that the fishing industry adopt a corporate model to organize itself around the sectors and compete in the global market. But his suggestion was rejected by one participant who objected that such a move would remove all local control.

Again and again, participants returned to the concept of “catch shares” — pieces of the overall catch that they will be allowed to land, based on their previous fishing experience. As they have said in other places, the catch shares are believed to be unreasonably small, don’t provide for the “optimum yield” for fisheries, and threaten to stop fishing entirely as soon as the quota is reached for the most restricted fish.

When that happens, boats will go idle and if they stay in business their catch shares for the next year will shrink because they are based on the current year’s suboptimal take.

It is all in pursuit of what many called an impossible goal: to bring all fish species to their maximum level in a 10-year span. Vito Giacolone of the New England Seafood Coalition said, “the law demands at face value what we all know is unachievable.” Setting deadlines for fish population growth is “absolutely not attainable” he said. But the industry has no choice but to play along, he said, “because all resources are going clearly toward sector management,” and away from “days at sea.”

New Bedford boat owner Carlos Rafael bluntly told fellow fishermen that unless catch shares are postponed this spring, “50 percent of you will be out of business by August.” He suggested, to enthusiastic applause, that the National Marine Fisheries service be cut in half when that happens, and the $150 million in savings be used to start a boat buyback program.

See the original article here.

]]> http://whalingmuseumblog.org/2010/03/09/at-the-museum-northeast-fisheries-summit/feed/ 0 whaleblog UN.1016.21 http://whalingmuseumblog.org/2010/03/05/northeast-fisheries-summit/ http://whalingmuseumblog.org/2010/03/05/northeast-fisheries-summit/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:53:40 +0000 whaleblog http://whalingmuseumblog.org/?p=1817 ]]> March 8th forum to be held at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

Mayor Scott W. Lang has announced the Northeast Fisheries Summit, a day-long discussion that will focus on the future and sustainability of the fishing industry in New England and near- and mid-Atlantic ports. The Summit is co-hosted by the Mayor’s Ocean and Fisheries Council, the School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Institute. Expected to attend is Eric Scwhaab, the newly appointed Assistant Administrator for Fisheries with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Congressman Barney Frank; and industry leaders, scientists, elected officials, environmentalists, and government officials from across the Northeastern region.

“We all recognize the importance of achieving a sustainable fisheries management plan,” said Mayor Lang. “I look forward to an open discussion about how we can ensure a balance of sensible conservation practices with the economic vitality of the fishing industry. It is appropriate that this discussion take place in New Bedford, the nation’s top-ranked value port.”

The Summit will include panel discussions on catch shares and sectors, scallops and scallop by-catch, and amending the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

The Summit will begin at 9:00am on March 8th at the Whaling Museum, located at 18 Johnny Cake Hill in New Bedford. The public is welcome to attend.

Marking the final leg of a national tour, the ECHO Performing Arts Festival Troupe comes to the New Bedford Whaling Museum on AHA! Night, Thursday, March 11 at 6:30 p.m. with their multicultural performance, Celebrate – Song, Dance & Story! The troupe’s appearance at the Whaling Museum will be the only performance for the general public in the region. They will be performing in five New Bedford schools while in the city.

The 45-minute performance will take the audience on a journey down life’s paths, from childhood to love and marriage and beyond. Through song, dance and stories, life’s challenges and triumphs are viewed through the lens of many cultures to reveal the commonality of the human experience.

The ECHO Performing Arts Festival Troupe (left to right): Curtis "Buck" Willis - Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Ani Lokomaika'i Lipscomb (Hawaiian) - Bishop Museum, Annawon Weeden (Wampanoag) - Peabody Essex Museum, Allison Warden (Iñupiaq Eskimo) - Iñupiat Heritage Center, Stephen Blanchett (Yu'pik) - Alaska Native Heritage Center, José Manuel Vinagre, New Bedford ECHO Project.

The troupe will be available after the performance to talk with the audience.

The whale is perhaps the most mysterious animal known to man.  For centuries it inspired awe and fear, and was hunted for its oil, blubber and whalebone.  Now it is seen as a symbol of an ecological threat, a barometer for a world out of kilter.  It is even more remarkable that the transition from an age of whale-hunting to an era of whale-watching has happened within living memory.

Humpback off Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania

Ancient myth regarded the whale as an uncanny monster, a creature beyond comprehension.  A whale might swallow a single human being, such as Jonah, or an entire city, as one Greek myth imagined.  The poet William Blake wrote of a terrifying vision, ‘the head of Leviathan, his forehead was divided into streaks of green and purple like those on a tyger’s forehead…advancing towards us with all the fury of a spiritual existence’.

But ever since the early Basque fishermen travelled as far as the north-east coast of America to hunt whales, humans also saw these animals as a source of wealth.  When the Pilgrim Fathers sailed into Provincetown harbour in 1620, they saw  hundreds of whales ‘playing hard by us, of which in that place, if we had instruments and means to take them, we might have made a rich return’.  By the early 1800s, Provincetown was a profitable whaling port with a fleet of 70 ships, almost rivalling New Bedford – then the richest city in America, wealthy on whale oil – in what was, in effect, a New England version of a Texan oil boom.

Feeding humpback and shearwater, Stellwagen Bank, October 2009

Initially the hunt concentrated on coastal right whales and Greenland or common whale (bowheads) that supplied not only oil from their blubber, but huge pieces of baleen or whalebone that, in the days before plastic, were used for everyday objects from corset stays to carriage suspension, umbrellas and even Venetian blinds.  But the development of onboard tryworks – largely an American innovation – enabled ships to go further afield in the hunt for the sperm whale, whose pugnacious head contained spermaceti oil – the purest known to man, and prized for its light-creating and lubricating properties.  Whale oil, rather than mineral oil, lit and lubricated the Industrial Revolution.  The result for the whale was disaster.

Yet the 19th century culls paled in comparison with those of the 20^th century.  With the invention of steam ships and grenade harpoons, even the faster, rorqual whales – such as the blue and fin whales, the largest animals ever to live on Earth – came within range.  By now, America had turned to another oil in the fuelling of its empire, leaving British, Norwegian, and Russian factory ships to harvest this unsustainable resource.  By the 1960s, they were taking more whales in one year than the American whalers had taken in a century and a half of whaling.  The declaration of an international moratorium on whaling in 1986 came only just in time for the blue whale, now reduced to just 15,000 animals.

The sprawling, idiosyncratic work of genius that is Moby-Dick, published in 1851, was extraordinarily prophetic.  Not only did Melville foresee the threat to the whale in chapters such as ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?’, but he  also used the whaling industry as an allegory of American imperial power.  Melville configured the crazed Captain Ahab – who goes in pursuit of the eerie White Whale which scythed off his leg, determined to wreak his revenge – as a symbol of obsessive evil.

If you had any doubt about its prescience, just read the last page of the first chapter of Moby-Dick, in which the writer satirises his own narrator’s self-importance in mock newspaper headlines:

‘Grand contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.’

‘WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL’

‘BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN’

Indeed, modern political commentators have compared the ‘war on terror’ to Ahab’s impossible mission.  Only days after the 9/11 attacks, Edward Said wrote, ‘Collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time…’  Such madness is seen as one which endangers the hunter more than it does his prey.  After all, as anyone who had made it to the end of Melville’s long and digressive novel knows, it is the whale that wins.

Humpback off Cape Cod

Yet this is not a story with a happy ending.  This past December, in Hobart harbour, I watched as Sea Shepherd’s ‘Ady Gil’, eco-warrior Paul Watson’s latest weapon in his war against Japanese whaling readied itself for departure.  The black-painted and futuristic trimaran – a former racing vessel looking more like a watery version of the Batmobile– was about to do battle with a whaling fleet that persistently breaches Australian waters to hunt for whales under the guise of ‘scientific research’.

As I looked on from the quayside, the dreadlocked and tattooed crew – who would have looked more at home at rock festival than on an ocean-going vessel – got ready for the fight.  It occurred to me, even then, that for all its apparent power, their craft would prove flimsy in the face of ocean waves – let alone Japanese resistance.  Yet its crew are undoubtedly committed.  Later, fresh from watching humpback whales off the Tasman Peninsula, I met one shaven-headed former Sea Shepherd acolyte, who spoke with a passionate devotion to Paul Watson – a modern Ahab if there ever was one – that was almost cultish in its intensity.  Last month, his friends met their foe in the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean – and suffered a collision, the rights and wrongs of which are still unclear.

Perhaps what’s needed here is dialogue, not violence in return for violence.  More pragmatic whale conservationists even envisage allowing Japan a local quota for whaling – thereby curtailing their unregulated pelagic fleet – in return for some kind of control.  They reason that if the Japanese are pushed to anger any further, they may abandon all pretence of abiding by the IWC, and thus we (the largely Western nations devoted to anti-whaling) will lose all semblance of control over the issue.

There is political context to remember, too.  Post-war Japan, defeated and starving, was encouraged by Allied powers to convert their decommissioned naval fleet into a whaling fleet, in order to feed their nation.  Given this history, we might start to understand the greater political picture.  It is intriguing to note that American literary critics of Moby-Dick compared the atom bomb tests in the Pacific – itself the arena in which the novel’s dramatic narrative reaches its violent denouement – to the White Whale.  In The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, published in 1949, Howard P. Vincent considered that Moby Dick was ‘ubiquitous in time and place.  Yesterday he sank the Pequod; within the past two years he has breached five times; from a New Mexico desert, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most recently, at Bikini atoll.’

Japan also points out that IWC-sanctioned aboriginal whale hunts take place in American waters every year – what is the difference between that and their own claim to cultural precedence in coastal towns?  And since the Japanese were encouraged and even assisted in post-war whaling by the West, it irks to be lectured on the subject.  ‘It’s not because Japanese want to eat whale meat,’ Ayako Okubo told the New York Times in 2007.  ‘It’s because they don’t like being told not to eat it by foreigners.’

Indeed, some contest that it was America’s over-use of pressure on the Japanese – and the moral weight of the environmental lobby – which pushed Japan into its current and apparently intransigent position.  Although America was highly vocal in the anti-whaling campaign of the 1970s (presenting a proposal to a 1972 United Nations conference on the environment to ban all whaling for ten years), things might have been very different if, like Russia, Norway and Japan, the US had maintained a whaling presence in the post-war years.  If its industry had not withered in the late 19th century, there may not have been the political impetus to ban international whaling.  Perhaps this is the true legacy of Moby-Dick.

The Pacific bears an ironical name; for more than two centuries it has been an arena for imperial and economic appropriation, a truly fatal impact for its native peoples and animals.  The Australian government, under Kevin Rudd, is determined to end Japanese whaling in their waters.  But as more than one whale conservationist in Australia confided to me, Sea Shepherd’s antics may, for all their popular support in Australia and America (the Red Hot Chili Peppers are just one of the donors to their cause), be actively shackling the Australian government’s diplomatic efforts to end the slaughter.  One is left to wonder: is Paul Watson’s project a mere act of vanity?  Maybe – but the rebel in me still applauds his Ahabian madness.

Herman Melville was playing on ancient fears and myths of the whale.  My own mission was to discover the truth behind our relationship with the whale.  In the process, I came closer to the object of my pursuit than I had ever thought possible.  The encounter which provides the climax to my book was the single most exciting, terrifying moment of my life.  What I learned that day was that the vexed shared history between human and whale has yet to run its course.  Even now, in an age of science and domination, these creatures remain deeply mysterious animals, beyond our reach.  We still have a lot to learn about each other.

The idea to recreate this book online, in order to bring it to a wider audience, came to us from local historian Bob Maker, who recently completed transcribing the entire text. Working with him to prepare images, and to improve the museum’s cataloging of the photographs, is NBWM volunteer Penny Cole.

West end of the old Ricketson house

This project runs through the NBWM’s Departments of Digital Initiatives, Photography, and the Research Library and is supported in part by grants from the Dartmouth and Fairhaven Cultural Councils, local agencies which are supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.

Beginning in 1904, Fred Palmer began taking photographs of over two hundred buildings in Old Dartmouth with construction dates ranging from the late 1600s to the 1840s. The photographs are predominantly exterior shots of individual residential buildings. They are currently held in their original form as nitrate and glass negatives in the Adaline H. Perkins Rand Photo & Digital Archive, located in the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library. There are a few residential interiors, a scattering of shots of public buildings, and a few streetscapes in New Bedford. In many cases, Palmer’s photographs are the only known images, especially for buildings outside downtown New Bedford.

Henry Worth visited and meticulously researched each of the buildings in the collection. He traced property deeds back to the very earliest records. He consulted town meeting records, maps and other documentary sources. He also interviewed property owners and descendants of builders and earlier owners. Worth’s text combines information from all these sources with his own extensive knowledge of architectural styles and construction techniques. He was a significant figure in the earliest history of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, the governing body of The New Bedford Whaling Museum. He wrote the annual “Report of the Historical Research Section” from 1904 to 1911, and authored a number of the early Old Dartmouth Historical Sketches.

We are in the process of building a set of images on flickr that represents these historic photographs.

Photo courtesy of Cordell Polk. The consul general of Cape Verde, Pedro Graciano Gomes de Carvalho shakes hands with Mayor Scott Lang. Also pictured from left to right, State Rep. Tony Cabral, State Rep Vinny deMacedo, Maria Isabel Sanches de Carvalho

The newly appointed consul general of Cape Verde, Pedro Graciano Gomes de Carvalho was welcomed to New Bedford on Saturday as he begins his term as Cape Verde’s official government representative in Boston.

The consul spent the day in New Bedford getting acquainted with elected officials, educators and representatives of numerous Cape Verdean-American organizations.

In the morning, accompanied by his wife Isabel, he visited the schooner Ernestina and the Strand Theater on Acushnet Avenue which now serves as a cultural center for the Cape Verdean Association. A reception at the Whaling Museum followed in the afternoon, featuring a succession of welcome speeches in the museum theater.

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