The Whale as the World in Mystic’s Seaport Museum

Despite my disillusionment with the celebratory depiction of commercial whaling among the tourist attractions of Mystic and Stonington, certain exhibits in the Mystic Seaport Museum offer a breath of fresh air. Sat on the bank of the Mystic River, about half a mile North of the Drawbridge, the museum is comprised of several buildings and exhibits all designed to replicate how the town would have looked in the nineteenth-century. Visitors can walk along the banks of the river, stepping in and out of medicinal shops, churches, and taverns adorned with Victorian-era furniture, lamps, and other props. One café alongside the gravel walkway circling the museum’s buildings is even named the “Spouter Tavern”, a minor nod to the inn that Ishmael visits in the opening chapters of Moby Dick.

‘Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of out-hanging light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath – “The Spouter Inn” – Peter Coffin’ – Melville, Moby Dick, 11.

Signpost for the “Spouter Tavern”, one of the exhibit buildings at the Mystic Seaport Museum.

Signposts dispersed throughout the museum grounds also direct visitors to one of Mystic’s notable whaling relics – the Charles W. Morgan. Named after a notable whaling captain, the Morgan is the last surviving whaling vessel from the nineteenth-century. The ship was utilized for whaling voyages from 1841 to 1921, and has sat in the Mystic Seaport since the mid-20th century. In 2014, the Morgan sailed from Mystic to New Bedford, Massachusetts following years of restoration. Jamie Jones, one of the passengers aboard the Morgan’s recent voyage, describes the event as a reparative effort to dispel hetero-patriarchal and white supremacist narratives of Yankee whaling heritage in the early-twentieth century: “The 38th voyage reflected their efforts at telling a more accurate history of diversity among the whaling labor force; among the 38th voyagers were descendants of the Indigenous, Portuguese, Black, and white crew members who lived and labored on the ship” (Jones 185). Despite its transformation from whaling vessel to tourist attraction, the Morgan resists the romanticized narrative of New England whaling that other sites along the Mystic River continue to profit from.

Photo of the Charles W. Morgan, Mystic Seaport Museum.
Sperm Whale signpost directing tourists to the Charles W. Morgan.
Whaleship Anchor, Mystic Seaport Museum.

The Charles W. Morgan is beautiful in person – but in a recent visit to the Seaport Museum, I was completely blown away by a different exhibit. Inside one of the more modern buildings of the museum lies the “Monstrous: Whaling and its Colossal Impact” exhibit. The exhibit hall is filled with dozens of harpoons, photographs, and other artifacts of nineteenth-century whaling, including a sperm whale jawbone resting at the center of the room. The crown jewel of this exhibit, however, is a 14- by 51- foot scratchboard mural in the shape of a sperm whale. The mural was created by artist Jos Sances in 2019, and is titled, Or, the Whale: Ark of the Anthropocene. Viewed at a distance, the artwork appears to be just a scratched-out drawing of a sperm whale. But as you get closer, it transforms to reveal “an intricate network of animate parts, immersing us in a pageant of hand-drawn figures and vignettes literally scratched into the whale’s illusionistic skin – fretwork reminiscent of the incisions of scrimshaw or tattooing, with larger gashes representing wounds from the barbed tentacles of giant squid – and inviting us to make meaning of the panoply of images and their provocative juxtapositions” (Peterson 10).

Photo of the “Monstrous” Exhibit at the Mystic Seaport Museum.

An information panel next to the mural explains that it is meant to be viewed, or read, from left to right – beginning at the sperm whale’s head and ending at its tail. Inside the whale’s outline, the figures and landscapes scratched into it depict Sances’ “history of America from 1851”, the year of Moby Dick’s publication, “to the present”. The interior drawings particularly shed light on the ravages of American capitalism, with graphic embodiments of enslaved Africans, child coal miners, and Native American residential schools. Landscapes of devastated oceans, forests, and tundras also accompany seas of plastic bottles, contaminated waters, and forest fires in a simultaneous overlay of climate disaster. It would be easy to spend all day staring up at the intricate details of this mural, and would most certainly take several hours to dissect every figure or social, political, and ecological reference included in Sances’ design. It is even difficult to limit which pieces of the whale stand out the most to me, but I’ve included a few of them below. 

This section of the whale’s tail depicts an ocean experiencing a multitude of ecological disasters — in the bottom half a female surfer wades through a beach covered in trash, while below, a man appears to be picking up cartons of oil or waste in front of a sign reading “Sewage Contaminated Water”. The physical act of carving depictions of oceanic disaster onto the body of a whale reminded me of several remarks made in Rebecca Giggs’ Fathoms — primarily, her assertion that “no whale species was ever driven to extinction by whaling, for all its sweeping violence – but cetaceans have disappeared from the planet, already, as a result of pollution’ (Giggs 220). It is deeply troubling to imagine whaling as only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to anthropic threats to whale populations.

In this section, located near the whale’s head, I was instantly reminded of a segment in Moby Dick, in which Ishmael reflects on the potential extinction of the whale as a result of commercial whaling. Ishmael claims that, despite knowledge of other species driven extinct by capitalist hunting practices, like American bison, the singularity of whaling prevents the whale from suffering a similar fate: “Though so short a period ago — not a good life-time — the census of buffalo in Illinois extended the census of men in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region…” (Melville 502). Sances draws an American bison in this section, the gaze of which is directed outwards at the viewer. The bison stands in company with other well-documented injustices enforced upon Native American populations.

As difficult as it is to single out one portion of this mural as more affective than the rest, I was deeply moved by Sances’ rendering of the whale’s eye. Both Melville and Giggs contemplate the whale’s gaze as a unique point of encounter and confrontation between land and sea mammal. Pointing out the dispersion of the whale’s eyes on either side of its head, Melville writes that “the whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side, while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him…the peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne to mind in the fishery” (Melville 360). With this in mind, to make contact with a singular eye on one side of the whale, as opposed to two, almost makes the gaze of the whale seem more targeted. During a whale-watching trip in Australia, Giggs recalls a moment when a passing whale seemed to stare directly at her – in a surreal moment of role-reversal, she experiences “the time-freezing power of the whale, watching” (Giggs 92).

‘I am saying that those who survived in the underbellies of boats, under each other under unbreathable circumstances are the undrowned, and their breathing is not separate from the drowning of their kin and fellow captives, their breathing is not separate from the breathing of the ocean, their breathing is not separate from the sharp exhale of hunted whales, their kindred also.”

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, 5.

To lock eyes with the whale is to no longer have the privilege to view it on one’s own perceptive terms, or to project a desired image of monstrosity, cuteness, or even wonder onto it. Instead, the human viewer is forced to reckon with the question of how the whale perceives them. Viewing this section of the mural, I feel that Jos Sances is acutely aware of the reckoning that comes with this gaze. Surrounding the whale’s eye are scratchboard illustrations depicting the horrors of American chattel slavery and the Jim Crow Era. Directly below the whale’s eye is a replica of the infamous slave ship diagrams from the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Joseph Peterson imagines the ship diagrams to resemble “an enormous double headstone (or teardrop)” hanging below the whale’s eye: “the eye of Sances’s Whale is…an organ of moral-political indictment: an obligatory space of reflection in which the plunder of Black bodies is made inescapably visible” (Peterson 40). Viewers do not meet the whale’s gaze to find humility in one’s humanity, or to experience a moment of multispecies connection. The whale stares back at the human viewer, and forces them to contend with the knowledge of one’s intrinsic personhood and human rights against the irrepressible history of genocide and dehumanization from which this country was founded.

As uncomfortable as this confrontation with history may feel, I think Sances’s mural exemplifies the kind of engagement with history that is essential to the project of combatting ongoing regimes of harm and destruction targeted against marginalized human and non-human communities across the globe. The value of this kind of engagement is amplified even more by the location of this mural among the tourist destinations of Mystic and Stonington. My hope is that other people – especially those just passing through town, eager to take advantage of the pleasant maritime aesthetics of the area and the accessible whales (symbolic and real) for public viewing – will see this mural and approach their engagement within these communities and beyond, with more awareness and compassion.

“Sailor Sisters”: Women’s Work in the 19th-century New England Whalefishery

It should come as no surprise that the New England whalefishery was a male-dominated space. Seafaring has traditionally been viewed in Western societies as a gendered occupation; this results in part from the physically strenuous, dangerous labors associated with maritime employment, but in 19th-century America, Victorian moral ideals reinforced a strict binary, gendered division of labor for New England men and women. Men were free to sail the high seas for years at a time in pursuit of income to support their families, while women were restricted to shoreside domestic society and expected to manage household affairs in the meantime. While this strictly gendered narrative of American maritime history is true to an extent, a closer look at the operation of maritime industries and communities reveals the extensive, essential roles that women played in the prosperity of the New England whalefishery. In rare cases, the myth of women’ s absence aboard whaleships can even be contested.

 “She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies..a noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, “The Ship”, pg. 78.

With a large percentage of the men in townships like Mystic and Stonington gone for 3, 4, even 5 years at a time, New England women assumed sole responsibility for the upkeep of their children, homes, and wider communities. It was often assumed that the bulk of the wages earned by whalers during their voyages were distributed to female dependents back on land during their absences; but more often than not, agents or shipowners had more control over the management of seamen’s wages. In her historical survey of 19th-century maritime cultures, Captain Ahab Had a Wife, Lisa Norling documents the erratic timing and inconsistencies within shipowners’ accounts as evidence that, in many cases, whalemen’s families rarely were able to access wages or credit during a voyage: “These sorts of advances could not have represented the families’ sole source of financial support…it seems clear that the industry discussion characterizing females as dependents mattered more to the men, those at sea and those on land, as a means of cementing their own relationships” (Norling 147).

Photo of my mother’s house, originally built in 1683 by English captain John Hallam.

To make up for this loss, many New England women would take on extra work to bring in more income – this included piecework, sewing shirts for sailors, purveying retail goods, and taking in boarders, an occupation that “ranged from the small-scale, informal, and occasional to large-scale commercial enterprises” (Norling 159). I was moved to read this detail during my research, as my own mother moved to Stonington with the goal of restoring our 17th-century home and turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. The homes and inns are (in my opinion) one of the most beautiful and unique assets of these communities, and I’d like to think of my mother’s passion project as just one piece of a much wider history of women fostering comfort, hospitality and kinship within the communities they inhabit.

The labors of New England women extended beyond the shoreline during whaling voyages as well. In addition to the preparation of clothing, bedding, and preserved food for their husbands to take to sea, New England wives also supplied a vital degree of emotional intimacy and comfort in the form of tokens or letters sent to men during their absences (Norling 154). Reinforcement of romantic attachment was essential to seamen on difficult voyages apart from their families for years at a time, and constituted an additional degree of sentimental labor that New England women were expected to perform on top of their other domestic responsibilities.

‘But by far their most important contribution was indirect: their taking responsibility for family and community onshore during the men’s absences. The rhythms of migrant labor that were built into the industry’s growth and expansion into distant seas simply and fundamentally assumed the continued willingness and ability of those left on shore to care for the young, the sick, and the old; to oversee property, manage budgets, maintain households, integrate networks of kinship and neighborhood, and generally to do whatever was necessary to support families during the men’s absences” (Norling 156).

Portrait of Mary I. Burch Brewster, one of the pioneer whaling wives. Brewster accompanied her husband on the whaling ship Tiger, which sailed out of the Stonington Port in 1845.

In rare cases, some women would even accompany their husbands on whaling voyages as “sailor sisters”, a term coined by a Stonington-born woman named Mary I. Burch Brewster (1822-1878). It was believed by some ship owners that a female presence aboard whaling ships would raise the spirits of seamen; however, this privilege was usually only extended to the wealthiest or most successful ship captains and their wives. Feminist historians also speculate that some New England women opted to join their husbands on whaling voyages to inhibit the presence of concubines aboard the ship. American whalemen were known to kidnap Pacific Islander women and keep them aboard as sexual servants. In one account by Briton Cooper Busch, a whaling captain from Stonington named William Wilson recorded this statement following a stop on the island of Pohnpei: “Girls come on board – have to if brother tells them to – if they cry they are beat – a man can get any girl he wishes” (Busch 139). Beneath the already buried history of women’s involvement in the American whaling industry lies the sexual exploitation and abuse of unnamed Indigenous women.

Mermaid Statue located in the gift shop at the Mystic Seaport Museum.
Mermaid rings/jewelry from gift shop in Downtown Mystic.

Reading about the extensive labor that New England women performed to sustain themselves, their families, and their townships, I’m once again struck by the absence of any acknowledgement of this labor in local homages to whaling history across Mystic and Stonington. Any mention of women, or nod to the ‘feminine’ is included only to accessorize the strength and prowess of whalemen, many of whom remained emotionally and physically dependent on women’ s labor on and offshore. It does not seem accidental to me that so many of the whale souvenirs dispersed throughout Mystic and Stonington gift shops sit in close proximity to mermaid, siren, or other feminized tokens. In the nineteenth-century and in the present day, female bodies, labors, and accomplishments are marginalized to the extent that they occupy a similar ontological status to the non-human. 

Many ecofeminist activists and scholars proceed with the conviction that gender inequality and environmental degradation in patriarchal, extractivist societies are interdependent phenomena – simply put, we can not hope to disassemble one system of oppression without the other. If more care and accountability was taken towards the representation of women in New England whaling history, would that accountability then be feasibly taken for whales as well? Acknowledging the embodied experiences and agencies beyond that which has been accessorized in the name of hypermasculine patriotism seems to be another necessary step if we want to harness history to enact a more equitable, eco-conscious future for all.