When I began researching the New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park I got very confused. Was it a national park? Was it a whaling museum? Were those the same place? If so, why did it have two different street addresses?
It turns out the “Park” is an historic district of several blocks with several buildings officially part of the park but not all owned by the National Park System. The National Park System owns a visitor center with free exhibits and a film. Kitty Corner across the street from the NP Visitor Center is the Whaling Museum with it’s exhibits and films but my National Parks pass is not honored there.
We went only to those two buildings. By the time we did that our brains were on overload so we skipped the other buildings. We might have made an effort to see the church known as Seamen’s Bethel, a.k.a the Whaleman’s Chapel in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, but it was closed to the public today as it often is on weekends for weddings, baptisms, funerals, and memorial services.
We didn’t take a lot of pictures today because there was just too much to photograph it all but here’s a small sampling of what we saw.
The below deck section is the part of a whaling ship in which the ordinary seamen slept. Even I had to duck to get in there and the bunks were too short for me to stretch out in. The sides were higher than the mattresses so you wouldn’t roll out of bed in rough weather. I’d be badly bruised, though.
When a whale was sighted, you were expected to get into one of these boats with seven other seamen and go catch a whale whose skeleton was bigger than your boat.
If the harpooner did his job right, the whale would then take you for a wild ride before it died. Then you hauled the dead whale back to the ship for processing. The products it was turned into depended on where and when you caught your whale.
Personally, I’ve never been that fond of fishing.
TTYL,
Linda