By David A. Fryxell
Set sail for Yankee maritime history in Mystic, Conn., where the days of Moby Dick and clipper-ship captains come back to life.
“She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her,” Herman Melville described the Pequod, Captain Ahab's whaling ship in Moby Dick. “Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's.... A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”
Barely more than 150 years after Melville wrote about the noble-yet-melancholy Pequod, only one ship remains of New England's once-vast whaling fleet. In 1941, the fledgling Marine Historical Association, forerunner of today's Mystic Seaport, rescued the Charles W. Morgan and brought it to Mystic, Conn., where the ship became the centerpiece of “the Museum of America and the Sea.” Period buildings from across New England joined the Morgan on the banks of the Mystic River to re-create a 19th-century whaling village. The 133-foot Morgan — the last surviving wooden, square-rigged commercial vessel from America's great age of sail — is now one of four National Historic Landmark ships at Mystic Seaport, along with the Emma C. Berry, Sabino and L.A. Dunton. They are part of the largest collection of boats and ships in the world, totaling nearly 500.
Many of those vessels started their voyages in Mystic — between 1784 and 1919, more than 600 ships were built in this small Connecticut town. Few cities this small can match Mystic's shipbuilding heritage, and none can compare with how that history has been preserved — and brought back to life. Some 100 interpreters make Mystic Seaport hum with activity, as it did in the 19th century — climbing riggings, singing sea chanteys, splitting codfish for salting, spinning tales of sailing adventures.