Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round
yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered.
Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came
from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.
One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither
from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander
perform a feat like that?
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for
dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces
with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to
New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say,
they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every
night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti
candles.
In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of
fine maples— long avenues of green and
gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful
and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer
the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated
blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many
a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright
terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown
aside at creation’s final day.
And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their
own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer;
whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial
as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere
match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem,
where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk,
their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore,
as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas
instead of the Puritanic sands.
The Chapel
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s
Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound
for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make
a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I
did not.
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied
out upon this special errand. The sky had changed
from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.
Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth
called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn
storm. Entering, I found a small scattered congregation
of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows.
A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by
the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper
seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as
if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.
The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent
islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several
marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the
wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them
ran something like the following, but I do not pretend
to quote:
Sacred
to the memory
of
John Talbot,
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard
Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,
November 1st, 1836.
This tablet
Is erected to his Memory
by his sister.
