All Astir

This issue of Extracts appears as the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan begins her historic 38th Voyage. The Morgan made 37 whaling voyages, the last of which ended in 1921. Now, 93 years later, she heads to sea again. The Morgan was built less than seven miles from and only seven months after the Acushnet, the whaleship on which Herman Melville sailed; the only remaining nineteenth-century whaleship bears a close resemblance to that on which Melville served. The crew for the Morgan’s present voyage is made up not of “meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways” (NN MD 117), but rather of scholars, teachers, artists, scientists, and descendants of whalers as well as professional sailors and Mystic Seaport staff. Among the scholars sailing aboard the Morgan are Hester Blum, John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, Peter Norberg, Daniel Payne, Elizabeth Schultz, Ellie Stedall, and Robert K. Wallace. Peter Gansevoort Whittemore, Melville’s great-great-grandson, will be aboard the Morgan as the whaleship enters New Bedford for the first time in over 90 years, along with Robert K. Wallace; Michael P. Dyer, Senior Maritime Historian at New Bedford Whaling Museum; British artist Vanessa Hodgkinson, whose powerful, intellectual images inspired by Moby-Dick will be exhibited in New Bedford; and Mary K. Bercaw Edwards. These 38th Voyagers will record their time at sea in a multiplicity of ways. Readers can learn more about the Morgan’s voyage at <http://www.mysticseaport.org/38thvoyage/>.

The Morgan will spend nine days in New Bedford (June 28–July 6) and will be open to the public each day between 9 am and 5 pm. Among other activities, visitors can row a whaleboat, getting a taste of the experience Melville endured on the open ocean in the hunt for sperm whales. As part of the celebration in New Bedford, there will be a Whaling History Symposium, at which scholars and writers on Melville will speak, including Jennifer Baker, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Jaime Campomar, Jason Hine, Wyn Kelley, Timothy Marr, Dale Peterson, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Christopher Sten, and Robert K. Wallace. See the Melville Society website for more information: <http://melvillesociety.org/>.

Proposals for the Tenth International Melville Conference, “Melville in a Global Context,” which will be held in Tokyo, Japan, June 25–29, 2015, are due by August 15, 2015. This long-planned conference will be rich and rewarding, and all are encouraged to propose a paper and attend. The CFP can be found on the Melville Society website. Please note the inventive logo for the conference (Fig. 1). At the Society site, you can find a high-resolution, color digital copy of the logo and also a digitized image of the Joseph Oriel Eaton portrait of Melville (1870), owned by the Houghton Library at Harvard University. A large image of the portrait can be seen by going to the “Credits” tab in the toolbar and clicking on the smaller Eaton image. Thanks are due to the Society’s expert webmaster, Robert Sandberg, for his continuing and creative work on the site.

Fig. 1.

Logo for the Tenth International Melville Conference, “Melville in a Global Context,” designed by YOUCHAN (Yuko Ito). Courtesy of the Melville Society of Japan.

In exciting digital news, Melville’s marked and annotated volumes of William Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art (1843) and Lectures on the English Comic Writers [and] Lectures on the English Poets (1859) are now up on Melville’s Marginalia Online, along with Melville’s copy of A. J. W. Morrison’s translation of Goethe’s The Auto-Biography of Goethe, Letters from Switzerland, and Travels in Italy (1849, his copy of Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1865), and his copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The Conduct of Life (1860). The marginalia in the Hazlitt volumes, owned by William Reese, have not been published before. The editors of Melville’s Marginalia Online—Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis Marnon—continue to expand our knowledge of Melville’s intellectual life. You can view these volumes, and many others, at <http://melvillesmarginalia.org/>.