Journey to New Beford

By BRETT WARNKE

             I was fortunate to arrive in New Bedford’s Whaling National Historical Park Visitor Center on a bright April day minutes before a special tour:  A ninety minute walk and talk through the Seamen’s Bethel and “The Mariner’s Home,” a former mansion turned boarding house.  The Seamen’s Bethel is open daily to the public.  The Visitor’s Center, formerly a bank built in 1853, is the locus of a thirteen block historical park.  The knobby cobblestone streets course through the crowded streets, on which, there once were 19 financial institutions. The Center’s eager volunteers and rangers encourage patrons to scan the historical dioramas and interpretive signs and are helpful with history, the site’s background, group tours, and maps for lost loners.

A short jaunt from the Visitor’s center, my tour group entered Seamen’s Bethel which still serves New Bedford seafarers.  It stands plain, proud, and white, but the cudgels of time and termites have diminished its quiet beauty.  The non-denominational church was made famous by Hollywood’s prow-shaped pulpit in John Huston’s Moby Dick.  Our tour guide looked at the 1960s pulpit like it was an imbedded tick: “It is so tacky, isn’t it?  But it’s what the public wants!”  Bethel’s grimmer but more interesting adornments are the chiseled cenotaphs.  Our guide provided a hand-out with questions about these and other information that visitors independently discovered.  After reading the cenotaphs detailing the shark-bit, the fevered, the drowned, and the lost, we reconvened to discover that seven of the cenotaphs were teenage sailors. 

                In between tours, I walked east out of the historic district over JFK Memorial parkway and MacArthur Drive.  The roads cleave the water from the city, but I could still see the forest of ship masts several blocks up the road.  I was met by the old wooden bark, the Ernestina, a surviving Arctic voyager donated from Cape Verde.

I tried to imagine the 1840s as thousands of young roustabouts, weary of poverty, rushed to New Bedford and spotted the inferno of oil barrels.  Imagine the flophouses they frequented and the smelly barks they boarded.  With only a bag and an empty stomach many hoped like Melville and Conrad to see and taste and sail the world.  Others simply went because it paid.  But only a few generations of whalers lived such lives.  The Civil War, the 1849 Gold Rush, and the discovery of oil began New Bedford’s rapid diminution.  Albert Bierstadt and Robert Swain Gifford, young artists living in the city at this time, were not known for painting steam ships.  No, they followed the money and energy to the West. 

                By 1857 there were 48 millionaires in New Bedford, a gritty and pretty city, swelling with money as the Quaker and Unitarian merchant class challenged Nantucket as the world’s whaling capital.  Melville, looking at their spare mansions wrote, “One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.” 

Today, while New Bedford’s fishing industry survives, the 1825-1860 years are forever gilded.  The majority of the city’s jobs are in health care and construction.  As I walked down passed City Hall, “A Dead Whale or a Stove Boat,” a 1985 bronze sculpture of a harpooner at the helm of a proud boat leapt out at me.  Yet, beside this indomitable mariner, a woman was merrily handing out sandwiches to the needy.  If New Bedford seems everywhere brimming with history—the streets are peppered with historic markers and statues—it could be as a result of the very real possibility of forgetting:  20 percent of the city is foreign born and the majority of local workers in the recession-stung city, who reside further west of the coast, are as likely to have a millworker as an ancestor as a mariner. 

Next door to the Bethel is the 1787 Mariner’s Home, a plain, squat, four-story building now closed to the public but open once a year for this special tour.  It once was a wholesome boarding house for voyagers who were homeless between runs.  The inside was empty but bright (from its many windows) and Alcoholics Anonymous titles, holy books, and board games filled the shelves in a center room—evidence of its recent past.  But while we toured the hollow home, my head repeatedly met with the low-hanging door frames; beware ‘ye upright pedestrians! 

 William Roach, Jr., the little known titan of 19^th century whaling, built it as a residence.  Later, operators converted it to an inn, as cozy spot of “moral influence” and uplift to compete with the pesthouses and booze guzzles nearby. 

After all the talk of blubber and hardtack, I felt a rumble in the deep.  I took a short walk up Union Street to “Brick” a narrow and bright brickoven pizzeria with 8-12 dollar pies, $7 sandwiches, and $10 calzones.  It has a mellow mood and one patron cried out over a mound of artichoke:  “If I worked nearby, I would be in here every day!”  The chicken pesto pizza was substantial and delivered a punchy flavor.  But “Brick’s” true hero is the crust—a crisp exterior but moist within.

                For dessert, a four-minute drive to “Biera Mar Bakery” (Portuguese for “Sea Border”) was a delicious detour after a day of walking and learning.  I shuffled a bit after the pizza and the gulls honked at me as I entered, but I was craving a sweet.  The proprietress—a traveler herself—spoke no English but the goods were worth the confusion.  She adoringly pointed out hanging tiles of her church in Lisbon and produced a photograph of an Atlantic beach near the Vasco da Gama Bridge.  For food, she encouraged one of her $3.00 sandwiches.  But I was sated like a whaler’s hull.  I wanted a small potent dessert.  I gestured to a beguiling specimen beneath the glass; a large slice of fudgy crumb cake, dusted with coconut and packed with nuts.  With an espresso for the journey back to Providence, the entire dessert cost $2.25.  New World coffee and chocolate from a Western European immigrant near an east coast historic district:  New Bedford was worth the trip. 

If you go:  The Seamen’s Bethel (15 Johnny Cake Hill, 508-922-3295) is open on Saturdays, 10-4 and on Sundays 1-4 through April and more often in the summer.  The New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park includes 13 blocks south of Route 6.  Its visitor center 933 William Street, 508-996-4095; www.nps.gov/nebe) is open 9-5.  “Brick” is located at 163 Union Street, 508-999-4943.  “Biera Mar” Bakery is located at 82 Cove Street, a four-minute drive down JFK Memorial Highway which becomes West Rodney French Boulevard.  Turn left at Cove Street, 508-993-3211.  The Mariner House is no longer open to the public.