All Astir...

Keep an eye on the Whaling Museum website, YouTube channel, and Facebook page during this shelter-in-place period! The museum staff are busy making their collection available on the Web, often with expert interpretation.

 

A Virtual MDM

Beginning Friday, April 17, at 5 P.M. Eastern, the museum will make available a one-hour video segment from a recent Moby Dick Marathon. The closing chapters will be read by folks currently in "lockdown" at home.

Tours of the Collection

The Museum from Home series is an ever-expanding set of resources for students and parents.

• Check out the "Educator Website" video series.
• Go behind-the-scenes with the "Collections Show & Tell" series.
• Search the museum's entire trove of objects and photographs. Scrimshaw knuckle-duster anyone?

The current exhibition of Dutch maritime paintings, De Wind is Op!, is now behind closed doors, but a wealth of material is available online:

• The entire (4.5 hour) opening symposium.
• A tour of the works, with commentary by Chief Curator, Christina Connett Brophy.
• The complete exhibition catalog(!). Grab a copy while you can.

If you have wandered the museum during the Marathon's "Graveyard Shift" and browsed the items in Turner Gallery (where we used to read Cetology), you'll want to watch these videos guided by Akeia de Barros Gomes, Curator of Social History; and Michael Dyer, Curator of Maritime History.

Speaking of Maritime Museums

The Mystic Seaport Museum offers its share of digital treasures, including a cool "Behind the Scenes" series.

 

 Other Avenues

• Explore the Melville Society website, particularly the set of blogs by MDM pillar Robert K. Wallace.
• Get lost in the Melville Electronic Library and Melville's Marginalia.
• Search through Melville's papers at Harvard's Houghton Library, like his letter to Hawthorne dated Aug. 13, 1852. (Zoom in and try to decipher his scrawl.)

In your "insular Tahiti"...

These recordings of M-D could ease the monotony of isolation. All are available as free, downloadable .mp3 files. So load up your audio device of choice for those home-bound sessions of low-impact aerobics.

• Both Librivox and Project Gutenberg offer the same reading by Stewart Wills. He's a good, clear speaker, not overly dramatic. Slightly annoying is the 15-second intro to each file: "This is a Librivox recording, ..." There are 44 .mp3 files, including Etymology and Extracts. The Librivox site lets you download all the recordings in a single .zip file (677 MB); on the Gutenberg site, you can only download each file separately. (Scroll down the Gutenberg page to see the files in .mp3 format.)
• The recordings of the Moby Dick Big Read were posted in weekly installments back in 2013 (and duly reviewed). The drivers of this project, Angela Cockayne and Philip Hoare, recruited as readers prominent actors, authors, and artists; as well as TV/radio hosts, scientists, sailors, students, and a Prime Minister. The voices are varied, and nearly all the readings are top-notch. (Tilda Swinton reading Loomings is refreshingly unexpected.) You have to download each of the 136 chapters separately (no Etymology or Extracts), via the "down arrow" icon at the top-right corner of the player.

One caveat: All of these readings are from some copy of M-D that does not include the corrections made (by Hayford, Parker, and Tanselle) for the 1988 Northwestern-Newberry edition (discussed previously).

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Whaling Museum closed through March 27

The Whaling Museum just announced that it will close immediately due to "the growing concerns related to the coronavirus."

The Museum plans to remain shuttered to the public through March 27, 2020. Consult the Museum's website for updates.

Think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible plague!
- Chapter 71

...a time to hunker down with a good book.

Sunspots & Whale Strandings

Biologists have already demonstrated that many animals can navigate by somehow sensing Earth’s magnetic field lines. Gray whales, which migrate over 10,000 miles a year through a featureless expanse of blue, might be relying on a similar hidden sense.
        - New York Times, 25 Feb. 2020

The Times article quoted above summarizes a study published in Current Biology; a collaboration of Duke University biologists and an astronomer from Chicago's Adler Planetarium. The research looks at strandings of healthy gray whales, chosen because they have "one of the longest migrations of any mammal, an extensive history in the stranding database, and [are] near-shore migrator[s]." (Near-shore is where "small navigation errors increase the risk of stranding.")

Previous studies have correlated these strandings with solar magnetic storms, but were the strandings the result of alterations of the Earth's geomagnetic field, or did the storms somehow "disrupt the animal's receptor itself"?

Examining the influence of climate/season, magnetic field displacement, and radio-frequency noise, the researchers conclude that the whales' navigation errors are "best explained by increases in RF noise rather than alterations to the magnetic field." The analog that comes to mind is headlights of oncoming cars when you're walking at night.

One of the authors, biologist Jesse Granger, notes that such RF noise is not the sole cause of gray whale strandings. Her hope, according to the Times, is "to unlock the secrets of magnetic navigation."