All Hands

The New Bedford Whaling Museum Curator of Maritime History, Michael P. Dyer, explores the deep cultural connections between American whaling and the U.S. Navy in the 19th century up to the First World War. With a quarter-century of experience studying, collecting, writing, and exhibiting American whaling and maritime history, Michael brings a mature perspective to this hitherto unexamined subject. Starting in the late 1980s with the U.S. Naval collections at the Kittery Historical and Naval Museum in Kittery, Maine, and working at Mystic Seaport Museum, the Kendall Whaling Museum, and the Australian National Maritime Museum, he has grown into this subject at every professional level.

The exhibit features diverse objects such as whalemen’s scrimshaw of naval battles, marine paintings and prints, and personal biographies and objects of sailors who served in both branches. It also features U.S. Naval Hydrographic Office sea charts to which whalers contributed, Federal documents supporting the United States Exploring Expedition, and the facts surrounding numerous naval protection and police operations in seas around the world in support of whalers.

Objects from other institutional collections are included, such as cultural artifacts from Oceania collected by Lieutenant John Collings Long, stationed on the USS United States in Callao, Peru, in 1825 at the time the U.S. schooner Dolphin was dispatched to arrest the mutineers of the whaleship Globe of Nantucket. These objects are held at the Portsmouth Atheneaum and are exhibited on loan. Other subjects include Herman Melville’s time spent in both services in the 1840s, and the adventures of Captain David Porter defending American whalers in the Pacific during the War of 1812. American whalers also serve with distinction in the Navy during the Civil War, and many objects reflect their service and experiences.