A Whale Ship was My Yale College and My Harvard: Herman Melville’s Whaling Years

In late December 1840, adrift in his personal life, 21-year-old Herman Melville arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, preparing to embark on a South Seas whaling voyage. His diverse experiences and adventures in the course of the ensuing nearly four years would profoundly shape him and his writings. During this time, young Melville toiled as a foremast hand in the uniquely demanding and colorful social world of a whaleship on three different vessels and also served for more than a year as a seaman aboard a United States Navy frigate. His odyssey took him to far-flung South American ports, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, and the Sandwich Islands. He lived among the indigenous people in the Marquesas Islands and also witnessed the early impacts of colonialism and Christian missionary work in the Pacific world.

This talk by Arrowhead docent and researcher Peter Hacunda will explore Melville’s life during the early 1840s, consider how it shaped him and why a whaleship truly was Melville’s “Yale College and [his] Harvard.”

Use the BOOK NOW button to purchase tickets: $15 BCHS Members, $20 non-members.

About Peter Hacienda

After a decades-long international business career, twenty years ago Peter Hacunda began following his passion for public history becoming a docent with the Alcatraz Night Tour program. Upon returning East, he led tours at Newport’s Gilded Age mansions and served as “mate” on a duck boat in Providence. For fifteen years he volunteered at New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park where he led walking tours, including “In Ishmael’s Footsteps: Herman Melville’s New Bedford.” Peter is an alumnus of Mystic Seaport’s Munson Institute for American Maritime Studies and holds a Masters Degree in History from Providence College. In recent years, as a panelist at the American History Association Conference, he explored maritime perspectives on the California Gold Rush (2020) as well as how nineteenth-century British aristocrats helped preserve America’s historical and cultural legacies (2023). For the past two seasons as an Arrowhead docent, Peter delights in connecting visitors with matters