2024 Walter Bezanson Archival Fellowship
by Chris Bates, CHASE Doctoral Researcher at the University of Sussex.
1: In the Reading Room. Image courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum
This summer, I was lucky enough to travel to New England as the recipient of the Herman Melville Society’s Walter Bezanson Archival Fellowship for 2024. The two-week fellowship, which took place at the New Bedford Museum Whaling Museum, granted me access to a vast collection of materials documenting the history of the whaling industry, as well as the collection of the Melville Society itself. Having spent countless hours reading and writing about Melville in service of both by my MA and now my PhD, I was excited to see what I could take from an extended archival visit that I am unable to from my home in East Sussex.
My aim in heading to New Bedford was to gather information about how the whaling industry sourced, processed, and utilised timber to deepen my understanding of how Melville presents the many lives of trees and wood across his work, as well as how the timber and whale oil economies were enmeshed during the first half of the nineteenth-century. In turn, I will utilise this information in my wider thesis about what an analysis of political economies of wood within early- and nineteenth-century American literature might teach us about how our present ecological and social relationships became impoverished, and potential solutions for their restoration. The museum’s reading room, ably managed by Madeline Smith, certainly provided rich pickings: contracts for the construction of whaling ships; journals of lumbermen who went “live-oaking” in the swamps of Louisiana; countless account books detailing the outfitting of whalers; reports written by missionaries in the Pacific Islands who traded for goods using timber; decades-old journals and serials describing the process of building wooden whalers in minute detail. I could go on and on, but needless to say I found a huge amount of material useful for my argument. Thanks, too, to all those in the fantastic team the museum who helped make my trip a success: Madeline Smith, Marina Wells, Samantha Santos, Emma Rocha, Bob Rocha, and many others.
2: Information board on shipbuilding at Mattapoisett. Image courtesy of Chris Bates
As a resident of the UK who is studying literature from the other side of the Atlantic, I was surprised and delighted by much I gained from simply being in the US. Beyond the archive, I was privileged to be able to travel to a number of other fascinating sites: Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau was inspired to write Walden; Cape Cod, which inspired Thoreau to write, well, Cape Cod, a focus of a later chapter in my thesis; Arrowhead farm, where Melville wrote Moby-Dick and other great works; Concord, MA, home of literary giants Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the site of the “shot heard round the world” which began the American Revolution on April 19, 1775.
In addition to these sights of literary pilgrimage, I also seized the chance to travel through the New England landscape and gained a great sense of how its geography, ecology, and materiality may have shaped the timber economies in New England. A particular highlight, for example, was being able to trace the route of a map produced in 1856, which outlined the location of mills and other infrastructural features in the nearby town of Mattapoisett. Following those roads and rivers, with their entanglements of old stone walls, forest edges, and vibrant wetlands put me right at the material and historical heart of my argument, as did the town information boards that pinpointed exactly which dock belonged to the shipbuilders of the Acushnet, which Melville sailed on as a young man and inspired so much of his work.
I was also delighted to be given a tour by leading Melville scholar, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, of the last remaining original, wooden, whaling ship, the Charles W. Morgan. Docked at Mystic Seaport, CT. The restored ship served as a powerful example of the extent to which sailors such as Melville were living in a wooden world and the sheer amount of old-growth timber that would have been felled in order to provide the components of the ship. I was also delighted to be shown around the shipyard by lead shipwright, Scott Gifford, whose knowledge of timber was second-to-none.
3: The Charles W. Morgan at Mystic Seaport. Image courtesy of Chris Bates.
The trip was also a great opportunity to meet other scholars and extend my research network; it was a delight to meet people who loved talking about issues related to my research as much as I do. I am extremely grateful to those scholars, especially those in the Melville Society Cultural Project, who took the time to ask about my work, suggest avenues for further research and to prod and probe me with questions that have yielded a great deal of thought in the subsequent weeks. So, a sincere thanks to Wyn Kelley, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Tim Marr, Jennifer Baker, Christopher Sten, Erica Zimmer, and Tony McGowan. I’d also like to take the opportunity here to thank CHASE for their support with this trip. Whilst the fellowship did come with a stipend, travel to the US is expensive and I was fortunate enough to be able to use CHASE RTSG fund for my flights, which helped a great deal.
To those considering applying for future fellowships in any subject area, I cannot recommend it enough. Even if the application proves unsuccessful, the process itself is extremely valuable. In my case, it enabled me to organise my inchoate ideas into something resembling coherence and I now look back at my initial application letter with satisfaction at seeing how far my ideas have come since those first steps. My supervisor, Michael Jonik, was, as always, invaluable in helping support and shape my application, so many thanks to him.
Finally, this fellowship has provided me with much food for thought and I find myself with a great deal of motivation for the coming academic year. Indeed, since I returned from the US at the end of July, much of my time has been taken up with writing abstracts for conferences, treatments for potential articles, and writing up my archival research into the beginnings of a chapter, for which I am extremely grateful. I hope as many of my CHASE colleagues as possible are able to experience the same over the course of their research.