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Not two hours into the 2025 Moby-Dick Marathon last weekend, it was clear something big was taking shape at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Mayor Jon Mitchell early Saturday afternoon had just finished reading the chapter of Herman Melville’s novel that sets the New Bedford street scene, and he was chatting with the museum president and CEO, Amanda McMullen.
“He said ‘Amanda, this is different,’ ” McMullen said on Friday, recalling her conversation with Mitchell at the Lagoda, the half-scale whaling ship model in the Bourne Building. “We talked about the energy. The museum felt more alive than ever. You felt it on Saturday. There was just a vibrancy in this building. It was kind of pulsing.”
The 29th annual read-a-thon of Melville’s 1851 novel was the biggest yet, drawing 2,483 visitors, 60% more than 2024 and 40% more than the previous record of just over 1,700.
That record was set in 2020, less than three months before the pandemic shut down public gatherings. The global health emergency shifted the marathon to online-only events in 2021 and 2022.
The surge for the 25-hour reading on the weekend of Jan. 4 and 5 represented not only another point in the museum’s emergence from the pandemic. McMullen said it reflects a years-long effort to broaden the museum’s audience not only through marketing, including more effort on social media, but also by offering exhibits meant to draw a bigger audience, particularly younger people.
Since 2019, a year after McMullen took the helm, there’s been “an effort to make the museum more accessible, more relevant. This is not an overnight success. It has been years. We are working to not be seen as this old, boring museum on a hill.”
That’s meant more exhibits devoted to science, the environment and stewardship. A shift in focus, in terms of the one key species, whales, from “pursuit to preservation,” as McMullen put it.
As the weekend unfolded, McMullen said she and others were struck by the continuing “aging down” of the marathon crowd, which has been happening for a number of years.
McMullen said the museum keeps records on visitors’ home ZIP codes, but not their ages. Still, there is a general sense from watching the crowds that “we grew through a younger audience.”
The bigger numbers show in several ways.
While the previous peak audience for the online streaming of the event was about 6,000, this year’s event drew 9,000. The gift shop did about $15,000 in revenue, two-thirds higher than the earlier peak of $9,000.
Visitors showed up from 37 U.S. states, and at least five other countries, Australia, Sweden, Italy, France and Brazil.
The planned four-hour mini-marathon in Portuguese was complemented this year with impromptu readings in other languages, including French and Cape Verde Creole.
The opening “Call me Ishmael” chapter this year was read by actor and writer Karyn Parsons, best known for playing Hilary Banks in “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” The closing “Epilogue,” in keeping with marathon tradition, was read by the head of the museum.
McMullen said she got through it smoothly, keeping her nerves in check, as she told how the narrator survived the catastrophe of the whaler Pequod brought on by Captain Ahab’s mad pursuit of the white whale. She felt the emotion building as she read the last words.
“On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last,” goes the opening of the next-to-last sentence. “It was the devious cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children only found another orphan.”
With the word “FINIS,” McMullen said, members of the crowd rose to their feet. People cheered.
“I don’t recall in years past seeing the level of emotion,” McMullen said.
It’s scarcely an uplifting story, yet it seems to McMullen that the reading has become a destination for people seeking new year cheer in the communal reading experience.
She said she received an email a bit later from a Harvard student who had attended for the first time, thanking her for the event, which he said “felt like a shaft of light in what sometimes feels like a dark moment for American society.”
Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
Everything seemed to elevate this year. The keynotes readers embraced the challenge and joy and delivered their reading! In a world where expression of human experience is reduced to pithy sensationalism, this event is a model for cultivating community around great works of literature and affirmation of its profundity.
In the early seventies while attending SMU, now U Mass Dartmouth, I served as a greeter at the Seaman’s Bethel. One day the Bethel was visited by a young aspiring author who was a Herman Melville aficionados. I remember that he wore a beard similar to that worn by Melville. He told me that he was traveling the country to visit all the cities and towns that Melville had visited as an author including his birthplace. He felt inspiration from these travels and gained some measure of understanding as to what motivated many of Melville’s writings.
I regret that I didn’t get more information about who he was or where he was from. I wonder, these years later, has he evever attended the Moby Dick Readathon? I guess I’ll never know.