The first of the Moby-Dick lecture series lectures, by Dr Chris Routledge, entitled From Liverpool’s Greenland Street to Greenland’s Liverpool Coast: William Scoresby, Whaling, and Exploration, is now available to watch or download from his website here.
Join us on Wednesday June 5th for a free public lecture by Dr Joanna Ostapkowicz of National Museums Liverpool entitled ‘To be closest to the Creator’: Nuu-chah-nulth and Inuit whaling imagery in the collections of the World Museum, Liverpool. This is the final lecture in what has been a diverse and remarkable series about whaling, the Arctic, and marine science. It takes place at 1pm on June 5th, in the 4th floor lecture theatre at the Merseyside Maritime Museum.
10% off in the Maritime Dining Rooms for guests attending the lectures.
On May 22nd (1pm-2pm) Professor Chris Frid of the University of Liverpool will be giving a talk entitled “Whales, fish & sponges: the scientific & social challenges of marine conservation” at the 4th Floor Lecture Theatre in the Merseyside Maritime Museum. Like the others in this series this public lecture is free to all.
Professor Frid’s talk was to have been the last in the Moby Dick lecture series, but as it happens there is still one to go. Dr Joanna Ostapkowicz’s rescheduled talk entitled “‘To be closest to the Creator’: Nuu-chah-nulth and Inuit whaling imagery in the collections of the World Museum, Liverpool” will now take place at 1pm on Wednesday June 5th.
This week’s Moby Dick lecture series is by Dr Bernard Stonehouse of the Scott Polar Institute, University of Cambridge and is entitled Liverpool’s Arctic Whalers: the story of an industry. This is a free public lecture which takes place on May 15th at 1pm in the 4th Floor Lecture Theatre of the Merseyside Maritime Museum. To get you in the mood, below is a lecture given by Dr Stonehouse in 2011 at Gresham College on ‘The Greenlanders – Arctic whaleships and whalers’:
Katie McGettigan’s talk at the Museum of Liverpool on Monday May 6th (2pm-3pm) already promises fascinating insights into Melville’s time in Liverpool and the city’s influence on his work. But Katie has also been working with Dr. Diana Powell on a project to map landmarks from Melville’s visits onto the current map of Liverpool. Using Google Earth, and a map of the city published in 1808, the result is an interactive map that can be viewed in a web browser or even downloaded to a smartphone for use by anyone interested in visiting some of the locations themselves.
The map, and more details about the project can be seen here: Melville’s Liverpool.
This Wednesday, May 1st 2013, sees the third of the Moby-Dick lectures at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. This free public lecture is given by Emeritus Professor David Murray from Nottingham University, and is about Herman Melville and Moby-Dick. The lecture starts at 1pm in the 4th floor lecture theatre at the museum.
The second in our series of free public lectures, by Gavin Hunter, takes place on Wednesday April 24th entitled From Whaling to MacFisheries: Leverhulme, Soap & the Outer Hebrides. This lecture will explore the involvement of the Lever Brothers soap manufacturing empire in whaling and fishing on the islands of Lewis and Harris.
The lecture is part of the Moby Dick Lecture Series at the Merseyside Maritime Museum and is free to attend.
Picture of the whaling station on Harris is from Virtual Hebrides.
The Moby-Dick lecture series begins on Wednesday April 17th, 1-2pm, at the Merseyside Maritime Museum 4th Floor Lecture Theatre with a talk entitled ‘From Liverpool’s Greenland Street to Greenland’s Liverpool Coast: William Scoresby Jr., Whaling, and Exploration’ by Dr. Chris Routledge. The talk will offer a brief history of whaling in Liverpool and consider William Scoresby Jr.’s short career as a Liverpool whaler. Snubbed by the Admiralty, Scoresby attempted to explore and document the Arctic regions alongside his commercial duties as the commander of a whale ship.
More information about the lecture series is here. It is still not too late to volunteer to read in the Moby-Dick marathon. For more information, visit this page.
Apart from the marathon reading (you can volunteer to read a chapter here if you haven’t already) there is a full programme of events for adults and children taking place at the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the Museum of Liverpool over the weekend of May 4th-6th. In this post I want to highlight two of the free talks taking place over the weekend.
On Saturday, May 4th, Dr. Janet West, from the Scott Polar Research Institute, will be talking about Scrimshaw in the Age of Moby-Dick (3pm-4pm Merseyside Maritime Museum). Scrimshaw was a craft that began on whaling ships and involved carving, cutting and polishing whale teeth and bones. These illustrated whale hunts, or recorded important events during voyages; they are often very beautiful. You can see examples of scrimshaw in the Museum as part of the Whale Trail. Dr. West’s talk promises to give fascinating insights into this rare art form.
On Monday May 6th, at the Museum of Liverpool, the focus shifts to the time Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, spent in Liverpool, with Katie McGettigan’s talk ‘Sailors love this Liverpool’: Herman Melville and Liverpool in Fact and Fiction (2pm-3pm Museum of Liverpool).
Melville visited Liverpool twice, and used the city as the setting for part of his 1849 novel Redburn, which describes the adventures of a young sailor on his first voyage. Examining both Melville’s real-life and literary dealings with the city, this talk will look at what Melville might have experienced as a sailor visiting Liverpool in the 1840s, before looking at Melville’s representation of Liverpool and its people in his fiction. An interactive map of Melville’s Liverpool is here.
The full programme of events for adults and children is here. If you haven’t yet volunteered to read a chapter in the marathon, you can do so here. Most available places are now on Sunday 5th and Monday 6th of May.
In the weeks before and after the weekend of our marathon reading, there will be a series of accessible public lectures exploring Liverpool’s connection with Melville and Moby Dick, mythologies of whaling, whaling in Liverpool, and the whaling industry in Liverpool and the Northwest, and on whales and marine conservation. The programme is starting to shape up, so I thought I would share what we have so far:
Provisional programme:
mobydickonthemersey.org 