![]() ![]() Why not? When I was at sea, standing midships on the Charles W. I did not get my perfectly researched tattoo. Soon, the ship will pull into port for what is likely the final time. My journey on the Morgan is now finished. My research into weaponry was done: this was the sign I was waiting for. But the final surprise was learning that Lewis Temple had adapted his harpoon head design from one used for centuries by the Inuit in the Arctic, the region on which my current studies and imagination are fixated. I teach 19th-century American literature and therefore this connection was powerful to me, too. New Bedford was also the city in which Frederick Douglass had found port work - whaling industry labor - after his escape from enslavement. ![]() The inventor of this particular harpoon barb was Lewis Temple, a free African-American blacksmith who owned a smithy in New Bedford, that same whaling port where the Morgan was built and from which Herman Melville had sailed. When I started researching the weapon’s history, the perfect aptness of the Temple toggle head for my self-inscription was almost too much. Like a tattoo, a harpoon is designed to embed itself into flesh. The asymmetrical harpoon head features what the New Bedford Whaling Museum nicely describes as a “dynamically upsweeping rear barb, a gently curving front barb, and the ability of the barbs to ‘toggle,’ or pivot on an axle and swing upon once planted deep into the blubber.” I loved this shape, loved its association with the ship. It is one of the harpoon designs used on the Morgan, but not just the Morgan: it was also used on the Morgan’s sister ship Acushnet, which is best known now for carrying the young harpooneer Herman Melville. The chance to be among the very few chosen to voyage on the only whaleship left from the age of spermaceti candles and Moby-Dick - my obsession! - on a ship on which no one alive has ever sailed! - here was my tattoo opportunity.Īnd the Temple toggle was perfect. I preferred something more specialized or esoteric, like the terrific whale stamps used by sailors in C19 logbooks, representing particular kills. Images I had considered and rejected include a ship or a whale - but these symbols were too obvious, I thought. I thought that the right iconography would present itself to me at some point, and that it would likely come from the oceanic history that is the object of both my academic research and my general enthusiasm. I don’t presently have any tattoos, but I’ve been considering it for a while. ![]() Morgan, the world’s only surviving 19th-century wooden whaleship, and I wanted a tattoo to commemorate my journey. I was setting sail on the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. THE TATTOO I thought I would get was the head of a Temple toggle harpoon. ![]()
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