If all the chairs are taken during the annual Moby-Dick Marathon, held every January at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, you can always climb aboard the Lagoda. It’s the museum’s pièce de résistance: a half-scale replica of an old whaling ship outfitted with the proper rigging for a yearslong hunt in the North Atlantic. (There are dispatchable paddle boats from which sailors could harpoon the beasts, and space for furnaces capable of rendering the harvested blubber into reeking vats of oil.) The original Lagoda was scrapped for parts in 1899 after the global whaling industry swooned into obscurity. This model, commissioned in 1916, has never touched the sea, but it does function as an impeccably Melvillian venue.
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