Before there was the city, or even the village of New Bedford, the Russell family had settled in the Old Dartmouth Purchase on the South Coast of Massachusetts which lies between Cape Cod and Rhode Island.
Miles away on the island of Nantucket sand kept filling in the opening to the harbor used by the whale ships, making it difficult to get the returning ships filled with whale oil and whale products over the sand bar. Something needed to be done as methods used to lift ships over the bar were becoming impractical and expensive. Nantucket, being an island, required that whale products would have to be loaded onto ships to get them to the main land
New Bedford harbor, at the mouth of the Acushnet River, was wide and deep, perfect for ships of any size or freight load, and on the mainland, so in 1765 Nantucket whaling merchant Joseph Rotch purchased ten acres of land from Joseph Russell III, and brought the whaling industry to what would become New Bedford, The City That Lit the World.
When the ships and businesses came and land was needed, the Russells had it to sell.
As the village grew, so did the Russell family fortune as they made money selling land and became one of New Bedford’s oldest whaling families.
Benjamin Russell became one of the first directors of the Marine Bank of New Bedford, speculated in real estate, and owned shares in ten vessels between 1829 and 1833. That was until Andrew Jackson, who resented that the East Coast controlled the banks, the industries, and the money, instituted the Second National Bank, and several banks called in their loans. Russell had to liquidate his assets losing real estate and his interests in the vessels. By 1835 Benjamin Russell had nothing but debt and a wife and three children.
As an interesting aside, to me anyway, I moved from the state to which Andrew Jackson had sent some Eastern Native American tribes thereby assaulting their culture only to find I had moved to a city in which the same man’s actions destroyed people’s lives and assaulted a healthy commerce.
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Like many in New Bedford, Benjamin Russell went to sea to make ends meet.
In 1841 Russell signed onto the whale ship Kutusoff, bound to the Indian and Pacific Oceans going from New Bedford to St, Helena, a voyage that lasted forty-two months and the one on which he sketched what he saw .
In 1848, Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington turned those sketches into a 1,275 foot panorama that depicts that voyage.
Placed on rollers behind a customized proscenium arch, the panorama moved across a stage as Russell narrated the voyage for well over two hours in the days before movies, and it was shown in the major cities of the time.
When the tour ended, the panorama disappeared.
In 1918, without explaining how he came in possession of it, a local businessman, Benjamin Cummings, gave it to the New Bedford Whaling Museum where it was displayed in sections being last seen in full in 1961 in a vacant New Bedford grocery store, and in part at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York in the New England pavilion. It was then squirrelled away in 1971 in the basement of the museum by a curator so that it would sit quietly and hidden from a museum president who really wanted it gone because it was deemed worthless and impossible to conserve.
Now the 170 year old painting, after a three year process of extensive restoration work needed because of damage done to it over its life span, will be on display from July 14 to October 8 at the Kilburn Mill building At Clark’s Cove in New Bedford, 7 days a week from 9 am to 5 pm.
Because the New Bedford Whaling Museum sees the Panorama as a treasure belonging to the New Bedford community, there is no admission fee.
As the Whaling Museum describes it:
“Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington’s Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World 1848) at eight feet tall and 1,295 feet long is likely the world’s largest original painting. A highly descriptive work of art and significant historical document, the moving panorama depicts the whaling industry’s expansion of American commercial hegemony throughout the world by tracking the voyage of a single New Bedford whaleship.”