At the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), the sea is inescapable. Salem Harbor sits mere steps from the front door. The museum’s collection, first showcased in 1799, contains “natural and artificial curiosities” brought from around the world in the hulls of ships.
But saltiness is having a real moment. Right now, the museum is focused on marine animals as they’re found in nature and literature as well as on PEM’s tradition of sharing maritime art and history. In recent months, you could listen to sea chanteys, sculpt a whale with an art-making group, or embark on a yearlong journey, making your way with other readers through the epic novel Moby-Dick.
The depths of Moby Dick
In Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick, extended through March 2026 by popular demand, you can gain a deeper understanding of the novel, a masterwork all about whaling and the sea that references the Bible and Shakespeare. Even if you haven’t read it, you are probably aware of the expanse of geography Herman Melville’s epic novel covers in the search for a white whale. The book begins, however, with a Salem connection, as it is dedicated to the author who helped shape the final draft, Nathaniel Hawthorne.



“Melville looked up to Hawthorne as a mentor, and Hawthorne’s work helped Melville make Moby-Dick a bit darker and more sinister,” says Dan Lipcan, the Ann C. Pingree director of PEM’s Phillips Library.
Lipcan hopes the exhibition will help people gain a greater appreciation for finely crafted books with their rich illustrations, design, binding, and typography. “We have books that open, fold out, and pop up or expand into a telescoping peep show view of a particular scene from the novel,” he says. “We’re thinking about ways in which designers try to summarize the contents of Moby-Dick through the exterior package.”

A two-inch-high edition was made in Germany, and another, in England, bound in white leather that mirrors the skin of the whale, with a prosthetic eye looking over the gallery. What is the ongoing allure of Moby-Dick that continues to inspire book artists? Perhaps it is that the story brings people from around the world to work together on one ship with a common goal. “It’s a great American novel in that it encompasses almost everything that was known by Americans in 1851,” says Lipcan. “It’s a story of struggle and a chase for a dream.”
Narwhals come to life
Once you’ve learned all about a fictional whale, head to PEM’s Dotty Brown Art & Nature Center to learn about real narwhals. Dubbed the “unicorns of the sea,” these seemingly mythical creatures are unlike any whale you might find in New England waters, with tusks that grow up to 10 feet and a habitat in the northernmost part of the world. In Narwhal: Revealing an Arctic Legend, the animal comes to life with a full-scale model, an eight-foot-long touchable cast of a tusk, and a soundscape of the animal’s provocative vocalizations.

Visitors will learn how narwhals are closely tied to Inuit communities who have helped the world better understand the animals that inhabit icy Arctic waters and cannot survive in captivity. Brought to PEM from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the exhibition also examines how human-caused climate change has altered the sea ice, melting it over the last several decades. Finally, it explores the range of ways that people around the world have been inspired by narwhals over centuries, including Inuit art that depicts narwhals, works acquired as recent gifts to the museum.
“The very survival of Inuit culture in many ways is tied to the narwhal,” says Jane Winchell, PEM’s curator of Natural History and the Sarah Fraser Robbins director of the Art & Nature Center. “Narwhals have been a long-term food source, but there’s also a tremendous amount of respect for the narwhal, and an interdependence. That’s one of the reasons that we particularly were excited about bringing this show to PEM.”


Organization, Cuvier, Georges, baron, and McMurtrie, Henry, and Latreille, P.A., 1831. Courtesy Smithsonian Libraries

Learn about narwhals at PEM through June 15 as part of the museum’s ongoing Climate + Environment Initiative, a concurrently inward-facing and outward-looking effort to bring conversation to a critical topic, as well as to motivate action.
Salem’s rich maritime history
Coinciding with PEM’s most recent expansion that opened in 2019, the museum’s ongoing Maritime Art and History installation offers artworks that reflect Salem’s rich history of trade and exploration, as well as a wider global perspective on the human creative response to the sea. Stunning ship portraits and an impressive 2,000+-pound, 22-foot-long model of the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner are displayed among less assuming objects that contain compelling storie,s like a calendar stick from 1803 whose carved notches record the long days that Rhode Island native James Drown spent shipwrecked and left for dead on Tristan da Cunha, a remote speck island in the South Atlantic.




“The concept of voyaging is alluring, to leave one’s life behind,” says Dan Finamore, PEM’s associate director of wxhibitions, and the Russell W. Knight curator of Maritime Art and History. “You would come home with stories nobody else could tell.”
For those who romanticize PEM’s salty origin story, East India Marine Hall, the first space where visitors could encounter PEM’s collection, will soon feel reminiscent of another age. A sampling of the many collections that were displayed in the museum during its earliest years will showcase Salem as a unique city, uniquely impacted by global maritime trade. To celebrate the bicentennial of the museum’s founding building, the ongoing installation will return attention to East India Marine Hall as the heart of the museum.

commission, 1803. M235.
The presentation will also give voice to early donors, trading partners, and museum visitors, extracted from records in the museum’s vast archive, as well as contemporary perspectives from around the globe. These captivating works, said Finamore, can inspire not only wonder but also compassion and empathy for people who lived on the other side of the world. “A mariner could bring home a fishhook from the Marquesas Islands, and to him, it could explain how different life was in the Marquesas, but also how similar it was,” he says. “The sea is a universal phenomenon across geography and across time.”