Restored Melville drafts go on display in New Bedford

Working drafts from Herman Melville's most productive years went on public display for the first time on Tuesday at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, after a four-year conservation effort recovered text from pages scorched in a 1906 warehouse fire.

Multispectral imaging revealed passages beneath the charring, including a discarded opening for a chapter of Moby-Dick in which Ishmael addresses the reader from the masthead rather than the shore.

Scholars called the recovered variants modest but telling. "You watch him choose the quieter opening," the exhibition's curator said. "The famous first line was the revision, not the instinct." The exhibition runs through March.