It’s a whale of a repair job

As researched by Daniel Rodrigues, a member of the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Leadership Council and the grandson of Captain John T. Gonsalves, the men were wrestled down by the rest of the crew before they could reach Gonsalves and harm him.

For punishment, the two mutineers were hanged by their thumbs for 10 minutes then locked in the ship’s brig. Their imprisonment lasted about a week, when the Morgan came upon a group of whales and every available man was needed for the hunt and the eventual slaughter and processing of the blubber into oil.

“My grandfather, he saw a lot on that ship,’’ said Rodrigues, 81, of Taunton.

Gonsalves, who was born in Cape Verde and began his maritime career as an 11-year-old cabin boy, served at the helm during the Morgan’s final voyage in 1921. Since then, the ship has served as a docked museum, the last wooden whaling ship in the world, according to Stephen C. White, president of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, where the ship has been on display since 1941.

Seaport officials are now considering whether to make the ship seaworthy again so that it can tour New England’s coastline in the summer of 2012, with stops in New London, Newport, R.I., Provincetown, Mass., and New Bedford, Mass. The Morgan is undergoing a $6 million restoration at the museum, which has a working shipyard. Putting air in the sails would cost an additional $2 million. The idea has been tossed around for at least a decade, but last May, White and other officials started giving it serious consideration.

Next month, the museum’s administrators and restoration officials will gather and may decide on whether to sail the ship.

“We’ll bring forward what we’ve learned so far, which will probably be that it needs a tremendous amount of work,’’ said Quentin Snediker, director of the Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard.

The Morgan had run-ins with cannibals in the Pacific and with Confederate raiders and German U-Boats in the Atlantic, among other experiences during 37 whaling voyages spanning 80 years, said museum spokesman Michael O’Farrell.

The ship traveled the globe in pursuit of whales, typically spending three to five years at sea, occasionally docking for supplies. The crew, usually numbering about 35, reflected the ethnic diversity of the 50 countries it visited. In almost 200 years of commercial whaling, approximately 2,700 ships made 14,000 voyages, O’Farrell said.

There are accounts of whale hunts aboard the Morgan contained in the memoirs of Nelson Cole Haley, a harpooner aboard the ship from 1849 to 1853. The Morgan carried seven small boats that were deployed to chase whales.

In one account, Haley and a handful of men give quick chase to a whale protruding from the water:

“With the speed we were going, the boat shot like a dart by his hump,’’ Nelson wrote. “I raised the iron, and with all the force I was capable of, I sent it to the socket into the vast mass of blubber and meat that was now only a foot or two clear of the boat.’’

Whales were towed to the boat, and hoisted along the side, where they were cut into “blankets’’ for processing.

The Morgan has undergone three major restorations, the first in the 1880s. At the completion of current repairs, it should retain about 10 percent of its original materials. The ship was pulled from the water last November and the restoration is expected to be completed by the summer of 2011.

White said of the Morgan, which was built in New Bedford and launched there in 1841, “she needs someone to protect her, and right now the Mystic Seaport is her protector. We don’t own her - she’s New England’s ship, and indeed is the world’s ship as a living museum.’’

In 1966, the ship, which was named after its original owner, was designated a National Historic Landmark by the US Department of the Interior.

O’Farrell said the ship was acquired by the museum in 1941 from a private owner and it has hosted approximately 20 million visitors since then.

“The museum built a town around the Morgan to show what a 19th-century seafaring town would have looked like,’’ he said. “It gave people a bigger reason to come to here, and to Mystic. The impact of the Morgan has been transformational.’’

The majority of the restoration involves replacing the wooden planks that form the outside shell and the framing of the ship. The museum already has a massive stockpile of wood set aside just off the main parking lot. Long-leaf pine from Georgia and live oak salvaged from areas hit by hurricanes Katrina and Ike will be used, the same type of wood used during the original construction. The restoration crew includes eight full-time shipwrights.

The ship is open for visitors during the restoration. Large braces hold it upright and a three-story staircase provides access to the deck. The ship looks much as it always has, though it is without its massive masts and sails, which were dismantled for the restoration.

Two huge pots sit in a red-brick pit on the deck. The pots were used to boil down the blubber into oil, which was poured into wooden barrels that were stacked in the hold of the ship. When the massive compartment was filled, it was time to head home.

After touring the Morgan for the first time Thursday, Mary Miltimore of Southport, Conn., stood next to the pots and marveled.

“It’s incredible to think of all the places this ship has been and all the adventures,’’ she said. “I really can’t wait to see it when they’re done.’’