“You’re very discerning,” Rachael Dobbs said. “Seth Franklin was self-taught, and he sold paintings of ships to their owners or captains. Before he started painting, he was a ship’s carpenter. As I understand it, Nye stood in front of the diorama as it was unrolled from panel to panel and fleshed out the details with his own story. The lighting would have been dramatic, and maybe there were even sound effects. You know, someone behind the diorama shouting ‘Thar she blows!’ ”

The next panel showed the Princess rounding a point of land that the caption identified as THE TIP OF AFRICA. In another panel, the ship was at anchor against the backdrop of a lush volcanic island. Dark figures that could have been natives were standing on the deck, which was bathed in a blue glow. The caption read:

TROUBLE ISLAND—LAST PACIFIC LANDFALL.

The panel that followed showed another volcanic island, apparently much bigger, with a dozen or so ships at anchor in its harbor. The caption identified the setting as Pohnpei.

Paul continued unrolling the diorama. The next panels depicted, in reverse, the crew cutting up a sperm whale and boiling its blubber down for oil. Particularly interesting was what appeared to be a white-haired man lying on the deck over the caption:

MODERN-DAY JONAH.

“It’s the Ghost,” Rachael said. “This is marvelous! This shows Caleb Nye as he must have looked after he’d been cut out of the whale’s stomach.”

The stiff canvas of the diorama was becoming hard to handle, but with Paul unrolling it and Gamay rolling it back on its spindle, the whaling saga continued to unfold in reverse.

The panel before them was the classic depiction of a whaleboat-harpooned sperm whale in the lace-topped waves. Two legs were sticking out of the whale’s mouth. The caption identified the scene:

CALEB NYE—SWALLOWED BY A WHALE.

Rachael Dobbs could hardly contain her excitement. She started talking about a fund-raiser to restore the diorama and finding wall space to hang it. Paul and Gamay Trout found the diorama fascinating but of little help. Yet they kept going until they came to the last panel, almost a mirror image of the ship in the first panel, only returning from its long voyage. In this panel, there was a crowd of people on the dock, and the ship’s rigging was unfurled. The caption read SETTING SAIL.

Paul stood up to stretch his legs, but Gamay’s sharp eye noticed that there were a few more feet of canvas. She asked him to keep unrolling, expecting to see a title panel of some sort. Instead, they were looking at a map of the South Pacific. Lines had been drawn in a crooked pattern across the ocean. There were whales’ tails scattered across it. Each tail had a longitude-latitude position inked next to it.