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Title: Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

Author: Raymond M. Weaver

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HERMAN MELVILLE
Mariner and Mystic
RAYMOND M. WEAVER

Engraved on wood, by L. F. Grant.
From a photograph.

HERMAN MELVILLE
MARINER AND MYSTIC

BY
RAYMOND M. WEAVER

COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
PROFESSOR FRANKLIN T. BAKER
“—il maestro cortese”

To Professor Carl Van Doren, to Miss Cora Paget, and to Mrs. Eleanor
Melville Metcalf, I am, in the writing of this book, very especially indebted.
By Professor Van Doren’s enthusiasm and scholarship I was instigated to a
study of Melville. It has been my privilege to enjoy Miss Paget’s very
valuable criticism and assistance throughout the preparation of this volume.
Mrs. Metcalf gave me access to all the surviving records of her grandfather:
Melville manuscripts, letters, journals, annotated books, photographs, and a
variety of other material. But she did far more. My indebtedness to Mrs.
Metcalf’s vivid interest, her shrewd insight, her keen sympathy can be
stated only in superlatives. To Mrs. and Mr. Metcalf I owe one of the richest
and most pleasant associations of my life.
Raymond M. Weaver.

October 1, 1921.
Most of the letters of Melville to Hawthorne included in this volume are
quoted from Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, by Julian Hawthorne.
These letters, and other citations from Mr. Hawthorne’s memoir, are
included through the courtesy of Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Devil’s Advocate 15
II Ghosts 33
III Parents and Early Years 53
IV A Substitute for Pistol and Ball 77
V Discoveries on Two Continents 98
VI Pedagogy, Pugilism and Letters 113
VII Blubber and Mysticism 128
VIII Leviathan 153
IX The Pacific 170
X Man-Eating Epicures—The Marquesas 194
XI Mutiny and Missionaries—Tahiti 215
XII On Board a Man-of-War 233
XIII Into the Racing Tide 250
XIV Across the Atlantic Again 283
XV A Neighbour of Hawthorne’s 305
XVI The Great Refusal 334
XVII The Long Quietus 349
Bibliography 385
Index of Names 391

ILLUSTRATIONS
Herman Melville Frontispiece
PAGE
Melville’s Grandfathers 40
General Peter Gansevoort
Major Thomas Melville
Allan Melville 56
Maria Gansevoort Melville 64
In 1820
In 1865
A Page from One of Melville’s Journals 104
Throwing the Harpoon 136
Sounding 136
Sperm Whaling. The Capture 160
One of Six Whaling Prints 160
“Toby.” Richard Tobias Greene 164
In 1846
In 1865
Evangelising Polynesia 184
Richard Tobias Greene. In 1885 200
First Home of the Protestant Missionaries in Tahiti 224
The Fleet of Tahiti 224
Elizabeth Shaw Melville 272
Arrowhead 312
The Fireplace. Arrowhead 312
Herman Melville. In 1868 352
Melville As Artist 368
Melville’s Children 376

HERMAN MELVILLE
Mariner and Mystic

HERMAN MELVILLE

CHAPTER I
DEVIL’S ADVOCATE
“If ever, my dear Hawthorne,” wrote Melville in the summer of 1851, “we
shall sit down in Paradise in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if
we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I
won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven); and if we shall then cross our
celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our
glasses and our heads together till both ring musically in concert: then, O
my dear fellow mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things
manifold which now so much distress us.” This serene and laughing
desolation—a mood which in Melville alternated with a deepening and less
tranquil despair—is a spectacle to inspire with sardonic optimism those
who gloat over the vanity of human wishes. For though at that time
Melville was only thirty-two years old, he had crowded into that brief space
of life a scope of experience to rival Ulysses’, and a literary achievement of
a magnitude and variety to merit all but the highest fame. Still did he
luxuriate in tribulation. Well-born, and nurtured in good manners and a
cosmopolitan tradition, he was, like George Borrow, and Sir Richard
Burton, a gentleman adventurer in the barbarous outposts of human
experience. Nor was his a kid-gloved and expensively staged dip into studio
savagery. “For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials,
and tribulations of every kind whatsoever,” he declared. And as proof of
this abomination he went forth penniless as a common sailor to view the
watery world. He spent his youth and early manhood in the forecastles of a
merchantman, several whalers, and a man-of-war. He diversified whale-
hunting by a sojourn of four months among practising cannibals, and a
mutiny off Tahiti. He returned home to New England to marry the daughter
of Chief Justice Shaw of Massachusetts, and to win wide distinction as a
novelist on both sides of the Atlantic. Though these crowded years had
brought with them bitter hardship and keen suffering, he had sown in tears
that he might reap in triumph. But when he wrote to Hawthorne he felt that
triumph had not been achieved. Yet he needed but one conclusive gesture to

provoke the world to cry this as a lie in his throat: one last sure sign to
convince all posterity that he was, indeed, one whom the gods loved. But
the gods fatally withheld their sign for forty years. Melville did not die until
1891.
None of Melville’s critics seem ever to have been able to forgive him his
length of days. “Some men die too soon,” said Nietzsche, “others too late;
there is an art in dying at the right time.” Melville’s longevity has done deep
harm to his reputation as an artist in dying, and has obscured the
phenomenal brilliancy of his early literary accomplishment. The last forty
years of his history are a record of a stoical—and sometimes frenzied—
distaste for life, a perverse and sedulous contempt for recognition, an
interest in solitude, in etchings and in metaphysics. In his writings after
1851 he employed a world of pains to scorn the world: a compliment
returned in kind. During the closing years of his life he violated the self-
esteem of the world still more by rating it as too inconsequential for
condemnation. He earned his living between 1866 and 1886 as inspector of
Customs in New York city. His deepest interest came to be in metaphysics:
which is but misery dissolved in thought. It may be, to the all-seeing eye of
truth, that Melville’s closing years were the most glorious of his life. But to
the mere critic of literature, his strange career is like a star that drops a line
of streaming fire down the vault of the sky—and then the dark and blasted
shape that sinks into the earth.
There are few more interesting problems in biography than this offered by
Melville’s paradoxical career: its brilliant early achievement, its long and
dark eclipse. Yet in its popular statement, this problem is perverted from the
facts by an insufficient knowledge of Melville’s life and works. The current
opinion was thus expressed by an uncircumspect critic at the time of
Melville’s centenary in 1919: “Owing to some odd psychological
experience, that has never been definitely explained, his style of writing, his
view of life underwent a complete change. From being a writer of stirring,
vivid fiction, he became a dreamer, wrapping himself up in a vague kind of
mysticism, that rendered his last few books such as Pierre: or The
Ambiguities and The Confidence Man: His Masquerade quite
incomprehensible, and certainly most uninteresting for the average reader.”
Unhampered by diffidence—because innocent of the essential facts—critics
of Melville have been fluent in hypothesis to account for this “complete

change.” A German critic patriotically lays the blame on Kant. English-
speaking critics, with insular pride, have found a sufficiency of disruptive
agencies nearer at home. Some impute Melville’s decline to Sir Thomas
Browne; others to Melville’s intimacy with Hawthorne; others to the
dispraise heaped upon Pierre. Though there is a semblance of truth in each,
such attempts at explanation are, of course, too shallow and neat to merit
reprobation. But there is another group of critics, too considerable in size
and substance to be so cavalierly dismissed. This company accounts for
Melville’s swift obscuration in a summary and comprehensive manner, by
intimating that Melville went insane.
Such an intimation is doubtless highly efficacious to mediocrity in
bolstering its own self-esteem. But otherwise it is without precise
intellectual content. For insanity is not a definite entity like leprosy,
measles, and the bubonic plague, but even in its most precise use, denotes a
conglomerate group of phenomena which have but little in common.
Science, it is true, speaking through Nordau and Lombroso, has attempted
to show an intimate correlation between genius and degeneracy; and if the
creative imagination of some of the disciples of Freud is to be trusted, the
choir invisible is little more than a glorified bedlam. Plato would have
accepted this verdict with approval. “From insanity,” said Plato, “Greece
has derived its greatest benefits.” But the dull and decent Philistine,
untouched by Platonic heresies, justifies his sterility in a boast of sanity.
The America in which Melville was born and died was exuberantly and
unquestionably “sane.” Its “sanity” drove Irving abroad and made a recluse
of Hawthorne. Cooper alone throve upon it. And of Melville, more
ponderous in gifts and more volcanic in energy than any other American
writer, it made an Ishmael upon the face of the earth. With its outstanding
symptoms of materialism and conformity it drove Emerson to pray for an
epidemic of madness: “O Celestial Bacchus! drive them mad.—This
multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving
for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalise this too much
pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine
of alcohol, of politics, of money.”
From this it would appear that a taste for insanity has been widespread
among poets, prophets and saints: men venerated more by posterity than by
their neighbours. It is well for Socrates that Xantippe did not write his

memoirs: but there was sufficient libel in hemlock. In ancient and mediæval
times, of course, madness, when not abhorred as a demoniac possession,
was revered as a holy and mysterious visitation. To-day, witch-burning and
canonisation have given place to more refined devices. The herd must
always be intolerant of all who violate its sacred and painfully reared
traditions. With an easy conscience it has always exterminated in the flesh
those who sin in the flesh. In times less timid than the present it dealt with
sins of the spirit with similar crude vindictiveness. We boast it as a sign of
our progress that we have outgrown the days of jubilant public crucifixions
and bumpers of hemlock: and there is ironic justice in the boast. Openly to
harbour convictions repugnant to the herd is still the unforgivable sin
against that most holy of ghosts—fashionable opinion; and carelessly to let
live may be more cruel than officiously to cause to die.
Melville sinned blackly against the orthodoxy of his time. In his earlier
works, he confined his sins to an attack upon Missionaries and the
starchings of civilisation: sins that won him a succes de scandal. The
London Missionary Society charged into the resulting festivities with its
flag at half mast. Cased in the armour of the Lord, it with flagrant injustice
attacked his morals, because it smarted under his ideas. But when Melville
began flooding the very foundations of life with torrents of corrosive
pessimism, the world at large found itself more vulnerable in its
encasement. It could not, without absurdity obvious even to itself, accuse
Melville of any of the cruder crimes against Jehovah or the Public. Judged
by the bungling provisions of the thirty-nine articles and the penal code, he
was not a bad man: more subtle was his iniquity. As by a divine visitation,
the Harper fire of 1853 effectually reduced Pierre—his most frankly
poisonous book—to a safely limited edition. And the public, taking the hint,
ceased buying his books. In reply, Melville earned his bread as Inspector of
Customs. The public, defeated in its righteous attempts at starvation, hit
upon a more exquisite revenge. It gathered in elegiacal synods and
whispered mysteriously: “He went insane.”
To view Melville’s life as a venturesome romantic idyll frozen in mid-
career by the deus ex machina of some steadily descending Gorgon is
possible only by a wanton misreading of patent facts. Throughout
Melville’s long life his warring and untamed desires were in violent conflict
with his physical and spiritual environment. His whole history is the record

of an attempt to escape from an inexorable and intolerable world of reality:
a quenchless and essentially tragic Odyssey away from home, out in search
of “the unpeopled world behind the sun.” In the blood and bone of his youth
he sailed away in brave quest of such a harbour, to face inevitable defeat.
For this rebuff he sought both solace and revenge in literature. But by
literature he also sought his livelihood. In the first burst of literary success
he married. Held closer to reality by financial worry and the hostages of
wife and children, the conflict within him was heightened. By a vicious
circle, with brooding disappointment came ill health. “Ah, muskets the gods
have made to carry infinite combustion,” he wrote in Pierre, “and yet made
them of clay.” The royalties from his books proved inadequate for the
support of his family, so for twenty years he earned a frugal living in the
customs houses in New York. During his leisure hours he continued to
write, but never for publication. Two volumes of poetry he privately
printed. His last novel, surviving in manuscript, he finished a few months
before his death. Though it is for the second half that his critics have felt
bound to regret, it seems that in serenity and mental equipoise, the last state
of this man was better than the first.
In his early manhood he wrote in Mardi: “Though essaying but a sportive
sail, I was driven from my course by a blast resistless; and ill-provided,
young, and bowed by the brunt of things before my prime, still fly before
the gale.... If after all these fearful fainting trances, the verdict be, the
golden haven was not gained;—yet in bold quest thereof, better to sink in
boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter
wreck, if wreck I do.” To the world at large, it has been generally believed
that the Gods ironically fulfilled his worst hopes.
One William Cranston Lawton, in an Introduction to the Study of American
Literature—a handy relic of the parrot judgment passed upon Melville
during the closing years of his life—so enlightens young America: “He
holds his own beside Cooper and Marryat, and boy readers, at least, will
need no introduction to him. Nor will their enjoyment ever be alloyed by a
Puritan moral or a mystic double meaning.” And Barrett Wendell, in A
Literary History of America—a volume that modestly limits American
literature of much value not only to New England, but even tucks it neatly
into the confines of Harvard College—notes with jaunty patronage:
“Herman Melville with his books about the South Seas, which Robert Louis

Stevenson is said to have declared the best ever written, and his novels of
maritime adventure, began a career of literary promise, which never came
to fruition.”
These typical pronouncements, unperverted by the remotest touch of
independent judgment, transcend Melville’s worst fears. “Think of it!” he
once wrote to Hawthorne. “To go down to posterity is bad enough, any
way; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals!’ When I
think of posterity in reference to myself, I mean only the babes who will
probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up
the ghost. I shall go down to them, in all likelihood. Typee will be given to
them, perhaps, with their gingerbread.” In that mythical anomaly known as
the “popular mind,” Melville has, indeed, survived as an obscure adventurer
in strange seas and among amiable barbarians. Typee and Omoo have lived
on as minor classics. Though there have been staccato and sporadic attacks
upon the ludicrous inadequacy of the popular judgment upon Melville, not
until recently, and then chiefly in England has there been any popular and
concerted attempt to take Melville’s truer and more heroic dimensions. An
editorial in the London Nation for January 22, 1921, thus bespeaks the
changing temper of the times:
“It is clear that the wind of the spirit, when it once begins to blow through
the English literary mind, possesses a surprising power of penetration. A
few weeks ago it was pleased to aim a simultaneous blast in the direction of
a book known to some generations of men as Moby-Dick. A member of the
staff of The Nation was thereupon moved in the ancient Hebrew fashion to
buy and to read it. He then expressed himself on the subject, incoherently
indeed, but with signs of emotion as intense and as pleasingly uncouth as
Man Friday betrayed at the sight of his long-lost father. While struggling
with his article, and wondering what the deuce it could mean, I received a
letter from a famous literary man, marked on the outside ‘Urgent,’ and on
the inner scroll of the manuscript itself ‘A Rhapsody.’ It was about Moby-
Dick. Having observed a third article on the same subject, of an equally
febrile kind, I began to read Moby-Dick myself. Having done so I hereby
declare, being of sane intellect, that since letters began there never was such
a book, and that the mind of man is not constructed so as to produce such
another; that I put its author with Rabelais, Swift, Shakespeare, and other
minor and disputable worthies; and that I advise any adventurer of the soul

to go at once to the morose and prolonged retreat necessary for its
deglutition.”
Having earlier been hailed in France as an “American Rabelais;” prized in
England by the author of The City of Dreadful Night; greeted by Stevenson
with slangy enthusiasm as a “howling cheese;” rated by Mr. Masefield as
unique among writers of the sea; the professed inspirer of Captain Hook of
Sir James Barrie’s Peter Pan, Melville is beginning to appear as being
vastly more than merely a “man who lived among the cannibals” and who
returned home to write lively sea stories for boys.
The wholesale neglect of Melville at the hands of his countrymen—though
explained in some part as a consummation of Melville’s best efforts—has
not been merely unintelligent, but thoroughly discreditable. For Melville,
from any point of view, is one of the most distinguished of our writers, and
there is something ludicrous in being before all the world—as, assuredly,
we sometimes are—in recognising our own merit where it is contestable,
and in neglecting it where it is not.
It has been our tradition to cherish our literature for its embodiment of
Queen Victoria’s fireside qualities. The repudiation of this tradition—as a
part of our repudiation of all tradition—has made fashionable a wholesale
contempt for our native product. “I can’t read Longfellow” is frequently
remarked; “he’s so subtle!” Our critical estimates have laboured under the
incubus of New England provincialism: a provincialism preserved in
miniature in the first pages of Lowell’s essay on Thoreau. At present we
need to have the eminence of the section recalled to us; but during the
period of Melville’s productivity, it was at its apex, and in its bosom
Melville wrote. This man, whose closest literary affinities were Rabelais,
Zola, Sir Thomas Browne, Rousseau, Meredith, and Dr. John Donne,—a
combination to make the uninitiated blink with incredulity—was indebted
to Nathaniel Hawthorne for the best makeshift for companionship he was
ever to know: one of the most subtly ironical associations the imps of
comedy ever brought about. Nor was the comedy lessened by Mrs.
Hawthorne’s presence upon the scene. Shrewd was her instinctive
resentment of her husband’s friend. Viewed by his neighbours “as little
better than a cannibal and a ‘beach comber’”—such was the report of the
late Titus Munson Coan in a letter to his mother written immediately after a
pilgrimage to Melville in the Berkshires—Melville turned to Hawthorne for

understanding. Frank Preston Stearns, in his Life and Genius of Nathaniel
Hawthorne (1906) says that for Hawthorne “the summer of 1851 in Lenox
was by no means brilliant.... Hawthorne’s chief entertainment seems to have
been the congratulatory letters he received from distinguished people.... For
older company he had Herman Melville and G. P. R. James, whose society
he may have found as interesting as that of more distinguished writers.” But
Mrs. Hawthorne had studied Melville with a closer scrutiny and was not so
easily convinced of Melville’s insignificance. Melville had visited the
Hawthornes in the tiny reception room of the Red House, where Mrs.
Hawthorne “sewed at her stand and read to the children about Christ;” in
the drawing room, where she disposed “the embroidered furniture,” and
where, in the farther corner, stood “Apollo with his head tied on;” in
Hawthorne’s study, which to Mrs. Hawthorne’s wifely adoration was
consecrated by “his presence in the morning.” Mrs. Hawthorne looked from
the “wonderful, wonderful eyes” of her husband—each eye “like a violet
with a soul in it,”—to Melville’s eyes, and confessed to her mother her
grave and jealous suspicion of Melville: “I am not quite sure that I do not
think him a very great man.... A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and
an intellect,—with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere and reverent; very
tender and modest.... He has very keen perceptive power; but what
astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to see
everything very accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I
cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any
way. His nose is straight and rather handsome, his mouth expressive of
sensibility and emotion. He is tall, and erect, with an air free, brave and
manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself
in his subject. There is no grace nor polish. Once in a while, his animation
gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of these eyes to which I
have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you
feel that he is at that moment taking deepest note of what is before him. It is
a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem
to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself. I saw him look at Una
so, yesterday, several times.”
Mrs. Hawthorne must ever enjoy a lofty eminence as one of Melville’s most
penetrating critics. Her husband dwelt apart, and less because he found the
atmosphere of New England wholly uncongenial than because he shared his
wife’s conviction that he was like a star. And shrewdly his wife resented the

presence of a second luminary—treacherously veiled and of heaven knows
what magnitude!—in her serene New England sky. Time may yet harp her
worst fears aright.
For despite his comparative obscurity, Melville is—as cannot be too
frequently iterated—one of the chief and most unusual figures in our native
literature. And his claim to such high distinction must rest upon three prime
counts.
First—because most obvious—Melville was the literary discoverer of the
South Seas. And though his ample and rapidly multiplying progeny includes
such names as Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Warren Stoddard, John La
Farge, Jack London, Louis Becke, A. Safroni-Middleton, Somerset
Maugham, and Frederick O’Brien, he is still unsurpassed in the manner he
originated. On this point, all competent critics are agreed.
Melville’s second achievement is most adequately stated by the well-known
English sea-writer, W. Clark Russell, in A Claim of American Literature
(reprinted from The North American Review in The Critic for March 26,
1892). “When Richard Henry Dana, and Herman Melville wrote,” says
Russell, “the commercial sailor of Great Britain and the United States was
without representation in literature.... Dana and Melville were Americans.
They were the first to lift the hatch and show the world what passes in a
ship’s forecastle; how men live down in that gloomy cave, how and what
they eat, and where they sleep; what pleasures they take, what their sorrows
and wrongs are; how they are used when they quit their black sea-parlours
in response to the boatswain’s silver summons to work on deck by day and
by night. These secrets of the deep Dana and Melville disclosed.... Dana
and Melville created a new world, not by the discovery, but by the
interpretation of it. They gave us a full view of the life led by tens of
thousands of men whose very existence, till these wizards arose, had been
as vague to the general land intelligence as the shadows of clouds moving
under the brightness of the stars.” And to Melville and Dana, so Russell
contends, we owe “the first, the best and most enduring revelation of these
secrets.” On this score, Conrad, Kipling, and Masefield must own Melville
as master.
Melville’s third and supreme claim to distinction rests upon a single
volume, which, after the order of Melchizedek, is without issue and without

descent: “a work which is not only unique in its kind, and a great
achievement” to quote a recent judgment from England, “but is the
expression of an imagination that rises to the highest, and so is amongst the
world’s great works of art.” This book is, of course, Moby-Dick, Melville’s
undoubted masterpiece. “In that wild, beautiful romance”—the words are
Mr. Masefield’s—“Melville seems to have spoken the very secret of the sea,
and to have drawn into his tale all the magic, all the sadness, all the wild joy
of many waters. It stands quite alone; quite unlike any other book known to
me. It strikes a note which no other sea writer has ever struck.”
The organising theme of this unparalleled volume is the hunt by the mad
Captain Ahab after the great white whale which had dismembered him of
his leg; of Captain Ahab’s unwearied pursuit by rumour of its whereabouts;
of the final destruction of himself and his ship by its savage onslaught. On
the white hump of the ancient and vindictive monster Captain Ahab piles
the sum of all the rage and hate of mankind from the days of Eden down.
Melville expresses an ironical fear lest his book be scouted “as a monstrous
fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable
allegory.” Yet fabulous allegory it is: an allegory of the demonism at the
cankered heart of nature, teaching that “though in many of its visible
aspects the world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed
in fright.” Thou shalt know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. To
the eye of truth, so Melville would convince us, “the palsied universe lies
before us as a leper;” “all deified Nature absolutely paints like a harlot,
whose allurements cover nothing but the charnal house within.” To embody
this devastating insight, Melville chooses as a symbol, an albino whale.
“Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
An artist who goes out to find sermons in stones does so at the peril of
converting his stone pile into his mausoleum. His danger is excessive, if,
having his sermons all ready, he makes it his task to find the stones to fit
them. Allegory justifies itself only when the fiction is the fact and the moral
the induction; only when its representation is as imaginatively real as its
meaning; only when the stones are interesting boulders in a rich and
diversified landscape. So broadly and vividly is Moby-Dick based on solid
foundation that even the most literal-minded, innocent of Melville’s dark
intent, have found this book of the soul’s daring and the soul’s dread a very
worthy volume. One spokesman for this congregation, while admitting that

“a certain absorption of interest lies in the nightmare intensity and
melodramatic climax of the tale,” finds his interest captured and held far
more by “the exposition of fact with which the story is loaded to the very
gunwale. No living thing on earth or in the waters under the earth is so
interesting as the whale. How it is pursued, from the Arctic to the Antarctic;
how it is harpooned, to the peril of boat and crew; how, when brought to the
side, ‘cutting in’ is accomplished; how the whale’s anatomy is laid bare;
how his fat is redeemed—to be told this in the form of a narrative, with all
manner of dramatic but perfectly plausible incidents interspersed, is enough
to make the book completely engrossing without the white whale and
Captain Ahab’s fatal monomania.”
So diverse are the samples out of which Moby-Dick is compounded, yet so
masterful is each of its samples, that there is still far from universal
agreement as to the ground colour of this rich and towering fabric. Yet by
this very disagreement is its miraculous artistry affirmed.
In Moby-Dick, all the powers and tastes of Melville’s complex genius are
blended. Moby-Dick is at once indisputably the greatest whaling novel, and
“a hideous and intolerable allegory.” As Mr. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. has
said, “Out of the mere episodes and minor instances of Moby-Dick, a
literary reputation might be made. The retired Nantucket captains Bildad
and Peleg might have stepped out of Smollett. Father Mapple’s sermon on
the book of Jonah is in itself a masterpiece, and I know few sea tales that
can hold their own with the blood feud of Mate Rodney and sailor
Steelkilt.” Captain Hook of Peter Pan is but Captain Boomer of Moby-Dick
with another name: and this an identity founded not on surmise, but on Sir
James Barrie’s professed indebtedness to Melville. There are, in Moby-
Dick, long digressions, natural, historical and philosophical, on the person,
habits, manners and ideas of whales; there are long dialogues and
soliloquies such as were never spoken by mortal man in his waking senses,
conversations that for sweetness, strength and courage remind one of
passages from Dekker, Webster, Massinger, Fletcher and the other old
dramatists loved both by Melville and by Charles Lamb; in the discursive
tradition of Fielding, Sir Thomas Browne and the anatomist of melancholy,
Melville indulges freely in independent moralisings, half essay, half
rhapsody; withal, scenes like Ishmael’s experience at the “Spouter-Inn”
with a practising cannibal for bed-fellow, are, for finished humour, among

the most competent in the language. When Melville sat down to write,
always at his knee stood that chosen emissary of Satan, the comic spirit: a
demoniac familiar never long absent from his pages.
There are those, of course, who would hold against Dante his moralising,
and against Rabelais his broad humour. In like manner, peculiarity of
temperament has necessarily coloured critical judgment of Moby-Dick. But
though critics may mouth it as they like about digressions, improbability,
moralising reflections, swollen talk, or the fetish of art now venerated with
such articulate inveteracy, all wonderfully agree upon the elementary force
of Moby-Dick, its vitality, its thrilling power. That it achieves the effect of
illusion, and to a degree peculiar to the highest feats of the creative
imagination, is incontestable. No writer has more. On this point it is simply
impossible to praise Melville too highly. What defects Moby-Dick has are
formal rather than substantial. As Thackeray once impatiently said of
Macaulay: “What critic can’t point them out?” It was the contention of
James Thomson that an overweening concern for formal impeccability is a
fatal sign of weakened vitality. Intensity of imagination—and Melville
exhibited it prodigally in Moby-Dick—is an infinitely rarer and more
precious gift than technical sophistication. Shakespeare has survived,
despite his “monstrous irregularities.” But since Shakespeare, as Francis
Thompson has observed, there has been a gradual decline from
imperfection. Milton, at his most typical, was far too perfect; Pope was
ruined by his quest for the quality. No thoughtful person can contemplate
without alarm the idolatry bestowed upon this quality by the contemporary
mind: an idolatry that threatens to reduce all art to the extinction of
unendurable excellence. How insipid would be the mere adventures of a
Don Quixote recounted by a Stevenson.
The astonishing variety of contradictory qualities synthesised in Moby-Dick
exists nowhere else in literature, perhaps, in such paradoxical harmony.
These qualities, in differences of combination and emphasis, are
discoverable, however, in all of Melville’s writings. And he published,
besides anonymous contributions to periodicals, ten novels and five
volumes of poetry (including the two volumes privately printed at the very
close of his life). There survives, too, a bulk of manuscript material: a
novel, short stories, and a body of verse. And branded on everything that

Melville wrote is there the mark of the extraordinary personality that
created Moby-Dick.
Though some of Melville’s writing is distinctly disquieting in devastating
insight, and much of it is very uneven in inspiration, none of it is
undistinguished. Yet only four of his books have ever been reprinted. The
rest of his work, long since out of print, is excessively rare, some of it being
practically unavailable. The scarcity of a book, however, is not invariably a
sign of its insignificance. It is one of the least accessible of Melville’s books
that Mr. Masefield singles out for especial distinction. “The book I love best
of his,” says Mr. Masefield, “is one very difficult to come by. I think it is his
first romance, and I believe it has never been reprinted here. It is the
romance of his own boyhood. I mean Redburn. Any number of good pens
will praise the known books, Typee and Omoo and Moby-Dick and White-
Jacket, and will tell their qualities of beauty and romance. Perhaps Redburn
will have fewer praises, so here goes for Redburn; a boy’s book about
running away to sea.” Even more difficult of access is Pierre—a book at the
antipodes from Redburn. Far from being a boy’s book, Pierre was prophetic
of the pessimism of Hardy and the subtlety of Meredith. From Redburn to
Pierre; from Typee, a spirited travel-book on Polynesia, to Clarel, an
intricate philosophical poem in two volumes: these mark the antithetical
extremes of the art that mated poetry and blubber, whaling and metaphysics.
The very complexity and versatility of Melville’s achievement has been an
obstacle in the way of his just appreciation. Had Mandeville turned from his
Travels, to write The City of Dreadful Night, the incompatibility would have
been no less extraordinary or bewildering.
Indeed, Melville’s complete works, in their final analysis, are a long effort
towards the creation of one of the most complex, and massive, and original
characters in literature: the character known in life as Herman Melville. “I
am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids,” he wrote to
Hawthorne while he was in the middle of Moby-Dick, “which, after being
three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English
soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I.
Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth
year I date my life. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the
bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. It seems to me now

that Solomon was the truest man who ever spoke, and yet that he managed
the truth with a view to popular conservatism.”
Blighted by disillusionment, and paralysed by doubt, Melville came to treat
as an irrelevancy, the making of books. “He informed me that he had ‘pretty
much made up his mind to be annihilated,’” wrote Hawthorne in his Note-
book, after Melville visited him in Southport, England, in 1856; “but still he
does not seem to rest in that anticipation. It is strange how he persists—as
he has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in
wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the
sandhills amidst which we were sitting. He can neither believe nor be
comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try
to do one or the other.” If, in contempt for the orthodox interpolations by
which pious scribes attempted to sweeten Solomon’s bitter message,
Melville ever managed truth as he saw it, it was more to violate popular
conservatism than to propitiate it. “We incline to think that God cannot
explain His own secrets,” he editorially wrote Hawthorne in 1851, “and that
He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals
astonish Him as much as He us.” And as Melville grew in disillusionment,
he grew in astonishment. In his relentless pessimism he boasted himself “in
the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered travellers in Europe; they
cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet bag,—that is to
say, the Ego.” It was his ripest conviction that the exclamation point and the
triumphant perpendicular pronoun were interchangeable signs. But to the
end, he bristled with minor revelations.
Though he boasted that he crossed the frontier into Eternity with nothing
but a carpet bag, he had, in fact, sent more bulky consignments on ahead.
And at the final crack of doom, this dead and disappointed mariner may yet
rise to an unexpected rejoicing. For at that time of ultimate reckoning,
according to the eschatology of Mr. Masefield, “then the great white whale,
old Moby-Dick, the king of all the whales, will rise up from his quiet in the
sea, and go bellowing to his mates. And all the whales in the world—the
sperm-whales, the razor-back, the black-fish, the rorque, the right, the forty-
barrel Jonah, the narwhal, the hump-back, the grampus and the thrasher—
will come to him, ‘fin-out,’ blowing their spray to the heavens. Then Moby-
Dick will call the roll of them, and from all the parts of the sea, from the
north, from the south, from Callao to Rio, not one whale will be missing.

Then Moby-Dick will trumpet, like a man blowing a horn, and all that
company of whales will ‘sound’ (that is, dive), for it is they that have the
job of raising the wrecks from down below.
“Then when they come up the sun will just be setting in the sea, far away to
the west, like a ball of red fire. And just as the curve of it goes below the
sea, it will stop sinking and lie there like a door. And the stars and the earth
and the wind will stop. And there will be nothing but the sea, and this red
arch of the sun, and the whales with the wrecks, and a stream of light upon
the water. Each whale will have raised a wreck from among the coral, and
the sea will be thick with them—row-ships and sail-ships, and great big
seventy-fours, and big White Star boats, and battleships, all of them green
with the ooze, but all of them manned by singing sailors. And ahead of
them will go Moby-Dick, towing the ship our Lord was in, with all the
sweet apostles aboard of her. And Moby-Dick will give a great bellow, like
a fog-horn blowing, and stretch ‘fin-out’ for the sun away in the west. And
all the whales will bellow out an answer. And all the drowned sailors will
sing their chanties, and beat the bells into a music. And the whole fleet of
them will start towing at full speed towards the sun, at the edge of the sky
and water. I tell you they will make white water, those ships and fishes.
“When they have got to where the sun is, the red ball will swing open like a
door, and Moby-Dick, and all the whales, and all the ships will rush through
it into an anchorage in Kingdom Come. It will be a great calm piece of
water, with land close aboard, where all the ships of the world will lie at
anchor, tier upon tier, with the hands gathered forward, singing. They’ll
have no watches to stand, no ropes to coil, no mates to knock their heads in.
Nothing will be to do except singing and beating on the bell. And all the
poor sailors who went in patched rags, my son, they’ll be all fine in white
and gold. And ashore, among the palm-trees, there’ll be fine inns for the
seamen.” And there, among a numerous company, will be Fayaway, and
Captain Ahab, and Jack Chase, and Jarl, and Toby, and Pierre, and Father
Mapple, and Jackson, and Doctor Long Ghost, and Kory-Kory, and Bildad,
and Peleg, and Fedallah, and Tashetego, and Marnoo, and Queequeg. But it
seems hardly likely that Melville will there find Hawthorne to tempt by a
basket of champagne into some little shady corner, there to cross their legs
in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and to discourse pleasantly of

all the things manifold which once so much distressed them. In my Father’s
house are many mansions.

CHAPTER II
GHOSTS
“We are full of ghosts and spirits; we are as grave-yards full of
buried dead, that start to life before us. And all our dead sires,
verily, are in us; that is their immortality. From sire to son, we
go on multiplying corpses in ourselves; for all of which, are
resurrections. Every thought’s a soul of some past poet, hero,
sage. We are fuller than a city.” —Herman Melville: Mardi.
The High Gods, in a playful and prodigal mood, gave to Melville, to Julia
Ward Howe, to Lowell, to Kingsley, to Ruskin, to Whitman, and to Queen
Victoria, the same birth year. On August 1, 1819, Herman Melville was
born at No. 6 Pearl Street, New York City.
Melville’s vagabondage as a common sailor on a merchantman, on whaling
vessels, and in the United States Navy, together with his Bohemian
associations with cannibals, mutineers, and some of the choicest dregs of
our Christian civilisation, must have wrenched a chorus of groans from a
large congregation of shocked ancestral ghosts. For Melville was descended
from a long and prolific line of the best American stock. Through his
mother, Maria Gansevoort, he traced back to the earliest Dutch emigrants to
New York; through his father, Allan Melville, to pre-revolutionary Scotch-
Irish emigrants to New England. Both of his grandfathers distinguished
themselves in the Revolutionary War. His ancestors, on both sides, came to
this country in the days when some of the best blood of Europe was being
transferred to America.
Though Melville was too ironic a genius ever to have been guilty of the ill-
breeding that makes an ostentation of ancestry, still he looked back upon his
descent with self-conscious pride: a pride drawn by childhood absorption
from his parents who, by resting on the achievements of their forebears,
added several cubits to their stature. Lacking the prophetic vision to glory in
being ancestors, they chose the more comfortable rôle of parading as

descendants. Melville’s father, Allan, was sufficiently absorbed in his
genealogy to compile, in 1818, an elaborately branching family tree that
sent its master root back to one Sir Richard de Melvill, del Compte de Fife,
a worthy of the thirteenth century. And at the proud conclusion of his
labours he inscribed the Melville motto, Denique Coelum—“Heaven at
last.” Melville’s mother, Maria Gansevoort, though too absorbed in
domesticity to compete with Allan in drawing up a parallel document, still
sat opposite her spouse with a stiff spine, conscious that she could counter
his ancestry, grandfather for grandfather. It is true, she had no thirteenth
century count to fall back upon; and though her line lost itself in a cluster of
breweries, they were very substantial breweries, and owned by a race of
stalwart and affluent and uncompromising burghers. Her ancestor, Harmen
Harmense Van Gansevoort, was brewing in Beverwyck as early as 1660,
and with sufficient success to acquire such extended investments in land
that he bequeathed to his heirs a baronial inheritance. During the centuries
following his death his name crossed itself with that of the Van Rensselaers,
the Ten Broeks, the Douws, the Van Schaicks,—with the proudest names
that descended from the earlier Colonial Dutch families. Melville’s mother,
Maria, is remembered as a cold, proud woman, arrogant in the sense of her
name, her blood, and the affluence of her forebears.
She was the only daughter and oldest child in a family of six, of General
Peter Gansevoort and Catharine Van Schaick. Her father, born in Albany,
New York, July 17, 1749, was among the outstanding patriots of the
American Revolution. He was among the troops which accompanied
Schuyler, in 1775, in his advance towards Canada. In December of the same
year he was with Montgomery, as Major, in the unfortunate assault upon
Quebec. In the summer of 1777, when Burgoyne’s semi-barbarous invading
army was slowly advancing down Lake Champlain and the Hudson, he was
Colonel in command of Fort Stanwix. By his obstinate and gallant defence
of Fort Stanwix in August, 1777, he prevented the juncture of St. Leger
with Burgoyne, and so changed the course of the whole subsequent
campaign. Washington keenly and warmly recognised this, and Congress
passed a vote of thanks to Colonel Gansevoort. Peter Gansevoort did other
brilliant service in the Revolutionary War, and in 1809, when the War of
1812 was approaching, he was made brigadier general in the United States
army. He was sheriff of Albany County from 1790 to 1792, and regent of
the University of New York from 1808 until his death in 1812.

Of his sons, Hon. Peter Gansevoort, who was born in Albany in 1789, was
long one of the most prominent and honoured citizens of Albany. The elder
son, General Herman Gansevoort, from whom Melville received his name,
lived at Gansevoort, a village in the township of Northumberland, Saratoga
County, New York. In 1832-33, the brothers built on the site of the
birthplace of their father what is now the Stanwix Hotel. As a boy, Melville
spent most of his summers as guest of the Gansevoorts, and in his novel
Pierre, the childhood recollections of his hero are transparent
autobiographical references to his own early memories. “On the meadows
which sloped away from the shaded rear of the manorial mansion, far to the
winding river, an Indian battle had been fought, in the earlier days of the
colony, and in that battle the great-grandfather of Pierre, mortally wounded,
had sat unhorsed on his saddle in the grass, with his dying voice still
cheering his men in the fray.... Far beyond these plains, a day’s walk for
Pierre, rose the storied heights, where in the Revolutionary War his
grandfather had for several months defended a rude but all-important
stockaded fort, against the repeated combined assaults of Indians, Tories
and Regulars. From behind that fort, the gentlemanly but murderous half-
breed, Brandt, had fled, but survived to dine with General (Gansevoort) in
the amiable times that followed that vindictive war. All the associations of
Saddle-Meadows were full of pride to Pierre. The (Gansevoort) deeds by
which their estate had been so long held, bore the cyphers of three Indian
kings, the aboriginal and only conveyancers of those noble woods and
plains. Thus loftily, in the days of his circumscribed youth, did Pierre
glance along the background of his race.... Or how think you it would be
with this youthful Pierre if every day, descending to breakfast, he caught
sight of an old tattered British banner or two, hanging over an arched
window in the hall: and those banners captured by his grandfather, the
general, in fair fight?”
On February 22, 1832, so it is recorded in Joel Munsell, The Annals of
Albany (Vol. IX, Albany, 1859) “the military celebrated the centennial
anniversary of the birthday of Washington. Col. Peter Gansevoort, on this
occasion, presented to the artillery a large brass Drum, a trophy of the
revolution, taken from the British on the 22nd August, 1777, at Fort
Stanwix, by his father, General Peter Gansevoort.” The sound of this drum
was tapping in Melville’s memory, when he goes on to ask: “Or how think
you it would be if every time he heard the band of the military company of

the village, he should distinctly recognise the peculiar tap of a British
kettle-drum also captured by his grandfather in fair fight, and afterwards
suitably inscribed on the brass and bestowed upon the Saddle-Meadows
Artillery Corps? Or how think you it would be, if sometimes of a mild
meditative Fourth of July morning in the country, he carried out with him
into the garden by way of ceremonial cane, a long, majestic, silver-tipped
staff, a Major-General’s baton, once wielded on the plume-nodding and
musket-flashing review by the same grandfather several times here-in-
before mentioned?”
Not content to leave this a rhetorical query, Melville answers his own
catechism in unambiguous terms: “I should say that considering Pierre was
quite young and very unsophisticated as yet, and withal rather high-
blooded; and sometimes read the History of the Revolutionary War, and
possessed a mother who very frequently made remote social allusions to the
epaulettes of the Major-General his grandfather;—I should say that upon all
these occasions, the way it must have been with him was a very proud,
elated sort of way.”
Melville did not preserve throughout his long life this early and proud
elation in his descent, and in later years he thought it necessary to apologise
for the short-sighted and provincial self-satisfaction that he absorbed from
his parents in his early youth. “And if this seem but too fond and foolish in
Pierre,” he pleads in a mood both of apology and of prophecy; “and if you
tell me that this sort of thing in him showed him no sterling Democrat, and
that a truly noble man should never brag of any arm but his own; then I beg
you to consider again that this Pierre was but a youngster as yet. And
believe me, you will pronounce Pierre a thorough-going Democrat in time;
perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy.”
Radical he came to be, indeed: it was the necessary penalty of being cursed
with an intelligence above that of the smug and shallow optimism of his
country and his period. Democratic he may have been, but only in the most
unpopular meaning of that once noble term. He was a democrat in the same
relentless sense that Dante or Milton were democrats. Lucifer rebelled, let it
be remembered, to make Heaven “safe for Democracy:” the first
experiment in popular government. “Hell,” says Melville, “is a democracy
of devils.” In Mardi, Melville indulges lengthy reflections on a certain
“chanticleer people” who boast boisterously of themselves: “Saw ye ever

such a land as this? Is it not a great and extensive republic? Pray, observe
how tall we are; just feel of our thighs; are we not a glorious people? We are
all Kings here; royalty breathes in the common air.” Before the spectacle of
this lusty republicanism, Melville exhibits unorthodox doubts. “There’s not
so much freedom here as these freemen think,” he makes a strolling deity
observe; “I laugh and admire.... Freedom is more social than political. And
its real felicity is not to be shared. That is of a man’s own individual getting
and holding. Little longer, may it please you, can republics subsist now,
than in days gone by. Though all men approached sages in wisdom, some
would yet be more wise than others; and so, the old degrees would be
preserved. And no exemption would an equality of knowledge furnish, from
the inbred servility of mortal to mortal; from all the organic causes, which
inevitably divide mankind into brigades and battalions, with captains at
their heads. Civilisation has not ever been the brother of equality.”
As Melville grew away from boyhood, he came to distinguish between the
accidentals and the essentials that distinguish man from man. At his
mother’s breast he had absorbed with her milk a vivid and exaggerated
belief that the accidents concomitant upon birth that range men into
artificial classes, were ingrain in the very woof of the universe. When he
later discovered that his parents tinted life with a very perishable dye, he
also found, set below their cheap calico patterns, an unchangeable texture of
sharper and deeper and more variegated colours. And he discovered, too,
that his uncritical boyhood pride in his blood was, withal, not entirely a
mere savage delight in calico prints.
He was, as he boasts in the sub-title of Redburn, “the son-of-a-gentleman,”
reared in an environment rich with the mellowing influences of splendid
family traditions. And these associations left an indelible stamp upon him.
In Mardi, in speaking of the impossibility of belying one’s true nature while
at sea and in the fellowship of sailors, he offers himself as an example to
point. “Aboard of all ships in which I have sailed,” he says, “I have
invariably been known by a sort of drawing-room title. Not,—let me hurry
to say,—that I put hand in tar bucket with a squeamish air, or ascended the
rigging with a Chesterfieldian mince. No, no, I was never better than my
vocation. I showed as brown a chest, and as hard a hand, as the tarriest tar
of them all. And never did shipmate of mine upbraid me with a genteel
disinclination to duty, though it carried me to truck of main-mast, or jib-

boom-end, in the most wolfish blast that ever howled. Whence, then, this
annoying appellation? for annoying it most assuredly was. It was because of
something in me that could not be hidden; stealing out in an occasional
polysyllable; an otherwise incomprehensible deliberation in dining; remote,
unguarded allusions to belle-lettres affairs; and other trifles superfluous to
mention.”
Though his grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, had been dead seven
years when Melville was born, so vital were the relics of him that
surrounded Melville’s boyhood, so reverently was his memory tended by
his first child and only daughter, that the image of Peter Gansevoort was
one of the most potent influences during Melville’s most impressionable
years. The heroic presence that dominated Melville’s imagination,
“measured six feet four inches in height; during a fire in the old manorial
mansion, with one dash of the foot, he had smitten down an oaken door, to
admit the buckets of his negro slaves; Pierre had often tried on his military
vest, which still remained an heirloom at Saddle-Meadows, and found the
pockets below his knees, and plenty additional room for a fair-sized quarter-
cask within its buttoned girth; in a night scuffle in the wilderness before the
Revolutionary War, he had annihilated two Indian savages by making
reciprocal bludgeons of their heads. And all this was done by the mildest
hearted, the most blue-eyed gentleman in the world, who, according to the
patriarchal fashion of those days, was a gentle, white-haired worshipper of
all the household gods; the gentlest husband and the gentlest father; the
kindest master to his slaves; of the most wonderful unruffledness of temper;
a serene smoker of his after dinner pipe; a forgiver of many injuries; a
sweet-hearted, charitable Christian; in fine, a pure, cheerful, childlike, blue-
eyed, divine old man; in whose meek, majestic soul the lion and the lamb
embraced—fit image of his God.” His portrait was to Melville “a glorious
gospel framed and hung upon the wall, and declaring to all people, as from
the Mount, that man is a noble, god-like being, full of choicest juices; made
up of strength and beauty.” Most of the images of God that Melville met in
actual secular embodiment, suffered tragically by comparison with this
image of mortal perfection which Melville nursed in his heart. Most men
that Melville met, in falling short of the mythical excellence of Peter
Gansevoort, whom he never knew in the flesh, seemed to Melville, to be
libels upon their Divine Original. According to Melville’s account, he could
never look upon his grandfather’s military portrait without an infinite and

mournful longing to meet his living aspect in actual life. Yet such was the
temper of Melville’s mind, his life such a tragic career of dreaming of
elusive perfection, dreams invariably to be dashed and bruised and shattered
by an incompatible reality, that it is safe to surmise—with no impiety to the
memory of Peter Gansevoort—that had Melville known his maternal
grandfather, the old General’s six feet four of blood and bone would have
shrunk, with his extravagance of all human excellence, to more truly
historical dimensions.

MELVILLE’S GRANDFATHERS

GENERAL PETER GANSEVOORT

MAJOR THOMAS MELVILLE

Melville’s paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melville, who died in 1832,
when Melville was thirteen years old, inspired his grandson to no such
glowing tributes. Born in Boston, in 1751, an only child, he was left an
orphan at the age of ten. It appears by the probate records on the
appointment of his guardian in 1761, that he inherited a considerable
fortune from his father. He was reared by his maternal grandmother, Mrs.
Mary Cargill. Mrs. Mary Cargill’s brother was the celebrated and eccentric
dissenter and polemic writer, John Abernethy of Dublin, who in his Tracts
(collected in 1751) measured swords with Swift himself triumphantly; her

son, David, was both a celebrated warrior against the Indians, and the father
of twenty-three children, fifteen of whom were sons. Whatever the
immediate male relatives of Mrs. Mary Cargill did, it would appear, they
did vigorously, and on an enterprising scale. She was herself an old lady of
very independent ideas about the universe, and her grandson, Thomas
Melville—Melville’s grandfather,—perpetuated much of her independence.
Indifferent to the caprices of fashion, Thomas Melville persisted until his
death in 1832, in wearing the old-fashioned cocked hat and knee breeches.
Oliver Holmes said of him: “His aspect among the crowds of a later
generation reminded me of a withered leaf which has held to its stem
through the storms of autumn and winter, and finds itself still clinging to its
bough while the new growths of spring are bursting their buds and
spreading their foliage all around it.”
And so the Autocrat wrote:

“I saw him once before,
As he passed by the door,
And again
The pavement stones resound
As he totters o’er the ground
With his cane.

They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets
Sad and wan.
And he shakes his feeble head
And it seems as if he said,
‘They are gone.’

The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has pressed
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

My grandmamma has said,—
Poor old lady, she is dead
Long ago—
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow:

But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Lik t ff

Like a staff,
And a crook is in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.

I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!

And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough,
Where I cling.”

In his boyhood, Thomas Melville was sent by his grandmother (who lived
on till her grandson was thirty years old, clinging as tenaciously to life as to
every other good thing she set hands upon) to the College of New Jersey,
now Princeton. He was graduated in 1769. From both Princeton and
Harvard he later received an M.A. Between 1771 and 1773 he visited his
relatives in Scotland. During this visit he was presented with the freedom of
the city of St. Andrews and of Renfrew. He returned to Boston to become a
merchant and to enter with spirit into the patriotic ferment then so actively
brewing. He was a member of the Long Room Club, in sympathy with the
Sons of Liberty, and with Paul Revere, one of the “Indians” to take part in
the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773. There still survive a few
unbrewed leaves from this cargo of tea: the carefully preserved shakings
from Major Melville’s shoes, resurrected when he relaxed into slippers
immediately upon his return home from the excitements of revolutionary
defiance. Though Major Melville was, throughout his life, an extreme
conservative, it was his very conservatism that fired him to revolution. He
believed that what needed to be conserved was the constitutional—British
constitutional—rights of his country, not the innovation of Hanoverian
tyranny. He commanded a detachment sent to Nantucket, the centre of

whaling, to watch the movement of the British fleet; in the expedition into
Rhode Island, in 1778, he took the rank of Major in Croft’s regiment of
Massachusetts artillery. His resignation, dated Boston, Oct. 21, 1778, states
“that he had been almost three years in said service and would willingly
continue to serve, but owing to inadequate pay and subsequent inability to
support his family he felt compelled to resign his commission.” In 1789 he
was commissioned by Washington as naval officer of the port of Boston: a
commission renewed by all succeeding presidents down to Andrew
Jackson’s time in 1824. Major Melville was the nearest surviving male
relative of the picturesque General Robert Melville, who was the first and
only Captain General and Governor-in-Chief of the islands ceded to
England by France in 1763, and at the time of his death in 1809, with one
exception, the oldest General in the British Army.
In 1779, Major Melville was elected fire ward of Boston, and when he
resigned in 1825, he was offered a vote of thanks “for the zeal, intrepidity
and judgment with which he has on all occasions discharged his duties as
fire ward for forty-six years in succession, and for twenty-six as chairman
of the board.” In those days, volunteer fire companies were fashionable
sporting clubs, and such was the distinction attached to membership that a
premium was often paid for the privilege of belonging to such an exclusive
and diverting fraternity. Melville’s father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, Chief
Justice of Massachusetts, was Fire Warden between 1818 and 1821.
Melville’s grandfather and future father-in-law may have met at many a fire
and, for all we know to the contrary, the intimacy between the Shaws and
the Melvilles that culminated in Herman’s marriage, may have been first
kindled by a burning house.
The tradition survives of Major Melville that the excitement of running to
fire grew upon him like gambling upon more sedentary mortals, and that his
death was caused by over-fatigue and exposure at a fire near his house he
attended at the age of eighty-one.
Of Melville’s two grandmothers, Catharine Van Schaick and Priscilla
Scollay, there is no mention in any of his writings. It is a peculiarity of
Melville’s writings indeed, completely to disregard all of his female
relatives,—with the notable exceptions of his mother, his mother-in-law,
and his wife.

Major Thomas Melville, by his marriage with Priscilla Scollay, is said to
have aggravated an already ample fortune, though the terms of his
resignation from the Revolutionary army argue a dwindling of income
during unsettled times. The Scollays, one of the oldest of Boston families,
were related to Melville not only by direct blood descent, but Melville’s
great-great-uncle, John Melville (who died in London in 1798) married
Deborah Scollay, Melville’s great-aunt. Deborah Scollay, Priscilla’s sister,
was the first of thirteen children; Priscilla the tenth. The Scollays, in brave
competition with the Melvilles and the Gansevoorts, seem to have devoutly
accepted the Mosaic edict to increase and multiply: they were, as Carlyle
says of Dr. Thomas Arnold, of “unhastening, unresting diligence.” Major
Thomas Melville had eleven children by his wife Priscilla, Melville’s father
Allan being the fourth child and second son. Of the influence of Allan’s
numerous brothers and sisters upon Melville there are scant records to
show. His aunt Priscilla, however, mentioned him in her will.
Allan’s oldest sister, Mary (1778-1859) married Captain John DeWolf II. of
Bristol, Rhode Island. In Moby-Dick, in offering instances of ships being
charged upon by whales, Melville quotes from the Voyages of Captain
Langsdorff, a member of Admiral Krusenstern’s famous Discovery
Expedition in the beginning of the last century. In the passage quoted by
Melville is mentioned a Captain D’Wolf. “Now, the Captain D’Wolf here
alluded to as commanding the ship in question,” says Melville, “is a New
Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adventures as a sea captain, this
day resides in the village of Dorchester, near Boston. I have the honour of
being a nephew of his. I have particularly questioned him concerning this
passage in Langsdorff. He substantiates every word.” In Redburn, Melville
speaks of “an uncle of mine, an old sea-captain, with white hair, who used
to sail to a place called Archangel in Russia, and who used to tell me that he
was with Captain Langsdorff, when Captain Langsdorff crossed over by
land from the sea of Okotsk in Asia to St. Petersburg, drawn by large dogs
in a sled.... He was the very first sea captain I had ever seen, and his white
hair and fine handsome florid face made so strong an impression upon me
that I have never forgotten him, though I only saw him during this one visit
of his to New York, for he was lost in the White Sea some years after.” Just
what, if anything besides two contradictory statements—Melville owed to
this uncle it would be worthless to surmise.

Another of Melville’s uncles, however, Thomas—Allan’s older brother—
played an important rôle in Melville’s development. After an eventful
residence of twenty-one years in France, Thomas returned to America with
his wife Françoise Raymonde Eulogie Marie des Douleurs Lamé Fleury,
shortly before the War of 1812. Enlisted in the army, he was sent to
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with the rank of Major. After the war he
continued in Pittsfield, and with his family set up at what is now Broadhall.
Broadhall, built by Henry Van Schaek in 1781, bought by Elkanah Watson
in 1807, was, in 1816, acquired by Major Thomas Melville of the cocked
hat. His son, Major Thomas Melville of the French wife, lived in Broadhall
until 1837, when he moved to Galena, Illinois, where he died on August 1
—Melville’s birthday—1845. By a parallel irony of fate, just as the Stanwix
House of the Gansevoorts is now a hotel, Broadhall of the Melvilles is now
a country club.
It was a strange transplanting, that of Major Thomas Melville and his wife,
Marie des Douleurs, from Paris to the rustic crudities of the farming
outskirts of civilisation. Marie des Douleurs rapidly pined and wilted in the
harsh brusque air. A bundle of her letters survive, written in a delicate
drooping hand: letters that might have been written by a wasted and
homesick nun. In 1814, within the space of a single month, Mrs. Thomas
Melville and two of her children died of consumption. Thomas, of more
vigorous stock, survived to marry again—this time to Mary Anna Augusta
Hobard, and to take actively to farming. He achieved a local reputation for
his successful devotion to the soil; presiding at meetings of the Berkshire
Agricultural Association, and winning a first prize at a ploughing match at
the Berkshire Fair. As a boy, Melville was sent to alternate his visits to the
Gansevoorts by trips to his uncle at Pittsfield. The single record of his life at
Broadhall is preserved in The History of Pittsfield (1876) “compiled and
written, under the general direction of a committee, by J. E. A. Smith.”
Melville says:
“In 1836 circumstances made me the greater portion of a year an inmate of
my uncle’s family, and an active assistant upon the farm. He was then grey
haired, but not wrinkled; of a pleasing complexion, but little, if any, bowed
in figure; and preserving evident traces of the prepossessing good looks of
his youth. His manners were mild and kindly, with a faded brocade of old
French breeding, which—contrasted with his surroundings at the time—

impressed me as not a little interesting, not wholly without a touch of
pathos.
“He never used the scythe, but I frequently raked with him in the hay field.
At the end of the swath he would at times pause in the sun and, taking out
his smooth worn box of satinwood, gracefully help himself to a pinch of
snuff, while leaning on his rake; quite naturally: and yet with a look, which
—as I recall it—presents him in the shadowy aspect of a courtier of Louis
XVI, reduced as a refugee to humble employment in a region far from
gilded Versailles.
“By the late October fire, in the great hearth of the capacious kitchen of the
old farm mansion, I remember to have seen him frequently sitting just
before early bed time, gazing into the embers, while his face plainly
expressed to a sympathetic observer that his heart, thawed to the core under
the influence of the general flame—carried him far away over the ocean to
the gay boulevards.
“Suddenly, under the accumulation of reminiscences, his eye would glisten
and become humid. With a start he would check himself in his reverie, and
give an ultimate sigh; as much as to say ‘ah, well!’ and end with an
aromatic pinch of snuff. It was the French graft upon the New England
stock, which produced this autumnal apple: perhaps the mellower for the
frost.”
It was immediately following upon the heels of this sojourn in Pittsfield in
1836, that Melville went down to the sea and shipped before the mast. Of
Melville’s companionship with his Pittsfield cousins during this visit,
nothing seems to be known. Melville’s uncle, Thomas, had two children
living at the time: Anna Marie Priscilla, who died in Pittsfield in 1858, and
Pierre François Henry Thomas Wilson, thirteen years Melville’s senior, who
in 1842 died in the Sandwich Islands. That Pierre’s adventures to the far
corners of the earth may have had some influence upon Melville’s taking to
a ship is a tempting surmise; but a surmise whose only cogency is its
possibility.
Whatever the influence of Pittsfield in sending Melville to sea, it was to
Pittsfield he finally returned, when, after wide wanderings, he faced
homeward. The old Major, his uncle, was dead, and Broadhall, descended
to one of his sons, was rented as a hotel. During the summer of 1850,

Melville and his wife boarded at Broadhall. In October of the same year,
they settled in Pittsfield, not at Broadhall, as has been repeatedly stated, but
at a neighbouring farm, christened Arrowhead by Melville. Arrowhead was
Melville’s home for the following thirteen years.
Melville’s great-grandfather, Allan—father of The Last Leaf—came to
America in 1748, and settled in Boston as a merchant. This Allan was the
son of Thomas Melville, a clergyman of the Scotch Kirk. This Thomas
Melville was from 1718 to 1764 minister of Scoonie Parish, Levin,
Fifeshire. In 1769 he “ended his days in a state of most cheerful
tranquillity.”
Thomas Melville of Scoonie was second in lineal descent from Sir John
Melville of Carnbee: a worthy knighted by James VI. According to Sir
Robert Douglas’ The Baronage of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1798), this Sir John
Melville of Carnbee was thirteenth in direct blood descent from one Sir
Richard Melvill, a man of distinction in the reign of Alexander III, and who
in 1296 was compelled to swear allegiance to Edward I of England when he
overran Scotland.
If this remote tracing of Melville’s descent were a discovery of facts
unknown to Melville, it would be an ostentatious irrelevancy to flaunt it in
his biography. But Melville was ironically conscious of his lineage, and
when his earlier novels had won him reputation at home and in England as
an entertaining literary vagabond, in France (see the typically patronising
Études sur la Littérature et les Mœurs des Anglo-Américains du XIXe Siècle
—Paris, 1851—by M. Philarete Chasles) as a representative product of a
crude and traditionless civilisation, he took satirical unction to his soul at
the illustrious associations that clung around his ancient name. In his own
person he felt that he contradicted the conceit of the European world “that
in demagogical America the sacred Past hath no fixed statues erected to it,
but (that) all things irreverently seethe and boil in the vulgar caldron of an
everlasting, uncrystallising Present.” Founding his defence upon the
knowledge of his own ancestry, he maintained in Pierre that if America so
chose to glorify herself, she could make out a good general case with
England in the little matter of long pedigrees—pedigrees, that is, without a
flaw. In monarchical Europe, Melville takes pains to contend, the proudest
families are but grafted families that successively live and die on the eternal
soil of a name. In the pride of unbroken lineal blood descent from a

thirteenth century count, he matched his blood and patronym with the most
honoured in England. “If Richmond, and St. Albans, and Grafton, and
Portland, and Buccleugh, be names almost as old as England herself, the
present Dukes of those names stop in their own genuine pedigrees at
Charles II., and there find no very fine fountain; since what we would deem
the least glorious parentage under the sun, is precisely the parentage of a
Buccleugh, for example; whose ancestress could not well avoid being a
mother, it is true, but had incidentally omitted the preliminary rites. Yet a
King was the sire.... All honour to the names, and all courtesy to the men;
but if St. Albans tell me he is all-honourable and all-eternal, I must politely
refer him to Nell Gwynne.” Melville bitterly resented the fashionable
foreign imputation that his was a rootless and upstart people. Through its
grilling of bars sinister, he viewed the superior pretensions of monarchical
aristocracy with his finger at his nose. “If in America,” he boasted, “the vast
mass of families be as the blades of grass, yet some few there are that stand
as the oak; which, instead of decaying, annually puts forth new branches;
whereby Time, instead of subtracting, is made to capitulate into a multiple
virtue.”
If Melville took over-elaborate pains to point to himself as swinging at the
dizzy crest of such a patriarchal tree, it was not to derive personal glory
from mere altitude. By exhibiting the humorous incompatibility between his
destiny and his descent, he strove to show, at one and the same time, both
the absurdity of all pride in blood, and the ironic poignancy of his own
apparent defeat.
Melville’s parents, however, qualified their ancestral pride with no such
ironic considerations. With whole-hearted gratitude they thanked God for
their descent; nor did they, in their thanksgiving, fail to acknowledge, with
becoming humility, a Heavenly Father who, in power and glory,
transcended even terrestrial counts and brewers.
Allan was always a man of devout protestations; and although he always
signed his own name with an underscoring of tangled flourishes, he wrote
the name of God—and his correspondence is liberally scattered with Deity
—with three conspicuous capitals of his most ornate penmanship. Melville
was patently modelling the father of Pierre after his own male parent, when
he recorded Pierre’s father’s platitudinous insistence “that all
gentlemanhood was vain, all claims to it preposterous and absurd, unless

the primeval gentleness and golden humanities of religion had been so
thoroughly wrought into the complete texture of the character, that he who
pronounced himself gentleman, could also rightly assume the meek but
knightly style of Christian.”
Allan, proud in the sense of this humility, in untangling his descent back to
Sir John Melville of Carnbee, seems to have rested serenely in the pious
faith that he had established his kinship to all the titled and illustrious
Melvilles in history. So he carried his head high—as he felt a republican
should—and with a generous and comprehensive fraternity claimed as his
more than kith—as indeed they were—an impressive congregation of
courtiers, scholars and divines.
So prolific has been the Melville family, so extended its history, that its
intricate branchings from the veritable Aaron’s rod in which it had its
source, have never been completely untangled by even the most arduous
genealogical historians. With what directness and potency the different
Melville strains were active in Melville’s blood it would be utterly absurd to
pretend to determine. But if not forces in Melville’s blood, Allan made them
vital presences in his son’s boyhood imagination.
The most illustrious of this shadowy company of adopted ancestors was the
old Viking, Andrew Melville (1545-1622), the dauntless “Episcopomastrix”
or “Scourge of Bishops,” second in fame among Scotch reformers only to
John Knox. In October, 1577, at an interview between Andrew and the
Regent Morton, the latter, irritated at the intrepidity of the assembly,
exclaimed: “There will never be quiet in this country till half a dozen of you
be hanged!” Whereupon Andrew, in language Morton dared not resent,
exclaimed: “Hark! Sir; threaten your courtiers after that manner. It is the
same to me whether I rot in the air or in the ground. The earth is the Lord’s.
Patria est ubicunque est bene.” Another Andrew (1624-1706) among these
ghostly presences was a soldier of fortune who in the preface of his
Memoires de M. de Chevalier de Melville (Amsterdam, 1704) was
eulogised for his valour and his protestantism.
Conspicuous in Allan’s library was a copy of the Memoirs of His Own Life
by Sir James Melvil of Hallhill (London, 1683), bearing the autograph of
Allan’s great-grandfather, Thomas Melville of Scoonie. This volume had
been brought to America by Allan’s grandfather in 1746, and was cherished

by Melville’s father as a record of the part played by his exuberant
ancestors in the turbulent affairs of Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots.
From this volume Allen taught his children of Sir James’ father, John
Melville, Lord of Raith in Fife, who, “although there was not the least
suspicion of anie fault, yitt lost he his head, becaus he was known to be one
that unfainedlie favoured the truthe;” of Sir James’ brother, William, who
was able to speak perfectly “the Latin, the Dutche, the Flemyn, and the
Frenche tongue;” of another brother of Sir James, Sir Robert Melville, who
“spak brave and stout language to the consaill of England, so that the quen
herself boisted him of his lyf.” But all of the details of Sir James’ racy
account of his own adventures were not fit entertainment for the sons of
New England Unitarians. Yet many of these unpuritan accounts are in
Melville’s own vein, as witness the recounting of the incident that befell Sir
James at the age of fourteen, when, in company with the French
Ambassador, Monluc, Bishop of Valence, he was entertained in Ireland by
one O’Docherty who lived in “a dark tour.” It appears that the Bishop paid
such disquieting attention to O’Docherty’s daughter that the father
substituted another bait to the Prelate’s susceptibilities: a substitution that
produced an awkward scene in etiquette. For the second lady mistook a
phial “of the maist precious balm that grew in Egypt, which Soliman the
great Turc had given in a present to the same bishop” for something to eat;
and this “because it had an odoriphant smell.” “Therefore she licked it clean
out.” During this process of consumption, O’Docherty’s daughter,
disengaged from the Bishop, turned to Sir James for solace, with an offer to
elope. Sir James was cautious for his fourteen years, and convinced the lady
of the superfluousness of migratory impulses.
Contemporary with Allan, there lived in Scotland, direct descendants of
these Elizabethan Melvilles. One year before Herman’s birth, Allan, with
admirable republican simplicity, decided, during one of the frequent
business trips that took him across the Atlantic, to look up his titled Scotch
cousins, and pay them the compliments of his dutiful respects. The record
of this adventure is preserved in Allan’s journal, bound in vellum of a lurid
emerald green. The entries are characteristically business-like, and stoically
naked of personal reflections:
May 22, 1818—Visited Melville house, the seat of the Earl of
Leven & Melville at 2 P.M., 14 miles—the Earl & Family being

absent, left them at 4 A.M. & dined at the New Inn at the
Junction of the Perth, Cupar & Dundee Roads, 6 miles.
May 26, 1818—Reached Melville house at ½ past 3 P.M.—10
miles—& met with a very hospitable & friendly reception from
his lordship & family.
May 27, 1818—Left Melville house at ½ past 11 in his
lordship’s gig with a lacquey to meet the coach at the New Inn.
It would, perhaps, be entertaining to know just exactly what Alexander, 7th
Earl of Levin and 6th Earl of Melville, who was also Viscount Kirkaldie,
Lord Melville of Monymaill, Lord Bolgonie, and Lord Raith, Monyraill and
Balwearie, thought in his heart of Allan Melville of Boston, merchant, and
importer of commodities from France.

CHAPTER III
PARENTS AND EARLY YEARS
“In general terms we have been thus decided in asserting the
great genealogical and real-estate dignity of some families in
America, because in so doing we poetically establish the richly
aristocratic condition of Master Pierre Glendinning, for whom
we have claimed some special family distinction. And to the
observant reader the sequel will not fail to show how important
is this circumstance, considered with reference to the singularly
developed character and most singular life-career of our hero.
Nor will any man dream that the last chapter was merely
intended for a foolish bravado, and not with a solid purpose in
view.”
—Herman Melville: Pierre.
Samuel Butler, who with Thomas Huxley cherished certain unorthodox
convictions as to “the unfathomable injustice of the Universe,” found the
make-shift of family life not the least of natural evils. In a more benevolent
adjustment of the human animal to its environment, so Butler declared,
children would be spared the incubus of parents. After the easeful death of
their progenitors, they would be hatched, cocoon-like, from an ample and
comfortable roll of bank-notes of high denomination. And it is a foregone
surety that, had Samuel Butler known Herman Melville’s parents, he would
not have been moved to soften his impeachment of the way of all flesh. For
the household of Allan Melville bore striking resemblances to that of the
most self-important of the Pontifexes. Both John Pontifex and Allan
Melville, judged either by the accepted standards of their own time or to-
day, were good men: to his God, his neighbours, his wife, his children, each
did his duty relentlessly. And each, as Melville, with obvious
autobiographical reference, says of the father of Pierre, “left behind him in
the general voice of the world, a marked reputation as a Christian and a
gentleman; in the heart of his wife, a green memory of many healthy days

of unclouded and joyful wedded life.” But each also left behind him a son
who in the end was to cherish his memory with some misgivings. Allan was
less fortunate than John Pontifex in that though he died rich in virtue, he
died with no corresponding abundance of corruptible riches. Nothing in his
life so ill became him as his bequest of poverty to his widow and eight
children.
Herman, the second son and third child, was thirteen years old at the time of
Allan’s decease: young enough to cherish up into early manhood the most
fantastic idealisation of his father. “Children begin by loving their parents,”
a modern cynic has said; “later the children grow to understanding, and
sometimes, they forgive.” As Melville grew in maturity of years, he did not
grow in charity toward his parents. In his novel Pierre he seems to draw
malicious delight in pronouncing, under a thin disguise, an imaginary libel
upon his father’s memory. There he desecrated in fiction what he had once
fondly cherished in life. Aside from its high achievement as a work of art,
this dark wild book of incest and death is of the greatest importance as a
document in autobiography. Most of the characters in Pierre are
unmistakably idealisations of clearly recognisable originals. The hero,
Pierre Glendinning, is a glorification of Melville; the widowed mother,
Marie Glendinning, owes much more to Melville’s mother, Maria
Gansevoort, than the initials of her name. And in this book, Melville
exorcises the ghost of his father, and brings him forth to unearth from the
past a skeleton that Melville seems to have manufactured in the closet of a
vindictive subconsciousness.
“Blessed and glorified in his tomb beyond Prince Mausolus,” wrote
Melville at the age of thirty-three, “is that mortal sire, who, after an
honourable, pure course of life, dies, and is buried, as in a choice fountain,
in the filial breast of a tender-hearted and intellectually appreciative child.
But if fate preserve the father to a later time, too often the filial obsequies
are less profound, the canonisation less ethereal.”
As has been said, Melville was thirteen when, in 1832, his father died. And
at that time, as for years following, there survived from Allan in Melville’s
memory “the impression of a bodily form of rare manly virtue and
benignity, only rivalled by the supposed perfect mould in which his virtuous
heart had been cast.” In Redburn he says of his youthful idealisation of
Allan: “I always thought him a marvellous being, infinitely purer and

greater than I was, who could not by any possibility do wrong or say an
untruth.” And as a gesture expressive of this piety for his father’s memory,
he took but one book with him to Liverpool when at the age of seventeen he
worked his way across the Atlantic in a merchantman. This was an old dog-
eared guide-book that had belonged to his father. On the map in this book,
Allan, with characteristic precision, had traced with a pen a number of
dotted lines radiating in all directions from Riddough’s Hotel at the foot of
Lord Street: marks that delineated his various excursions in the town. As
Melville planned his itinerary while in Liverpool, he was in the first place
to visit Riddough’s Hotel, where his father had stopped more than thirty
years before; and then, with the map in his hand, to follow Allan through
the town, according to the dotted lines in the diagram. “For this,” says
Melville, “would be performing a filial pilgrimage to spots which would be
hallowed to my eyes.” Because Melville had failed to take into account the
mutability of cities, he was disappointed to find some of the shrines
hallowed by his father’s visits no longer in existence. But the very
bitterness of his disappointment was an eloquent tribute to his father’s
memory.
Allan himself was born in 1782, second son, and fourth child, in a family of
eleven children. Of his early life, almost nothing is known. Though he was
born into a well-to-do family of considerable cultivation, he seems never to
have been exposed to the boasted advantages of a university education. He
was, however, a rather extensively travelled man. At the age of eighteen, as
if to set a precedent for his son, he made his first trip abroad. But whereas
Melville went as a sailor before the mast, to land in Liverpool as a penniless
itinerant, Allan was two years in Paris as a guest, in comfortable
circumstances, of a well-to-do uncle. Before his marriage in 1814, Allan
made five other pilgrimages to Europe; and once, after his marriage, he
crossed the Atlantic again. This last trip he would not have taken but from
urgency of business: “It will be a most painful sacrifice to part from my
beloved wife and children,” he says, in prospect of the journey; “but duty
towards them requires it.” Allan acclimated himself to France as a young
man, and so acquired a mastery of the French language. He is said to have
spoken French like a native: a bilingual accomplishment that Melville never
even remotely acquired. Melville boasted a smattering of a Polynesian
dialect or two: but so imperfect was this smattering that it moved Stevenson
to complain that Melville, like Charles Lamb, “had no ear.”

In the journal which Allan kept from 1800 to 1831, there survives a
meticulously accurate account of his wanderings up and down upon the face
of Christendom. On the fly-leaf of the journal, under the title
“Recapitulations of Voyages and Travels from 1800 to 1822 both
inclusive,” he gives, in ledger-like summary, this statement of his
peregrinations:
“by land 24425 miles.
by water 48460 miles.
days at sea, etc. 643.”
That part of his early life that he spent outside of Europe, he distributed
between Boston and Albany. Allan was a man to turn to account all of his
resources. His knowledge of French he converted into a business asset, by
setting up as a merchant-importer trafficking in dry-goods and notions from
France: “razors, children’s white leather gloves, leghorn hats, and taffeta
ribbons” being a typical shipment.

From a Painting made in Paris, 1810.

It was in Albany that Allan met Maria Gansevoort: a meeting of which his
journal is austerely ignorant. If there ever were any romance in Allan’s life
he must have emulated Pepys and recorded it in cipher, and then, with a
caution deeper than Pepys’, have burned the cryptic revelation. It is true
that in Pierre, Melville attempts to brighten his father’s pre-marital years by
imputing to him a lively vitality in his youth: but the evidence for this
imputation hangs upon a most tenuous thread of ambiguities. Yet now that it
has transpired that even the sober Wordsworth under similar circumstances
succumbed to the flesh, it is not impossible, on the face of it, that Allan, in
the unredeemed years before his comparatively late marriage, may have
been anointed in mortality. But in his later life—as was Wordsworth—he
was a paragon of propriety, and he must be acquitted of indiscretion until
more damning facts are mustered to accuse him. All surviving evidence
presents him as a model of rigid decorum. In so far as he has revealed
himself, all but the most restrained and well-behaved and standardised
emotions fell within the forbidden degrees. It is certain that no flower ever
gave him thoughts too deep for tears.
His courtship seems to have been a model of discretion, and might well
have been modelled after Mrs. Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife.
There survive two gifts that he made while he was meditating on the serious
verge of matrimony. A year before his marriage he bought, fresh from the
press, a copy of The Pleasures of Imagination by Mark Akenside, M.D.,
with a critical essay on the poem, by Mrs. Barbauld, prefixed. Whether
either Allan or Maria ever read a line of Dr. Akenside we do not know:
Maria’s copy, it must be confessed, is suspiciously well-preserved. But
Allan had the authority of Coelebs that “the condensed vigour, so
indispensable to blank verse, the skilful variation of the pause, the masterly
structure of the period, and all the occult mysteries of the art, can, perhaps,

be best learned from Akenside.” That the poet’s object was “to establish the
infinite superiority of mind over unconscious matter, even in its fairest
terms,” gave Allan opportunity to pay Maria a veiled compliment.
This same Anna Letitia Barbauld, whose introductory essay gave the final
stamp of respectability to Dr. Akenside, had, in a chapter of advice to young
girls, earlier remarked, and with best-intentioned seriousness, that “An ass
is much better adapted than a horse to show off a lady.” It may be so. In any
event, Allan inscribed on the fly-leaf of Dr. Akenside’s effusion:
MISS MARIA GANSEVOORT
FROM HER FRIEND
A. M.
The emotions that smouldered beneath this chaste inscription he vented, and
with no compromise to himself, in a tropical tangle of copy-book flourishes
that he made below his initials.
The second gift is also a book—Mrs. Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement
of the Mind. Lydia Languish, it is true, had, on a memorable occasion, with
unblushing deceit, placed Mrs. Chapone and the reverend Fordyce
ostentatiously on a table together. But it is certain that Allan was not
consciously furnishing Miss Gansevoort with any of the stage-properties of
hypocrisy. Mrs. Chapone’s pronouncements were then being accepted by
the adoring middle class as Protestant Bulls. And Allan purchased Mrs.
Chapone’s little volume with his ear to the verdict of Mrs. Delany, who
wrote: “They speak to the heart as well as to the head; and I know no book
(next to the Bible) more entertaining or edifying.”
It was within a few months before his marriage that Allan, in the most
orthodox manner of that “Happy Half Century” so happily celebrated by
Miss Agnes Repplier, undertook to heighten the virtues of Miss Maria
Gansevoort by exposing her to the “pure and prevailing superiority” of Mrs.
Chapone. For Allan was a cautious man, and marriage, he knew, was a step
not lightly to be made. “I do not want a Helen, or a Saint Cecilia, or a
Madame Dacier,” said Coelebs, in sketching an ideal wife; “yet must she be
elegant or I could not love her; sensible, or I could not respect her; prudent,
or I could not confide in her; well-informed, or she could not educate my
children; well-bred, or she could not entertain my friends; pious, or I should

not be happy with her, because the prime comfort in a companion for life is
the delightful hope that she will be a companion for eternity.”
Maria was patently elegant, well-bred and pious. The present of Dr.
Akenside and Mrs. Chapone gave her generous opportunity of coming to be
well-informed. But Allan did not hesitate to make further and more direct
contributions to her information. Prudence he rated prime among virtues;
and he approached marriage with Miltonic preconceptions. By no means
confident that the eternal truths enunciated by Mrs. Chapone would
penetrate Maria’s female intellect, Allan prudently summarised the most
sacred verities of the volume in two manuscript introductions. Maria’s copy
of the Letters bears three inscriptions made by Allan on three separate fly-
leaves. The first is in a formal upright hand, rigid in propriety:
“Prudence should be the governing principle of Woman’s
existence, domestick life her peculiar sphere; no rank can
exempt her from an observation of the laws of the former, from
an attention to the duties of the latter. To neglect both is to
violate the sacred statutes of social happiness, and to frustrate
the all-wise intention of that Providence who framed them.”
In the second inscription, made with acknowledgment to Miss Owensong,
Allan takes all the precautions of a Coelebs to make certain that at his table
“the eulogist of female ignorance might dine in security against the
intrusion and vanity of erudition.” The inscription reads:
“The liberal cultivation of the female mind is the best security
for the virtues of the female heart; and genius, talents and grace,
where regulated by prudence and governed by good sense, are
never incompatible with domestic qualities or meek and modest
virtues.”
On the third fly-leaf, this double pronouncement is presented to “Miss
Maria Gansevoort” and “from A. M.” Allan had doubtless learned from
Mrs. Chapone that “our feelings are not given us for ornament, but to spur
us on to right action.” And Miss Maria may have taken to heart Mrs.
Chapone’s dictum that “compassion is not impressed upon the human heart,
only to adorn the fair face with tears and to give an agreeable languor to the
eyes.” There survives no trace of a record of Allan’s indulging emotions for
decorative purposes. How far his sentiments were moved in “right action”

to melt Miss Maria to becoming compassion can never be known. During
the months immediately before the marriage, however, the even tenor of
Allan’s journal is jolted by the unusual acknowledgment of the existence of
his sisters, and the bald mention of a specified number of miles covered in a
“pleasure wagon.” Miss Maria, when not his undisputed property by rites of
holy matrimony, he never mentions in his journal.
Maria kept no journal; if she presented Allan with inscribed volumes, Allan
has eradicated all such breaches of maiden modesty. The only intimate
records of Maria that survive are three of her letters, comments upon her in
Allan’s letters, Melville’s elaborate idealisation of her in the person of the
mother of Pierre, and a vague memory handed down orally by her
descendants.

MARIA GANSEVOORT MELVILLE

In 1820

In 1865

Maria was born in 1791 and died in 1871. Of her girlhood, little or nothing
is very specifically known. After Melville’s marriage, she spent the greater
part of the remaining years of her life as a dependant in his household, and
the oral traditions that survive of her do not halo her memory. She is
remembered in such terms as “cold,” “worldly,” “formal,” “haughty” and
“proper”; as putting the highest premium upon appearances; as frigidly
contemptuous of Melville’s domestic economy, and of the home-made
clothes of his four children. Though she condescended eight times to
motherhood, such was her animal vigour and her ferocity of pride that she
preserved to her death a remarkable regality of appearance. She is said to
have made a completely competent wife to Allan, superior both to any
undue intellectual distractions, and to any of the demoralisations of
domesticity. She managed his household, she bore and reared his children,
and she did both with a vigorous and unruffled efficiency, without sign of

worry or regret. There persists the story—significant even if apocryphal—
that each afternoon, enthroned upon a high four-poster, she would nap in
order to freshen herself for Allan’s evening arrival, her children seated
silently on a row of low stools ranged on the floor at the side of her bed. In
his death, as in his life, she cherished the image of Allan—with that of her
father, General Gansevoort—as the mirror of manly perfection.
In Pierre, Melville is said to have drawn an essentially accurate portrait of
his mother in the character and person of Mrs. Glendinning. Mrs.
Glendinning is presented as a “haughty widow; a lady who externally
furnished a singular example of the preservative and beautifying influences
of unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth, when joined to a fine mind of
medium culture, uncankered by any inconsolable grief, and never worn by
sordid cares. In mature age, the rose still miraculously clung to her cheek;
litheness had not yet completely uncoiled itself from her waist, nor
smoothness unscrolled itself from her brow, nor diamondness departed from
her eyes.” Proudly conscious of this preservation, never, even in the most
intimate associations of life, did she ever appear “in any dishabille that was
not eminently becoming.” For “she was vividly aware how immense was
that influence, which, even in the closest ties of the heart, the merest
appearances make upon the mind.” And to her pride of appearance she
added “her pride of birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity, and all
the Semiramian pride of woman:” a pride “which in a life of nearly fifty
years had never betrayed her into a single published impropriety, or caused
her one known pang of the heart.”... “Infinite Haughtiness had first
fashioned her; and then the haughty world had further moulded her; nor had
a haughty Ritual omitted to finish her.” Nor must Allan’s moralisings, and
Dr. Akenside, and Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Chapone, be denied their due
credit in contributing to the finished product.
Between Maria and her son there existed a striking personal resemblance.
From his mother, too, Melville seems to have inherited a constitution of
very remarkable vigour, and all the white intensity of the Gansevoort
aptitude for anger. But here the resemblance ceased. In the youthful Pierre,
Mrs. Glendinning felt “a triumphant maternal pride,” for in her son “she
saw her own graces strangely translated into the opposite sex.” But of his
mother’s love for him, Pierre entertained precocious and Meredithian
suspicions: “She loveth me, ay;—but why? Had I been cast in a cripple’s

mould, how then? Now do I remember that in her most caressing love, there
ever gleamed some scaly, glittering folds of pride.... Before my glass she
stands—pride’s priestess—and to her mirrored image, not to me, she offers
up her offering of kisses.”
Strangely must she have been baffled by this mirrored image of herself,—
fascinated, and at the same time contemptuously revolted. What sympathy,
what understanding could she know for this thing of her blood that in
obscurity, in poverty, a failure in the eyes of the world, returned from
barbarism to dream wild dreams that were increasingly unsalable? As a boy,
all his passionate cravings for sympathy, for affection, were rebuffed by her
haughty reserve, and recoiled within him. Fatherless and so mothered, he
felt with Pierre, “that deep in him lurked some divine unidentifiableness,
that owed no earthly kith or kin. Yet was this feeling entirely lonesome and
orphan-like. He felt himself driven out an infant Ishmael into the desert,
with no maternal Hagar to accompany and comfort him.” In Redburn, with
the mother image like a fury in his heart, he describes himself as “a sort of
Ishmael.” “Call me Ishmael,” is the striking opening sentence of Moby-
Dick; and its no less striking close: “On the second day, a sail drew near,
nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious cruising Rachel, that in
retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” Of
his mother he is reported to have said in later life: “She hated me.”
It seems not altogether fantastic to contend that the Gorgon face that
Melville bore in his heart; the goading impalpable image that made his
whole life a pilgrimage of despair: that was the cold beautiful face of his
mother, Maria Gansevoort. One shudders to think how such a charge would
have violated Maria’s proprieties. But in the treacherous ambiguities of
Pierre, Melville himself hovers on the verge of this insight. Pierre is
haunted by a mysterious face, which he thus invokes: “The face!—the face!
—The face steals down upon me. Mysterious girl! who art thou? Take thy
thin fingers from me; I am affianced, and not to thee. Surely, thou lovest not
me?—that were most miserable for thee, and me. What, who art thou? Oh!
wretched vagueness—too familiar to me, yet inexplicable,—unknown,
utterly unknown!” To the mind of Pierre it was a face “backward hinting of
some irrevocable sin; forward, pointing to some inevitable ill; hovering
between Tartarian misery and Paradisaic beauty.” In Pierre, this face,
“compounded so of hell and heaven,” is the instrument by which the

memory of Pierre’s father is desecrated, Pierre’s mother is driven to insanity
and death, and Pierre himself is utterly ruined. Pierre is a book to send a
Freudian into ravishment.
Allan Melville, aged thirty-two, and Maria Gansevoort, nine years younger,
were married on the fourth of October, 1814. In his journal, Allan has left
this record of their wedding-trip.
October 4, 1814—Left Albany at 11 A.M. in a hack with Mrs.
M. and Helen (his youngest sister, in her sixteenth year). Dined
at Stottard’s, Lapan, & slept at Beths Lebanon.
October 5, 1814—Left Lebanon at 9, dined at Pittsfield & slept
at Worthington.
October 6, 1814—Left Worthington at ½ past 9, dined at
Southampton & slept at Belchertown.
October 7, 1814—Left Belchertown at 9, dined at Brookfield &
slept at Worcester.
October 8, 1814—Left Worcester at ½ past 9, dined at
Farmingham & arrived at Boston at 5 P.M.
For five years following this initial daily shifting of bed and board, Allan
and his wife lived in Albany. The monotony of this residence was broken by
the birth of two children,—Gansevoort, and Helen Marie,—and Allan’s trip
to Europe in the spring of 1818: the enforced business trip, already
mentioned, that took him to the home of his titled Scotch cousins. Upon his
return he resolved to leave Albany, and settle in what he appreciatively
called “the greatest universal mart in the world.” On May 12, 1819, he
records in his journal: “Commenced Housekeeping at No. Park Street,
New York. Mrs. M. & the children who had been to a visit to her Mother at
Albany since 6th April, having joined me on this day, to my great joy.”
Three months after Allan’s moving to “the greatest universal mart in the
world,” Maria presented him with a third child, and second son, who was
christened after Maria’s brother, Herman. At this time, Allan seems to have
accepted the excitements of childbirth so casually that Melville’s birth
passed unrecorded in his father’s journal. The first surviving record of
Melville’s existence is unromantic enough. In a letter dated October 7,
1820, Allan wrote: “Helen Marie suffers most from what we term the

whooping cough but which I am sometimes suspicious is only influenza.
But Gansevoort and Herman are as yet slightly affected.”
At this time, Allan seems to have prospered in business, for on September
20, 1820, he reported to his mother: “We have hired a cook & nurse and
only want a waiter to complete our domestic establishment.”
Herman’s infancy seems to have been untroubled by any event more
startling than a growing aggregation of brothers and sisters, occasional trips
to Boston, and periodic pilgrimages to Albany with his mother to be
exhibited to his grandmother Gansevoort. There are frequent references to
his ailing health. In April, 1824, Allan complains that “Gansevoort has lost
much of his ruddy appearance, while Herman who has never entirely
regained his health again looks pale, thin and dejected.”
At this time Allan signed “a 4 yrs. lease at $300 per annum free of taxes, for
a new brick 2 story house replete with conveniences, to be handsomely
furnished in the most modern style under my own direction & a vacant lot
of equal size attached to it which will be invaluable as a play ground for the
children. It is situated in Bleecker, the first south, and parallel to Bond St....
An open, dry & elevated location equidistant from Broadway & the
Bowery, in plain sight of both & almost uniting the advantages of town &
country, but its distance from my store, nearly two miles, will compel me to
dine from my family most of the time, a serious objection to us all, but we
shall be amply compensated by a residence which will obviate the necessity
of their leaving town every summer, which deprives me altogether of their
society. I shall also remove professionally on the 1st of May to No. 102
Pearl St. upstairs in the very focus of Business & surrounded by the auction
rooms which have become the Rialto of the modern merchants but where I
dare say even Shylock would be shy of making his appearance.”
By December 29, 1824, we hear of Herman that “he attends school
regularly but does not appear so fond of his Book as to injure his health. He
has turned into a great tease & daily puts Gansevoort’s patience to flight
who cannot bear to be plagued by such a little fellow.”
On the same date, Maria writes to her brother about pickling oysters, 500 of
which she sent to Albany as a gift to his family. The picture of her life that
she then gives is evidence that she had cherished the counsels that “her
friend A. M.” had appended to Mrs. Chapone. She tells of a call she

received before eleven o’clock. “Although the hour was early, all things
were neat & in order & my ladyship was dressing herself preparatory to
sitting down to her sewing.” She boasts of this fact, she says, in shamed
recollection of the time her brother and Mr. Smyth were ushered into a
parlour out of order. “It is the first time a thing of this kind has ever
happened to me & for my credit as a good housekeeper, I hope it will be the
last.” In conclusion she reports: “This afternoon Mr. M. & myself, induced
by the enlivening rays of the setting sun, strolled down the Bowery & after
an agreeable walk returned home with renovated spirits.”
In December, 1825, Allan is moved to “lament little Herman’s melancholy
situation, but we trust in humble confidence that the GOD of the widow and
the fatherless will yet restore him.” By the following May, Allan’s humble
confidence seems to have been rewarded not only by Herman’s recovery,
but by the birth of another child. In the midst of a business letter—the usual
repository of Allan’s raptures—he with unwonted vivacity so celebrates his
paternal felicity: “The Lovely Six!! are all well, and, while the youngest
though both last & least is a sweet child of promise, & bids fair to become
the fairest of the fair—so much for affection, now for business.”
On August 10, 1826, Melville was sent out upon his first trip from home
unaccompanied by his parents. His destination was his mother’s people in
Albany, and his custodian during the trip a Mr. Walker. Allan shifts his
responsibility for his son on the shoulders of his brother-in-law, Peter
Gansevoort, in these terms:
“I now consign to your especial care & patronage my beloved son Herman,
an honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker of the true Albany stamp,
who, I trust, will do equal honour in due time to ancestry, parentage &
kindred. He is very backward in speech & somewhat slow in
comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and
things both solid & profound & of a docile & amiable disposition. If
agreeable, he will pass the vacation with his grandmother & yourself & I
hope he may prove a pleasant auxiliary to the Family circle—I depend
much on your kind attention to our dear Boy who will be truly grateful to
the least favour—let him avoid green fruit & unseasonable exposure to the
Sun & heat, and having taken such good care of Gansevoort last Summer I
commit his Brother to the same hands with unreserved confidence. & with
love to our good mother and yourself in which Maria, Mary & the children

most cordially join I remain very truly Your Friend & Brother, Allan
Melville.”
At the foot of this document, Allan appended in pencil: “please turn over.”
On the reverse of the letter is scribbled a breathless last request: “Have the
goodness to procure a pair of shoes for Herman, time being insufficient to
have a pair made here.”
When Allan here pronounces Melville “very backward in speech &
somewhat slow in comprehension,” he puts his son in a large class of genius
conspicuous for a deferred revelation of promising intelligence. Scott,
occupied in building up romances, was dismissed as a dunce; Hume, the
youthful thinker, was described by his mother as “uncommon weak
minded.” Goldsmith was a stupid child; Fanny Burney did not know her
letters at the age of eight. Byron showed no aptitude for school work. And
Chatterton, up to the age of six and a half, was, on the authority of his
mother, “little better than an absolute fool.” Allan scorned to take solace
from such facts, however. He consoled himself with the fact that though his
son was dull, he was at least “docile & amiable.”
Melville spent the summer of 1826 with the Gansevoorts. And he looked
back upon it as perhaps the most fortunate privilege of his youth, that this
first visit to Albany set the precedent for a whole series of similar summers.
He is idealising from his own experience when he says of Pierre: “It had
been his choice fate to have been born and nurtured in the country,
surrounded by scenery whose uncommon loveliness was the perfect mould
of a delicate and poetic mind; while the popular names of its finest features
appealed to the proudest patriotic and family associations of the historic line
of Glendinning.” Nor does he hesitate to reiterate that Pierre’s was a
“choice fate”: “For to a noble American youth this indeed—more than in
any other land—this indeed is a most rare and choice lot.” Each summer,
for as long as his school vacations would permit, Melville shared the choice
lot of Pierre. But Allan, unconverted to Melville’s Wordsworthian creed,
regularly recalled his son to the city with the opening of school.
This is the recall for the year 1826, dated “12 Sept. Tuesday, 4 P.M.”: “We
expect Gansevoort on Sunday, at fartherest, when we wish Herman also to
be here, that they may recommence their studies together on Monday next,
with equal chances of preferment, & without any feelings of jealousy or

ideas of favoritism—besides they may thus acquire a practical lesson whose
influence may endure forever, for if they understand early, that inclination
must always yield to Duty, it will become a matter of course when their
vacations expire to bid a fond adieu to friends & amusements, & return
home cheerfully to their books, & they will consequently imbibe habits of
Order & punctuality, which bear sweet blossoms in the dawn of life, golden
fruits in ‘the noon of manhood’ & a rich harvest for the garners of old age—
business is about as dull and unprofitable as the most bitter foe to general
prosperity, if such a being exists in human shape, could desire it, & it
requires a keener vision than mine, to discern among the signs of the times,
any real symptoms of future improvement.”
The summer of 1827 Melville spent with his grandparents in Boston; the
two following summers in Albany.
On February 28, 1828, Allan reported to his brother-in-law Peter
Gansevoort: “We have taken a house on Broadway (No. 675—if I mistake
not) for 5 years @ $575 without taxes—being the 2d beyond the marble
buildings & nearly opposite Bond Street. The house is a modern 2 stories
built 4 years since for the owner & has only been occupied by his family.
The lot is 200 feet deep through to Mercer St., Maria is charmed with the
house & situation.”
But Allan never lived to see this lease expire. The dull business of which he
earlier complained settled upon him, and in 1830 the prospects in New York
were so hopeless that he moved back to Albany, to die two years later,
leaving his wife and eight children practically penniless.
But before Allan moved away from New York, Herman had time to write
the earliest manuscript of his that survives. It reads:
11th of October, 1828.
Dear grandmother
This is the third letter that I ever wrote so you must not think it
very good. I now study geography, gramar, writing, Speaking,
Spelling, and read in the Scientific class book. I enclose in this
letter a drawing for my dear grandmother. Give my love to
grandmamma, Uncle Peter and Aunt Mary. And my Sisters and
also to allan,

Your affectionate grandson
Herman Melville.
In Redburn, Melville speaks “of those delightful days before my father was
a bankrupt, and died, and we moved from the city”; or again, speaking of
Allan: “he had been shaken by many storms of adversity, and at last died a
bankrupt.” Allan’s journal, however, which he kept until within a few
months of his death, is proudly superior to anything suggestive of the
outrageousness of fortune: its hard glazed surface betrays to the end no
crack in the veneer. Beyond a persistent tradition, and Melville’s iterated
statement, no further evidence of Allan’s financial reverses has transpired.
It is certain, however, that after Allan’s death his family found themselves
in straitened circumstances. After 1830, the most specific evidence known
to exist about the whereabouts and condition of Melville’s family is
preserved in old Albany Directories, as follows:
1830: no Melvilles mentioned.

1831: Melville, Allan, 446 s. Market.
house 338 n. Market.

1832: Melville, Gansevoort, fur store, 364 s. Market.
Melville, widow Maria, cor. of n. Market & Steuben.

1833: Melville, Gansevoort, fur store, 364 s. Market.
Melville, widow Maria, 282 n. Market.

1834: Melville, Gansevoort, fur and cap store, 364 s. Market,
res. 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl.
Melville, Herman, clerk in N. Y. State Bank, res. 3
Clinton Square n. Pearl.
Melville, widow Maria, 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl.

1835: Melville, Gansevoort, fur and cap store, 364 s. Market,
res. 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl.
Melville, Herman, clerk at 364 s. Market, res. 3 Clinton
Square n. Pearl.
Melville, widow Maria, 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl.

After 1835 the family scattered, Melville to begin his wanderings on land
and sea,—Gansevoort to drift about Albany for two years, Maria and the
rest of the children to move to Lansingburg—now a part of Albany.
The publication of the Celebration of the Semi-Centennial Anniversary of
the Albany Academy (Albany, 1862) in its list of alumni, and the date of
their entrance, offers the following record:
1831: Melville, Allan.
1830: Melville, Gansevoort.
1830: Melville, Herman.
This Semi-Centennial Anniversary Celebration took place in Tweedle Hall,
which, so says the publication, “was crowded with an appropriate
audience.” “The meeting was presided over by the Honourable Peter
Gansevoort, the President of the Board of Trustees,” the publication goes
on to say, “and by his side were his associates and the guests of the festival,
among whom was warmly welcomed Herman Melville, whose reputation
as an author has honoured the Academy, world-wide.” As Melville sat there,
“the Rev. Doc. Ferris ... made prayer to Heaven the source of that
knowledge which shall not vanish away;” Orlando Mead, LL.D., read a
Historical Discourse; and “at successive periods the exercises were
diversified by the music of Home, Sweet Home or Rest, Spirit, Rest, and of
other appropriate harmonies.” What recollections of his school-days at the
Albany Academy were then passing through Melville’s head, we haven’t
sufficient knowledge of his schooling to guess. As part of the celebration,
Alexander W. Bradford, who was a student at the Academy between 1825
and 1832, spoke of the “domestic discords and fights between the Latins
and the English, and the more fierce and bitter foreign conflicts waged
between the Hills and the Creeks, the latter being a pugnacious tribe of
barbarians who inhabited the shores of Fox Creek;” of “the weekly
exhibitions in the Gymnasium grand with the beauty of Albany;” of “the
lectures and experiments in chemistry, which being in the evening, were
favoured by the presence of young ladies as well as gentlemen.” In what
capacity, if any, Melville figured in these activities there is no way of
knowing.
Dr. Henry Hun, now President of the Albany Academy, in answer to a
request for information about Melville, answers: “Unfortunately, the

records of the Albany Academy were burned in 1888. It is impossible to say
how long he remained in the school or what results he achieved. He
probably took the Classical Course, as most of the brighter boys took it. It
was really a Collegiate Course, and the Head-master (or Principal as he was
then called) Dr. T. Romeyn Beck was an extraordinary man, but one who
did not spare the rod, but gave daily exhibitions in its use.” In a postscript
Dr. Hun adds: “It was a God-fearing school.”
Joseph Henry, at one time teacher at the Albany Academy, later head of the
Smithsonian Institute, in an address before the Association for the
Advancement of Science, in session in Albany in 1851, said of Melville’s
Alma Mater: “The Albany Academy was and still is one of the first, if not
the very first, institution of its kind in the United States. It early opposed the
pernicious maxim that a child should be taught nothing but what it could
perfectly understand, and that the sole object of instruction is to teach a
child to think.”
Since Melville was in 1834 employed as clerk in the New York State Bank
(a post he doubtless owed to his uncle, Peter Gansevoort, who was one of
the Trustees) he must have ceased to enjoy the advantages of the Albany
Academy before that date. During the time of Melville’s attendance, the
same texts were used by all students alike during their first three years at
the Albany Academy. This, then, would seem to be a list of the texts
(offered by the courtesy of Dr. Hun) studied by Melville:
1st Year:
Latin Grammar
Historia Sacra
Turner’s Exercises (begun)
Latin Reader
Irving’s Universal History
2d Year:
Latin Reader continued
Turner’s Exercises
Cornelius Nepos
Irving’s Grecian and Roman Histories
Roman Antiquities

3d Year:
Cæsar, Ovid, Latin Prosody
Turner’s Exercises, Translations
Irving’s Grecian Antiquities
Mythology and Biography
Greek Grammar
J. E. A. Smith, in the Biographical Sketch of Herman Melville that in 1891
he wrote for The Evening Journal of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, says of
Melville’s school-days:
“In 1835, Professor Charles E. West ... was president of the Albany
Classical Institute for boys, and Herman Melville became one of his pupils.
Professor West now remembers him as a favourite pupil, not distinguished
for mathematics, but very much so in the writing of ‘themes’ or
‘compositions’ and fond of doing it, while the great majority of pupils
dreaded it as a task, and would shirk it if they could.”
In 1835, Melville was clerk in his brother’s shop. If J. E. A. Smith’s record
is accurate, Melville was at the time alternating business with education.
The greater part of 1836 was spent by Melville, according to his own
account, already quoted, in the household of his uncle Major Thomas
Melville, at Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
J. E. A. Smith in his Biographical Sketch so supplements Melville’s
account: “Besides his labours with his uncle in the hay field, he was for one
term teacher of the common school in the ‘Sykes district’ under Washington
mountain, of which he had some racy memories—one of them of a
rebellion in which some of the bigger boys undertook to ‘lick’ him—with
what results, those who remember his physique and character can well
imagine.”
The only other records we have of Melville’s boyhood and early youth are
the scattered recollections preserved in his published works. Such,
throughout his life, were the veering whims of his blood, that he recalled
these earlier years with no unity of retrospect. The confessions of St.
Augustine are a classical warning of the untrustworthiness of even the most
conscientious memory. To call memory the mother of the Muses, is too
frequently but a partial and euphemistic naming of her offspring. So when

Melville writes of early years, now in rhapsody and then in bitterness, the
result, though always valuable autobiography, is not invariably, of course,
strict history.
Some of his idealisations of his life with the Gansevoorts have already been
given. Through the refracting films of memory he at times looked back
upon “those far descended Dutch meadows ... steeped in a Hindooish haze”
and proud of his name and his “double revolutionary descent,” he viewed
himself with Miltonic self-esteem as a “fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous
boy.” And there is no reason to suspect him of perverting the truth. Behind
these are “certain shadowy reminiscences of wharves, and warehouses, and
shipping, which a residence in a seaport during early childhood had
supplied me.” And with them he blended remembrances “of winter
evenings in New York, by the well-remembered sea-coal fire, when my
father used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea,
mountain high; of the masts bending like twigs; and all about Havre, and
Liverpool, and about going up into the ball of St. Paul’s in London. Indeed,
during my early life, most of my thoughts of the sea were connected with
the land; but with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and
long, narrow crooked streets without sidewalks, and lined with strange
houses. And especially I tried hard to think how such places must look on
rainy days and Saturday afternoons; and whether indeed they did have rainy
days and Saturdays there, just as we did here, and whether the boys went to
school there, and studied geography and wore their shirt collars turned over,
and tied with a black ribbon; and whether their papas allowed them to wear
boots instead of shoes, which I so much disliked, for boots looked so
manly.”
Melville confesses here to a precocious exercise of the poetic imagination: a
type of imagination for which the consistent disappointments of his life
were to be the invariable penalty. In the prosaic man, in Benjamin Franklin,
for example, the imagination does not, as it did with Melville, enrich the
immediate facts of experience with amplifications so vivid that the reality is
in danger of being submerged. In the prosaic man, the imagination works in
a safely utilitarian fashion, combining images for practical purposes under
the supervision of a matter-of-fact judgment. And though it may indeed
bring the lightning from the clouds, it makes the transfer not to glorify the
firmament, but to discipline the lightning and to make church steeples safe

from the wrath of God. Melville’s was the type of imagination whose
extreme operation is exemplified in William Blake. “I assert for myself,”
said Blake, “that I do not behold the outward creation, and that it is to me
hindrance and not action. ‘What,’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises,
do you not see a round disk of fire something like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I
see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God Almighty!’ I question not my corporeal eye any more than I
would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with
it.” Though Allan Melville chose as courtship gift a copy of Pleasures of
Imagination, the pleasures he derived from the exercise of this faculty were
of a sort that both Blake and his son would have thought tame in the
extreme. Allan saw the world with his eyes alone, he proudly believed, the
world as it really is. It was both the blessing and the curse of his son that his
was the gift of “second sight.”
“We had several pieces of furniture in the house,” says Melville, speaking
of his childhood days, “which had been brought from Europe”: furniture
that had been imported by Allan, some of which is still in the possession of
Melville’s descendants. “These I examined again and again, wondering
where the wood grew: whether the workmen who made them still survived,
and what they could be doing with themselves now.” Could Allan have
known what was going on in the head of his son, he would have been as
alarmed as was the father of Anatole France when the young Thibault
undertook to emulate St. Nicholas of Patras and distribute his riches to the
poor.
Even as a child, he was lured by the romance of distance, and he confesses
how he used to think “how fine it would be, to be able to talk about remote
barbarous countries; with what reverence and wonder people would regard
me, if I had just returned from the coast of Africa or New Zealand: how
dark and romantic my sunburnt cheeks would look; how I would bring
home with me foreign clothes of rich fabric and princely make, and wear
them up and down the streets, and how grocers’ boys would turn their heads
to look at me, as I went by. For I very well remembered staring at a man
myself, who was pointed out to me by my aunt one Sunday in church, as the
person who had been in stony Arabia and passed through strange adventures
there, all of which with my own eyes I had read in the book which he wrote,
an arid-looking book in a pale yellow cover.

“‘See what big eyes he has,’ whispered my aunt, ‘they got so big, because
when he was almost dead in the desert with famishing, he all at once caught
sight of a date tree, with the ripe fruit hanging on it.’ Upon this, I stared at
him till I thought his eyes were really of an uncommon size, and stuck out
from his head like those of a lobster. When church was out, I wanted my
aunt to take me along and follow the traveller home. But she said the
constables would take us up, if we did; and so I never saw the wonderful
Arabian traveller again. But he long haunted me; and several times I dreamt
of him, and thought his great eyes were grown still larger and rounder; and
once I had a vision of the date tree.”
It is one of the few certainties of life that a child who has once stood fixed
before a piece of household furniture worrying his head about whether the
workman who made it still be alive; who after seeing an Arabian traveller in
church goes home and has a vision of a date tree: such a child is not going
to die an efficiency expert. At the age of fifteen Melville found himself
faced with the premature necessity of coming to some sort of terms with life
on his own account. Helped by his uncle, he tried working in a bank. The
experiment seems not to have been a success. His next experiment was
clerk in his brother’s store. But banking and clerking seem to have been
equally repugnant. Melville had a taste for landscape, so his next
experiment was as farmer and country school-keeper. But farming,
interspersed with pedagogy and pugilism, fired Melville to a mood of
desperation. “Talk not of the bitterness of middle age and after-life,” he
later wrote; “a boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young
soul the mildew has fallen.... Before the death of my father I never thought
of working for my living, and never knew there were hard hearts in the
world.... I had learned to think much, and bitterly, before my time.” So he
decided to slough off the tame respectabilities of his well-to-do uncles, and
cousins, and aunts. Goaded by hardship, and pathetically lured by the
glamorous mirage of distance, with all the impetuosity of his eighteen
summers he planned a hegira. “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws
himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. This is my substitute for
pistol and ball.”

CHAPTER IV
A SUBSTITUTE FOR PISTOL AND BALL
“When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-
head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump
from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at
first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s
sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established
family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or
Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your
hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country
schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you, the
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a
sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics
to enable you to grin and bear it.”
—Herman Melville: Moby-Dick.
When, at the age of seventeen, Melville cut loose from his mother, his kind
cousins and aunts, and sympathising sisters, he was stirred by motives of
desperation, and by the immature delusion that happiness lies elusive and
beckoning, just over the world’s rim. It was a drastic escape from the
intolerable monotony of prosaic certainties and aching frustrations. “Sad
disappointments in several plans which I had sketched for my future life,”
says Melville, “the necessity of doing something for myself, united with a
naturally roving disposition, conspired within me, to send me to sea as a
sailor.”
In Redburn: His First Voyage. Being the Sailor-boy Confessions and
Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman (1849) Melville has left what is
the only surviving record of his initial attempt “to sail beyond the sunset.”
Luridly vivid and exuberant was his imagination, flooding the world of his
childhood and fantastically transmuting reality. At the time of his first

voyage, Melville was, it is well to remember, a boy of seventeen. He was
not old enough, not wise enough, to regard his dreams as impalpable
projections of his defeated desires: desires inflamed by what Dr. Johnson
called the “dangerous prevalence of imagination,” and which, in “sober
probability” could find no actual satisfaction. Had Melville been a nature of
less impetuosity, or of less abundant physical vitality, he might have moped
tamely at home and “yearned.” But with the desperate Quixotic enterprise
of a splendid but embittered boy, he sallied forth into the unknown to put
his dreams to the test. When it was reported to Carlyle that Margaret Fuller
made boast: “I accept the universe,” unimpressed he remarked: “Gad! she’d
better.” Melville, when only seventeen, had not yet come to Carlyle’s
dyspeptic resignation to the cosmic order. “As years and dumps increase; as
reflection lends her solemn pause, then,” so Melville says, in substance, in a
passage on elderly whales, “in the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of
life, do sulky old souls go about all alone among the meridians and parallels
saying their prayers.” Lacking Dr. Johnson’s elderly wisdom, Melville
believed there to be some correlation between happiness and geography. He
was not willing to take resignation on faith. Not through “spontaneous
striving towards development,” but through necessity and hard contact with
nature and men does the recalcitrant dreamer accept Carlyle’s dictum. With
drastic experience, most men come at last to have a little commonsense
knocked into their heads,—and a good bit of imagination knocked out, as
Wordsworth, for one, discovered.
Melville’s recourse to the ocean in 1837, as that of Richard Henry Dana’s
three years before, was a heroic measure, calculated either to take the
nonsense out of both of them, or else to drive them straight either to suicide,
madness, or rum-soaked barbarism. To both boys, it was a crucial test that
would have ruined coarser or weaker natures. Dana came from out the
ordeal purged and strengthened, toned up to the proper level, and no longer
too fine for everyday use. Though as years went by, so says C. F. Adams,
his biographer, “the freshness of the great lesson faded away, and influences
which antedated his birth and surrounded his life asserted themselves, not
for his good.”
Because of lack of contemporary evidence, the immediate influences of
Melville’s first experience in the forecastle, cannot be so positively stated.
Redburn, the only record of the adventure, was not written until twelve

years after Melville had experienced what it records. Extraordinarily
crowded was this intervening span of twelve years. But despite the fulness
of intervening experience—or, maybe, because of it—the universe still
stuck in his maw: it was a bolus on which he gagged. Redburn is written in
embittered memory of Melville’s first hegira. In the words of Mr. H. S. Salt:
“It is a record of bitter experience and temporary disillusionment—the
confessions of a poor, proud youth, who goes to sea ‘with a devil in his
heart’ and is painfully initiated into the unforeseen hardships of a sea-faring
life.” In 1849 he was still unadjusted to unpalatable reality, and in Redburn
he seems intent upon revenging himself upon his early disillusion by an
inverted idealism,—by building for himself, “not castles, but dungeons in
Spain,”—as if, failing to reach the moon, he should determine to make a
Cynthia of the first green cheese. And this inverted idealism he achieves
most effectively by recording with photographic literalness the most
hideous details of his penurious migration. His romantic realism—
reminding one of Zola and certain pages out of Rousseau—he alternates
with malicious self-satire, and its obverse gesture, obtrusive self-pity. To
those austere and classical souls who are proudly impatient of this style of
writing, it must be insisted with what Arnold called “damnable iteration”
that Redburn purports to be the confessions of a seventeen-year-old lad.
Autobiographically, the book is, of course, of superlative interest. But
despite its unaccountable neglect, and Melville’s ostentation of contempt
for it, it is none the less important, in the history of letters, as a very notable
achievement. Mr. Masefield and W. Clark Russell alone, of competent
critics, seem to have been aware of its existence. It is Redburn that Mr.
Masefield confesses to loving best of Melville’s writings: this “boy’s book
about running away to sea.” Mr. Masefield thinks, however, that “one must
know New York and the haunted sailor-town of Liverpool to appreciate that
gentle story thoroughly.”
When Melville wrote Redburn in 1849, there was no book exactly like it in
our literature, its only possible forerunners being Nathaniel Ames’ A
Mariner’s Sketches (1830) and Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840).
The great captains had written of their voyages, it is true; or when they
themselves left no record, their literary laxity was usually corrected by the
querulousness of some member of their ship’s company. Great compilations
such as Churchill’s, or Harris’, or Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations,
Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation: made by sea or

overland to the remotest and farthest different quarters of the earth at any
time within the Compass of these 1600 years, or no less luxuriously entitled
works, such as the fine old eighteenth century folio of Captain Charles
Johnson’s A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most
Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street Robbers, etc., To which is added,
A Genuine Account of the Voyages and Plunders of the Most Notorious
Pyrates, interspersed with several diverting tales, and pleasant songs, and
adorned with the Heads of the Most Remarkable Villains, curiously
Engraven, are monuments to the prodigious wealth of the early literature of
sea adventure. The light of romance colours these maritime exploits, and
even upon the maturest gaze there still lingers something of the radiance
with which the ardent imagination of boyhood gilds the actions and persons
of these fierce sea-warriors, treacherous, cruel and profligate miscreants
though the most picturesque of them were.
But these hardy adventurers were men of action; men proud of their own
exploits, but untouched by any corrupt self-consciousness of their Gilbert-
and-Sullivan, or Byronic possibilities; men untempted to offer any
superfluous encouragement to the deep blue sea to “roll.” And though many
of them—Captain Cook, for example—ran away to sea to ship before the
mast, they in later years betray no temptings to linger with attention over
their days of early obscurity. Even The Book of Things Forgotten passes
over the period of Cook’s life in the forecastle. He began as an apprentice,
he ended as a mate. That is all. As regards the life he led as a youth on
board the merchant ship there is no account: a silence that forces Walter
Besant in his Captain Cook to a page or two of surmise as a transition to
more notable sureties. An appreciation of the romance of the sea, and of the
humbler details of the life of the common sailor is one of our most recent
sophistications.
In fiction, it is true, Smollett had his sailors, as did Scott, and Marryat, and
Cooper,—to mention only the most notable names. Provoked to originality
by a defiant boast, Cooper wrote the earliest first-rate sea-novel: a story
concerning itself exclusively with the sea. Remarkable is the clearness and
accuracy of his description of the manœuvres of his ships. He makes his
vessels “walk the waters like a thing of life.” “I have loved ships as I have
loved men,” says Melville. And Cooper before him, as Conrad after him,
have by similar love given personality to vessels. Among his company of

able seamen, Cooper has his Long Tom Coffin: and these are more
picturesque, and perhaps more real than his Lord Geoffrey Cleveland, his
Admiral Bluewater, his Griffith, and his other quarterdeck people. But sea-
life as Cooper knew it was sea-life as seen from the quarterdeck, and from
the quarterdeck of the United States navy.
Marryat, it is true, makes his Newton Foster a merchant sailor. But Marryat
knew nothing of the hidden life of the merchant service. He had passed his
sea-life in the ships of the States, and he knew no more of what passed in a
merchantman’s forecastle than the general present day land intelligence
knows of what passes in a steamer’s engine room. Dana and Melville were
the first to lift the hatch and show the world what passes in a ship’s
forecastle. Dana disclosed these secrets in a single volume; Melville in a
number of remarkable narratives, the first of which was Redburn.
Dana’s is a trustworthy and matter-of-fact account in the form of a journal;
a vigorous, faithful, modest narrative. With very little interest exhibited in
the feeling of his own pulse, he recounts the happenings aboard the ship
from day to day. Melville’s account is more vivid because more intimate.
As is the case with George Borrow, his eye is always riveted upon himself.
He minutely amplifies his own emotions and sensations, and with an
incalculable gain over Dana in descriptive vividness. One would have to be
colour blind to purple patches to fail to recognise in Redburn streaks of the
purest Tyrean dye. Between Melville and Dana the answer is obvious as to
“who fished the murex up?”
“It was with a heavy heart and full eyes,” says Melville, “that my mother
parted from me; perhaps she thought me an erring and a wilful boy, and
perhaps I was; but if I was, it had been a hard-hearted world, and hard times
that had made me so.”
Dressed in a hunting jacket; one leg of his trousers adorned with an ample
and embarrassing patch; armed with a fowling piece which his older brother
Gansevoort had given him, in lieu of cash, to sell in New York; without a
penny in his pocket: Melville arrived in New York on a fine rainy day in the
late spring of 1837. Dripping like a seal, and garbed like a housebreaker, he
walked across town to the home of a friend of Gansevoort’s, where he was
dried, warmed and fed.

Philo of Judea has descended to posterity blushing because he had a body.
Melville survives, rosy in animality: but his was never Philo’s scarlet of
shame. Melville was a boy of superb physical vigour: and his blackest
plunges of discouragement and philosophical despair were always
wholesomely amenable to the persuasions of food and drink. It was
Carlyle’s conviction that with stupidity and a good digestion man can bear
much: had Melville been gifted with stupidity, he would have needed only
regular meals to convert him into a miracle of cheerful endurance. “There is
a savour of life and immortality in substantial fare,” he later wrote; “we are
like balloons, which are nothing till filled.” When Melville sat down to the
well-stocked table at his friend’s house in New York he was a very
miserable boy. But his misery was not invulnerable. “Every mouthful
pushed the devil that had been tormenting me all day farther and farther out
of me, till at last I entirely ejected him with three successive bowls of
Bohea. That night I went to bed thinking the world pretty tolerable after
all.”
Next day, accompanied by his brother’s friend, whose true name Melville
disguises under the anonymity of Jones, Melville walked down to the water
front.
At that time, and indeed until as recently as thirty years ago, the water front
of a great sea-port town like New York showed a towering forest of tall and
tapering masts reaching high up above the roofs of the water-side buildings,
crossed with slender spars hung with snowy canvas, and braced with a maze
of cordage: a brave sight that Melville passes over in morose silence. He
postpones until his arrival in Liverpool the spicing of his account with the
blended smells of pitch, and tar, and old-ropes, and wet-wood, and resin and
the sharp cool tang of brine. Nor does Melville pause to conjure up the great
bowsprits and jib-booms that stretched across the street that passed the foot
of the slips. Though Melville has left a detailed description of the Liverpool
docks—not failing to paint in with a dripping brush the blackest shadows of
the low life framing that picturesque scene—it was outside his purpose to
give any hint of the maritime achievement of the merchant service in which
he was such an insignificant unit.
The maritime achievement of the United States was then almost at the
pinnacle of its glory. At that time, the topsails of the United States flecked
every ocean, and their captains courageous left no lands unvisited, no sea

unexplored. From New England in particular sailed ships where no other
ships dared to go, anchoring where no one else ever dreamed of looking for
trade. And so it happened, as Ralph D. Paine in his The Old Merchant
Marine has pointed out, that “in the spicy warehouses that overlooked
Salem Harbour there came to be stored hemp from Luzon, gum copal from
Zanzibar, palm oil from Africa, coffee from Arabia, tallow from
Madagascar, whale oil from the Antarctic, hides and wool from the Rio de
la Plata, nutmeg and cloves from Malaysia.” With New England originality
and audacity, Boston shipped cargoes of ice to Calcutta. And for thirty years
a regular trade in Massachusetts ice remained active and lucrative: such
perishable freight out upon a four or five months’ voyage across the fiery
Equator, doubling Da Gama’s cape and steering through the furnace heat of
the Indian Ocean. In those days the people of the Atlantic seacoast from
Maryland northward found their interests vitally allied with maritime
adventure. There was a generous scattering of sea-faring folk among
Melville’s forebears of our early national era; and Melville’s father, an
importing merchant, owed his fortunes in important part, to the chances of
the sea. The United States, without railroads, and with only the most
wretched excuses for post-roads, were linked together by coasting ships.
And thousands of miles of ocean separated Americans from the markets in
which they must sell their produce and buy their luxuries. Down to the
middle of the last century, one of the most vital interests of the United
States was in the sea: an interest that deeply influenced the thought, the
legislature and the literature of our people. And during this period, as Willis
J. Abbott, in his American Merchant Ships and Sailors has noted, “the sea
was a favourite career, not only for American boys with their way to make
in the world, but for the sons of wealthy men as well. That classic of New
England seamanship Two Years Before the Mast was not written until the
middle of the 19th century, and its author went to sea, not in search of
wealth, but of health. But before the time of Richard Henry Dana, many a
young man of good family and education—a Harvard graduate, like him,
perhaps—bade farewell to a home of comfort and refinement and made his
berth in a smoky, fetid forecastle to learn the sailor’s calling. There was at
that time less to engage the activities and arouse the ambitions of youth than
now, and the sea offered a most promising career.... Ships were multiplying
fast, and no really lively and alert seaman need stay long in the forecastle.”
The brilliant maritime growth of the United States, after a steady

development for two hundred years, was, when Melville sailed in 1837,
within twenty-five years of its climax. It was to reach its peak in 1861,
when the aggregate tonnage belonging to the United States was but a little
smaller than that of Great Britain and her dependencies, and nearly as large
as the combined tonnage of all other nations of the world, Great Britain
excepted. Vanished fleets and brave memories—a chronicle of America
which had written its closing chapters before the Civil War!
But this state of affairs,—if, indeed, he was even vaguely conscious of its
existence,—left Melville at the time of his first shipping, completely cold. It
is doubtless true that Maria would have respected him more if he had
attempted to justify his sea-going by assuring her that at that time it was to
no degree remarkable for seamen to become full-fledged captains and part
owners at the age of twenty-one, or even earlier. And Maria would have
listened impressed to such cogent evidence as the case of Thomas T.
Forbes, for example, who shipped before the mast at the age of thirteen, and
was commander of the Levant at twenty; or the case of William Sturges,
afterwards the head of a firm which at one time controlled half the trade
between the United States and China, who shipped at seventeen, and was a
captain and manager in the China trade at nineteen. But such facts touched
Melville not at all. “At that early age,” he says, “I was as unambitious as a
man of sixty.” Melville’s brother, Tom, came to be a sea-captain. Melville’s
was a different destiny.
So he trudged with his friend among the boats along the water front, where,
after some little searching, they hit upon a ship for Liverpool. In the cabin
they found the suave and bearded Captain, dapperly dressed, and humming
a brisk air as he promenaded up and down: not such a completely odious
creature, despite Melville’s final contempt for him. The conversation was
concluded by Melville signing up as a “boy,” at terms not wildly lucrative
for Melville.
“Pray, captain,” said Melville’s amiable bungling friend, “how much do you
generally pay a handsome fellow like this?”
“Well,” said the captain, looking grave and profound, “we are not so
particular about beauty, and we never give more than three dollars to a
green lad.”

Melville’s next move was to sell his gun: an experience which gives him
occasion to discourse on pawn shops and the unenviable hardships of
paupers. With the two and a half dollars that he reaped by the sale of his
gun, and in almost criminal innocence of the outfit he would need, he
bought a red woollen shirt, a tarpaulin hat, a belt, and a jack-knife. In his
improvidence, he was ill provided, indeed, with everything calculated to
make his situation aboard ship at all comfortable, or even tolerable. He was
without mattress or bed-clothes, or table-tools; without pilot-cloth jackets,
or trousers, or guernsey frocks, or oil-skin suits, or sea-boots and the other
things which old seamen used to carry in their chests. As he himself says,
his sea-outfit was “something like that of the Texan rangers, whose
uniform, they say, consists of a shirt collar and a pair of spurs.” His
purchases made, he did a highly typical thing: “I had only one penny left, so
I walked out to the end of the pier, and threw the penny into the water.”
That night, after dinner, Melville went to his room to try on his red woollen
shirt before the glass, to see what sort of a looking sailor he would make.
But before beginning this ritual before the mirror, he “locked the door
carefully, and hung a towel over the knob, so that no one could peep
through the keyhole.” It is said that throughout his life Melville clung to
this practice of draping door-knobs. “As soon as I got into the shirt,”
Melville goes on to say, “I began to feel sort of warm and red about the
face, which I found was owing to the reflection of the dyed wool upon my
skin. After that, I took a pair of scissors and went to cutting my hair, which
was very long. I thought every little would help in making me a light hand
to run aloft.”
Next morning, before he reached the ship, it began raining hard, so it was
plain there would be no getting to sea that day. But having once said
farewell to his friends, and feeling a repetition of the ceremony would be
awkward, Melville boarded the ship, where a large man in a large dripping
pea-jacket, who was calking down the main-hatches, directed him in no
cordial terms to the forecastle. Rather different was Dana’s appearance on
board the brig Pilgrim on August 14, 1834, “in full sea-rig, with my chest
containing an outfit for a two or three years’ voyage.” Nor did Dana begin
in the forecastle.
In the dark damp stench of that deserted hole, Melville selected an empty
bunk. In the middle of this he deposited the slim bundle of his belongings,

and penniless and dripping spent the day walking hungry among the
wharves: a day’s peregrination that he recounts with vivid and remorseless
realism.
At night he returned to the forecastle, where he met a thick-headed lad from
Lancaster of about his own years. Glad of any companionship, Melville and
this lubber boy crawled together in the same bunk. But between the high
odour of the forecastle, the loud snoring of his bed-fellow, wet, cold and
hungry, he went up on deck, where he walked till morning. When the
groceries on the wharf opened, he went to make a breakfast of a glass of
water. This made him qualmish. “My head was dizzy, and I went staggering
along the walk, almost blind.”
By the time Melville got back to the ship, everything was in an uproar. The
pea-jacket man was there ordering about men in the riggings, and people
were bringing off chickens, and pigs, and beef, and vegetables from the
shore. Melville’s initial task was the cleaning out of the pig-pen; after this
he was sent up the top-mast with a bucket of a thick lobbered gravy, which
slush he dabbed over the mast. This over, and, in the increasing bustle
everything having been made ready to sail, the word was passed to go to
dinner fore and aft. “Though the sailors surfeited with eating and drinking
ashore did not touch the salt beef and potatoes which the black cook handed
down into the forecastle: and though this left the whole allowance to me; to
my surprise, I found that I could eat little or nothing; for now I only felt
deadly faint, but not hungry.”
Only a lunatic, of course, would expect to find very commodious or airy
quarters, any drawing-room amenities, Chautauqua uplift, or Y.M.C.A.
insipidities aboard a merchantman of the old sailing days. Nathaniel Ames,
a Harvard graduate who a little before Melville’s time shipped before the
mast, records that on his first vessel, men seeking berths in the forecastle
were ordered to bring certificates of good character from their clergymen:
an unusual requirement, surely. In more than one memoir, there is mention
of a “religious ship”: an occasional mention that speaks volumes for the
heathenism of the majority. Dana says of one of the mates aboard the
Pilgrim: “He was too easy and amiable for the mate of a merchantman. He
was not the man to call a sailor a ‘son of a bitch’ and knock him down with
a hand-spike.” And J. Grey Jewell, sometime United States Consul at
Singapore, in his book Among Our Sailors makes a sober and elaborately

documented attempt to strip the life of a sailor of its romantic glamour, to
show that it is not a “round of fun and frolic and jollity with the advantages
of seeing many distant lands and people thrown in”: an effort that would
seem to be unnecessary except to boy readers of Captain Marryat and dime
thrillers.
Melville’s shipmates were, it goes without saying, rough and illiterate men.
With typical irony, he says that with a good degree of complacency and
satisfaction he compared his own character with that of his shipmates: “for I
had previously associated with persons of a very discreet life, so that there
was little opportunity to magnify myself by comparing myself with my
neighbours.” In a more serious mood, he says of sailors as a class: “the very
fact of their being sailors argues a certain restlessness and sensualism of
character, ignorance, and depravity. They are deemed almost the refuse of
the earth; and the romantic view of them is principally had through
romances.” And their chances of improvement are not increased, he
contends, by the fact that “after the vigorous discipline, hardships, dangers
and privations of a voyage, they are set adrift in a foreign port, and exposed
to a thousand enticements, which, under the circumstances, would be hard
even for virtue to withstand, unless virtue went about on crutches.” It was a
tradition for centuries fostered in the naval service that the sailor was a dog,
a different human species from the landsman, without laws and usages to
protect him. This tradition survived among merchant sailors as an unhappy
anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an American Congress
was reluctant to bestow upon seamen the decencies of existence enjoyed by
the poorest labourer ashore. Melville’s shipmates did not promise to be men
of the calibre of which Maria Gansevoort would have approved.
With his ship, the Highlander, streaming out through the Narrows, past
sights rich in association to his boyish recollection; streaming out and away
from all familiar smells and sights and sounds, Melville found himself “a
sort of Ishmael in the ship, without a single friend or companion, and I
began to feel a hatred growing up in me against the whole crew.” In other
words, Melville was a very homesick boy. But he blended common sense
with homesickness. “My heart was like lead, and I felt bad enough, Heaven
knows; but I soon learnt that sailors breathe nothing about such things, but
strive their best to appear all alive and hearty.” And circumstances helped

him live up to this gallant insight. For, as he says, “there was plenty of work
to be done, which kept my thoughts from becoming too much for me.”
Melville was a boy of stout physical courage, game to the marrow, and in
texture of muscle and bone a worthy grandson of General Gansevoort. What
would have ruined a sallow constitution, he seems to have thriven upon.
“Being so illy provided with clothes,” he says, “I frequently turned into my
bunk soaking wet, and turned out again piping hot and smoking like a
roasted sirloin, and yet was never the worse for it; for then, I bore a
charmed life of youth and health, and was daggerproof to bodily ill.” With
alacrity and good sportsmanship, he went at his duties. Before he had been
out many days, he had outlived the acute and combined miseries of
homesickness and seasickness; the colour was back in his cheeks, he is
careful to observe with Miltonic vanity. Soon he was taking especial delight
in furling the top-gallant sails and royals in a hard wind, and in hopping
about in the riggings like a Saint Jago’s monkey. “There was a wild
delirium about it,” he says, “a fine rushing of the blood about the heart; and
a glad thrilling and throbbing of the whole system, to find yourself tossed
up at every pitch into the clouds of a stormy sky, and hovering like a
judgment angel between heaven and earth; both hands free, with one foot in
the rigging, and one somewhere behind you in the wind.”
The food, of course, was neither dainty nor widely varied: an unceasing
round of salt-pork, stale beef, “duff,” “lobscouse,” and coffee. “The thing
they called coffee,” says Melville with keen descriptive effort, “was the
most curious tasting drink I ever drank, and tasted as little like coffee as it
did like lemonade; though, to be sure, it was generally as cold as lemonade.
But what was more curious still, was the different quality and taste of it on
different mornings. Sometimes it tasted fishy, as if it were a decoction of
Dutch herring; and then it would taste very salt, as if some old horse or sea-
beef had been boiled in it; and then again it would taste a sort of cheesy, as
if the captain had sent his cheese-parings forward to make our coffee of;
and yet another time it would have such a very bad flavour that I was
almost ready to think some old stocking heel had been boiled in it.
Notwithstanding the disagreeableness of the flavour, I always used to have
a strange curiosity every morning to see what new taste it was going to
have; and I never missed making a new discovery and adding another taste
to my palate.”

Withal, Melville might have fared much worse, as contemporaneous
accounts more than adequately prove. Even in later days, Frank T. Bullen
was able to write: “I have often seen the men break up a couple of biscuits
into a pot of coffee for breakfast, and after letting it stand for a minute or
two, skim off the accumulated scum of vermin from the top—maggots,
weevils, etc., to the extent of a couple of tablespoonsful, before they could
shovel the mess into their craving stomachs.” Melville never complains of
maggots or weevils in his biscuits, nor does he complain of being stinted
food; during this period, both common enough complaints. The cook, it is
true, did not sterilise everything he touched. “I never saw him wash but
once,” says Melville, “and that was at one of his own soup pots one dark
night when he thought no one saw him.” But as has already been imputed to
Melville for righteousness, his was not a squeamish stomach, and despite
the usual amount of filth on board the Highlander, his meals seem to have
gone off easily enough. He has left this pleasant picture of the amenities of
food-taking: “the sailors sitting cross-legged at their chests in a circle, and
breaking the hard biscuit, very sociably, over each other’s heads, which was
very convenient, indeed, but gave me the headache, at least for the first four
or five days till I got used to it; and then I did not care much about it, only it
kept my hair full of crumbs; and I had forgot to bring a fine comb and
brush, so I used to shake my hair out to windward over the bulwarks every
evening.”
Though the forecastle was, to characterise it quietly, a cramped and fetid
hole, dimly lighted and high in odour, Melville came to be sufficiently
acclimated to it to enjoy lying on his back in his bunk during a forenoon
watch below, reading while his messmates slept. His bunk was an upper
one, and right under the head of it was a bull’s-eye, inserted into the deck to
give light. Here he read an account of Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, and
a large black volume on Delirium Tremens: Melville’s share in the effects of
a sailor whose bunk he occupied, who had, in a frenzy of drunkenness,
hurled himself overboard. Here Melville also struggled to read Smith’s
Wealth of Nations. “But soon I gave it up for lost work,” says Melville;
“and thought that the old backgammon board we had at home, lettered on
the back The History of Rome, was quite as full of matter, and a great deal
more entertaining.”

The forecastle, however, was not invariably the setting for scenes so idyllic.
Drunkenness there was aplenty, especially at the beginning of the voyage
both from New York and from Liverpool. Of the three new men shipped at
Liverpool, two were so drunk they were unable to engage in their duties
until some hours after the boat quit the pier; but the third, down on the
ship’s papers as Miguel Saveda, had to be carried in by a crimp and slung
into a bunk where he lay locked in a trance. To heighten the discomforts of
the forecastle, there was soon added to the stench of sweated flesh, old
clothes, tobacco smoke, rum and bilge, a new odour, attributed to the
presence of a dead rat. Some days before, the forecastle had been smoked
out to extirpate the vermin over-running her: a smoking that seemed to have
been fatal to a rodent among the hollow spaces in the side planks. “At
midnight, the larboard watch, to which I belonged, turned out; and instantly
as every man waked, he exclaimed at the now intolerable smell, supposed
to be heightened by the shaking up of the bilge-water, from the ship’s
rolling.
“‘Blast that rat!’ cried the Greenlander.
“‘He’s blasted already,’ said Jackson, who in his drawers had crossed over
to the bunk of Miguel. ‘It’s a water-rat, shipmates, that’s dead; and here he
is’—and with that he dragged forth the sailor’s arm, exclaiming ‘Dead as a
timber-head!’
“Upon this the men rushed toward the bunk, Max with the light, which he
held to the man’s face. ‘No, he’s not dead,’ he cried, as the yellow flame
wavered for a moment at the seaman’s motionless mouth. But hardly had
the words escaped when, to the silent horror of all, two threads of greenish
fire, like a forked tongue, darted out between his lips; and in a moment the
cadaverous face was crawled over by a swarm of worm-like flames.
“The light dropped from the hand of Max, and went out; while covered all
over with spires and sparkles of flame, that faintly crackled in the silence,
the uncovered parts of the body burned before us, precisely like a
phosphorescent shark in a midnight sea. The eyes were open and fixed; the
mouth was curled like a scroll, while the whole face, now wound in curls of
soft blue flame, wore an aspect of grim defiance, and eternal death.
Prometheus blasted by fire on the rock.

“One arm, its red shirt-sleeve rolled up, exposed the man’s name, tattooed
in vermilion, near the hollow of the middle joint; and as if there was
something peculiar in the painted flesh, every vibrating letter burned so
white that you might read the flaming name in the flickering ground of
blue.
“‘Where’s that damned Miguel?’ was now shouted down among us by the
mate.
“‘He’s gone to the harbour where they never weigh anchor,’ coughed
Jackson. ‘Come down, sir, and look.’
“Thinking that Jackson intended to beard him, the mate sprang down in a
rage; but recoiled at the burning body as if he had been shot by a bullet.
‘Take hold of it,’ said Jackson at last, to the Greenlander; ‘it must go
overboard. Don’t stand shaking there, like a dog; take hold of it, I say!—
But stop!’ and smothering it all in the blankets, he pulled it partly out of the
bunk.
“A few minutes more, and it fell with a bubble among the phosphorescent
sparkles of the sea, leaving a coruscating wake as it sank.”
After this, Melville ceased reading in the forecastle. And indeed no other
sailor but Jackson would stay in the forecastle alone, and none would laugh
or sing there: none but Jackson. But he, while the rest would be sitting
silently smoking on their chests, or on their bunks, would look towards the
nailed-up bunk of Miguel and cough, and laugh, and invoke the dead man
with scoffs and jeers.
Of Melville’s shipmates, surely this Jackson was the most remarkable: a fit
rival to Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus. Max and the Greenlander were
merely typical old tars. Mr. Thompson, the grave negro cook, with his
leaning towards metaphysics and his disquisitions on original sin, together
with his old crony, Lavendar the steward, with his amorous backslidings,
his cologne water, and his brimstone pantaloons, though mildly diverting,
were usual enough. Blunt, too, with his collection of hair-oils, and his
dream-book, and his flowing bumpers of horse-salts, though picturesque,
was pale in comparison with Jackson. Larry, the old whaler, with his
sentimental distaste for civilised society, was a forerunner of Mr. H. L.
Mencken; and as such, deserves a more prominent mention. “And what’s

the use of bein’ snivelized?” he asks Melville; “snivelized chaps only learn
the way to take on ’bout life, and snivel. Blast Ameriky, I say. I tell ye, ye
wouldn’t have been to sea here, leadin’ this dog’s life, if you hadn’t been
snivelized. Snivelization has been the ruin on ye; and it’s sp’iled me
complete: I might have been a great man in Madagasky; it’s too darned bad!
Blast Ameriky, I say.”
But flat, stale and unprofitable seem the whole ship’s company in
comparison with the demoniacal Jackson. Sainte-Beuve, in reviewing an
early work of Cooper’s, speaks enthusiastically of Cooper’s “faculté
créatrice qui enfante et met au monde des caractères nouveaux, et en vertu
de laquelle Rabelais a produit ‘Panurge,’ Le Sage ‘Gil Blas,’ et Richardson
‘Clarissa.’” In The Confidence Man Melville spends a chapter discussing
“originality” in literature. The phrase “quite an original” he maintains, in
contempt of Sainte-Beuve, is “a phrase, we fancy, oftener used by the
young, or the unlearned, or the untravelled, than by the old, or the well-
read, or the man who has made the grand tour.” This faculty of creating
“originals”—which is, after all, as both Melville and Flaubert clearly saw,
but a quality of observation—Melville had to an unusual degree. In this
incongruous group of striking “originals” Jackson deserves, as Melville
says, a “lofty gallows.”
“Though Tiberius come in the succession of the Cæsars, and though
unmatchable Tacitus has embalmed his carrion,” writes Melville in the
luxurious cadence of Sir Thomas Browne which some of his critics have
stigmatised as both the sign and cause of his later “madness,” “yet do I
account this Yankee Jackson full as dignified a personage as he, and as well
meriting his lofty gallows in history, even though he was a nameless
vagabond without an epitaph, and none but I narrate what he was. For there
is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags: and hell is a
democracy of devils, where all are equals. In historically canonising on
earth the condemned below, and lifting up and lauding the illustrious
damned, we do but make ensamples of wickedness; and call upon ambition
to do some great iniquity to be sure of fame.”
When Melville came to know Jackson, nothing was left of him but the foul
lees and dregs of a man; a walking skeleton encased in a skin as yellow as
gamboge, branded with the marks of a fearful end near at hand: “like that of
King Antiochus of Syria, who died a worse death, history says, than if he

had been stung out of the world by wasps and hornets.” In appearance he
suggests Villon at the time when the gallows spared him the death-penalty
of his vices. He looked like a man with his hair shaved off and just
recovering from the yellow fever. His hair had fallen out; his nose was
broken in the middle; he squinted in one eye. But to Melville that squinting
eye “was the most deep, subtle, infernal-looking eye that I ever saw lodged
in a human head. I believe that by good rights it must have belonged to a
wolf, or starved tiger; at any rate I would defy any oculist to turn out a glass
eye half so cold and snaky and deadly.” He was a foul-mouthed bully, and
“being the best seaman on board, and very overbearing every way, all the
men were afraid of him, and durst not contradict him or cross his path in
anything.” And what made this more remarkable was, that he was the
weakest man, bodily, of the whole crew. “But he had such an over-awing
way with him; such a deal of brass and impudence, such an unflinching
face, and withal was such a hideous mortal, that Satan himself would have
run from him.” The whole crew stood in mortal fear of him, and cringed
and fawned before him like so many spaniels. They would rub his back
after he was undressed and lying in his bunk, and run up on deck to the
cook-house to warm some cold coffee for him, and fill his pipe, and give
him chews of tobacco, and mend his jackets and trousers, and watch and
tend and nurse him every way. “And all the time he would sit scowling on
them, and found fault with what they did: and I noticed that those who did
the most for him were the ones he most abused.” These he flouted and
jeered and laughed to scorn, on occasion breaking out in such a rage that
“his lips glued together at the corners with a fine white foam.”
His age it was impossible to tell: for he had no beard, and no wrinkles
except for small crow’s-feet about the eyes. He might have been thirty, or
perhaps fifty years. “But according to his own account, he had been at sea
ever since he was eight years old, when he first went to sea as a cabin-boy
in an Indiaman, and ran away at Calcutta.” And according to his own
account, too, he had passed through every kind of dissipation and
abandonment in the worst parts of the world. He had served in Portuguese
slavers on the coast of Africa, and with diabolical relish would tell of the
middle passage where the slaves were stowed, heel and point, like logs, and
the suffocated and dead were unmanacled and weeded out from the living
each morning before washing down the decks. Though he was apt to be
dumb at times, and would sit with “his eyes fixed, and his teeth set, like a

man in the moody madness,” yet when he did speak his whole talk was full
of piracies, plagues, poisonings, seasoned with filth and blasphemy.
“Though he never attended churches and knew nothing of Christianity; no
more than a Malay pirate; and though he could not read a word, yet he was
spontaneously an atheist and an infidel; and during the long night watches,
would enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed;
nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for; but everything to be
hated in the wide world. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow
with some inscrutable curse; and going about corrupting and searing every
heart that beat near him.”
The last scene in his eventful history took place off Cape Cod, when, in a
stiff favourable breeze, the captain was impatient to make his port before a
shift of wind. Four sullen weeks previous to this had Jackson spent in the
forecastle without touching a rope. Every day since leaving New York
Jackson had seemed to be growing worse and worse, both in body and
mind. “And all the time, though his face grew thinner and thinner, his eyes
seemed to kindle more and more, as if he were going to die out at last, and
leave them burning like tapers before his corpse.” When, after these four
weeks of idleness, Jackson, to the surprise of the crew, came up on deck, his
aspect was damp and death-like; the blue hollows of his eyes were like
vaults full of snakes; and issuing so unexpectedly from his dark tomb in the
forecastle, he looked like a man raised from the dead.
“Before the sailors had made fast the reef-tackle, Jackson was tottering up
the rigging; thus getting the start of them, and securing his place at the
extreme weather-end of the topsail yard—which in reefing is accounted the
place of honour. For it was one of the characteristics of this man that though
when on duty he would shy away from mere dull work in a calm, yet in
tempest time he always claimed the van and would yield to none.
“Soon we were all strung along the main-topsail yard; the ship rearing and
plunging under us like a runaway steed; each man griping his reef-point,
and sideways leaning, dragging the sail over towards Jackson, whose
business it was to confine the reef corner to the yard.
“His hat and shoes were off; and he rode the yard-arm end, leaning
backward to the gale, and pulling at the earing-rope like a bridle. At all
times, this is a moment of frantic exertion with sailors, whose spirits seem

then to partake of the commotion of the elements as they hang in the gale
between heaven and earth; and then it is, too, that they are the most profane.
“‘Haul out to windward!’ coughed Jackson, with a blasphemous cry, and he
threw himself back with a violent strain upon the bridle in his hand. But the
wild words were hardly out of his mouth when his hands dropped to his
side, and the bellying sail was spattered with a torrent of blood from his
lungs.
“As the man next him stretched out his arm to save, Jackson fell headlong
from the yard, and with a long seethe, plunged like a diver into the sea.
“It was when the ship had rolled to windward, which, with the long
projection of the yard-arm over the side, made him strike far out upon the
water. His fall was seen by the whole upward-gazing crowd on deck, some
of whom were spotted with the blood that trickled from the sail, while they
raised a spontaneous cry, so shrill and wild that a blind man might have
known something deadly had happened.
“Clutching our reef-joints, we hung over the stick, and gazed down to the
one white bubbling spot which had closed over the head of our shipmate;
but the next minute it was brewed into the common yeast of the waves, and
Jackson never arose. We waited a few minutes, expecting an order to
descend, haul back the fore-yard, and man the boats; but instead of that, the
next sound that greeted us was, ‘Bear a hand and reef away, men!’ from the
mate.”

CHAPTER V
DISCOVERIES ON TWO CONTINENTS
“If you read of St. Peter’s, they say, and then go and visit it, ten
to one, you account it a dwarf compared to your high-raised
ideal. And, doubtless, Jonah himself must have been much
disappointed when he looked up to the domed midriff
surmounting the whale’s belly, and surveyed the ribbed pillars
around him. A pretty large belly, to be sure, thought he, but not
so big as it might have been.”
—Herman Melville: Redburn.
The merchantman on which Melville shipped was not a Liverpool liner, or
packet-ship, plying in connection with a sisterhood of packets. She was a
regular trader to Liverpool; sailing upon no fixed days, and acting very
much as she pleased, being bound by no obligation of any kind, though in
all her voyages ever having New York or Liverpool for her destination.
Melville’s craft was not a greyhound, not a very fast sailer. The swifter of
the packet ships then made the passage in fifteen or sixteen days; the
Highlander, travelling at a more matronly pace, was out on the Atlantic a
leisurely month.
“It was very early in the month of June that we sailed,” says Melville; “and
I had greatly rejoiced that it was that time of year; for it would be warm and
pleasant upon the ocean I thought; and my voyage would be like a summer
excursion to the seashore for the benefit of the salt water, and a change of
scene and society.” But the fact was not identical with Melville’s fancy, and
before many days at sea, he found it a galling mockery to remember that his
sisters had promised to tell all enquiring friends that he had gone “abroad”:
“just as if I was visiting Europe on a tour with my tutor.” Though his thirty
days at sea considerably disabused him—for the time—of the unmitigated
delights of ocean travel in the forecastle; still always in the vague and
retreating distance did he hold to the promise of some stupendous discovery

still in store. Finally, one morning when he came on deck, he was thrilled to
discover that he was, in sober fact, within sight of a foreign land: a shore-
line that in imagination he transformed into the seacoast of Bohemia. “A
foreign country actually visible!” But as he gazed ashore, disillusion ran hot
upon the heels of his romantic expectations.
“Was that Ireland? Why, there was nothing remarkable about that; nothing
startling. If that’s the way a foreign country looks, I might as well have
stayed at home. Now what, exactly, I had fancied the shore would look like,
I can not say; but I had a vague idea that it would be something strange and
wonderful.”
The next land they sighted was Wales. “It was high noon, and a long line of
purple mountains lay like a bank of clouds against the east. But, after all,
the general effect of these mountains was mortifyingly like the general
effect of the Kaatskill Mountains on the Hudson River.”
It was not until midnight of the third day that they arrived at the mouth of
the Mersey. Before the following daybreak they took the first flood.
“Presently, in the misty twilight, we passed immense buoys, and caught
sight of distant objects on shore, vague and shadowy shapes, like Ossian’s
ghosts.” And then it was that Melville found leisure to lean over the side,
“trying to summon up some image of Liverpool, to see how the reality
would answer to my concept.”
As the day advanced, the river contracted, and in the clear morning Melville
got his first sharp impression of a foreign port.
“I beheld lofty ranges of dingy ware-houses, which seemed very deficient
in the elements of the marvellous; and bore a most unexpected resemblance
to the ware-houses along South Street in New York. There was nothing
strange, nothing extraordinary about them. There they stood; a row of calm
and collected ware-houses; very good and substantial edifices, doubtless,
and admirably adapted to the ends had in view by the builders: but yet,
these edifices, I must confess, were a sad and bitter disappointment to me.”
Melville was six weeks in Liverpool. Of this part of his adventure, he says
in Redburn: “I do not mean to present a diary of my stay there. I shall here
simply record the general tenor of the life led by our crew during that
interval; and will proceed to note down, at random, my own wanderings

about town, and impressions of things as they are recalled to me now after
the lapse of so many (twelve) years.”
Not the least important detail of these six weeks is the fact that Melville and
his ship-mates were very well fed at the sign of the Baltimore Clipper. “The
roast beef of Old England abounded; and so did the immortal plum-
puddings and the unspeakably capital gooseberry pies.” Owing to the strict
but necessary regulations of the Liverpool docks, no fire of any kind was
allowed on board the vessels within them. And hence, though the sailors of
the Highlander slept in the forecastle, they were fed ashore at the expense
of the ship’s owners. This, in a large crew remaining at Liverpool more than
six weeks, as the Highlander did, formed no inconsiderable item in the
expenses of the voyage. The Baltimore Clipper was one of the boarding
houses near the docks which flourished on the appetite of sailors. At the
Baltimore Clipper was fed not only the crew of the Highlander, but, each in
a separate apartment, a variety of other crews as well. Since each crew was
known collectively by the name of its ship, the shouts of the servant girls
running about at dinner time mustering their guests must have been
alarming to an uninitiated visitor.
“Where are the Empresses of China?—Here’s their beef been smoking this
half-hour”—“Fly, Betty, my dear, here come the Panthers”—“Run, Molly,
my love; get the salt-cellars for the Splendids”—“You, Peggy, where’s the
Siddons’ pickle-pot?”—“I say, Judy, are you never coming with that
pudding for the Sultans?”
It was to the Baltimore Clipper that Jackson immediately led the ship’s
crew when they first sprang ashore: up this street and down that till at last
he brought them to their destination in a narrow lane filled with boarding-
houses, spirit-vaults and sailors. While Melville’s shipmates were engaged
in tippling and talking with numerous old acquaintances of theirs in the
neighbourhood who thronged about the door, he sat alone in the dining-
room appropriated to the Highlanders “meditating upon the fact that I was
now seated upon an English bench, under an English roof, in an English
tavern, forming an integral part of the British empire.”
Melville examined the place attentively. “It was a long narrow little room,
with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out upon a smoky,
untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall, the top of which was horrible

with pieces of broken old bottles stuck into mortar. A dull lamp swung
overhead, placed in a wooden ship suspended from the ceiling. The walls
were covered with a paper, representing an endless succession of vessels of
all nations continually circumnavigating the apartment. From the street
came a confused uproar of ballad-singers, bawling women, babies, and
drunken sailors.”
It was during this disenchanting examination that the realisation began to
creep chillingly over Melville that his prospect of seeing the world as a
sailor was, after all, but very doubtful. It seems never to have struck him
before that sailors but hover about the edges of terra-firma; that “they land
only upon wharves and pier-heads, and their reminiscences of travel are
only a dim recollection of a chain of tap-rooms surrounding the globe.”
Melville’s six weeks in Liverpool offered him, however, opportunity to
make slightly more extended observations. During these weeks he was free
to go where he pleased between four o’clock in the afternoon and the
following dawn. Sundays he had entirely at his own disposal. But withal, it
was an excessively limited and distorted version of England that was open
for his examination. Except for his shipmates, his very distant cousin, the
Earl of Leven and Melville and Queen Victoria and such like notables, he
knew by name no living soul in the British Isles. And neither his
companions in the forecastle, nor the remote and elaborately titled strangers
of Melville House, offered encouragement of an easy and glowing intimacy.
With but three dollars as his net capital—money advanced him in Liverpool
by the ship—and without a thread of presentable clothing on his back, he
could not hope promiscuously to ingratiate himself either by his purse or
the adornments of his person. Thus lacking in the fundamentals of
friendship, his native charms stood him in little stead. So alone he walked
the streets of Liverpool and gratuitously saw the sights.
While on the high seas, Melville had improved his fallow hours by poring
over an old guide-book of Liverpool that had descended to him from his
father. This old family relic was to Melville cherished with a passionate and
reverent affection. Around it clustered most of the fond associations that are
the cords of man. It had been handled by Allan amid the very scenes it
described; it bore some “half-effaced miscellaneous memoranda in pencil,
characteristic of a methodical mind, and therefore indubitably my father’s”:
jottings of “a strange, subdued, old, midsummer interest” to Melville. And

on the fly-leaves were crabbed inscriptions, and “crayon sketches of wild
animals and falling air-castles.” These decorations were the handiwork of
Melville and his brothers and sisters and cousins. Of his own contributions,
Melville says: “as poets do with their juvenile sonnets, I might write under
this horse, ‘Drawn at the age of three years,’ and under this autograph,
‘Executed at the age of eight.’” This guide-book was to Melville a sacred
volume, and he expresses a wish that he might immortalise it. Addressing
this unpretentious looking little green-bound, spotted and tarnished guide-
book, he exclaims: “Dear book! I will sell my Shakespeare, and even
sacrifice my old quarto Hogarth, before I will part from you. Yes, I will go
to the hammer myself, ere I send you to be knocked down in the
auctioneer’s scrambles. I will, my beloved; till you drop leaf from leaf, and
letter from letter, you shall have a snug shelf somewhere, though I have no
bench for myself.”
To the earlier manuscript additions to this guide-book, Melville added,
while on the Atlantic, drawings of ships and anchors, and snatches of
Dibdin’s sea-poetry. And as he lay in his bunk, with the aid of this
antiquated volume he used to take “pleasant afternoon rambles through the
town, down St. James street and up Great George’s, stopping at various
places of interest and attraction” so familiar seemed the features of the map.
But in this vagabondage of reverie he was but preparing for himself a
poignant disillusionment. Lying in the dim, reeking forecastle, with his head
full of deceitful day-dreams, he was being tossed by the creaking ship
towards a bitter awakening. The Liverpool of the guide-book purported to
be the Liverpool of 1808. The Liverpool of which Melville dreamed was, of
course, without date and local habitation. When Melville found himself face
to face with the solid reality of the Liverpool of 1837, he was offered an
object-lesson in mutability. As the brute facts smote in the face of his
cherished sentimentalisings, he sat his concrete self down on a particular
shop step in a certain street in Liverpool, reflected on guide-books and
luxuriated in disenchantment. “Guide-books,” he then came to see, “are the
least reliable books in all literature: and nearly all literature, in one sense, is
made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went; but
how few of those former places can their posterity trace.” In the end he
sealed his moralising by the pious reflection that “there is one Holy Guide-
Book that will never lead you astray if you but follow it aright.” There can
be no doubt that the ghost of Allan, retracing its mundane haunts at that

moment trailed its shadowy substance through the offspring of its discarded
flesh.
If this same paternal ghost, recognising its kinship with this obstruction of
blood and bone, tracked in futile affection at Melville’s heels through
Liverpool, only a posthumous survival of its terrestrial Calvinism could
have spared it an agonised six weeks; only the sardonic optimism of a faith
in predestination could have saved Allan’s shade from consternation and
fear at the chances of Melville’s flesh. Or it may be that Allan was sent as a
disembodied spectator to haunt Melville’s wake, by way of penance for his
pre-ghostly theological errors. In any event, Melville, on occasion, took
Allan through the most hideous parts of Liverpool. Of evenings they
strolled through the narrow streets where the sailors’ boarding-houses were.
“Hand-organs, fiddlers, and cymbals, plied by strolling musicians, mixed
with the songs of seamen, the babble of women and children, and groaning
and whining of beggars. From the various boarding-houses proceeded the
noise of revelry and dancing: and from the open casements leaned young
girls and old women chattering and laughing with the crowds in the middle
of the street.” In the vicinity were “notorious Corinthian haunts which in
depravity are not to be matched by anything this side of the pit that is
bottomless.” Along Rotten-row, Gibraltar-place and Boodle-alley Melville
surveyed the “sooty and begrimed bricks” of haunts of abomination which
to Melville’s boyish eyes (seen through the protecting lens of Allan’s ghost)
had a “reeking, Sodom-like and murderous look.” Melville excuses himself
in the name of propriety from particularising the vices of the residents of
this quarter; “but kidnappers and resurrectionists,” he declares, “are almost
saints and angels to them.”
Melville satirically pictures himself as pathetically innocent to the iniquities
of the flesh and the Devil when he left home to view the world. He was, he
says, a member both of a Juvenile Total Abstinence Association and of an
Anti-Smoking Society organised by the Principal of his Sunday School.
With dire compunctions of conscience—which had been considerably
weakened by sea-sickness—Melville had his first swig of spirits—
administered medicinally to him by a paternal old tar,—before they were
many hours out upon the Atlantic. But neither on the high seas nor in
England does he seem to have been prematurely tempted by the bottle. And
this, for the adequate reason that united to his innocence of years, his very

limited finances spared him the solicitations of toping companions as well
as the luxury of precocious solitary tippling. Though at the beginning of the
voyage he refused the friendly offer of a cigar, he less austerely eschewed
tobacco by the time he again struck land. Melville did not, throughout his
life, hold so strictly to the puritanical prohibitions of his boyhood.

A PAGE FROM ONE OF MELVILLE’S JOURNALS

The youthful member of the Anti-Smoking Society came in later years to be
a heroic consumer of tobacco, and the happiest hours of his life were haloed
with brooding blue haze. “Nothing so beguiling,” he wrote in 1849, “as the
fumes of tobacco, whether inhaled through hookah, narghil, chibouque,
Dutch porcelain, pure Principe, or Regalia.” On another occasion he
expressed a desire to “sit cross-legged and smoke out eternity.” And the
youthful pillar of the Juvenile Total Abstinence Association, growing in
wisdom as he took on years, lived to do regal penance for his unholy
childhood pledge. His avowed refusal to believe in a Temperance Heaven
would seem to imply a conviction that it is only the damned who never
drink. In his amazing novel Mardi—which won him acclaim in France as
“un Rabelais Americain”—wine flows in ruddy and golden rivers. And the
most brilliantly fantastic philosophising, the keenest wit of the demi-gods
that lounge through this wild novel, are concomitant upon the heroic
draining of beaded bumpers. In Mardi, Melville celebrates the civilising
influences of wine with the same devout and urbane affection to be found in
Horace and Meredith. On occasion, however, he seems to share
Baudelaire’s conviction that “one should be drunk always”—and drunk on
wine in the manner of the best period. He quotes with approval the epitaph
of Cyrus the Great: “I could drink a great deal of wine, and it did me a great
deal of good.” In Clarel he asks: “At Cana, who renewed the wine?” In the
riotous chapter wherein “Taji sits down to Dinner with five-and-twenty
Kings, and a royal Time they have,” there is an exuberant tilting of
calabashes that would have won the esteem even of Socrates and
Pantagruel. One wonders if Rabelais, in his youth, did not belong to some
Juvenile Total Abstinence Society, or if Socrates, who both lived and died
over a cup, had not as a boy committed an equally heinous sacrilege to
Dionysus.
On board the Highlander Melville was too young yet to have come to a
sense of the iniquity of the deadly virtues. He was not thereby, however,
tempted to the optimism of despair that preaches that because God is
isolated in His Heaven, all is right with the world. Even at seventeen
Melville had keenly felt that much in the world needs mending. And at
seventeen—more than at any other period—he felt moved to exert himself
to set the world aright. Ashipboard, the field of his operations being very
limited, he cast a missionary eye upon the rum-soaked profanity and
lechery of his ship-mates. “I called to mind a sermon I had once heard in a

church in behalf of sailors,” says Melville, “when the preacher called them
strayed lambs from the fold, and compared them to poor lost children,
babes in the wood, or orphans without fathers or mothers.” Overflowing
with the milk of human kindness at the sad condition of these amiable
outcasts, Melville, during his first watch, made bold to ask one of them if he
was in the habit of going to church. The sailor answered that “he had been
in a church once, some ten or twelve years before, in London, and on a
week-day had helped to move the Floating Chapel round the Battery from
North River.” This first and last effort of Melville’s to evangelise a
shipmate ended in winning Melville hearty ridicule. “If I had not felt so
terribly angry,” he says, “I should certainly have felt very much like a fool.
But my being so angry prevented me from feeling foolish, which is very
lucky for people in a passion.” Though Melville made no further effort to
save the souls of his shipmates, his own seems not to have been jeopardised
by any hankering after the instruments of damnation.
As has been said, he was without friends, both ashipboard and later ashore;
a complete absence of companionship that on occasion inspired him with a
parched desire for some friend to whom to say “how sweet is solitude.” He
craved in his isolation, he says, “to give his whole soul to another; in its
loneliness it was yearning to throw itself into the unbounded bosom of
some immaculate friend.” In Redburn, Melville spends a generous number
of pages in celebrating his encounter with a good-for-nothing but courtly
youth whom he calls Harry Bolton. “He was one of those small, but
perfectly formed beings with curling hair, and silken muscles, who seem to
have been born in cocoons. His complexion was a mantling brunette,
feminine as a girl’s; his feet were small; his hands were white; and his eyes
were large, black and womanly: and, poetry aside, his voice was as the
sound of a harp.” How much of Harry Bolton is fact, how much fiction, is
impossible to tell. The most significant thing about him is Melville’s
evident affection for him, no matter who made him. In Redburn, this
engaging dandy kidnaps Melville, and takes him for a mysterious night up
to London: a night spent, to Melville’s consternation, in a gambling palace
of the sort that exists only in the febrile and envious imagination of vitriolic
puritans. In his description of this escapade, Melville owes more, perhaps,
to his early spiritual guides than to any first-hand observation. This flight to
London in Redburn, its abrupt reversal, and the escape to America of Harry
Bolton, may, of course, all be founded on sober fact. But there is a lack of

verisimilitude in the recounting that prompts to the suspicion that in this
part of the narrative, Melville is making brave and unconvincing
concessions to romance. Not, of course, that Melville in his youth was
incapable of the wild impetuosity of suddenly leaving his ship and running
up to London with an engagingly romantic stranger: he did more impulsive
and far more surprising things than that before he died. But his account of
this adventure in Redburn reads hollow and false. Harry Bolton must be
discounted as myth until he is more cogently substantiated as history.
In Liverpool Melville seems to have spent his leisure in company with his
thoughts, wandering along the docks and about the city. Each Sunday
morning he went regularly to church; Sunday afternoons he spent walking
in the neighbouring country. His most vivid impressions of Liverpool were
of the terrible poverty he saw, and it is doubtful if there is a more ruthless
piece of realism in the language than his account in Redburn of the slow
death through starvation of the mother and children that Melville found
lying in a cellar, and whose lives he tried in vain to save. The green cold
bodies in the morgue, the ragpickers, the variety of criminals that haunt the
shadows of the docks: these too came in for characterisation.
The noblest sight that Melville found in England, it would seem, was the
truck-horses he saw round the docks. “So grave, dignified, gentlemanly and
courteous did these fine truck horses look—so full of calm intelligence and
sagacity, that often I endeavoured to get into conversation with them as they
stood in contemplative attitudes while their loads were preparing.” And
Melville admired the truckmen also. “Their spending so much of their
valuable lives in the high-bred company of their horses seems to have
mended their manners and improved their taste; but it has also given to
them a sort of refined and unconscious aversion to human society.” Though
Melville grew to a most uncomplimentary rating of the human biped, he
always cherished a very deep reverence for some of his four-footed
brothers. “There are unknown worlds of knowledge in brutes,” he wrote;
“and whenever you mark a horse, or a dog, with a peculiarly mild, calm,
deep-seated eye, be sure he is an Aristotle or a Kant, tranquilly speculating
upon the mysteries in man.”
The trip back across the Atlantic, after six weeks in Liverpool, though
longer than the out-bound passage, was for Melville less of an ordeal. He
was no longer a bewildered stranger in the forecastle or in the riggings, so

he turned his eye to other parts of the ship. It was the steerage of the
Highlander packed with its four or five hundred emigrants, that gave him
most bitter occasion to reflect on the criminal nature of the universe.
Because of insufficient provisions in food for an unexpectedly prolonged
voyage, the dirty weather, and the absence of the most indispensable
conveniences, these emigrants suffered almost incredible hardships. Before
they had been at sea a week, to hold one’s head down the fore hatchway,
Melville says, was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool. The
noisome confinement in this close unventilated and crowded den, and the
deprivation of sufficient food, helped by personal uncleanliness, brought on
a malignant fever among the emigrants. The result was the death of some
dozens of them, a panic throughout the ship, and a novel indulgence in
spasmodic devotions. “Horrible as the sights of the steerage were, the cabin,
perhaps, presented a scene equally despairing. Trunks were opened for
Bibles; and at last, even prayer-meetings were held over the very tables
across which the loud jest had been so often heard.”
But with the coming of fair winds and fine weather the pestilence subsided,
and the ship steered merrily towards New York. The steerage was cleaned
thoroughly with sand and water. The place was then fumigated, and dried
with pieces of coal from the gallery: so that when the Highlander streamed
into New York harbour no stranger would have imagined, from her
appearance, that the Highlander had made other than a tidy and prosperous
voyage. “Thus, some sea-captains take good heed that benevolent citizens
shall not get a glimpse of the true condition of the steerage while at sea.”
As they came into the Narrows, “no more did we think of the gale and the
plague; nor turn our eyes upward to the stains of blood still visible on the
topsail, whence Jackson had fallen. Oh, he who has never been afar, let him
once go from home, to know what home is. Hurra! Hurra! and ten thousand
times hurra! down goes our anchor, fathoms down into the free and
independent Yankee mud, one handful of which was now worth a broad
manor in England.”
Melville spent the greater part of the night “walking the deck and gazing at
the thousand lights of the city.” At sunrise, the Highlander warped into a
berth at the foot of Wall street, and the old ship was knotted, stem and stern,
to the pier. This knotting of the ship was the unknotting of the bonds of the
sailors; for, the ship once fast to the wharf, Melville and his shipmates were

free. So with a rush and a shout they bounded ashore—all but Melville. He
went down into the forecastle and sat on a chest. The ship he had loathed,
while he was imprisoned in it, grew lovely in his eyes when he was free to
bid it forever farewell. In the tarry old den he sat, the only inhabitant of the
deserted ship but for the mate and the rats. He sat there and let his eyes
linger over every familiar old plank. “For the scene of suffering is a scene
of joy when the suffering is past,” he says, inverting the reflection of Dante;
“and the silent reminiscence of hardship departed, is sweeter than the
presence of delight.” According to this philosophy, the more accumulated
and overwhelming the hardships we survive, the richer and sweeter will be
the ensuing hours of thoughtful recollection. For whom the Lord loveth He
chasteneth. And pleasure’s crown of pleasure is remembering sorrier things.
So indoctrinated, Melville should have viewed the concluding scene with
the captain of the Highlander, on the day the sailors drew their wages, with
eternal thanksgiving.
“Seated in a sumptuous arm-chair, behind a lustrous inlaid desk, sat Captain
Riga, arrayed in his City Hotel suit, looking magisterial as the Lord High
Admiral of England. Hat in hand, the sailors stood deferentially in a semi-
circle before him, while the captain held the ship-papers in his hand, and
one by one called their names; and in mellow bank notes—beautiful sight!
—paid them their wages.... The sailors, after counting their cash very
carefully, and seeing all was right, and not a bank-note was dog-eared, in
which case they would have demanded another, salaamed and withdrew,
leaving me face to face with the Paymaster-general of the Forces.”
Melville stood awhile, looking as polite as possible, he says, and expecting
every moment to hear his name called. But no such name did he hear. “The
captain, throwing aside his accounts, lighted a very fragrant cigar, took up
the morning paper—I think it was the Herald—threw his leg over one arm
of the chair, and plunged into the latest intelligence from all parts of the
world.”
Melville hemmed, and scraped his foot to increase the disturbance. The
Paymaster-general looked up. Melville demanded his wages. The captain
laughed, and taking a long inspiration of smoke, removed his cigar, and sat
sideways looking at Melville, letting the vapour slowly wriggle and
spiralise out of his mouth.

“Captain Riga,” said Melville, “do you not remember that about four
months ago, my friend Mr. Jones and myself had an interview with you in
this very cabin; when it was agreed that I was to go out in your ship, and
receive three dollars per month for my services? Well, Captain Riga, I have
gone out with you, and returned; and now, sir, I’ll thank you for my pay.”
“Ah, yes, I remember,” said the captain. “Mr. Jones! Ha! Ha! I remember
Mr. Jones: a very gentlemanly gentleman; and stop—you, too, are the son of
a wealthy French importer; and—let me think—was not your great-uncle a
barber?”
“No!” thundered Melville, his Gansevoort temper up.
Captain Riga suavely turned over his accounts. “Hum, hum!—yes, here it
is: Wellingborough Redburn, at three dollars a month. Say four months,
that’s twelve dollars: less three dollars advanced in Liverpool—that makes
it nine dollars; less three hammers and two scrapers lost overboard—that
brings it to four dollars and a quarter. I owe you four dollars and a quarter, I
believe, young gentleman?”
“So it seems,” said Melville with staring eyes.
“And now let me see what you owe me, and then we’ll be able to square the
yards, Monsieur Redburn.”
“Owe him!” Melville confesses to thinking; “what do I owe him but a
grudge.” But Melville concealed his resentment. Presently Captain Riga
said: “By running away from the ship in Liverpool, you forfeited your
wages, which amount to twelve dollars; and there has been advanced to
you, in money, hammers and scrapers, seven dollars and seventy-five cents;
you are therefore indebted to me for precisely that sum. I’ll thank you for
the money.” He extended his open palm across the desk.
The precise nature of Melville’s eloquence at this juncture of his career has
not been recorded. Penniless, he left the ship, to trail after his shipmates as
they withdrew along the wharf to stop at a sailors’ retreat, poetically
denominated “The Flashes.” Here they all came to anchor before the bar.
“Well, maties,” said one of them, at last—“I s’pose we shan’t see each other
again:—come, let’s splice the mainbrace all round, and drink to the last
voyage.”

And so they did. Then they shook hands all round, three times three, and
disappeared in couples through the several doorways.
Melville stood on the corner in front of “The Flashes” till the last of his
shipmates was out of sight. Then he walked down to the Battery, and within
a stone’s throw of the place of his birth, sat on one of the benches, under the
summer shade of the trees. It was a quiet, beautiful scene, he says; full of
promenading ladies and gentlemen; and through the fresh and bright foliage
he looked out over the bay, varied with glancing ships. “It would be a pretty
fine world,” he thought, “if I only had a little money to enjoy it.” He leaves
it ambiguous whether or not he imbibed his optimism at “The Flashes.”
Equally veiled does he leave the mystery by which he came by the money
to pay his passage on the steamboat up to Albany: a trip he took that
afternoon. “I pass over the reception I met with at home; how I plunged into
embraces, long and loving,” he says:—“I pass over this.”
For the home we return to, is never the home that we leave, and the more
desperate the leave-taking, the more bathetic the return.

CHAPTER VI
PEDAGOGY, PUGILISM AND LETTERS
“It is often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals
in the mines, much earthly rubbish has first to be troublesomely
handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one’s soul for the fine
gold of genius, much dulness and common-place is first brought
to light. Happy would it be, if the man possessed in himself
some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort: but he is like
the occupant of a dwelling, whose refuse cannot be clapped into
his own cellar, but must be deposited in the street before his own
door, for the public functionaries to take care of.”
—Herman Melville: Pierre.
The record of the next three and a half years of Melville’s life is extremely
scant. What he was doing and thinking and feeling must be left almost
completely to surmise. In the brief record of his life preserved in the
Commonplace Book of his wife, this period between Liverpool and the
South Seas is dismissed in a single sentence: “Taught school at intervals in
Pittsfield and in Greenbush (now East Albany) N. Y.” Arthur Stedman (who
got his facts largely from Mrs. Melville), in his “Biographical and Critical
Introduction” to Typee, slightly enlarges upon this statement. “A good part
of the succeeding three years, from 1837 to 1840,” says Stedman, “was
occupied with school teaching. While so engaged at Greenbush, now East
Albany, N. Y., he received the munificent salary of ‘six dollars a quarter and
board.’ He taught for one term at Pittsfield, Mass., ‘boarding around’ with
the families of his pupils, in true American fashion, and early suppressing,
on one memorable occasion, the efforts of his larger scholars to inaugurate
a rebellion by physical force.” J. E. A. Smith, in his Biographical Sketch
already cited, dates this “memorable” mating of pedagogy and pugilism
somewhat earlier.

Besides teaching during these years, Melville was engaged in another
activity, which all of his biographers—if they knew of it at all—pass over in
decent silence: an activity to which Melville devotes a whole book of
Pierre.
“It still remains to be said,” says Melville, “that Pierre himself had written
many a fugitive thing, which had brought him not only vast credit and
compliments from his more immediate acquaintances, but the less partial
applauses of the always intelligent and extremely discriminating public. In
short, Pierre had frequently done that which many other boys have done—
published. Not in the imposing form of a book, but in the more modest and
becoming way of occasional contributions to magazines and other polite
periodicals. Not only the public had applauded his gemmed little sketches
of thought and fancy; but the high and mighty Campbell clan of editors of
all sorts had bestowed upon them those generous commendations which,
with one instantaneous glance, they had immediately perceived was his
due.... One, after endorsingly quoting that sapient, suppressed maxim of Dr.
Goldsmith’s, which asserts that whatever is new is false, went on to apply it
to the excellent productions before him; concluding with this: ‘He has
translated the unruffled gentleman from the drawing-room into the general
levee of letters; he never permits himself to astonish; is never betrayed into
anything coarse or new; as assured that whatever astonishes is vulgar, and
whatever is new must be crude. Yes, it is the glory of this admirable young
author, that vulgarity and vigour—two inseparable adjuncts—are equally
removed from him.’”
In Pierre, Melville spends more than twenty-five closely printed pages—
half satirical, half of the utmost seriousness—discussing his own literary
growth: a passage of the highest critical and biographical interest. In its
satirical parts the passage is consistently double-edged; therein, Melville
ironically praises his early writing for possessing those very defects which
his maturer work was damned for not exhibiting. It is doubtless true that his
juvenile works were “equally removed from vulgarity and vigour.” They
were “characterised throughout by Perfect Taste,” as he makes one critic
observe “in an ungovernable burst of admiring fury.” But the Perfect Taste
was the Perfect Taste of Hannah More, and Dr. Akenside, and Lalla Rookh.
With the publication of Typee, Melville was charged not only with the
crimes of vulgarity and vigour, but with the milder accompanying vices of

indecency and irreverence. His earliest writings were untouched by any of
these taints. In Pierre, Melville speaks of “a renowned clerical and
philological conductor of a weekly religious periodical, whose surprising
proficiency in the Greek, Hebrew and Chaldaic, to which he had devoted by
far the greater part of his life, peculiarly fitting him to pronounce unerring
judgment upon works of taste in the English.” Melville makes this critic
thus deliver himself on Pierre’s early efforts in letters: “He is blameless in
morals, and harmless throughout.” Another “unhesitatingly recommended
his effusions to the family circle.” A third had no reserve in saying that “the
predominant end and aim of this writer was evangelical piety.” Melville is
here patently satirising the vitriolic abuse which Typee and Omoo provoked.
Only two of Melville’s earliest effusions, written before the world had
“fairly Timonised him” are known to survive. These appeared in The
Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser for May 4, and May 18,
1839. The first is signed “L. A. V.”; the second, known to exist only in a
single mutilated clipping, in lacking the closing paragraphs, can give no
evidence as to concluding signature. Copies of these two articles are
preserved among Melville’s papers, each autographed by him in faded
brown ink. The interest of the earlier paper is heightened by this inscription,
in Melville’s hand, boldly scrawled across the inner margin: “When I woke
up this morning, what the Devil should I see but your cane along in bed
with me. I shall keep it for you when you come up here again.” It is more
easy to imagine Melville’s astonishment in waking to find such a stately
novelty as a walking-stick for a bed-fellow, than to fancy how the walking-
stick found itself in such an unusual environment. It is about as futile to
inquire into the history and meaning of this incident as soberly to debate
“what songs the sirens sang and what name Achilles bore among the
daughters of the King of Scyros.” It is certain, however, that the Sirens had
little hand in Melville’s juvenile effusions. And of this fact Melville grew to
be keenly aware. “In sober earnest,” he says in Pierre, “those papers
contained nothing uncommon; indeed, those fugitive things were the veriest
commonplace.” Yet as the initial literary efforts of a man who wrote Typee
and Moby-Dick they are intensely interesting: interesting, like the longer
prayers of St. Augustine, less because of their content than because of the
personality from which they were derived.

What would seem to be Melville’s first published venture in letters is here
given, nearly complete.

For the Democratic Press
fragments from a writing desk
No. 1

My Dear M——, I can imagine you seated on that dear,
delightful, old-fashioned sofa; your head supported by its
luxurious padding, and with feet perched aloft on the aspiring
back of that straight limbed, stiff-necked, quaint old chair,
which, as our facetious W—— assured me, was the identical
seat in which old Burton composed his Anatomy of Melancholy.
I see you reluctantly raise your optics from the huge-clasped
quarto which encumbers your lap, to receive the package which
the servant hands you, and can almost imagine that I see those
beloved features illumined for a moment with an expression of
joy, as you read the superscription of your gentle protégé. Lay
down I beseech you that odious black-lettered volume and let
not its musty and withered leaves sully the virgin purity and
whiteness of the sheet which is the vehicle of so much good
sense, sterling thought, and chaste and elegant sentiment.
You remember how you used to rate me for my hang-dog
modesty, my mauvaise honte, as my Lord Chesterfield would
style it. Well! I have determined that hereafter you shall not have
occasion to inflict upon me those flattering appellations of
“Fool!” “Dolt!” “Sheep!” which in your indignation you used to
shower upon me, with a vigour and a facility which excited my
wonder, while it provoked my resentment.
And how do you imagine that I rid myself of this annoying
hindrance? Why, truly, by coming to the conclusion that in this
pretty corpus of mine was lodged every manly grace; that my
limbs were modelled in the symmetry of the Phidian Jupiter; my
countenance radiant with the beams of wit and intelligence, the
envy of the beaux, the idol of the women and the admiration of

the tailor. And then my mind! why, sir, I have discovered it to be
endowed with the most rare and extraordinary powers, stored
with universal knowledge, and embellished with every polite
accomplishment.
Pollux! what a comfortable thing is a good opinion of one’s self
when I walk the Broadway of our village with a certain air, that
puts me down at once in the estimation of any intelligent
stranger who may chance to meet me, as a distingué of the
purest water, a blade of the true temper, a blood of the first
quality! Lord! how I despise the little sneaking vermin who
dodge along the street as though they were so many footmen or
errand boys; who have never learned to carry the head erect in
conscious importance, but hang that noblest of the human
members as though it had been boxed by some virago of an
Amazon; who shuffle along the walk with a quick uneasy step, a
hasty clownish motion, which by the magnitude of the contrast,
set off to advantage my own slow and magisterial gait, which I
can at pleasure vary to an easy, abandoned sort of carriage, or to
the more engaging alert and lively walk, to suit the varieties of
time, occasion, and company.
And in society, too—how often have I commiserated the poor
wretches who stood aloof, in a corner, like a flock of scared
sheep; while myself, beautiful as Apollo, dressed in a style
which would extort admiration from a Brummel, and belted
round with self-esteem as with a girdle, sallied up to the ladies
—complimenting one, exchanging a repartee with another;
tapping this one under the chin, and clasping this one round the
waist; and finally, winding up the operation by kissing round the
whole circle to the great edification of the fair, and to the
unbounded horror, amazement and ill-suppressed chagrin of the
aforesaid sheepish multitude; who with eyes wide open and
mouths distended, afforded good subjects on whom to exercise
my polished wit, which like the glittering edge of a Damascus
sabre “dazzled all it shone upon.”

By my halidome, sir, this same village of Lansingburgh contains
within its pretty limits as fair a set of blushing damsels as one
would wish to look upon on a dreamy summer day!—When I
traverse the broad pavements of my own metropolis, my eyes
are arrested by beautiful forms flitting hither and thither; and I
pause to admire the elegance of their attire, the taste displayed in
their embellishments; the rich mass of the material; and
sometimes, it may be, at the loveliness of the features, which no
art can heighten and no negligence conceal.
But here, sir, here—where woman seems to have erected her
throne, and established her empire; here, where all feel and
acknowledge her sway, she blooms in unborrowed charms; and
the eye undazzled by the profusion of extraneous ornament,
settles at once upon the loveliest faces which our clayey natures
can assume.

Nor, my dear M., does there reign in all this bright display, that
same monotony of feature, form, complexion, which elsewhere
is beheld; no, here are all varieties, all the orders of Beauty’s
architecture; the Doric, the Ionic, the Corinthian, all are here.
I have in “my mind’s eye, Horatio,” three (the number of the
Graces, you remember) who may stand, each at the head of their
respective orders.

When I venture to describe the second of this beautiful trinity, I
feel my powers of delineation inadequate to the task; but
nevertheless I will try my hand at the matter, although like an
unskilful limner, I am fearful I shall but scandalise the charms I
endeavour to copy.

Come to my aid, ye guardian spirits of the Fair! Guide my
awkward hand, and preserve from mutilation the features ye
hover over and protect! Pour down whole floods of sparkling
champagne, my dear M——, until your brain grows giddy with
emotion; con over the latter portion of the first Canto of Childe
Harold, and ransack your intellectual repository for the loveliest
visions of the Fairy Land, and you will be in a measure prepared
to relish the epicurean banquet I shall spread.
The stature of this beautiful mortal (if she be indeed of earth) is
of that perfect height which, while it is freed from the charge of
being low, cannot with propriety be denominated tall. Her figure
is slender almost to fragility but strikingly modelled in spiritual
elegance, and is the only form I ever saw which could bear the
trial of a rigid criticism.
Every man who is gifted with the least particle of imagination,
must in some of his reveries have conjured up from the realms
of fancy, a being bright and beautiful beyond everything he had
ever before apprehended, whose main and distinguishing
attribute invariably proves to be a form the indescribable
loveliness of which seems to

“—Sail in liquid light,
And float on seas of bliss.”

The realisation of these seraphic visions is seldom permitted us;
but I can truly say that when my eyes for the first time fell upon
this lovely creature, I thought myself transported to the land of
Dreams, where lay embodied, the most brilliant conceptions of
the wildest fancy. Indeed, could the Promethean spark throw life
and animation into the Venus de Medici, it would but present the
counterpart of ——.
Her complexion has the delicate tinge of the Brunett, with a
little of the roseate hue of the Circassian; and one would swear
that none but the sunny skies of Spain had shone upon the

infancy of the being, who looks so like her own “dark-glancing
daughters.”

And then her eyes! they open their dark, rich orbs upon you like
the full moon of heaven, and blaze into your very soul the fires
of day! Like the offerings laid upon the sacrificial altars of the
Hebrew, when in an instant the divine spark falling from the
propitiated God kindled them in flames; so, a single glance from
that Oriental eye as quickly fires your soul, and leaves your
bosom in a perfect conflagration! Odds Cupids and Darts! with
one broad sweep of vision in a crowded ball-room, that splendid
creature would lay around her like the two-handed sword of
Minotti, hearts on hearts, piled round in semi-circles! But it is
well for the more rugged sex that this glorious being can vary
her proud dominion, and give to the expression of her eye a
melting tenderness which dissolves the most frigid heart and
heals the wounds she gave before.
If the devout and exemplary Mussulman who dying fast in the
faith of his Prophet anticipates reclining on beds of roses,
gloriously drunk through all the ages of eternity, is to be waited
on by Houris such as these: waft me ye gentle gales beyond this
lower world and

“Lap me in soft Lydian airs!”

But I am falling into I know not what extravagances, so I will
briefly give you a portrait of the last of these three divinities,
and will then terminate my tiresome lucubrations.

Here, my dear M——, closes this catalogue of the Graces, this
chapter of Beauties, and I should implore your pardon for

trespassing so long on your attention. If you, yourself, in whose
breast may possibly be extinguished the amatory flame, should
not feel an interest in these three “counterfeit presentments,” do
not fail to show them to —— and solicit her opinion as to their
respective merits.
Tender my best acknowledgments to the Major for his prompt
attention to my request, and, for yourself, accept the assurance
of my undiminished regard; and hoping that the smiles of
heaven may continue to illuminate your way,
I remain, ever yours,
L. A. V.
These “chaste and elegant sentiments” are, surely, “embellished with every
polite accomplishment.” Melville called down the Nine Gods, and a host of
minor deities; he ransacked Athens, Rhodes, Cyprus, Circassia, Lydia,
Lilliputia, Damascus, this world and the next, for geographical adornments;
he called up Burton, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Milton, Coleridge and
Chesterfield, as well as Prometheus and Cinderella, Mahomet and
Cleopatra, Madonnas and Houris, Medici and Mussulman, to strew
carelessly across his pages. “Not in vain,” says Melville of the idealisation
of himself in the character of Pierre, “had he spent long summer afternoons
in the deep recesses of his father’s fastidiously picked and decorous
library.” Not in vain, either, had he been submitted to three years of
elementary drill in the classics at the Albany Academy. “Not that as yet his
young and immature soul had been accosted by the wonderful Mutes, and
through the vast halls of Silent Truth, had been ushered into the full, secret,
eternally inviolable Sanhedrim, where the Poetic Magi discuss, in glorious
gibberish, the Alpha and Omega of the Universe,” says Melville; “but
among the beautiful imaginings of the second and third degree of poets he
freely and comprehendingly ranged.” Melville was always a wide if
desultory reader, more and more interested after the manner of Sir Thomas
Browne, and the Burton with reference to whom he began his career in
letters, in “remote and curious illusions, wrecks of forgotten fables,
antediluvian computations, obsolete and unfamiliar problems, riddles that
no living Œdipus would care to solve.” And this preoccupation—first made
manifest in Mardi (1849)—must always stand in the way of his most typical
writings ever becoming widely popular. His earliest known piece of

juvenile composition is interesting as revealing the crude beginnings of one
of the manners superbly mastered in parts of Moby-Dick. This early
effusion, by revealing so crudely the defects of his qualities, reads as a dull
parody of one of his most typical later manners.
With a Miltonic confidence in his own gifts, Melville came to view these
earlier pieces as the first “earthly rubbish” of his “immense quarries of fine
marble.” Melville goes on to say that “no commonplace is ever effectually
got rid of, except by essentially emptying one’s self of it into a book; for
once trapped into a book, then the book can be put into the fire and all will
be well.” “But they are not always put into the fire,” he said with regret.
And because of his own laxity in cremation, his crude first fruits stalk
abroad to accuse him.
At this early period, Melville had nothing very significant to say; but he
seems to have been urged to say it with remorseless pertinacity. In Pierre,
he satirises his youthful and reckless prolixity where he speaks of his
manuscripts as being of such flying multitudes that “they were to be found
lying all round the house; gave a great deal of trouble to the housemaids in
sweeping; went for kindlings to the fires; and forever flitting out of the
windows, and under the doorsills, into the faces of people passing the
manorial mansion.”
Having nothing very particular to write about, he followed an ancient
tradition, and wrote of love. In Pierre, which is Melville’s spiritual
autobiography, and in Pierre alone, does Melville elaborately busy himself
with romantic affection. And in Pierre, his is no sugared and conventional
preoccupation. He traces his own development through the love-friendship
of boyhood, the miscellaneous susceptibility of adolescence, to a
crucifixion in manhood between the images of his wife and his mother. His
first Fragment from a Writing Desk seems to have been conceived at a time
before his “innumerable wandering glances settled upon some one specific
object.”
His second Fragment from a Writing Desk concerns itself with an
allegorical quest of elusive feminine loveliness: a kind of Coelebs in Search
of a Wife, allegorised and crossed with Lalla Rookh. It survives, as has been
said, only as a fragment of a Fragment. Its conclusion must remain a

mystery until some old newspaper file disgorges its secrets. It begins as
follows:

For the Democratic Press
FRAGMENTS FROM A WRITING DESK
No. 2

“Confusion seize the Greek!” exclaimed I, as wrathfully rising
from my chair, I flung my ancient Lexicon across the room and
seizing my hat and cane, and throwing on my cloak, I sallied out
into the clearer air of heaven. The bracing coolness of an April
evening calmed my aching temples, and I slowly wended my
way to the river side. I had promenaded the bank for about half
an hour, when flinging myself upon the grassy turf, I was soon
lost in revery, and up to the lips in sentiment.
I had not lain more than five minutes, when a figure effectually
concealed in the ample folds of a cloak, glided past me, and
hastily dropping something at my feet, disappeared behind the
angle of an adjoining house, ere I could recover from my
astonishment at so singular an occurrence.
“Cerbes!” cried I, springing up, “here is a spice of the
marvellous!” and stooping down, I picked up an elegant little,
rose-coloured, lavender-scented billet-doux, and hurriedly
breaking the seal (a heart, transfixed with an arrow) I read by
the light of the moon, the following:—
“Gentle Sir:
If my fancy has painted you in genuine colours, you
will on the receipt of this, incontinently follow the
bearer where she will lead you.
Inamorita.”
“The deuce I will!” exclaimed I,—“But soft!”—And I re-
perused this singular document, turned over the billet in my
fingers, and examined the hand-writing, which was femininely

delicate, and I could have sworn was a woman’s. Is it possible,
thought I, that the days of romance are revived?—No, “The days
of chivalry are over!” says Burke.
As I made this reflection, I looked up, and beheld the same
figure which had handed me this questionable missive,
beckoning me forward. I started towards her; but, as I
approached, she receded from me, and fled swiftly along the
margin of the river at a pace which, encumbered as I was with
my heavy cloak and boots, I was unable to follow; and which
filled me with sundry misgivings, as to the nature of the being,
who could travel with such amazing celerity. At last, perfectly
breathless, I fell into a walk; which, my mysterious fugitive
perceiving, she likewise lessened her pace, so as to keep herself
still in sight, although at too great a distance to permit me to
address her.”
The hero hastens after his guide but always she eludes him.
Piqued by her repeated escapes, he stops in a rage, and relieves
his feelings in “two or three expressions that savoured
somewhat of the jolly days of the jolly cavaliers.” And under the
circumstances, he felt fully justified in his profanity. “What! to
be thwarted by a woman! Peradventure; baffled by a girl?
Confusion! It was too bad! To be outwitted, generated, routed,
defeated, by a mere rib of the earth? It could not be borne!”
Recovering his temper, he followed his capricious guide out of
the town, into a shadowy grove to “an edifice, which seated on a
gentle eminence, and embowered amidst surrounding trees, bore
the appearance of a country villa.”
“The appearance of this spacious habitation was anything but
inviting; it seemed to have been built with a jealous eye to
concealment; and its few, but well-defended windows were
sufficiently high from the ground, as effectually to baffle the
prying curiosity of the inquisitive stranger. Not a single light
shone from the narrow casement; but all was harsh, gloomy and
forbidding. As my imagination, ever alert on such an occasion,
was busily occupied in assigning some fearful motive for such
unusual precautions, my leader suddenly halted beneath a lofty

window, and making a low call, I perceived slowly descending
therefrom, a thick silken cord, attached to an ample basket,
which was silently deposited at our feet. Amazed at this
apparition, I was about soliciting an explanation: when laying
her fingers impressively upon her lips, and placing herself in the
basket, my guide motioned me to seat myself beside her. I
obeyed; but not without considerable trepidation: and in
obedience to the same low call which had procured its descent,
our curious vehicle, with sundry creakings, rose in air.”
This airy jaunt terminated, of course, in an Arabian Nights exterior, which
Melville particularises after the “voluptuous” traditions of Vathek and Lalla
Rookh. “The grandeur of the room,” of course, “served only to show to
advantage the matchless beauty of its inmate.” This matchless beauty was,
after established tradition, “reclining on an ottoman; in one hand holding a
lute.” Her fingers, too, “were decorated with a variety of rings, which as she
waved her hand to me as I entered, darted forth a thousand coruscations,
and gleamed their brilliant splendours to the sight.”
“As I entered the apartment, her eyes were downcast, and the expression of
her face was mournfully interesting; she had apparently been lost in some
melancholy revery. Upon my entrance, however, her countenance
brightened, as with a queenly wave of the hand, she motioned my
conductress from the room, and left me standing, mute, admiring and
bewildered in her presence.”
“For a moment my brain spun round, and I had not at command a single of
my faculties. Recovering my self-possession, however, and with that, my
good-breeding, I advanced en cavalier and, gracefully sinking on one knee,
I bowed my head and exclaimed ‘Here do I prostrate myself, thou sweet
Divinity, and kneel at the shrine of thy—’”
But here, just at the climax of the quest, the clipping is abruptly torn, and
the reader is left cruelly suspended.
From the publication of Lalla Rookh, in 1817, to the publication of
Thackeray’s Our Street in 1847, there settled upon letters and life in
England an epidemic of hankering for the exotic. At the instigation of Lalla
Rookh, England made a prim effort to be “purely and intensely Asiatic,” and
this while delicately avoiding “the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of

Asia.” In the fashionable literature of the period, the harem and the slave-
market unburdened its gazelles and its interior decorations, and by a resort
to divans and coruscating rubies, and ottar of roses, and lutes, and warm
panting maidens, the “principled goodness” of Anglo-Saxon self-
righteousness was thrilled to a discreet voluptuousness.
In his second Fragment, Melville has caught at some of the drift-wood of
this great tidal wave that was washed across the Atlantic. And in
acknowledgment of this early indebtedness, he in Pierre speaks of Tom
Moore with an especial burst of enthusiasm, mating him with Hafiz,
Anacreon, Catullus and Ovid.
Reared in a New England environment that had been soberly tempered by
Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Barbauld, Melville had, under the goadings of
poverty, the frustrations of his environment, and the teasing lure of some
stupendous discovery awaiting him at the rainbow’s end, plunged into the
hideousness of life in the forecastle of a merchantman. At both extremes of
his journey he reaped only disillusion. As a practically penniless sailor in
Liverpool he enjoyed the freedom of the streets: and the architecture of the
city impressed him less than did the sights of the poverty and viciousness to
which he was especially exposed. Back he came to Lansingburg, to the old
pump in the yard, the stiff-corseted decorum, and the threadbare and
pretentious proprieties of his mother, to decline into the enforced drudgery
of teaching school. The sights of Liverpool and the forecastle had given no
permanent added beauty to home. He did not comfortably fit into any
recognised socket of New England respectability. He sought escape in
books, in amateur authorship. And Burton, and Anacreon, and Tom Moore
are not guaranteed to reconcile a boy in ferment to a tame and repugnant
environment. He was like a strong wine that clears with explosive violence.
He had been to sea once, and there acquired some skill as a sailor. The
excitement and hardship and downrightness of ocean life, when viewed
through the drab of the ensuing years, treacherously suffered a sea-change.
After three and a half years of mounting desperation, he was ripe for a
transit clean beyond the pale of civilisation.
“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” he later wrote
in an effort to explain his second hegira; “I love to sail forbidden seas, and
land on barbarous coasts.” The trip to Liverpool had slammed the sash on
one magic casement; but the greater part of the watery world was still to be

viewed. “Why,” he asks himself perplexed at his own mystery, “is almost
every healthy boy with a robust healthy soul, at some time or other crazy to
go to sea? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks
give it a separate deity, and own brother to Jove? Surely all this is not
without meaning. And still deeper the story of Narcissus, who because he
could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged
into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers
and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is
the key to all.” The key he here offers to the heart of his mystery is itself
locked in mystery; though when he compared himself to Narcissus
tormented by the irony of being two, Melville may have been hotter on the
trail of the truth than he was aware. His deepest insight, perhaps, came to
him one midnight, out on the Pacific, where in the glare and the wild
Hindoo odour of the tryworks of a whaler in full operation, he fell asleep at
the helm. “Starting from a brief standing sleep,” he says, “I was horribly
conscious of something fatally wrong. I thought my eyes were open; I was
half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching
them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before
me to steer by. Nothing seemed before me but a jet of gloom, now and then
made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that
whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any
haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.”
In a headlong retreat from all havens astern, on January 3, 1841, Melville
shipped on board the Acushnet, a whaler bound for the South Seas.

CHAPTER VII
BLUBBER AND MYSTICISM
“And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet
undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real
repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be
unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that,
upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left
undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my
creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I
prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling;
for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
—Herman Melville: Moby-Dick.
In 1892, the year after Melville’s death, Arthur Stedman wrote a
“Biographical and Critical Introduction” to Typee. During the final years of
Melville’s sedulous isolation, Arthur Stedman was—with the minor
exception of the late Dr. Titus Munson Coan, whose Missionary parentage
Melville seems never to have quite forgiven him—the single man who
clung to Melville with any semblance of personal loyalty. Stedman was
unwavering in his belief that in his earlier South Sea novels, Melville had
attained to his highest achievement: an achievement that entitled Melville to
more golden opinions, Stedman believed, than Melville ever reaped from a
graceless generation. To Stedman—as to Dr. Coan—Melville’s later
development into mysticism and metaphysics was a melancholy perversity
to be viewed with a charitable forbearance, and forgiven in the fair name of
Fayaway. Dr. Coan repeatedly used to recount, with a sigh at his frustration,
how he made persistent attempts to inveigle Melville into Polynesian
reminiscences, always to be rebuffed by Melville’s invariable rejoinder:
“That reminds me of the eighth book of Plato’s Republic.” This was a signal
for silence and leave-taking. What was the staple of Stedman’s conversation
is not known. But despite the fact that Melville was to him a crabbed and
darkly shadowed hieroglyph, he clung to Melville with a personal loyalty at

once humorous and pathetic. Melville to him was the “man who lived with
the cannibals,” and merited canonisation because of this intimacy with
unholy flesh. Stedman published in the New York World for October 11,
1891, a tribute to his dead friend, significantly headed: “Marquesan”
Melville. A South Sea Prospero who Lived and Died in New York. The
Island Nymphs of Nukuheva’s Happy Valley. While Stedman was not
necessarily responsible for this caption, it is, nevertheless, a just summary
of the fullest insight he ever got into Melville’s life and works. The
friendship between Petrarch and Boccaccio is hardly less humorous than the
relationship between Melville and Stedman; and surely Melville has
suffered more, in death, if not in life, from the perils of friendship than did
Petrarch: more even than did Baudelaire from the damaging admiration of
Gautier. When one’s enemy writes a book, one’s reputation is less likely to
be jeopardised by literary animosity than it is by the best superlatives of
self-appointed custodians of one’s good name. But as Francis Thompson
has observed, it is a principle universally conceded that, since the work of a
great author is said to be a monument, the true critic does best evince his
taste and sense by cutting his own name on it. Critical biographers have
contrived a method to hand themselves down to posterity through the gods
of literature, as did the Roman emperors through the gods of Olympus—by
taking the heads off their statues, and clapping on their own instead.
Criticism is a perennial decapitation.
“I have a fancy,” says Stedman, in his Biographical and Critical
Introduction, “that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years
Before the Mast which revived the spirit of adventure in Melville’s breast.
That book was published in 1840, and was at once talked of everywhere.
Melville must have read it at the time, mindful of his own experience as a
sailor. At any rate, he once more signed a ship’s articles, and on January 1,
1841, sailed from New Bedford harbour in the whaler Acushnet, bound for
the Pacific Ocean and the sperm fishery.”
In the second part of this statement, Stedman attempts to stick to the letter:
but there is a flaw in his text. That Melville sailed in the Acushnet is
corroborated by a statement in the journal of Melville’s wife; in the record
surviving in Melville’s handwriting, headed “what became of the ship’s
company on the whaleship Acushnet, according to Hubbard, who came
back in her (more than a four years’ voyage) and visited me in Pittsfield in

1850;” as well as by surviving letters written by Richard Tobias Greene, the
Toby of Typee.
The roster of Melville’s ship is preserved in Alexander Starbuck’s bulky
History of the American Whale Fishery from its Earliest Inception to the
Year 1876 (published by the author, Waltham, Mass., 1878). Starbuck rates
the Acushnet as a ship of 359 tons, built in 1840. Her managing owners are
reported as having been Bradford Fuller & Co. Under command of Captain
Pease she sailed from Fairhaven, bound for the whaling grounds of the
Pacific, on January 3, 1841, and returned to Fairhaven on May 13, 1845,
laden with 850 barrels of sperm oil, 1350 barrels of whale oil, and 13500
pounds of whale-bone. On July 18, 1845, she started upon her second
voyage, under command of Captain Rogers, to return June 7, 1848, stocked
with 500 barrels of sperm oil, 800 barrels of whale oil, and 6000 pounds of
whale-bone. On December 4, 1847, she had a boat stove by a whale, with
the loss of the third mate and four of the crew. Her third voyage, begun
August 31, 1848, under command of Captain Bradley, was her last. As by
some malicious fatality, the Acushnet was lost on St. Lawrence Island on
August 31, 1851, within a month of the time when Melville brought Moby-
Dick to its tragic close.
Between Stedman’s and Starbuck’s accounts of the time and place of
Melville’s sailing there is a discrepancy of half a mile and two days. This
discrepancy, however, does not necessarily impugn Stedman’s accuracy.
Fairhaven is just across the Acushnet river from New Bedford, and “sailing
from New Bedford” may be like “sailing from New York”—which is often
in reality “sailing from Hoboken.”
Stedman dates Melville’s sailing January 1; Starbuck, January 3. Melville
launches the hero of Moby-Dick neither from New Bedford nor from
Fairhaven, but from Nantucket. Ishmael begins his fatal voyage aboard the
Pequod on December 25; and there is a fitting irony in the fact that on the
day that celebrates the birth of the Saviour of mankind, the Pequod should
sail forth to slay Moby-Dick, the monstrous symbol and embodiment of
unconquerable evil.
That Dana’s book should have fired Melville to an impetuous and romantic
jaunt to the South Seas, though an ill-favoured statement, is Stedman’s very
own. When a boy concludes the Christmas holidays by a mid-winter plunge

into the filthy and shabby business of whaling; when a young man
inaugurates the year not among the familiar associations of the gods of his
hearth, but among semi-barbarous strangers of the forecastle of a whaler: to
make such a shifting of whereabouts a sign of jolly romantic exuberance, is
engagingly naïve in its perversity.
Just what specific circumstances were the occasion of Melville’s escape
into whaling will probably never be known: what burst of demoniac
impulse, either of anger, or envy, or spite; what gnawing discontent; what
passionate disappointment; what crucifixion of affection; what blind
impetuosity; what sinister design. But in the light of his writings and the
known facts of his life it seems likely that his desperate transit was made in
the mid-winter of his discontent. That the reading of Dana’s book should
have filled his head with a mere adolescent longing for brine-drenched
locomotion and sent him gallantly off to sea is a surmise more remarkable
for simplicity than insight.
Melville never wearies of iterating his “itch for things remote.” Like
Thoreau, he had a “naturally roving disposition,” and of the two men it is
difficult to determine which achieved a wider peregrination. It was
Thoreau’s proud boast: “I have travelled extensively in Concord.” He
believed that Concord, with its sylvan environment, was a microcosm “by
the study of which the whole world could be comprehended,” and so, this
wildest of civilised men seldom strayed beyond its familiar precincts. His
was a heroic provincialism, that cost him little loss either in worldliness or
in wisdom. Though his head went swimming in the Milky Way, his feet
were well-rooted in New England sod. “One world at a time” was the
programme he set himself for digesting the universe: and he looked into the
eyes of this world with cold stoical serenity.
Melville made no such capitulation with reality. Between the obdurate
world of facts and his ardent and unclarified desires there was always, to
the end of his life, a blatant incompatibility. Alongside the hard and
cramping world of reality, and in more or less sharp opposition to it, he set
up a fictitious world, a world of heart’s desire; and unlike Thoreau, he
hugged his dream in jealous defiance of reality. It is, of course, an
ineradicable longing of man to repudiate the inexorable restrictions of
reality, and return to the happy delusion of omnipotence of early childhood,
an escape into some land of heart’s desire. Goethe compared the illusions

that man nourishes in his breast to the population of statues in ancient Rome
which were almost as numerous as the population of living men. Most men
keep the boundaries between these two populations distinct: a separation
facilitated by the usual dwindling of the ghostly population. Flaubert once
observed that every tenth-rate provincial notary had in him the debris of a
poet. As Wordsworth complains, as we grow away from childhood, the
vision fades into the light of common day. Thoreau clung to his visions; but
they were, after all, cold-blooded and well-behaved visions. And by
restricting himself to “one world at a time,” by mastering his dream, he
mastered reality. Alcott declared that Thoreau thought he dwelt in the centre
of the universe, and seriously contemplated annexing the rest of the planet
to Concord. The delicacy of the compliment to the rest of the planet has
never been adequately appreciated. Melville’s more violent and restive
impulses never permitted him to feel any such flattering attachment to his
whereabouts, whether it was Albany, Liverpool, Lima, Tahiti or
Constantinople. Like Rousseau, who confessed himself “burning with
desire without any definite object,” Melville always felt himself an exile
from the seacoast of Bohemia. But his nostalgia, his indefinite longing for
the unknown, was not, in any literal sense, “homesickness” at all. As
Aldous Huxley has observed:

“Those find, who most delight to roam
’Mid castles of remotest Spain
That there’s, thank Heaven, no place like home
So they put out upon their travels again.”

That Melville came to no very pleasant haven of refuge in the forecastle of
the Acushnet is borne out by his drastic preference to be eaten by cannibals
rather than abide among the sureties of the ship and her company. That he
“left the ship, being oppressed with hard fare and hard usage, in the summer
of 1842 with a companion, Richard T. Greene (Toby) at the bay of
Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands” is the statement in the journal of his
wife vividly elaborated in Typee.
Of Melville’s history aboard the Acushnet there is no straightforward
account. Redburn, Typee, Omoo and White-Jacket are transparent chapters
in autobiography. From his experiences on board the Acushnet Melville

draws generously in Moby-Dick: but these experiences do not for one
moment pretend to be the whole of the literal truth. Only an insanity as lurid
as Captain Ahab’s would mistake Moby-Dick for a similarly reliable report
of personal experiences. Moby-Dick is, indeed, an autobiography of
adventure; but adventure upon the highest plane of spiritual daring.
Incidentally, it also offers the fullest, and truest, and most readable history
of an actual whaling cruise ever written. But it is not a “scientific” history.
The “scientific” historian, proudly unreadable, thanks God that he has no
style to tempt him out of the strict weariness of counting-house inventories;
and in despair of presenting the truth, he boasts a make-shift veracity. The
truest historians are, of course, the poets—and their histories are “feigned.”
Melville, writing in the capacity of poet, was licensed in the best interests of
truth to expurgate reality. And though Captain Ahab’s hunt of the abhorred
Moby-Dick belongs as essentially to the realm of poetry as does the quest
of the Holy Grail, it is, withal, in its lower reaches, so broadly based on a
foundation of solid reality that it is possible, by considering Moby-Dick in
double conjunction with the few facts explicitly known of Melville during
the period of his whaling cruise, and the wealth of facts known of whaling
in general, to block in, with a considerable degree of certainty, the contours
of his experiences aboard the Acushnet.
By all odds, the chief chapter in the history of whaling is the story of its rise
and practical extinction in the Southern New England States. In this limited
geographical area, trade in “oil and bone” was pursued with an alacrity, an
enterprise and a prosperity unparalleled in the world’s history. When, in
1841, Melville boarded the Acushnet, American whaling, after a
development through nearly two centuries, was within a decade of its
highest development, within two decades of its precipitous decay. The
doom of whale-oil lamps and sperm candles was ultimately decided in 1859
with the opening of the first oil well in Pennsylvania, and sealed by the
Civil War. Melville knew American whaling at the prime of its golden age,
and taking it at its crest, he raised it in fiction to a dignity and significance
incomparably higher than it ever reached in literal fact.
At the beginning of Moby-Dick, Melville culls from the most incongruous
volumes an anthology of comments upon Leviathan, beginning with the
Mosaic comment “And God created great whales,” and ending, after
eclectic quotations from Pliny, Lucian, Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne,

Spenser, Hobbes, Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Paley, Blackstone,
Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, Darwin, and dozens of others (including an
excerpt “From ‘Something’ Unpublished”) ends on the old whale song:

“Oh, the rare old whale, mid storm and gale
In his ocean home will be
A giant in might, where might is right,
And King of the boundless sea.”

Rather than conventionally distribute his quotations throughout the book as
chapter headings, Melville offers them all in a block at the beginning of the
volume, somewhat after the manner of Franklin’s grace said over the pork
barrel. And extraordinarily effective is this device of Melville’s in stirring
the reader’s interest to a sense of the wonder and mystery of this largest of
all created live things, of the wild and distant seas wherein he rolls his
island bulk; of the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale with all the
attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds. Even before
the reader comes to the superb opening paragraph of Moby-Dick, the great
flood-gates of the wonder-world are swung open, and into his inmost soul,
as into Melville’s, “two by two there float endless processions of the whale,
and midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the
air.”
The literature of whaling slopes down from Moby-Dick, both before and
after, into a wilderness of several hundred volumes.
There is but one attempt at a comprehensive history of whaling: Walter S.
Tower’s A History of the American Whale Fishery (Philadelphia, 1907).
This slender volume first makes a rapid survey of the sources and proceeds
from these to a cautious selection of the outstanding documented facts
which by “economic interpretation” it presents as a consecutive story.
Devoid of literary pretension, it is admirable in accuracy, compactness and
clarity. The most comprehensive popular treatment of American whaling is
to be found in Hyatt Verrill’s The Real Story of the Whaler (1916): a more
exuberant but less workmanly book than Tower’s. Representative shorter
surveys are to be found both in Winthrop L. Martin’s very able The
American Merchant Marine (1902) and Willis J. Abbot’s American
Merchant Ships and Sailors (1902).

Although the literature of whaling extends by repeated dilutions from
“economic interpretations” to infant books, the classical sources for this
extended literature tally less than a score. The great work on the Fisheries
and Fishing Industries of the United States, prepared under the direction of
G. Brown Goode in 1884, contains two articles on whaling of the first
magnitude of importance: Whalemen, Vessels, Apparatus and Methods of
the Whale Fishery and a History of the Present Condition of the Whale
Fishery. The facts presented in these last two encyclopædic treatments are
drawn principally from Alexander Starbuck’s History of the American
Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1874, published in
1876, and C. M. Scammon’s Marine Mammals of the North Western Coast
of North America, with an Account of the American Whale Fishery,
published in 1874. Lorenzo Sabine’s Report on the Principal Fisheries of
the American Seas, published in 1870, while prior to the monumental works
of Starbuck and Scammon in date of publication, enjoys no other priority.
The most complete and detailed treatment of the origin and early
development of whaling is to be found in William Scoresby’s An Account of
the Arctic Regions, dated 1820. Scoresby—“the justly renowned,”
according to Melville; “the excellent voyager”—was an English naval
officer, and in his discussion of the whale fishery he deals solely with the
European and principally with the British industry. But Scoresby’s book is
principally a classic as regards the earlier history of whaling. Scoresby
seems to have convinced all later historians in this field of the folly of
further research. Melville knew Scoresby’s book—“I honour him for a
veteran,” Melville confesses—and drew from its erudition in Moby-Dick.
Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket, published in 1836, is one of the few
important original sources for the history of whaling, and the most readable.
Melville expresses repeated indebtedness to Macy. Macy’s record has the
tang of first-hand experience, and the flavour of local records. Because of
the fact that many of the records from which this fine old antiquary of
whales drew have since been destroyed by fire, his book enjoys the
heightened authority of being a unique source. According to Anatole
France, the perplexities of historians begin where events are related by two
or by several witnesses, “for their evidence is always contradictory and
always irreconcilable.” The fire at Nantucket blazed a royal road to truth.
Daniel Ricketson, in his History of New Bedford (1850) attempted to
emulate Macy. And though Ricketson’s sources, as Macy’s, have been

largely destroyed by fire, his authority, though irrefutable in so far as it
goes, is less detailed and comprehensive.

THROWING THE HARPOON

SOUNDING

Of published personal narrative of whale-hunting, Owen Chase’s Narrative
of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Ship Wreck of the Whale Ship
Essex of Nantucket, published in 1821, as well as F. D. Bennett’s two-
volume Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, published 1833-36, were
drawn from by Melville in Moby-Dick. The account of the sinking of the
Essex is important as being the source from which Melville borrowed, with
superb transformation, the catastrophe with which he closes Moby-Dick.
The sinking of the Essex—recounted in Moby-Dick—is the first and best
known instance of a ship being actually sent to the bottom by the ramming
of an infuriated whale, and in its sequel it is one of the most dreadful
chapters of human suffering in all the hideous annals of shipwreck. “I have
seen Owen Chase,” Melville says in Moby-Dick, “who was chief mate of
the Essex at the time of the tragedy: I have read his plain and faithful
narrative: I have conversed with his son; and all within a few miles of the
scene of the tragedy.” Melville may here be using a technique learned from
Defoe.
Though in Moby-Dick Melville makes several references to J. Ross
Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes on a Sojourn on the
Island of Zanzibar, mildly praising some of his drawings while reprobating
their reproduction, he owes no debt to J. Ross Browne. Melville and

Browne wrote of whaling with purposes diametrically opposed. Melville
gloried in the romance of whales, and horsed on Leviathan, through a briny
sunset dove down through the nether-twilight into the blackest haunted
caverns of the soul. Browne provokes no such rhetorical extravagance of
characterisation. He sat soberly and firmly down on a four-legged chair
before a four-legged desk and wrote up his travels. “My design,” he says,
“is simply to present to the public a faithful delineation of the life of a
whaleman. In doing this, I deem it necessary that I should aim rather at the
truth itself than at mere polish of style.” So Browne made a virtue of
necessity, and convinced that “history scarcely furnishes a parallel for the
deeds of cruelty” then “prevalent in the whale fishery,” he sent his book
forth “to show in what manner the degraded condition of a portion of our
fellow-creatures can be ameliorated.” In a study of Melville’s life, Browne
is important as presenting an ungarnished account of typical conditions
aboard a whaler at the time Melville was cruising in the Acushnet. Useful in
the same way are R. Delano’s Wanderings and Adventures; Being a
Narrative of Twelve Years’ Life in a Whaleship (1846) and Captain Davis’
spirited overhauling of his journal kept during a whaling trip, published in
1872 under the title Nimrod of the Sea.
Though whales and Pilgrim Fathers would, at first blush, seem to belong to
two mutually repugnant orders of nature, yet were they, by force of
circumstance, early thrown into a warring intimacy. And strangely enough,
in this armed alliance, it was the whale who made the first advances.
Richard Mather, who came to Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635, records in
his journal, according to Sabine, the presence off the New England coast of
“mighty whales spewing up water in the air like the smoke of a chimney ...
of such incredible bigness that I will never wonder that the body of Jonah
could be in the belly of a whale.” From this and other evidence it seems
undoubted that in early colonial days whales were undaunted by the strict
observances of the Pilgrims, and browsed in great numbers, even on
Sabbath, within the sight of land. Yet, despite this open violation of
Scripture, the resourceful Puritan pressed them into the service of true
religion. Believing that

Whales in the sea
God’s voice obey,

they tolerated leviathan as an emissary more worthy than Elijah’s raven.
And whenever an obedient whale, harkening to the voice of God in the
wilderness, was cast ashore, a part of his bulk was fittingly appropriated for
the support of the ministry.
Tower establishes the fact that among the first colonists there were men at
least acquainted with, if not actually experienced in whaling. And it is quite
generally accepted that the settlement of Massachusetts was prompted not
only by a protestant determination to worship God after the dictates of a
rebellious conscience, but by a no less firm determination to vary Sunday
observances with the enjoyment on secular days of unrestricted fishing. As
a result of this double Puritan interest in worship and whaling, the history of
the American whaling fishery begins almost with the settlement of the New
England colonies.
By the end of the seventeenth century, whaling was established as a regular
business, if still on a comparatively small scale, in the different
Massachusetts colonies, especially from Cape Cod; from the towns at the
eastern end of Long Island, and from Nantucket. With the very notable
exceptions of New London, Connecticut, and New Bedford and the
neighbouring ports in Buzzard’s Bay, every locality subsequently to become
important in its whaling interests was well launched in this enterprise before
1700. New London did not begin whaling until the middle of the eighteenth
century. New Bedford, though almost the last place to appear as a whaling
port—and this immediately before the Revolution—was destined to stand,
within a century after its beginnings in whaling, the greatest whaling port
the world has ever known, the city which, in the full glory of whaling
prosperity, would send out more vessels than all other American ports
combined.
The earliest colonial adventurers in whaling were men who by special
appointment were engaged to be on the lookout for whales cast ashore.
Emboldened by commerce with drift-whales, these Puritan whalemen soon
took to boats to chase and kill whales which came close in, but which were
not actually stranded.

In 1712, through the instrumentality of Christopher Hussey, Providence
utilised a hardship to His creature to work a revolution in whaling. Hussey,
while cruising along the coast, was caught up by a strong northerly wind,
and despite his prayers and his seamanship was blown out to sea. When the
sky cleared, Hussey’s craft was nowhere to be seen by the anxious watchers
on shore. After awaiting his return for a decent number of days, his wife
and neighbours at home gave him up as lost. But in the middle of their
tribulations, a familiar sail dipped over the horizon, and Hussey slowly
headed landward, dragging a dead sperm whale in tow: the first sperm
whale known to have been taken by an American whaler.
Hussey’s exploit marked a radical change in whaling methods. All
Nantucket lusted after sperm whales. The indomitable islanders began
immediately to fit vessels, usually sloops of about thirty tons, to whale out
in the “deep.” These little vessels were fitted out for cruises of about six
weeks. On their narrow decks there was no room for the apparatus
necessary to “try out” the oil. So the blubber stripped from the whale was
cast into the hold, the oil awaiting extraction until the vessel returned. Then
the reeking whale fat, its stench smiting the face of heaven, was transferred
to the huge kettles of the “try houses.” There is an old saying that a nose
that is a nose at all can smell a whaler twenty miles to windward. The New
England indifference to the stenches of whaling suggests that the Puritan
contempt for the flesh was not a virtue but a deformity.
Other whaling communities ventured out after the sperm whale in the wake
of Nantucket. Year after year the colonial whalemen pushed further and
further out into the “deep” as their gigantic quarry retreated before them. In
1774, Captain Uriah Bunker, in the brig Amazon of Nantucket, made the
first whaling voyage across the equinoctial line to the Brazil Banks and,
according to local tradition, returned to port with a “full ship” on April 19,
1775, just as the redcoats were in full retreat from Concord Bridge.
The Revolutionary War dealt a terrific blow to American whaling.
Massachusetts was regarded as the hotbed of the Revolutionary spirit, and
that colony was also the centre of the fishing industries. Hence, in 1775, “to
starve New England,” Parliament passed the famous act restricting colonial
trade to British ports, and placing an embargo on fishing on the Banks of
Newfoundland or on any other part of the North American coast. It was this
same measure which inspired Burke in his Speech on Conciliation to his

superbly eloquent tribute to the exploits of the American whalemen. When
the war began there were in the whole American fleet between three and
four hundred vessels—of an aggregate of about thirty-three thousand tons.
The annual product of this fleet was, according to Starbuck’s estimate,
“probably at least 45,000 barrels of spermaceti oil, and 8,500 barrels of
right whale oil, and of bone nearly or quite 75,000 pounds.” Of all whaling
communities, the island of Nantucket held out most stoutly,—aided by
Melville’s grandfather, who was sent to Nantucket in command of a
detachment to watch the movements of the British fleet. Yet when the war
ended in 1783, Macy says that of the one hundred and fifty Nantucket
vessels, only two or three old hulks remained. In Nantucket, the money loss
exceeded one million dollars. So many of the young and active men
perished in the war that in the eight hundred Nantucket families there were
two hundred and two widows and three hundred and forty-two orphan
children.
But even in the face of such prodigal disaster, the fiery spirit of Nantucket
was unquenchable. When the news came of the peace of 1783, the Bedford,
just returned to Nantucket from a voyage, was hastily laden with oil and
cleared for London. This was, as a contemporary London newspaper
remarks, “the first vessel which displayed the thirteen rebellious stripes of
America in any British port.”
Through the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the American
whale fishery lived a precarious existence of constant ups and downs. The
whaling voyages were greatly lengthened during this period, however. In
1789 Nantucket whalemen first went hunting the sperm whale off
Madagascar, and in 1791 six whaleships fitted out at Nantucket for the
Pacific Ocean.
The years between 1820 and 1835 were marked mainly by stable conditions
and by a steady but gradual growth. In 1820 the Pacific whaling was
extended to the coast of Japan, and within the next few years the whalers
were going to all parts of the South Sea and Indian Ocean. And these years
marked, too, the falling of Nantucket from her hundred years of pre-
eminence in whaling, and the emergence of New Bedford as incomparably
the greatest whaling port in the history of the world. It was a Nantucket
whaler, however, who in 1835 captured the first right whale on the

northwest coast of America, thereby opening one of the most important
grounds ever visited by the whaling fleet.
The Golden Age of whaling falls between 1835 and 1860. In 1846 the
whaling fleet assumed the greatest proportions it was ever to know. In that
year, the fleet numbered six hundred and eighty ships and barks, thirty-four
brigs, and twenty-two schooners, with an aggregate of somewhat over two
hundred and thirty thousand tons. The value of the fleet alone at that time
exceeded twenty-one million dollars, while all the investments connected
with the business are estimated, according to Tower, at seventy million
dollars, furnishing the chief support of seventy thousand persons. This great
industry, so widespread in its operation, emanated, at the time of its most
extensive development, from a cluster of thirty-eight whaling ports
distributed along the southern New England coast from Cape Cod to New
York, and on the islands to the south. The greatest of all the whaling ports,
from 1820 onward, was New Bedford.
During the really great days of the whale fishery, the Pacific was by all odds
the chief fishing ground. During the early eighteen-thirties, the Nantucket
fleet began cruising mainly in the Pacific, and after 1840, the Nantucket
whalers hunted there almost exclusively. The Nantucket fleet was soon
followed by the majority of the New Bedford fleet, and a large proportion
of the New London and Sag Harbor vessels.
These vessels, manned by a mixed company of Quakers, farm boys, and a
supplementary compound of the dredgings of the terrestrial globe, would
usually be gone for three years, not infrequently for four or five. As long as
the craft held, and the food lasted, and an empty barrel lay in the hold, the
captain kept to the broad ocean, eschewing both the allurements of home
and the seductions of tattooed Didoes. When at last they sailed into the
harbour of their home ports, weed-grown, storm-beaten, patched and
forlorn, they usually looked, as Verrill says, more like the ghosts of ancient
wrecks than seaworthy carriers of precious cargo manned by crews of flesh
and blood. After a few months of repair and overhauling in port, these
vessels were refitted for another cruise, and off they sailed again for another
space of years. It thus happened that the veteran whalers of Nantucket and
New Bedford and the sister ports could look back upon whole decades of
their lives spent cruising upon the high seas: a fact that Melville amplifies
with a cadence he learned from the Psalms. Of the Nantucketer he says:

“For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen
having but a right of way through it. He alone resides and riots on the sea;
he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it
as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business,
which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the
millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks on the prairie; he
hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps.
For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it
smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an
earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is
rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of
sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very
pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”
The number of supplies, and the variety of articles required in fitting out a
whaling ship for a cruise, was, of course, prodigious. For aside from the
articles required in whaling, it was necessary that a whaling vessel should
sail prepared for any emergency, and equipped to be absolutely independent
of the rest of the world for years at a time, housekeeping upon the wide
ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers and bankers.
Aside from the necessary whaling equipment, there were needed supplies
for the men, ship’s stores and a dizzy number of incidentals: “spare boats,
spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost,
but a spare Captain and a duplicate ship.... While other hulls are loaded
down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves, the world-
wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons
and their wants. She has a whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold.
She is ballasted with utilities. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have
gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports,
the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil;
her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that
did you carry them the news that another flood had come; they would
answer—‘Well, boys, here’s the ark!’” N. H. Nye, a New Bedford outfitter,
published in 1858 an inventory of Articles for a Whaling Voyage: a
shopping list totalling some 650 entries, useful once to whalers with fallible
memories, useful now to landsmen with lame imaginations.

When, from such a port as Nantucket or New Bedford, a whaling vessel
was preparing to sail, there would be no house, perhaps, without some
interest in the cruise. Each took a personal pride in the success of the
whalers: a pride clinched by the economic dependence of nearly every soul
in the community upon the whalemen’s luck. During the time of continual
fetching and carrying preparatory to the sailing in Moby-Dick, no one was
more active, it will be remembered, than Aunt Charity Bildad, that lean
though kind-hearted old Quakeress of indefatigable spirit. “At one time she
would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another
time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his log;
a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic
back.” Hither and thither she bustled about, “ready to turn her hand and her
heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort and consolation to
all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and
in which she herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.” Nor did
she forsake the ship even after it had been hauled out from the wharf. She
came off in the whaleboat with a nightcap for the second mate, her brother-
in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward. Such were the conditions in
whaling-towns like Nantucket or New Bedford that there was nothing
remarkable in Aunt Charity’s behaviour. In such communities, “whale was
King.” The talk of the street was, as Abbot observes, of big catches and the
price of oil and bone. The conversation in the shaded parlours, where sea-
shell, coral, and the trophies of Pacific cruises were the chief ornaments,
was, in an odd mixture of Quaker idiom, of prospective cruises or of past
adventures, of distant husbands and sons, the perils they braved, and when
they might be expected home. Col. Joseph C. Hart, in his Miriam Coffin, or
the Whale Fishermen: a Tale (1834) offers perhaps the truest and most
vivid picture of life in Nantucket when whaling was at its prime. Speaking
of himself in the third person in the dedication, Hart describes his book as
being “founded on facts, and illustrating some of the scenes with which he
was conversant in his earlier days, together with occurrences with which he
is familiar from tradition and association.” Though reprinted in California
in 1872, Miriam Coffin is now very difficult to come by. It should be better
known.
The extended voyages of the American whaleman were made in heavy,
bluff-bowed and “tubby” crafts that were designed with fine contempt for
speed, comfort or appearance. In writing of Nantucket whaling during the

period about 1750, Macy says: “They began now to employ vessels of
larger size, some of 100 ton burden, and a few were square-rigged.” For
over a century thereafter the changes in whaling vessels were almost solely
in size. With the opening of the Pacific, the longer voyages and the desire
for larger cargoes led, as a necessary result, to the employment of larger
vessels. The first Nantucket ship sailing to the Pacific in 1791 was of 240-
ton burden. By 1826, Nantucket had seventy-two ships carrying over 280
tons each, and before 1850 whalers of 400 to 500 tons burden were not
unusual. The Acushnet, it will be remembered, was rated as a ship of 359
tons.
The vessels used in whaling, built, as has been said, less with a view to
speed than to carrying capacity, had a characteristic architecture. The bow
was scarce distinguishable from the stern by its lines, and the masts stuck
up straight, without that rake which adds so much to the trim appearance of
a clipper. Three peculiarities chiefly distinguished the whalers from other
ships of the same general character. (1) At each mast head was fixed the
“crow’s-nest”—in some vessels a heavy barrel lashed to the mast, in others
merely a small platform laid on the cross-trees, with two hoops fixed to the
mast above, within which the look-out could stand in safety. Throughout
Melville’s experiences at sea, in the merchant marines, in whalers, and in
the navy, it appears that his happiest moments were spent on mast-heads.
(2) On the deck, amidships, stood the “try-works,” brick furnaces holding
two or three great kettles, in which the blubber was reduced to odourless
oil. (3) Along each rail were heavy, clumsy wooden cranes, or davits, from
which hung the whale boats—never less than five, sometimes more—while
still others were lashed to the deck. For these boats were the whales’ sport
and playthings, and seldom was a big “fish” made fast without there being
work made for the ship’s carpenter.
As for the crow’s-nest, and the business of standing mast-heads, Melville
has more than a word to say. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the Garden of
Cyrus of “the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the
Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered,” to find, as
Coleridge remarks, “quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth
below, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves,
in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything,” so Melville finds the visible and
invisible universe a symbolic prefiguring of all the detailed peculiarities of

whaling. In the town of Babel he finds a great stone mast-head that went by
the board in the dread gale of God’s wrath; and in St. Simon Stylites, he
discovers “a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads, who
was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but
valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.” And in
Napoleon upon the top of the column of Vendome, in Washington atop his
pillar in Baltimore, as in many another man of stone or iron or bronze, he
sees standers of mast-heads.
In most American whalemen, the mast-heads were manned almost
simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; and this even though she
often had fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail before reaching her
proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage, she
found herself drawing near home with empty casks, then her mast-heads
were frequently kept manned, even until her skysail-poles sailed in among
the spires of her home port.
The three mast-heads were kept manned from sunrise to sunset, the seamen
taking regular turns (as at the helm) and relieving each other every two
hours, watching to catch the faint blur of vapour whose spouting marks the
presence of a whale. “There she blows! B-l-o-o-ws! Blo-o-ows!” was then
sung out from the mast-head: the signal for the chase.
As for Melville, he tries to convince us he kept very sorry watch, as in the
serene weather of the tropics, he perched “a hundred feet above the silent
decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while
beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the huge monsters of
the deep, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous
Colossus of old Rhodes.” There, through his watches, he used to swing, he
says, “lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the
waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow;
everything resolves you into languor.” “I used to lounge up the rigging very
leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else
off duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and
throwing a lazy leg over the topsail yard, take a preliminary view of the
watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.”
According to Melville’s own representation, the Acushnet was not a pint of
oil richer for all his watching in the thought-engendering altitude of the
crow’s-nest. He admonishes all ship-owners of Nantucket to eschew the bad

business of shipping “romantic, melancholy, absent-minded young men,
disgusted with the cankering cares of earth”: young men seeking sentiment
—as did he—in tar and blubber. “Childe Harold not infrequently perches
himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whaleship,” he
warns prosaic ship-owners, “young men hopelessly lost to all honourable
ambition,” and indifferent to the selling qualities of “oil and bone.” It is
well both for Melville and Captain Pease, the testy old skipper of the ship
Acushnet, that he could not see into the head of Melville as he hung silently
perched in his dizzy lookout. “Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of
vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the
mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless
soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding,
beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of
some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive
thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this
enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused
through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming
at last a part of every shore the round globe over.”
When, from the mast-head, eyes less abstracted than Melville’s sighted a
whale, the daring and excitement of the ensuing pursuit in the whale-boats
left Melville less occasion, during such energetic intervals, to luxuriate in
high mysteries. And it seems likely that Melville was of more value to the
ship’s owners when in a whale-boat than riding the mast-head.
Through long years of whaling these boats had been developed until
practical perfection had been reached. Never has boat been built which for
speed, staunchness, seaworthiness and hardiness excels the whaleboat of the
Massachusetts whalemen. These mere cockleshells, sharp at both ends and
clean-sided as a mackerel, were about twenty-seven feet long by six feet
beam, with a depth of twenty-two inches amidships and thirty-seven inches
at the bow and stern. These tiny clinker-built craft can ride the heaviest sea,
withstand the highest wind, resist the heaviest gale. Incredible voyages have
been made in these whaling boats, not the least remarkable being the three
months’ voyage of two boats that survived the wreck of the Essex in 1819,
or the even more remarkable six months’ voyage of the whaling boat
separated from the Janet in 1849. In Mardi Melville describes a prolonged

voyage in a whale-boat. In this account Melville takes one down to the very
plane of the sea. He is speaking from experience when he says: “Unless the
waves, in their gambols, toss you and your chip upon one of their lordly
crests, your sphere of vision is little larger than it would be at the bottom of
a well. At best, your most extended view in any one direction, at least, is in
a high slow-rolling sea; when you descend into the dark misty spaces,
between long and uniform swells. Then, for the moment, it is like looking
up and down in a twilight glade, interminable; where two dawns, one on
each hand, seem struggling through the semi-transparent tops of the fluid
mountains.”
Of his first lowering in pursuit of a whale, he says in Moby-Dick: “It was a
sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea;
the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales,
like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended
agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the
sharper waves, that seemed almost threatening to cut it in two; the sudden
profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and
goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide
down its other side:—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and
harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, and wondrous sight
of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails,
like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling. Not the
raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his
first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first unknown
phantom in the other world,—neither of these can feel stranger and stronger
emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling
into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.”
After this first lowering, Melville returned to the ship to indulge in the
popular nautical diversion of making his will. This ceremony concluded, he
says he looked round him “tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost
with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault. Now
then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes
for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the
hindmost.”
In Moby-Dick, whales are sighted, chased, and captured; nor does Melville
fail to give detailed accounts of these activities or of the ensuing “cutting

in” and the “trying” of the oil. One of the most vivid scenes in Moby-Dick
is the description of the “try-works” in operation.
“By midnight,” says Melville, “the works were in full operation. We were
clean from the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the
wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the
fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
illuminated every rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.... The
hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in
front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan
harpooners, always the whaleship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they
pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the
fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch
them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of
the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to
leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of
the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here
lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat
of the fire, their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat,
their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all
these strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As
they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told
in words of mirth; their uncivilised laughter forked upwards out of them,
like the flames from the furnace: to and fro, in their front, the harpooners
wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; the wind
howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, yet
steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea
and the night; and scornfully champed, and viciously spat round her on all
sides.” During this scene Melville stood at the helm, “and for long silent
hours guarded the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that
interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness,
the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me,
capering half in smoke and half in fire these at last begat kindred visions in
my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which
ever would come over me at a midnight helm.”
In a chapter on dreams, in Mardi, one of the wildest chapters Melville ever
wrote, and the one in which he profoundly searched into the heart of his

mystery, he compares his dreams to a vast herd of buffaloes, “browsing on
to the horizon, and browsing on round the world; and among them, I dash
with my lance, to spear one, ere they all flee.” In this world of dreams,
“passing and repassing, like Oriental empires in history,” Melville
discerned, “far in the background, hazy and blue, their steeps let down from
the sky, Andes on Andes, rooted on Alps; and all round me, long rolling
oceans, roll Amazons and Orinocos; waver, mounted Parthians; and to and
fro, toss the wide woodlands: all the world an elk, and the forest its antlers.
Beneath me, at the equator, the earth pulses and beats like a warrior’s heart,
till I know not whether it be not myself. And my soul sinks down to the
depths, and soars to the skies; and comet-like reels on through such
boundless expanses, that methinks all the worlds are my kin, and I invoke
them to stay in their course. Yet, like a mighty three decker, towing argosies
by scores, I tremble, gasp, and strain in my flight, and fain would cast off
the cables that hamper.”
On that night that Melville drowsed at the helm of the Acushnet while she
was “freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and
plunging into that blackness of blackness” his soul sank deep into itself, and
he seems to have awakened to recognise in the ship that he drowsily
steered, the material counterpart of the darkest mysteries of his own soul. It
was then that he awoke to be “horribly conscious” that “whatever swift
rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as
rushing from all havens astern.” And in reflecting upon that insight Melville
plunges into the lowest abyss of disenchantment. “The truest of men was
the Man of Sorrows,” he says, “and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and
Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.... He who
... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and
throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and
therefore jolly; not that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break
the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.”
The greatest of all dreamers conquer their dreams; others, who are great,
but not of the greatest, are mastered by them, and Melville was one of these.
There is a passage in the works of Edgar Allan Poe that Melville may well
have pondered when he awoke at the helm of the Acushnet after looking too
long into the glare of the fire: “There are moments when, even to the sober
eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of

a hell; but the imagination of man is no Carathes to explore with impunity
its every cavern. All the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be
regarded as altogether fanciful; but, like the demons in whose company
Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep or they will
devour us—they must be suffered to slumber or we perish.”

CHAPTER VIII
LEVIATHAN
“At the battle of Breviex in Flanders, my glorious old gossiping
ancestor Froissart informs me, ten good knights, being suddenly
unhorsed, fell stiff and powerless to the plain, fatally
encumbered by their armour. Whereupon the rascally
burglarious peasants, their foes, fell to picking their visors; as
burglars, locks; as oystermen oysters; to get at their lives. But all
to no purpose. And at last they were fain to ask aid of a
blacksmith; and not till then were the inmates of the armour
despatched. Days of chivalry these, when gallant chevaliers died
chivalric deaths! Yes, they were glorious times. But no sensible
man, given to quiet domestic delights, would exchange his
warm fireside and muffins, for a heroic bivouac, in a wild
beechen wood, of a raw gusty morning in Normandy; every
knight blowing his steel-gloved fingers, and vainly striving to
cool his cold coffee in his helmet.”
Herman Melville: Mardi.
It was the same Edmund Burke who movingly mourned the departure of the
epic virtues of chivalry, who in swift generalities celebrated the heroic
enterprise of the hunters of leviathan. But Burke viewed both whaling and
knight-errantry from a safe remove of time or place, and the crude everyday
realities of each he smothered beneath billows of gorgeous generalisation.
Burke offers a notable instance wherein romance and rhetoric conspired to
glorify two human activities that are glorious only in expurgation. Piracy is
picturesque in its extinction, and to the snugly domesticated imagination
there is both virtue and charm in cut-throats and highwaymen. Even the
perennial newspaper accounts of massacre and rape doubtless serve to keep
sweet the blood of many a benevolent pew-holder. The incorrigible
tendency of the imagination to extract sweet from the bitter, honey from the
carcass of the lion, makes an intimate consideration of the filthy soil from

which some of its choicest illusions spring, downright repugnant to
wholesomemindedness. Intimately considered, both whaling and knight-
errantry were shabby forms of the butchering business. Their virtues were
but the nobler vices of barbarism: vices that take on a semblance of nobility
only when measured against the deadly virtues of emasculated
righteousness. In flight from the deadly virtues, Melville was precipitated
into the reeking barbarism of the forecastle of a whaling ship. Whaling he
applied as a counter-irritant to New England decorum, and he seems to have
smarted much during the application. He was blessed with a high degree of
the resilience of youthful animal vigour, it is true; and there is solace for all
suffering, the godly tell us—omitting the ungodly solaces of madness and
suicide. It will be seen that whaling prompted Melville to extreme
measures. The full hideousness of his life on board the Acushnet has not yet
transpired.
The chief whaling communities—those of Nantucket and Buzzard’s Bay—
were originally settled by Quakers. The inhabitants of these districts in
general retained in an uncommon measure throughout the golden age of
whaling, the peculiarities of the Quaker. Never perhaps in the history of the
world has there been mated two aspects of life more humorously
incompatible than whale-hunting and Quakerism. This mating produced,
however, a race of the most sanguinary of all sailors; a race of fighting
Quakers: in Melville’s phrase, “Quakers with a vengeance.” Though
refusing from conscientious scruples to bear arms against land invaders, yet
these same Quakers inimitably invaded the Atlantic and the Pacific; and
though sworn foes to human bloodshed, yet did they, in their straight-
bodied coats, spill tons and tons of leviathan gore. And so, as Melville goes
on to point out, “there are instances among them of men who, named with
Scripture names, and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic
thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and
boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these
unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy
a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.”
The two old Quaker captains of Moby-Dick, Bildad and Peleg, are typical of
the race that made Nantucket and New Bedford the greatest whaling ports
in all history. Peleg significantly divides all good men into two inclusive
categories: “pious good men, like Bildad,” and “swearing good men—

something like me.” The “swearing good men,” Melville would seem to
imply, in sacrificing piety to humanity, while standing lower in the eyes of
God, stood higher in the hearts of their crew. Though Bildad never swore at
his men, so Melville remarks, “he somehow got an inordinate quantity of
cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them.”
Typical of the cast of mind of the whaling Quaker is Captain Bildad’s
farewell to ship’s company on board the ship in which he was chief owner:
“God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping. Be careful in the hunt, ye
mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooners; good white cedar
plank is raised full three per cent, within the year. Don’t forget your prayers,
either. Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s day, men; but don’t miss a fair
chance either; that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts. Have an eye to the
molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the
islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye!”
The old log-books most frequently begin: “A journal of an intended voyage
from Nantucket by God’s permission.” And typical is the closing sentence
of the entry in George Gardener’s journal for Saturday, January 21, 1757:
“So no more at Present all being in health by the Blessing of God but no
whale yet.”
At first, the New England vessels were manned almost entirely by
American-born seamen, including a certain proportion of Indians and coast-
bred negroes. But as the fishery grew, and the number of vessels increased,
the supply of hands became inadequate. Macy says that as early as about
1750 the Nantucket fishery had attained such proportions that it was
necessary to secure men from Cape Cod and Long Island to man the
vessels. Goode says: “Captain Isaiah West, now eighty years of age (in
1880), tells me that he remembers when he picked his crew within a radius
of sixty miles of New Bedford; oftentimes he was acquainted, either
personally or through report, with the social standing or business
qualifications of every man on his vessel; and also that he remembers the
first foreigner—an Irishman—that shipped with him, the circumstance
being commented on at that time as a remarkable one.” Time was, however,
when it was easy to gather at New Bedford or New London a prime crew of
tall and stalwart lads from the fishing coast and from the farms of the
interior of New England. Maine furnished a great many whalemen, and for
a long time the romance of whaling held out a powerful fascination for

adventurous farmer boys of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Upper New
York. During Melville’s time the farms of New England still supplied a
contingent of whalers. In writing of New Bedford he says: “There weekly
arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all
athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart
frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and
snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence
they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look
there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath-knife. Here
comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.” Of course, these
farm-boys were of the verdant innocence Melville paints them when they
signed the ship’s papers, not knowing a harpoon from a handspike. It is a
curious paradox in the history of whaling,—a paradox best elaborated by
Verrill,—that the ship’s crew were almost never sailors. The captain, of
course, the officers and the harpooners were usually skilled and efficient
hands. But so filthy was the work aboard the whaler, and so perilous; so
brutal the treatment of the crew, and so hazardous the actual earnings, that
competent deep-water sailors stuck to the navy or the merchant marine.
When Melville shipped from Honolulu as an “ordinary seaman in the
United States Navy,” he soon found occasion “to offer up thanksgiving that
in no evil hour had I divulged the fact of having served in a whaler; for
having previously marked the prevailing prejudice of men-of-war’s-men to
that much maligned class of mariners, I had wisely held my peace
concerning stove boats on the coast of Japan.” And in Redburn he says “that
merchant seamen generally affect a certain superiority to ‘blubber-boilers,’
as they contemptuously style those who hunt the leviathan.”
When the farmer lads came down to the sea no more in adequate numbers,
the whaleships were forced to fill their crews far from home, and to take
what material they could get. Shipping offices, with headquarters at the
whaling ports, employed agents scattered here and there in the principal
cities, especially in the Middle West and the interior of New England. These
agents received ten dollars for each man they secured for the ship’s crew.
Besides this, each agent was paid for the incidental expenses of
transportation, board, and outfit of every man shipped. By means of lurid
advertisements and circulars, these agents with emancipated conscience,
made glowing promises to the desperate and the ignorant. Each prospective

whaleman was promised a “lay” of the ship’s catch. For in the whaling
business, no set wages were paid. All hands, including the captain, received
certain shares of the profits called “lays.” The size of the lay was
proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties
of the ship’s company. The captain usually received a lay of from one-
twelfth to one-eighteenth; green hands about the one-hundred-and-fiftieth.
What lay Melville received is not known. Bildad is inclined to think that the
seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay was not too much for Ishmael; but
Bildad was a “pious good man.” Peleg, the “swearing good man,” after a
volcanic eruption with Bildad, puts Ishmael down for the three hundredth
lay. Though this may exemplify the relation that, in Melville’s mind, existed
between profanity and kindness, it tells us, unfortunately, nothing of the
prospective earnings of Melville’s whaling. Of one thing, however, we can
be fairly certain: Melville did not drive a shrewd and highly profitable
bargain. The details of his life bear out his boast: “I am one of those that
never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is
ready to board and lodge me, while I put up at the grim sign of the Thunder
Cloud.”
Each prospective whaler, besides being assured a stated fraction of the
ship’s earnings, was by the agents promised an advance of seventy-five
dollars, an outfit of clothes, as well as board and lodging until aboard ship.
From this imaginary seventy-five dollars were deducted all the expenses
which the agent defrayed, as well as the ten dollars head payment. By a
shameless perversion of exaggerated charges, a really competent outfitter
managed to ship his embryo whalemen without a cent of the promised
advance. The agent who shipped J. Ross Browne and his unfortunate friend,
was a suave gentleman of easy promises. “Whaling, gentlemen, is tolerably
hard at first,” Browne makes him say, “but it’s the finest business in the
world for enterprising young men. Vigilance and activity will insure you
rapid promotion. I haven’t the least doubt but you’ll come home boat
steerers. I sent off six college students a few days ago, and a poor fellow
who had been flogged away from home by a vicious wife. A whaler,
gentlemen, is a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school
for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy! There’s nothing like it. You can
see the world; you can see something of life.”

The first half of one of the truest and most popular of whaling chanteys, a
lyric which must have been sung with heartfelt conviction by thousands of
whalemen, runs:

’Twas advertised in Boston,
New York and Buffalo,
Five hundred brave Americans
A-whaling for to go.

They send you to New Bedford,
The famous whaling port;
They send you to a shark’s store
And board and fit you out.

They send you to a boarding-house
For a time to dwell.
The thieves there, they are thicker
Than the other side of Hell.

They tell you of the whaling ships
A-going in and out.
They swear you’ll make your fortune
Before you’re five months out.

The second half of this ballad celebrates the hardships of life aboard ship:
the poor food and the brutality of the officers. With this side of whaling we
know that Melville was familiar. But of the usual preliminaries of whaling
recounted by Browne and summarised in the chantey, Melville says not a
word, either in Moby-Dick or elsewhere. Nor does tradition or history
supplement this autobiographical silence. On this point, we know nothing.
Surely it would be intensely interesting to know how far egotism conspired
with art in guiding Melville in the writing of the masterful beginning of
Moby-Dick.
No matter by what process Melville found his way to the Acushnet, the
whaling fleet was, indeed, at the time of his addition to it, “a place of refuge
for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the dissipated, an asylum for

the needy.” J. Ross Browne was warned before his sailing that New
Bedford “was the sink-hole of iniquity; that the fitters were all blood-
suckers, the owners cheats, and the captains tyrants.”
Though the arraignment was incautiously comprehensive, Browne
confesses to have looked back upon it as a sound warning. The boasted
advantages of whaling were not selfishly withheld from any man, no matter
what the race, or the complexion of his hide or his morals. The Spanish,
Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, English, Scotch, Irish, in fact,
men of almost every country of Europe, and this with no jealous
discrimination against Asia, Africa, or the Islands of the Pacific, were
drawn upon by the whale fleet during the days of its greatest prosperity.
“And had I not been, from my birth, as it were, a cosmopolite,” Melville
remarks parenthetically in Redburn. It would have been difficult for him to
find a more promising field for the exercise of this inherited characteristic,
than was whaling in 1841: and this, indeed, without the nuisance of leaving
New Bedford. “In thoroughfares nigh the docks,” he says, “any
considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest nondescripts
from foreign ports. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean
mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not
unknown to Lascars and Malays; and in Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live
Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water
street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but
in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages
outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a
stranger stare.” It will be remembered that Ishmael spends his first night in
New Bedford in bed with one of these very cannibals; and on the following
morning, in a spirit of amiable and transcendent charity, goes down on his
knees with his tattooed bed-fellow before a portable wooden deity: an
experience fantastic and highly diverting, nor at all outside the bounds of
possibility. It is a fact to chasten the optimism of apostles of the
promiscuous brotherhood of man, that as the whaling crews grew in
cosmopolitanism, they made no corresponding advances towards the
Millennium. Had Nantucket and New Bedford but grown to the height of
their whaling activities in the fourth century, they might have sent
enterprising agents to the African desert to tempt ambitious cenobites with
offers of undreamed-of luxuries of mortification. These holy men might
have worked miracles in whaling, and transformed the watery wilderness of

the Pacific into a floating City of God. But in the nineteenth century of
grace, the kennel-like forecastle of the whaler was the refuge not of the
athletic saint, but of the offscourings of all races, the discards of humanity,
and of this fact there is no lack of evidence. Nor did Melville’s ship-mates,
on the whole, seem to have varied this monotony. There survives this record
in his own hand:
“What became of the ship’s company on the whale-ship
‘Acushnet,’ according to Hubbard who came back home in her
(more than a four years’ voyage) and visited me in Pittsfield in
1850.
“Captain Pease—returned & lives in asylum at the Vineyard.
“Raymond, 1st Mate—had a fight with the Captain & went
ashore at Payta.
“Hall, 2nd Mate—came home & went to California.
“3rd Mate, Portuguese, went ashore at Payta.
“Boatswain, either ran away or killed at Ropo one of the
Marquesas.
“Smith, went ashore at Santa, coast of Peru, afterwards
committed suicide at Mobile.
“Barney, boatswain, came home.
“Carpenter, went ashore at Mowee half dead with disreputable
disease.
“The Czar.
“Tom Johnson, black, went ashore at Mowee, half dead (ditto) &
died at the hospital.
“Reed, mulatto—came home.
“Blacksmith, ran away at San Francisco.
“Blackus, little black, ditto.
“Bill Green, after several attempts to run away, came home in
the end.

“The Irishman, ran away, coast of Colombia.
“Wright, went ashore half dead at the Marquesas.
“Jack Adams and Jo Portuguese came home.
“The Old Cook, came home.
“Haynes, ran away aboard of a Sidney ship.
“Little Jack, came home.
“Grant, young fellow, went ashore half dead, spitting blood, at
Oahu.
“Murray, went ashore, shunning fight at Rio Janeiro.
“The Cooper, came home.”
Of the twenty-seven men who went out with the ship, only the Captain, the
Second Mate, a Boatswain, the Cook, the Cooper and six of the mongrel
crew (one of which made several futile attempts to escape) came back home
with her. The First Mate had a fight with the Captain and left the ship; the
Carpenter and four of the crew went ashore to die, two at least with
venereal diseases, another went ashore spitting blood, another to commit
suicide.

SPERM WHALING. THE CAPTURE.
Drawing by A. Van Beest, R. Swain Gifford and Benj. Russell, 1850.

ONE OF SIX WHALING PRINTS. LONDON, 1750.

With this company Melville was intimately imprisoned on board the
Acushnet for fifteen months. Of the everyday life of Melville in this
community we know little enough. In Moby-Dick Melville has left
voluminous accounts of the typical occupations of whaling but beyond this
nothing certainly to be identified as derived from life on the Acushnet. The
ship’s company on board the Pequod, in so far as is known, belong as
purely to romance as characters of fiction can. It doubtless abbreviates the
responsibilities of the custodians of public morals, that the staple of
conversation on board the Acushnet, the scenes enacted in the forecastle and
elsewhere in the ship, shall probably never be known. In Typee Melville
says of the crew of the Acushnet, however: “With a very few exceptions,
our crew was composed of a parcel of dastardly and mean-spirited
wretches, divided among themselves, and only united in enduring without
resistance the unmitigated tyranny of the captain.”
Of the “very few exceptions” that Melville spares the tribute of
contemptuous damnation, one alone does he single out for portraiture. “He
was a young fellow about my own age,” says Melville in Typee, of a
seventeen-year-old shipmate, “for whom I had all along entertained a great
regard; and Toby, such was the name by which he went among us, for his
real name he would never tell us, was every way worthy of it. He was
active, ready, and obliging, of dauntless courage, and singularly open and
fearless in the expression of his feelings. I had on more than one occasion
got him out of scrapes into which this had led him; and I know not whether
it was from this cause, or a certain congeniality of sentiment between us,
that he had always shown a partiality for my society. We had battled out
many a long watch together, beguiling the weary hours with chat, song, and
story, mingled with a good many imprecations upon the hard destiny it
seemed our common fortune to encounter.”
Toby, like Melville, had evidently not been reared from the cradle to the life
of the forecastle; a fact that, despite his anxious effort, Toby could not
entirely conceal. “He was one of that class of rovers you sometimes meet at
sea,” says Melville, “who never reveal their origin, never allude to home,
and go rambling over the world as if pursued by some mysterious fate they
cannot possibly elude.”
By the spell of the senses, too, Melville was attracted to Toby. “For while
the greater part of the crew were as coarse in person as in mind,” says

Melville, “Toby was endowed with a remarkably prepossessing exterior.
Arrayed in his blue frock and duck trousers, he was as smart a looking
sailor as ever stepped upon a deck; he was singularly small and slightly
made, with great flexibility of limb. His naturally dark complexion had
been deepened by exposure to the tropical sun, and a mass of jetty locks
clustered about his temples, and threw a darker shade into his large black
eyes.”
There is preserved among Melville’s papers a lock of hair, unusually fine
and soft in texture, but not so much “jetty” as of a rich red-black chestnut
colour, and marked “a lock of Toby’s hair,” and dated 1846 the year of the
publication of Typee. When Melville and Toby parted in the Marquesas,
each came to think that the other had most likely been eaten by the
cannibals. Upon the publication of Typee, Toby was startled into delight to
learn of Melville’s survival and to rub his eyes at the flattering portrayal of
himself. In a letter of his to Melville, dated June 16, 1856, he says: “I am
still proud of the immortality with which you have invested me.” The extent
of the first extremity of his pride is not recorded. But in his first flush of
immortality he seems to have sent Melville a lock of his hair, an amiable
vanity, perhaps, at Melville’s celebration of his personal charms.
There survives with the lock of hair a daguerreotype of Toby, also of 1846.
There are also two other photographs: the three strewn over a period of
thirty years. These three photographs make especially vivid the regret at the
lack of any early picture of Melville. Melville’s likeness is preserved only
in bearded middle-age: and such portraiture gives no more idea of his
youthful appearance than does Toby’s washed-out maturity suggest his
Byronic earlier manner. There is every indication that Melville was a young
man of a very conspicuous personal charm. From his books one forms a
vivid image of him in the freshness and agility and full-bloodedness of his
youth. To bring this face to face with the photographs of his middle age is a
challenge to the loyalty of the imagination. All known pictures of Melville
postdate his creative period. They are pictures of Melville the disenchanted
philosopher. As pictures of Melville the adventurer and artist, they survive
as misleading posthumous images.
Of Toby’s character, Melville says: “He was a strange wayward being,
moody, fitful, and melancholy—at times almost morose. He had a quick
and fiery temper too, which, when thoroughly roused, transported him into

a state bordering on delirium. No one ever saw Toby laugh. I mean in the
hearty abandonment of broad-mouthed mirth. He did sometimes smile, it is
true; and there was a good deal of dry, sarcastic humour about him, which
told the more from the imperturbable gravity of his tone and manner.”
After escaping from the Acushnet with Melville into the valley of Typee,
Toby in course of time found himself back to civilisation, where the history
of his life that he kept so secret aboard the Acushnet came more fully to be
known.

“TOBY”
RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE

In 1846

In 1865

Toby, or Richard Tobias Greene, was, according to notices in Chicago
papers at the time of his death on August 24, 1892, born in Dublin, Ireland,
in 1825. He was as a child brought to America by his father, who settled in
Rochester, New York, where Toby “took public school and academic
courses.” Before he was seventeen he shipped aboard the Acushnet, there to
fall in with Melville and to accompany him into the uncorrupted heart of
cannibalism. Toby returned to civilisation to study law with John C.
Spencer, “the noted attorney whose son was executed for mutiny at
Canandaigua, New York,” and was, in time, admitted to the bar. He
relinquished jurisprudence for journalism, and was for some indefinite
period editor of the Buffalo Courier. He restlessly varied his activities by
assisting in constructing the first telegraph line west of New York State, and
opened the first telegraph office in Ohio, at Sandusky. For some years he
published the Sandusky Mirror. In 1857 he moved to Chicago and took a
place on the Times. With the Civil War he enlisted in the 6th Infantry of
Missouri and for three years was “trusted clerk at General Grant’s
headquarters.” He was discharged June, 1864, to enlist again October 19,
1864, in the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. With the end of the war he returned

to Chicago, ruined in health. Yet he continued to exert himself as a public-
minded citizen, and at his funeral were “many fellow Masons, comrades
from the G.A.R. and others who came to pay their respects to the late
traveller, editor and soldier.”
After the publication of Typee there were delighted exchanges of
recognition and gratitude between him and Melville. And though these two
men grew further and further apart with years, there continued between
them an irregular correspondence and a pathetic loyalty to youthful
associations: felicitations that grew to be as conscientious and hollow as the
ghastly amiabilities of a college reunion. Toby’s son, born in 1854, he
named Herman Melville Greene (a compliment to Melville adopted by
some of his later shipmates in the navy); and Melville presented his
namesake with a spoon—the gift he always made to namesakes. Toby’s
nephew was named Richard Melville Hair, and another spoon was shipped
west. In 1856 Toby wrote Melville he had read Melville’s most recent book,
Piazza Tales. Toby’s critical efforts exhausted themselves in the comment:
“The Encantadas called up reminiscences of the Acushnet, and days gone
by.” In 1858, when Melville was lecturing about the country, Toby
addressed a dutiful letter to his “Dear Old Shipmate,” asking that Melville
visit him while in Cleveland. If the visit was ever made, it has not
transpired. In 1860 Toby wrote to Melville: “Hope you enjoy good health
and can yet stow away five shares of duff! I would be delighted to see you
and ‘freshen the nip’ while you would be spinning a yarn as long as the
main-top bowline.” In acknowledgment Melville during the year following
sent Toby the gift of a spoon. In reply Toby observes: “My mind often
reverts to the many pleasant moonlight watches we passed together on the
deck of the Acushnet as we whiled away the hours with yarn and song till
eight bells.” Even to the third generation Toby’s descendants were “proud
of the immortality” with which Melville had invested Toby. Miss Agnes
Repplier has written on The Perils of Immortality. There are perils, too, in
immortalisation.
But in the days of Toby’s unredeemed immortality on board the Acushnet
before he joined the Masons and the Grand Army of the Republic, Toby was
to Melville a singularly grateful variation to the filth and hideousness and
brutality of the human refuse with which he cruised the high seas in search
of oil and bone.

Melville was fifteen months on board the Acushnet; and for the last six
months of this period he was out of sight of land; cruising “some twenty
degrees to the westward of the Gallipagos”—“cruising after the sperm-
whale under the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the
wide-rolling Pacific—the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else.”
The ship itself was, at the expiration of this period, deplorable in
appearance. The paint on her sides, burnt up by the scorching sun, was
puffed up and cracked. She trailed weeds after her; about her stern-piece an
unsightly bunch of barnacles had formed; and every time she rose on a sea,
she showed her copper torn away, or hanging in jagged strips. The only
green thing in sight aboard her was the green paint on the inside of the
bulwarks, and that, to Melville, was of “a vile and sickly hue.” The nearest
suggestion of the grateful fragrance of the loamy earth, was the bark which
clung to the wood used for fuel—bark gnawed off and devoured by the
Captain’s pig—and the mouldy corn and the brackish water in the little
trough before which the solitary tenant of the chicken-coop stood “moping
all day long on that everlasting one leg of his.”
The usage on board in Melville’s ship, as in that of J. Ross Browne and
many another, had been tyrannical in the extreme. In Typee he says: “We
had left both law and equity on the other side of the Cape.” And Captain
Pease, arbitrary and violent, promptly replied to all complaints and
remonstrances with the butt-end of a hand-spike, “so convincingly
administered as effectually to silence the aggrieved party.”
“The sick had been inhumanly neglected; the provisions had been doled out
in scanty allowance.” The provisions on board the Acushnet had consisted
chiefly of “delicate morsels of beef and pork, cut on scientific principles
from every part of the animal and of all conceivable shapes and sizes,
carefully packed in salt and stored away in barrels; affording a never-ending
variety in their different degrees of toughness, and in the peculiarities of
their saline properties. Choice old water, too, two pints of which were
allowed every day to every soul on board; together with ample store of sea-
bread, previously reduced to a state of petrification, with a view to preserve
it either from decay or consumption in the ordinary mode, were likewise
provided for the nourishment and gastronomic enjoyment of the crew.”
Captain Davis, in his Nimrod of the Sea, suggests that petrification is not
the worst state of ship’s-biscuits; he recounts how with mellower fare

“epicures on board hesitate to bite the ship-bread in the dark, and the
custom is to tap each piece as you break it off, to dislodge the large worms
that breed there.”
The itinerary of this fifteen months’ cruise is not known. In Moby-Dick
Melville says: “I stuffed a shirt or two into my carpet-bag, tucked it under
my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific.” In Omoo, Melville
speaks of “an old man-of-war’s-man whose acquaintance I had made at Rio
de Janeiro, at which place the ship touched in which I sailed from home.” In
White-Jacket and Omoo he speaks of whaling off the coast of Japan. And in
Moby-Dick, in a passage that reads like an excerpt from the Book of
Revelations, he indicates a more frigid whereabouts: “I remember the first
albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the
Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the
overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal,
feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill
sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to
embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it.
Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in
supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I
peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I
bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those
for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of
traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot
tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I
awoke; when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking,
and adoring cherubim!”
But what waters the Acushnet sailed, and what shores she touched before
she dropped anchor in the Marquesas, little positively is known.
The last eighteen or twenty days, however, during which time the light trade
winds silently swept the Acushnet towards the Marquesas, were to Melville,
when viewed in retrospect, “delightful, lazy, languid.” Land was ahead!
And with the refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass in prospect, Melville
and the whole ship’s company resigned themselves to a disinclination to do
anything, “and spreading an awning over the forecastle, slept, ate, and
lounged under it the livelong day.” The promise of the ship’s at last
breaking through the inexorable circle of the changeless horizon into the

fragrance of firm and loamy earth, gave Melville an eye for the sea-scape
he had formerly abhorred. “The sky presented a clear expanse of the most
delicate blue, except along the skirts of the horizon, where you might see a
thin drapery of pale clouds which never varied their form or colour. The
long, measured, dirge-like swell of the Pacific came rolling along, with its
surface broken by little tiny waves, sparkling in the sunshine. Every now
and then a shoal of flying fish, scared from the water under the bows, would
leap into the air, and fall the next moment like a shower of silver into the
sea.”
In later years, memory treacherously transformed this watery environment
upon which Melville and Toby had vented their youthful and impotent
imprecations. From his farm in the Berkshire Hills, he looked back
regretfully upon his rovings over the Pacific, and by a pathetic fallacy,
convinced himself that in them “the long supplication of my youth was
answered.” The spell of the Pacific descended upon him not while he was
cruising the Pacific, however, but while he was busy upon his farm in
Pittsfield, “building and patching and tinkering away in all directions,” as
he described his activities to Hawthorne.
Strangely jumbled anticipations haunted Melville, he says, as drowsing on
the silent deck of the Acushnet he was being borne towards land: towards
the Marquesas, one of the least known islands in the Pacific.
“The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very
name spirit up!” exclaims Melville in excited prospect. “Naked houris—
cannibal banquets—groves of cocoa-nut—coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—
and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved
canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands guarded by
horrible idols—heathenish rites and human sacrifices.”
After fifteen months aboard the Acushnet, Melville was ripe to discover
alluring Edenic beauties in tropical heathendom. And in the end, so
intolerable was the prospect of dragging out added relentless days under the
guardianship of Captain Pease, that as a last extremity, Melville preferred to
risk the fate of Captain Cook, and find a strolling cenotaph in the bellies of
a tribe of practising cannibals.

CHAPTER IX
THE PACIFIC
“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea,
whose gentle awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul
beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over
the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these
sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of
all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb, and
flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and
shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we
call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like
slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by
their restlessness.”
—Herman Melville: Moby-Dick.
First sighted by Balboa in the year 1513, and for more than two centuries
regarded by the Spaniards as their own possession, these midmost waters of
the world lay locked behind one difficult and dangerous portal. During
these centuries the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic—but arms of the Pacific
—were gloomy with mysteries. The Spanish sailors used to chant a litany
when they saw St. Elmo’s Fire glittering on the mast-head, and exorcised
the demon of the waterspout by elevating their swords in the form of
crosses. Mermaids still lived in the tranquil blue waters. The darkness of the
storm was thronged with gigantic shadowy figures. The pages of Purchas
and Hackluyt offer no lack of supernatural visitations. Thus superstition
joined with substantial danger to guard the entrance to the Pacific. Balboa
himself was beheaded. Everybody who had to do with Magellan’s first
passage into the Pacific came to a bad end. The captain was murdered in a
brawl by the natives of the Philippines; the sailor De Lepe, who first sighted
the straits from the mast-head, was taken prisoner by the Algerians,
embraced the faith of the False Prophet, and so lost his everlasting soul;

Ruy Falero died raving mad. There was a fatality upon the whole ship’s
company.
Two years before Magellan’s memorable voyage, the western boundary of
the Pacific had been approached by the Portuguese, Francisco Serrano
having discovered the Molucca Islands immediately after the conquest of
Malacca by the celebrated Albuquerque. To stimulate exertion, and to
preclude contention in the rivalry of dominion between Portugal and Spain,
Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander the Sixth, drew a line down the map
through the western limits of the Portuguese province of Brazil, and allotted
to Portugal all heathen lands she should discover on the eastern half of this
line; to Spain, all heathen lands to the west. So shadowy was the knowledge
of geography at the time that this apportionment of His Holiness left it
doubtful to which hemisphere the Moluccas belonged; and the precious
spices peculiar to those islands rendered the decision important. To
ascertain this was the purpose of Magellan’s voyage across the Pacific. In
this waste of waters Magellan made two discoveries: a range of small
islands—including Guam among its number—which he named Ladrones,
on account of the thievish disposition of the natives; and, at the cost of his
life, one of the islands which has since been called the Philippines.
The voyage of Magellan proved that by the allotment of Alexander the
Sixth, the Pacific belonged to Spain. And though for eight generations the
Spaniards were hereditary lords of the Pacific, they soon grew greedy and
jealous and lazy in their splendid and undisturbed monopoly. Once or twice,
it is true, the English devils took the great galleon: but only once or twice in
all these years. Lesser spoils occasionally fell into the hands of pirates; for
did not Dampier take off Juan Fernandez a vessel laden with “a quantity of
marmalade, a stately and handsome mule, and an immense wooden image
of the Virgin Mary”? Towns, too, were occasionally sacked. But the
Spaniards feared little danger, and ran few risks. They grew richer and
lazier, and troubled themselves little in exploring the great expanse of the
Pacific. They coasted the Americas as far north as California, which they
half-suspected to be an island. The Galapagos, Juan Fernandez, and
Masafuera they knew; a part of China, a part of Japan, the Philippines,
Celebes, Timor, and the Ladrones. Voyages across the Pacific between
Manilla and Acapulco were not infrequent: but these voyages were sterile in
discovery. The traditional route, once through the Straits of Magellan, was

to touch at Juan Fernandez, coast South America, stand in at Panama, turn
out to sea again, appear off Acapulco, and then sail in the parallel of 13° N.
to the Ladrones. The Abbé Raynal states that the strictest orders were given
by the Spanish Government prohibiting captains on any account to deviate
from the track laid down on their charts during the voyage between these
places.
In the darkness of this uncharted ocean there was believed to stretch a great
southern continent of fabulous wealth and beauty: the Terra Australis
Incognita that survived pertinaciously in the popular imagination until the
time of Captain Cook. Members of the Royal Society had proved, beyond
doubt, that the right balance of the earth required a southern continent;
geographers pointed out how Quiros, Juan Fernandez and Tasman had
touched at various points of this continent. Politicians and poets agreed that
treasures of all kinds would be found there,—though they varied in their
appropriation of these Utopian resources. The controversy over the
existence of this continent was vehemently revived in 1770 by the
appearance of Alexander Dalrymple’s An Historical Collection of the
Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean. Dalrymple
was an ardent advocate of the reality of the Terra Australis Incognita, and to
encourage an experimental confirmation of his faith, he dedicated his
handsome quarto: “To the man who, emulous of Magellan and the heroes of
former times, undeterred by difficulties and unseduced by pleasure, shall
persist through every obstacle, and not by chance but by virtue and good
conduct succeed in establishing an intercourse with a Southern Continent.”
Dr. Kippis, Captain Cook’s biographer, writing in 1788, says he remembers
how Cook’s “imagination was captivated in the early part of his life with
the hypothesis of a southern continent. He has often dwelt upon it with
rapture.” The year following Dalrymple’s dedication, Captain Cook, back
from his first voyage in the Pacific, was commissioned by the Earl of
Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, to go out and settle once and for all
the mystery of the Southern Continent. So long as this mystery remained
unsettled, the Pacific stretched a great limbo pregnant with the wildest
fancies. Between the times of Magellan and Captain Cook there was no
certainty as to what revelations it held to disgorge.
It was in 1575 that Drake climbed the hill and the tree upon its summit from
which could be seen both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. “Almighty

God,” this devout pirate exclaimed, “of thy holiness give me life and leave
to sail in an English ship upon that sea!” God heard his prayer, and blessed
him with rich pirate spoils in the Pacific, and honoured him at home by a
“stately visit” from the Queen. Yet he died at sea, and in a leaden coffin his
body was dropped into the ocean slime. Cavendish continued the British
tradition of lucrative piracy, and in 1586 captured the great plate galleon.
This stimulated competition in high-sea robbery, until in 1594, the capture
of Sir Richard Hawkins daunted even English courage.
In 1595, Alvaro Mendana de Neyra, departing from the beaten track across
the Pacific on his way to occupy the Solomon Islands which he had
discovered twenty-eight years earlier, chanced upon a new group of islands
which he named Las Marquesas de Mendoca, in honour of his patron
Mendoca, Marquis of Cenete, and viceroy of Peru. He had mass said on
shore, refitted his vessels, planted a few crosses in devout memorial, to die
before he accomplished the object of his voyage, and to leave the
Marquesas unmolested by visitors until visited by Captain Cook in 1774. It
was in the Marquesas, of course, that Melville lived with the cannibals.
The seventeenth century saw the Dutch upon the Pacific. During the greater
part of the century, England was busy with troublesome affairs at home; the
Spanish were too indolent to bestir themselves. Unmolested by competition,
the great Dutch navigators, Joris Spilbergen, La Maire, Schouten, and, most
famous of all, Tasman, drifted among the islands of the extreme southwest.
It was not until 1664 that the French sailed upon the Pacific. To the end of
the century belong the buccaneers—Morgan, Sawkin, Edward Cooke,
Woodes, Rogers, Cowley, Clipperton, Shelvocke and Dampier. William
Dampier, the greatest of these voyagers, crossed the Pacific, missing all
islands but New Zealand. He added but little to the stock of knowledge that
had been already collected from the narratives of Tasman, or Schouten. W.
Clark Russell, in his life of Dampier, suggests it as probable “that his
failure, coupled with the despondent tone that characterises his narrative,
went far to retard further explorations of the South Seas. It was no longer
disputed that a vast body of land stood in those waters. All that Dampier
said in its favour was theoretical; all that he had to report as an eye-witness,
all that he could speak to as facts, was extremely discouraging.” The myth
of the entrancing beauties and voluptuous charms of the South Seas owes
nothing to Dampier except, perhaps, a delayed inception. Of the inhabitants

of the South Seas he reports that they had the most unpleasant looks and the
worst features of any people he ever saw; and, says he: “I have seen a great
variety of Savages.” He speaks of them as “blinking Creatures,” with “black
skins and Hair frizzled, tall, thin, etc.”
Russell considered the depressing influence of Dampier’s recorded
adventures manifested in the direction given to later navigators. Byron in
1764, Wallis, Mouat, and Cartaret in 1766, were despatched on voyages
round the world to search the South Seas for new lands; but only one of
them, Cartaret, deviated from Dampier’s track, confining his explorations in
this way to a glance at New Guinea and New Britain, to the discovery of
New Ireland, lying adjacent to the island Dampier sailed around, and to
giving names to the Solomon and other groups. Both Byron and Wallis, it is
true, did enter the archipelago of the Society Islands, Wallis discovering
island after island, until he reached Tahiti. Wallis’s account of Otaheite—on
the authority of the London Missionary Society “to be pronounced so as to
rhyme with the adjective mighty”—and its people, occupies a great part of
his narrative. Though his reception was not without a show of arms and
bloodshed, the native women exerted themselves tirelessly to do unselfish
penance for the hostile behaviour of the native males. Oammo, the ruling
chief, retired from the scene, leaving the felicitation of the strangers in the
hands of his consort, Oberea, “whose whole character,” according to the
observations of the London Missionary Society, “for sensuality exceeded
even the usual standard of Otaheite.” In the establishment of friendship that
ensued, Wallis sent Lieutenant Furneaux ashore to erect a British pennant,
and in defiance of the Pope, to take formal possession of the island in the
name of King George the Third. Hopelessly unimpressed by the whole
transaction, the natives took down the flag during the night, and for a long
time afterwards the ruling chieftains wore it about their persons as a badge
of royalty. Oberea’s hospitality was requited by a parting gift of some
turkeys, a gander, a goose, and a cat. Oberea’s live stock figures repeatedly
in the later annals of Tahiti.
Early in April, 1768, Tahiti was again visited by Europeans. Louis de
Bougainville was in Tahiti only eight days. But, if Bougainville’s account
be not the bravado of patriotism, during that period his ship’s company
seem to have outdone their English predecessors in sensuality and open
indecency. Several murders were committed more privately. And the

natives, with an eye for the detection of such matters, exposed among the
ship’s crew a woman who had sailed from France disguised in man’s
apparel. Bougainville attached to himself a native youth, Outooroo, brother
of a chieftain; Outooroo accompanied Bougainville to France. Within a few
weeks after sailing from Tahiti, Bougainville discovered that Outooroo, as
well as others aboard, were infected with venereal disease. Wallis very
specifically asserts that his ship’s company were untouched by disreputable
symptoms six months before, and still longer after their visit at Tahiti. In
any event, before the first year had elapsed after the discovery of Tahiti, its
inhabitants were exhibiting unmistakable signs of their contact with
civilisation. In 1799, the London Missionary Society gave warning to the
world: “The present existence, and the general prevalence of the evil, is but
too obvious; and it concurs with other dreadful effects of sensuality, to
threaten the entire population of this beautiful island, if it is not seasonably
averted by the happy influence of the gospel.” The steady extinction of the
Polynesian races would seem to indicate that this happy influence has, to
date, not been efficacious. When Pope Alexander the Sixth gave to the
indolent Spanish the heathen for inheritance, His Holiness was being used
by a mysterious Providence as the guardian of heathendom. It was not until
he had been for over two centuries and a half in his tomb, that the heretical
and more enterprising English came to dispel the Egyptian darkness that
hung protectingly over most of the islands of the Pacific, and to expose a
competent barbarism to the devastating aggressions of civilisation.
Everybody knows how in 1769 the Royal Society, discovering that there
would happen a transit of Venus, and that this interesting astronomical event
would be best observed from some place in the Pacific, hit upon James
Cook—Byron, Wallis and Cartaret all being in the Pacific at the time—
master in the Royal Navy, to command the expedition. The Marquesas were
chosen as the place for the observation; but while the expedition was being
fitted out, Captain Wallis returned to England, bringing news of the
discovery of Tahiti. So well known is the story of Captain Cook that few
can boast the distinction of total ignorance of his three voyages to the
Pacific,—the first in command of an astronomical expedition, the second in
search of a Southern Continent, the third in quest of a Northwest Passage;
of his discoveries and adventures in every conceivable part of the Pacific;
of his repeated returns to Tahiti; of his finally being killed on the island
called by him Owhyhee, murdered despite the fact that he had shown a

power of conciliation granted to no other navigator in these seas. For, a long
time ago, there lived, on the island of Hawaii, Lono the swine-god. He was
jealous of his wife, and killed her. Driven to frenzy by the act, he went
about boxing and wrestling with every man he met, crying, “I am frantic
with my great love.” Then he sailed away for a foreign land, prophesying at
his departure: “I shall return in after times on an island bearing cocoa-nut
trees, swine, and dogs.” When, after a year’s absence, Cook returned to
Hawaii, he arrived the day after a great battle, and the victorious natives
were absolutely certain that Cook was the great swine-god, Lono, who long
ages ago had departed mad with love, now, to add lustre to their triumph,
returned on an island bearing cocoa-nut trees, swine, and dogs. This
attribution of deity was hardly complimentary to Cook’s crew. And in time
the islanders tired of their enthusiasm and the expense of entertaining
strolling deities. After sixteen days of prodigal hospitality, the natives began
stroking the sides and patting the bellies of the sailors, telling them, partly
by signs, partly by words, it was time to go. They went. But a week
afterwards the ship returned. There was a quarrel. Among some people a
quarrel leads to a fight. In a fight somebody naturally gets killed. Or, it may
have been,—Walter Besant suggests,—that perhaps it may have occurred to
some native humourist to wonder how a god would look and behave with a
spear stuck right through him. Cook fell into the water, and spoke no more.
In his life, as in his death, Cook enjoyed all the successes. Boswell dined
with him at Sir John Pringle’s on April 2, 1776, and reported the glowing
event to Dr. Johnson. A snuff-box was carved out of the planks of one of his
vessels, and presented to James Fenimore Cooper. Fanny Burney records
with pride her father’s meeting the famous navigator, whom she herself met
in society and in her own home. Joseph Priestly contemplated
accompanying Cook to the South Seas. An artist—W. Hodges—was
officially appointed to accompany him to perpetuate his exploits in oil. He
read learned papers before the Royal Society, for one of which the counsel
adjudged him the Copley Gold Medal. Six times was his portrait painted,
and once was it seriously proposed that Dr. Johnson be appointed his
official biographer. Not even by Omai, a native of Tahiti that Captain
Furneaux brought to England, was Captain Cook’s glory eclipsed. And
Omai was received by the King, was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and
was laden with gifts when he was taken back to Tahiti by Captain Cook on
his third voyage. Omai, too, attended meetings of the Royal Society, and it

is to his credit that he behaved himself fairly well. It was regretted by the
Directors of the London Missionary Society that though “great attention
was paid to him by some of the nobility, it was chiefly directed to his
amusement, and tended rather to augment than to diminish his habitual
profligacy.” In 1785-6, there was repeatedly performed at Covent Garden
Theatre a pantomime named after him. The characters, besides Omai, were
Towha, the Guardian Genius of Omai’s Ancestors; Otoo, Father of Omai;
Harlequin, Servant to Omai. To give a blend of edification to romance, the
performance included, so a surviving play-bill announces, “a Procession
exactly representing the dresses, weapons and manners of the Inhabitants of
Otaheite, New Zealand, Tanna, Marquesas, Friendly, Sandwich and Easter
Islands, and other countries visited by Captain Cook.” In 1789, so vividly
was the tragic end of Captain Cook still mourned, that at the Theatre-Royal,
Covent Garden, was presented a spectacular tribute posted as The Death of
Captain. It was “a Grand Serious Pantomimic Ballet, in Three Parts, as now
exhibiting in Paris with uncommon applause, with the Original French
Music, New Scenery, Machinery, and other Decorations.” This performance
may have been inspired by an Ode on the Death of Captain Cook penned by
Miss Seward, the Swan of Lichfield: an ode praised by her fellow-
townsman, Dr. Johnson. In 1774 there appeared in London “An Epistle
from Oberea, Queen of Otaheite, to Joseph Banks, Esq., translated by T. Q.
Z., Esq., Professor of the Otaheite Language in Dublin, and of all the
Languages of the Undiscovered Islands in the South Seas, enriched with
Historical and Explanatory Notes,” and so novel and popular was the South
Sea manner, that its author was mistaken for a wit, and his efforts at humour
repeatedly and laboriously imitated. As a corrective to such levity, there
appeared in 1779 an effusion in verse, adorned with vignette depicting
Tahitian women dancing, entitled The Injured Islanders; or, The Influence
of Art upon the Happiness of Nature. There is no lack of evidence to prove
that the exploits of Captain Cook brought the South Seas, and especially
Tahiti, into exuberant and irresponsible popularity. Nor did business
enterprise nap during the festivities. Information which had been received
of the great utility of the bread-fruit, induced the merchants and planters of
the British West Indies to request that means might be used to transplant it
thither. For this purpose a ship was benevolently commissioned by George
the Third: the Bounty, commanded by Lieutenant Bligh. The voyage of the
Bounty ended in a horrible tragedy and an intensely interesting romance.

The story of the mutiny of the Bounty, and its astonishing sequels, joined
further to vitalise the interest in the South Seas. A frigate, significantly
called the Pandora, was sent out from England to Tahiti to seize the Bounty
mutineers. Though the Pandora was despatched as a messenger of justice,
the usual course of festivity, amusement and debaucheries was
uninterrupted during the continuance of the ship at Tahiti. And the year
following, with British doggedness, Captain Bligh returned to accomplish
the purpose of his former voyage which had been frustrated by mutiny. In
1793, the Daedalus, Vancouver’s storeship, stopped at Tahiti, leaving
behind a Swedish sailor with a taste for savagery. The same year an
American whaler, the Matilda, was wrecked off Tahiti, and the crew,
delighted at their good fortune, betrayed no inclination for an immediate
departure.
But while the frivolous, the sentimental, and the ungodly were busy
converting Tahitian savagery into a Georgian idyll, the well-starched
Wesleyan conscience crackled in horror at the black unredemption of the
South Sea heathen. “The discoveries made in the great southern seas by the
voyages undertaken at the command of his present majesty, George the
Third,” says a spokesman for the community, “excited wonderful attention,
and brought, as it were, into light a world till then almost unknown. The
perusal of the accounts of these repeated voyages could not but awaken, in
such countries as our own, various speculations, according as men were
differently affected. But when these islands were found to produce little that
would excite the cupidity of ambition, or answer the speculations of the
interested”—well, then it was that the protestant conscience bestirred itself,
and on September 25, 1795, founded the London Missionary Society. It
celebrated its first birthday by determining to begin work with the islands of
the southern ocean, “as these, for a long time past, had excited peculiar
attention. Their situation of mental ignorance and moral depravity strongly
impressed on our minds the obligation we lay under to endeavour to call
them from darkness into marvellous light. The miseries and diseases which
their intercourse with Europeans had occasioned seemed to upbraid our
neglect of repairing, if possible, these injuries; but above all, we longed to
send to them the everlasting gospel, the first and most distinguished of
blessings which Jehovah has bestowed upon the children of men.”

A select committee of ministers, approved for evangelical principles and
ability, was appointed to examine the candidates for the mission—who
applied in great numbers—as to their views, capacity, and “knowledge in
the mystery of godliness.” Thirty missionaries were chosen: four ministers,
six carpenters, two shoemakers, two bricklayers, two tailors (one of whom,
“late of the royal artillery”), two smiths, two weavers, a surgeon, a hatter, a
cotton manufacturer, a cabinet maker, a harness maker, a tinsmith, a cooper,
and a butcher. There were three women and three children also in the party.
On August 10, 1796, on the ship Duff, commanded by Captain Wilson, who
had been wonderfully converted to God, this band, in chorus with a hundred
voices, sang “Jesus, at thy command—we launch into the deep” as they
sailed out of Spithead. The singing, it is said, produced “a pleasing and
solemn sensation.” On Sunday, March 5, 1797, after an uneventful voyage,
the Duff dropped anchor at Tahiti. Seventy-four canoes came out to
welcome the strangers and broke the Sabbath by crowding about the decks,
“dancing and capering like frantic persons.” Nor was the first impression
made upon the Missionaries entirely favourable; “their wild disorderly
behaviour, strong smell of cocoa-nut oil, together with the tricks of the
arreoies, lessened the favourable impression we had formed of them;
neither could we see aught of that elegance and beauty in their women for
which they had been so greatly celebrated.” Conversation with the natives
was facilitated by the presence of two tattooed Swedes—one formerly of
the crew of the Matilda, the other left by the Daedalus. During sermon and
prayer the natives were quiet and thoughtful, “but when the singing struck
up, they seemed charmed and filled with amazement; sometimes they
would talk and laugh, but a nod of the head brought them to order.” Next
day,—for they arrived on the Sabbath,—some of the missionaries landed
and were presented with the house King Pomare had built for Captain
Bligh. This important matter settled, the chief thought it time to enquire
after entertainment; “first sky-rockets, next the violin and dancing, and
lastly the bagpipe.” Lacking such diversions, the missionaries offered a few
solos on the German flute,—and “it plainly appeared that more lively music
would have pleased them better.”
Domestic arrangements established, to the great diversion of the natives, the
missionaries tried to get some clothes on some of them. The queen had to
rip open the garments, it is true, to get into them; but one Tanno Manoo,
who was given a warm week-day dress, and a showy morning gown and

petticoat for the Sundays, “when dressed, made a very decent appearance;
taking more pains to cover her breasts, and even to keep her feet from being
seen, than most of the ladies of England have of late done.” The natives
were deeply perplexed by the proprieties of the Missionaries, and especially
by what to them seemed the unnatural chastity of the men.
Since the Missionaries had resolved to distribute their blessings, they sent a
party of brethren to make investigations on the Marquesas. The first visitors
the ship received from the shore were “seven beautiful young women,
swimming quite naked, except for a few green leaves tied round their
middle; nor did our mischievous goats even suffer them to keep their green
leaves, but as they turned to avoid them they were attacked on each side
alternately, and completely stripped naked.” Such, too, was their “symmetry
of features, that as models for the statuary and painter their equals can
seldom be found.” As they danced about the deck, frequently bursting out
into mad fits of laughter, or talking as fast as their tongues could go, surely
they must have convinced more than one of the meditative brethren of the
total depravity of man. Nor did these shameless savages confine their
excursions to the decks. “It was not a little affecting to see our own seamen
repairing the rigging, attended by a group of the most beautiful females,
who were employed to pass the ball, or carry the tar-bucket, etc.; and this
they did with the greatest assiduity, often besmearing themselves with the
tar in the execution of their office. No ship’s company, without great
restraints from God’s grace, could ever have resisted such temptations.”
Harris and Crook, two of the brethren, daring temptation, decided to stay at
the Marquesas, and were moved ashore. But before the Duff sailed back to
Tahiti, Harris was found on the shore about four o’clock one morning “in a
most pitiable plight, and like one out of his senses.” It appears that the
Marquesan chief Tenae, taking Crook upon an inland jaunt, had departed,
conferring upon Harris all the privileges of domesticity. Tenae’s wife,
sharing her husband’s ideas of hospitality, was troubled at Harris’ reserve.
So, “finding herself treated with total neglect, became doubtful of his sex,”
says the London Missionary Society in a report dedicated to George the
Third, “and acquainted some of the other females with her suspicion, who
accordingly came in the night, when he slept, and satisfied themselves
concerning that point, but not in such a peaceable way but that they awoke
him. Discovering so many strangers, he was greatly terrified; and,

perceiving what they had been doing, was determined to leave a place
where the people were so abandoned and given up to wickedness; a cause
which should have excited a contrary resolution.” Harris was forty years old
at the time, and by trade a cooper.
Crook, however, remained in the Marquesas for eighteen months, where,
alone, he tried to enlighten and improve the natives. The Marquesas had a
bad reputation among whalemen, and though they had been occasionally
visited by enterprising voyagers—by Fanning, Krusenstern, Porter, and
Finch—they for long remained especially virulent in their native depravity.
It is true that Crook returned after many years to place among the
Marquesans four converted natives from the Society Islands. In 1834, two
missionaries from England, accompanied by Darling from Tahiti and
several converted natives, recommenced the arduous work of evangelising
this ferocious people. During four years the faithful Stallworthy patiently
toiled at his station, when in 1838 a French frigate landed two Catholic
priests in the very and the only spot then cultivated by an English protestant
labourer. These fellow-workers in Christ competed for the souls of
heathens. Though, in 1839, to even the odds, Stallworthy received a
reinforcement of one of his English brethren, after two years the English
missionaries found it impossible “to maintain usefully their ground against
the united influence of heathen barbarism, popish craft, French power, and
French profligacy.” Thus “ravished from the Protestant charity that had so
long watched for its salvation,” the Marquesans, when discovered by
Melville, were in large part virgin in their barbarism.
At Tahiti, the brethren of the London Missionary Society continued to work
unrestingly, and against incredible discouragement. The natives were, as
Captain Cook discovered, “prodigious expert” as thieves. One snatcher-up
of unconsidered trifles, when by way of punishment chained to a pillar with
a padlock, not only contrived to get away, but to steal the padlock. Yet, by
the representation of the London Missionary Society, “their honesty to one
another seems unimpeachable,” and they cultivated a Utopian sense of
property: “They have no writing or records, but memory or landmarks.
Every man knows his own; and he would be thought of all characters the
basest, who should attempt to infringe on his neighbour, or claim a foot of
land that did not belong to him, or his adopted friend.” Indeed, despite the
reprobation dealt out to them in tracts compiled for Sunday-school

edification (Mrs. F. L. Mortimer’s The Night of Toil being a typically
diverting libel), the London Missionary Society, in its official reports, was
—paradoxically enough—their most convincing apologist. The natural
beauties of their country were again expatiated upon to the glory of the First
Artist. So prodigal was the natural abundance of Tahiti that the brethren
glorified it by converting it into a temptation. One of the brethren wrote in
his journal: “O Lord, how greatly hast thou honoured me, that thousands of
thy dear children should be praying for me, a worm! Lord, thou hast set me
in a heathen land, but a land, if I may so speak, with milk and honey. O put
more grace and gratitude into my poor cold heart, and grant that I may
never with Jeshurun grow fat and kick.” The natives themselves were
untroubled by any such compunctions. “Their life is without toil,” the
brethren reported, “and every man is at liberty to do, go and act as he
pleases, without the distress of care or apprehension of want: and as their
leisure is great, their sports and amusements are various.” Their personal
beauty, their almost ostentatious cleanliness, their boundless generosity,
were by the London Missionary Society insisted upon. The best of them,
however, lived “in a fearfully promiscuous intercourse,” and emulated the
classical Greeks in infanticide and other reprehensible practices. Yet do the
brethren allow that “in their dances alone is immodesty permitted; it may be
affirmed, they have in many instances more refined ideas of decency than
ourselves. They say that Englishmen are ashamed of nothing, and that we
have led them to public acts of indecency never before practised among
them.” But then, as the London Missionary Society says in another place:
“Their ideas, no doubt, of shame and delicacy are very different from ours;
they are not yet advanced to any such state of civilisation and refinement.”
At their departure from native custom, however, they were untroubled by
contrition. When asked “what is the true atonement for sin?” they answered,
“Hogs and pearls.” When the pleasant novelty of being exhorted and
preached to wore off, they did not behave impeccably during the devotions
of the brethren. They often cried out “lies” and “nonsense” during the
sermon. At other times they tried to make each other laugh by repeating
sentences after the brethren, or by playing antics, and making faces. Many
of the natives used to lie down and sleep as soon as the sermon began,
while “others were so trifling as to make remarks upon the missionaries’
clothes, or upon their appearance. Thus Satan filled their hearts with folly,
lest they should believe and be saved.” All the best inducements the

brethren could hold out to tempt them into “the divine life” moved them
not. “You talk to us of salvation, and we are dying,” they said; “we want no
other salvation than to be cured of our diseases and to live here always, and
to eat and talk.” So unappreciative were they of the efforts of the brethren
that they explained the presence of the missionaries in Tahiti as growing out
of a sensible desire to escape from the ugliness and worry and brutality of
European civilisation. As for the lacerated solicitude and strange
unselfishness of the brethren to confer upon each of them a soul with all of
its pestering responsibilities: that, they found totally incomprehensible.

“We are going to church, you see; and Kanoa, my Hawaiian associate, is
blowing a shell to call the people to meeting, as we have no bell. Kanoa’s wife,
with one of her children is just behind us. Be sure to look at the king, son of the
one who was killed, in his long shirt, and under his umbrella. The queen will
come too, for both are very regular in their attendance; and, what is better still,
we hope they are Christians.
“You may say, perhaps, that some things in this picture look more like breaking
the Sabbath than keeping it; and you are quite right.
“The woman whom you see is a heathen, carrying her husband’s skull as she
goes on a visit to some other village. A party of the natives are pressing scraped
cocoanuts in an oil-press, to get the oil to buy tobacco with. The dog is one of
the many, as heathenish as their masters.”
From Story of the Morning Star,
By Rev. Hiram Bingham.
EVANGELIZING POLYNESIA

Excluding all considerations of intellect—in which both the Missionaries
and the Polynesians seem to have been about equally endowed—the abyss
between the brethren and the heathen was the abyss that separated John
Knox from Aristophanes and the Greek Anthology: the abyss between the
animal integrity of classical antiquity and the Hebraic heritage of the
agonised conscience. Reason may pass back and forth over this chasm: but
no man once touched by the traditions of Christianity can ever again sling
his heart back across the abyss. If he attempt the feat—as witness the
Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin—he but adds corruption to crucifixion,
and there is no doubt as to the last state of that man.
If the fall from innocence was begun in Eden, it was sealed beyond
redemption in Bethlehem. For at the time of the inception of Christianity,
the pagan world was going to its doom, and its death agonies were frightful
in the extreme. Something had to be done to save humanity,—and
something drastic. And humanity—which was at the same time the priest
and the victim—found in the cross the justest symbol of its triumph in utter
human defeat. More effectively to slander this world, Heaven was set up in
libellous contrast; in order to heap debasement upon the flesh, the spirit was
opposed to it as an infinitely precious eternal entity, tainted by contact with
its mortal habitation. Blessedness lay not in harmony, but in division, and
utter confusion was mistaken for total depravity. “For the flesh lusteth
against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the
one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” But these
things classical antiquity did—being given over to a reprobate mind, so St.
Paul tells us. The Wesleyan brethren found in Polynesia the same
untroubled indulgence in “unrighteousness, fornication and wickedness,”
that had so troubled St. Paul. But in Tahiti there were no signs of the
intellect that classical antiquity exhibited in the days of its reprobation. And
though the Polynesians seemed to have thriven on unrighteousness, the
brethren itched to infect them with misgivings, and this in a Holy Name.
Melville was profoundly stirred to loathing at these efforts: a loathing
heightened by the later contentions introduced into Tahiti by the rival
proselyting of French Catholic missionaries. Lost in doubt and shame at
such spectacles, in Clarel he thus invokes Christ:

“By what art
Of conjuration might the heart
Of heavenly love, so sweet, so good,
Corrupt into the creeds malign
Begetting strife’s pernicious brood,
Which claimed for patron thee divine?
Anew, anew,
For this thou bleedest, Anguished Face;
Yea, thou through ages to accrue,
Shall the Medusa shield replace:
In beauty and in terror too
Shall paralyse the nobler race—
Smite or suspend, perplex, deter—
Tortured, shall prove the torturer.”

The brethren in Tahiti were without any of Melville’s misgivings. Their
faith was extraordinary. No less extraordinary was the native
imperviousness to salvation. After the brethren had ceased to be an amusing
novelty with gifts to bestow, the natives submitted them to neglect and
mockery. Revolts against King Pomare and constant war kept the brethren
in peril of their lives without releasing them to celestial jubilation. The
Napoleonic wars cut them off from communication with England. During
the first twelve years they heard from home only three times. These days of
fruitless trial sifted the party. Many of the brethren seized any opportunity
that offered to sail away on chance trading vessels. Of the seven who
remained, two died. In 1801 eight new brethren came out to reinforce the
number, then reduced to four. In 1804 old King Pomare died, and his son
Oto became King under the title Pomare II. In the wars that followed, the
mission seemed broken up: their house was burned, the printing press
destroyed, and six of the brethren removed from Tahiti to Huahine. Two
remained, however, to carry on the forlorn hope. But after all these years
Pomare’s heart began to soften. His gods seemed to be standing him in little
stead. Defeated in battle, he escaped to Eimeo, and invited the missionaries
to follow him. Here he ate a sacred turtle, and when no harm came to him
he dared still further. Meanwhile it was proposed in England that
proselyting in Polynesia be discontinued, since after sixteen years not one

conversion had been effected. But those of undaunted faith protested. The
ship bearing fresh supplies and news of the revived determination of those
at home to prosecute the work was met in mid-ocean with the cargo of the
rejected idols of the Tahitians. In a church seven hundred and twelve feet
long, with twenty-nine doors and three pulpits, all paid for by himself,—the
church in which Melville witnessed Sunday devotion—King Pomare had
himself moistened on the forehead with the water of life.
Backed by their royal patron, the Missionaries undertook to convert Tahiti
into a Polynesian Chautauqua. As Mrs. Helen Barrett Montgomery says, in
her Christus Redemptor: “We cannot follow the glowing story of how the
King had a code of laws made and read it to seven thousand of his people,
who, by solemn vote, made these the law of the land.” In 1839, Captain
Hervey, in command of a whale-ship, reported of Tahiti: “It is the most
civilised place I have been at in the South Seas. They have a good code of
laws and no liquors are allowed to be landed on the island. It is one of the
most gratifying sights the eye can witness to see, on Sunday, in their
church, which holds about four thousand, the Queen near the pulpit with all
her subjects about her, decently apparelled and seemingly in pure
devotion.” Three years later, Melville attended one of these services, and
was less favourably impressed.
In 1823, the French establishment of the Œuvre de la propagation de la Foi
formed at Lyons, and soon cast a beneficent eye upon North and South
America and the islands of Oceania. In 1814, soon after the restoration of
the Bourbons, the Abbé Coudrin had founded the Society of Picpus “to
promote the revival of the Roman Catholic religion in France, and to
propagate it by missions among unbelievers or pagans.” This establishment
received Papal sanction in 1817, and was placed under “the special
protection of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.” In 1833, the Congregation of
the Propaganda, with the confirmation of the Sovereign Pontiff, confided to
the Society of Picpus the conversion of all the islands of the Pacific ocean.
Two apostolic prefectures were established. M. E. Rouchouse was made
bishop of Nilolopis, in partibus, and apostolic vicar of Eastern Oceania; M.
C. Liansu was appointed as his prefect; two priests, Caret and Laval, and a
catechist, Columban, or Murphy, were placed under his direction. In May,
1834, the Catholic missionaries arrived at Valparaiso, bound for the South
Seas.

The benefits of the True Faith were not to advance into the Pacific
unassisted by the secular arm. Two officers of the French Navy, Vincendon-
Dumoulin and Desgraz, in their Considerations générales sur la
Colonisation Française dans l’Oceanie thus speak for the less purely
religious interests of France: “It is impossible for a traveller who may visit
the islands of the Pacific, not to speculate on the destiny of the happy
groups scattered over its bosom. The first thing that strikes him is the sight
of men, consecrated to a religious work, meddling with the temporal affairs
of these free people, whom they have brought under their domination, under
pretence of directing their consciences.... When the rapid multiplication of
the population of all European countries is considered, it is evident that
before long a European colony will be formed in each of the innumerable
islands of the Pacific, and missionary efforts merit therefore all the attention
of the government.... On the signal from the first cannon that shall be fired
in Europe, a protecting flag will be seen to rise on each of these islands now
so peaceful. God grant that the tri-coloured flag of our nation may show
itself with honour!”
At this time, it was a law of Tahiti that before a foreigner could have leave
to reside on the island, permission must be granted by Queen Pomare and
the chiefs. The Catholic missionaries, aware of this regulation, succeeded,
however, in effecting a landing disguised as carpenters, and to this island,
partly idolatrous, partly heretic, they gave the salutation of peace. Pomare,
however, was unappreciative of their salute, and refused to the disguised
priests permission to remain. This exclusion, in its sequel, raised the most
delicate questions of international diplomacy, and bestirred Pomare to
scatter anxious letters broadcast over the face of the earth. Her
correspondence included a cosmopolitan company of Commodores and
Admirals, Queen Victoria, the President of the United States, and Louis
Philippe of France. Admiral Du Petit-Thouars, in command of the Venus,
was despatched to Tahiti under special orders, “to make the Queen and the
inhabitants feel that France is a great and powerful nation.” The Venus
arrived at Tahiti, August 27, 1838, and proceeded to summary justice.
Under the pressure of a broadside, Pomare was obliged to beg pardon of the
most Christian King. “I am only,” she wrote to Louis Philippe, “the
sovereign of a little insignificant island; may glory and power be with your
majesty; let your anger cease; and pardon me the mistake that I have made.”

It was further demanded of Pomare that she pay “a great and powerful
nation” the sum of two thousand dollars as a more solid reparation for her
bad behaviour. Pomare was appalled at the magnitude of this sum: there
was no such amplitude of wealth in her treasury. The missionaries were
moved in compassion to finance her political indiscretion. But in the next
humiliation dealt out to her, the brethren were unable to offer much
assistance. The French Admiral bore instructions to require that the French
flag be hoisted the day following the receipt of the two thousand dollars,
and that it be honoured by Pomare with a salute of twenty-one guns. The
situation was awkward. Pomare was very short of powder. She assured the
Admiral she had not enough for more than five shots. The Admiral paced
the deck, and passed his fingers through his hair in considerable agitation.
“What will they say in France,” said the patriotic commander, “when they
know that I furnished the powder to salute my own flag?” The difficulty
was great. An expedient was necessary, and the Admiral hit upon one: “Mr.
Consul,” said he to the Rev. Pritchard, and British Consul, “I can give you
some powder, and you can do with it as you please.” According to the
French report, Pritchard “himself loaded the bad cannon on the little island
and directed the firing;” and soon after, the French observed Pritchard to
look “thin and bilious, with an appearance of pride, and the cold dignity so
natural to the English.”
But the visiting Admiral had not yet completed his duty to “the justly
irritated King of the French.” He condescended to visit the Queen on
purpose to introduce Moerenhaut as French consul. Moerenhaut had been
American consul at Tahiti, but had been relieved of the responsibilities of
that office at a request of Pomare to the President of the United States.
Moerenhaut’s life, in all of its varied and unsavoury details, has yet to be
written: it would make an entertaining supplement to the Police Gazette.
Moerenhaut himself adventured in letters, and in his Voyages aux îles du
Grand Ocean he exposes many of the corrupt practices that he himself was
instrumental in bringing about. The Admiral and Moerenhaut, in the name
of Louis Philippe, drew up a convention with Pomare “to establish the right
of French subjects to stay in the territory of the Tahitian sovereign.”
During these proceedings, Captain Dumont D’Urville, cruising the Pacific,
arrived at the Marquesas with two corvettes, the Astrolabe and the Zélé, hot
from the Gambier islands, the seat of Bishop Rouchouse. At Gambier, when

“all were gay and cheerful,” D’Urville had been enlightened as to the true
character of the heretical missionaries: “oppressors of the poor Tahitians; in
short, vampires, whose cruelties and inquisitorial tortures were as atrocious
as their hypocrisy was disgusting.” Before he left the jovial board, his
indignation was so high that “he felt the honour of his flag” required that he
sail to Tahiti and dispense “exemplary chastisement.” Upon his arrival at
the Marquesas he was surprised to find Du Petit-Thouars, who had been
there, already departed. There was value to his visit, however, in giving to
the pious efforts of Bishop Rouchouse the support of a few broadsides. But
there were other scenes at the Marquesas of which Bishop Rouchouse, in
good conscience, could not have approved. Melville asserts that while the
Acushnet was at the Marquesas, “our ship was wholly given up to every
species of riot and debauchery.” In the official account of the voyages of
Captain Dumont D’Urville is a more detailed account of a similar surrender.
Melville says of the dances of the women of the Marquesas: “There is an
abandoned voluptuousness in their character that I dare not attempt to
describe.” The French, in their official reports, exhibit a greater courage.
Captain Dumont D’Urville arrived in Tahiti nine days after the submission
of Pomare, and the day following his arrival he accompanied Admiral Du
Petit-Thouars on a visit to the Queen. He had not yet cooled in his patriotic
indignation, so he addressed Pomare severely, and with gratifying results: “I
perceived that Pomare was deeply affected, and that tears began to fall from
her eyes, as she threw them on me with an evident expression of anger. At
the same moment I also perceived that Captain Du Petit-Thouars
endeavoured to diminish the effect of my words by some little liberties that
he was taking with the Queen; such as pulling gently her hair, and patting
her cheeks; he even added that she was foolish to be so much affected.”
When her French visitors sailed away, Pomare on November 8, 1838,
despatched a letter to her sister sovereign, Victoria, to implore “the shelter
of her wing, the defence of her lion, and the protection of her flag.” The
Tahitians expressed their sense of the favours being forced upon them by
the French by passing a law prohibiting “the propagation of any religious
doctrines, or the celebration of any religious worship, opposed to that true
gospel of old propagated in Tahiti by the missionaries from Britain; that is,
these forty years past.”

This breach of international courtesy brought Captain Laplace on the
Artémise out to Tahiti “to obtain satisfaction from the Lutheran evangelists
who had forced themselves on a simple and docile people.” As the Artémise
was off the coast, on April 22, 1839, she struck on a coral reef: an accident
that resulted in the officers and crew being lodged on shore for two months.
These two months must have given the brethren bitter fruit for reflection
upon the ease with which their years of unselfish striving could be
obliterated. According to the account of Louis Reybaud of the Artémise:
“From the first, the most perfect harmony prevailed between the ship’s
company and the natives. Each of the latter chose his tayo,—that is, another
self—among the sailors. Between tayos everything is common. At night, the
tayos, French and Tahitian, went together to the common hut. Every sailor
has thus a house, a wife, a complete domestic establishment. As jealousy is
a passion unknown to these islanders, it may be imagined what resources
and pleasures such an arrangement afforded our crew. The natives were
delighted with the character of our people; they had never met with such
gaiety, expansiveness, and kindness in any other foreigners. The beach
presented the aspect of a continual holiday, to the great scandal of the
missionaries. We have seen how the men managed, and what friends they
found. The officers were not less fortunate. The island that Bougainville
called the New Cytherea does not belie its name. When the evening set in,
every tree along the coast shaded an impassioned pair; and the waters of the
river afforded an asylum to a swarm of copper-coloured nymphs, who came
to enjoy themselves with the young midshipmen. Wherever you walked you
might hear the oui! oui! oui! the word that all the women have learnt with
marvellous facility. It would have been far more difficult to teach them to
say non!”
Among these relaxations, Captain Laplace found time publicly to declare to
the islanders “how shameful and even dangerous it was to violate the faith
of treaties, and how unjust and barbarous was intolerance.” Before his
sailing, Captain Laplace commanded Pomare to come aboard the Artémise
to sign a treaty guaranteeing no discrimination against the French. Pomare’s
despondency at the beginning of the proceedings was solaced by
champagne and brandy. Casimir Henricy, who accompanied the Artémise
throughout her circumnavigatory voyage, says: “When the spirits of the
party were sufficiently elevated to find everything good, and while the
hands were yet sufficiently steady not to let the pen drop, the treaty was

produced as the crowning act of the festivity. M. Laplace thought he had
gained a great victory over Polynesian diplomacy; and, certainly, never was
a political horizon more bright in flowers and bottles.”
While Tahiti was the theatre of these religious and political cabals, more
important and decisive measures occupied the mighty minds of Europe. The
captains who had punished and conventionalised Pomare and her people
had made their reports in person to their sovereign in Paris, and to the
ministers of state, who had indicated their instructions. Honours and titles
were awarded to the successful officers, and on their showing it was
resolved that the Marquesas should first be taken possession of, and then
Tahiti. Rear-Admiral Du Petit-Thouars was commissioned to execute the
seizure. On board the Reine Blanche, accompanied by three frigates and
three corvettes, he touched Fatu-Heva, the southernmost of the Marquesas,
on April 26, 1842, and culminated his triumphant progress through the
group in the bay of Tyohee at Nukuheva on May 31.
The Acushnet arrived at Nukuheva at a memorable time. “It was in the
summer of 1842 that we arrived at the islands,” says Melville; “the French
had then held possession of them for several weeks.”

CHAPTER X
MAN-EATING EPICURES—THE
MARQUESAS
“‘Why, they are cannibals!’ said Toby on one occasion when I
eulogised the tribe. ‘Granted,’ I replied, ‘but a more humane,
gentlemanly and amiable set of epicures do not probably exist in
the Pacific.’”
—Herman Melville: Typee.
It was sunset when the Acushnet came within sight of the loom of the
mountains of the Marquesas. Innumerable sea-fowls, screaming and
whirling in spiral tracts had, for some days previous, been following the
vessel as harbingers from land. As the ship drew nearer to green earth,
several of man-of-war’s-hawks, with their blood-red bills and raven
plumage, had circled round the ship in diminishing circles until Melville
was able distinctly to mark the strange flashing of their eyes; and then, as if
satisfied by their observations, they would sail up into the air as if to carry
sinister warning on ahead. Then,—driftwood on the oily swells; and finally
had come the glad announcement from aloft—given with that peculiar
prolongation of sound that a sailor loves—“Land ho!”
After running all night with a light breeze straight for the island, the
Acushnet was in easy distance of the shore by morning. But as the Acushnet
had approached the island from the side opposite to Tyohee—christened by
Captain Porter, Melville remembered, Massachusetts Bay,—they were
obliged to sail some distance along the shore. Melville was surprised not to
find “enamelled and softly swelling plains, shaded over by delicious groves,
and watered by purling brooks.” Instead he found himself cruising along a
bold rock-bound coast, dashed high against by the beating surf, and broken
here and there into deep inlets that offered sudden glimpses of blooming
valleys, deep glens, waterfalls and waving groves. As the ship sailed by the
projecting and rocky headlands with their short inland vistas of new and

startling beauty, one of the sailors exclaimed to Melville, pointing with his
hand in the direction of the treacherous valley: “There—there’s Typee. Oh,
the bloody cannibals, what a meal they’d make of us if we were to take it
into our heads to land! but they say they don’t like sailors’ flesh, it’s too
salt. I say, matey, how should you like to be shoved ashore there, eh?”
Melville shuddered at the question, he says, little thinking that within the
space of a few weeks he would actually be a captive in that self-same
valley.
Towards noon they swung abreast of their harbour. No description can do
justice to its beauty, Melville tells us. But its beauty was to him not an
immediate discovery. All that he saw was the tri-coloured flag of France
trailing over the stern of six vessels, whose black hulls and bristling
broadsides floated incongruously in that tranquil bay.
The first emissary from the shore to welcome the Acushnet was a visitor in
that interesting state of intoxication when a man is amiable and helpless: a
south-sea vagabond, once a lieutenant in the English navy, recently
appointed pilot to the harbour by the invincible French. He was aided by
some benevolent person out of his whale-boat into the Acushnet, and
though utterly unable to stand erect or navigate his own body, he
magnanimously proffered to steer the ship to a good anchorage: a feat
Captain Pease did for himself, despite the amazing volubility of the visitor
in contrary commands.
This renegade from Christendom and humanity was of a type not
infrequently met with in accounts of the South Seas. At Hannamanoo,
Melville came across another such—a white man in the South Sea girdle,
and tattooed on the face, living among a tribe of savages and apparently
settled for life, so perfectly satisfied seemed he with his circumstances. This
man was an Englishman,—Lem Hardy he called himself,—who had
deserted from a trading brig touching at Hannamanoo for wood and water
some ten years previous. Aboard the Acushnet he told his history. “Thrown
upon the world a foundling, his paternal origin was as much a mystery to
him as the genealogy of Odin; and scorned by everybody, he fled the parish
workhouse when a boy, and launched upon the sea. He had followed it for
several years, a dog before the mast, and now he had thrown it up forever.”
He had gone ashore as a sovereign power, armed with a musket and a bag
of ammunition, and soon became, what he was when Melville found him,

military leader of the tribe, war-god of the entire island, living under the
sacred protection of an express edict of the taboo, his person inviolable
forever. In Iles Marquises, ou Nouka-Hiva, Histoire, Géographie, Mœurs et
Considérations Générales (Paris, 1843) by Vincendon-Dumoulin and
Desgraz is to be found (pages 356-359) a history of two more of these
vagabonds: one Joseph Cabri, a Frenchman, and one E. Roberts, an
Englishman. Cabri returned to Europe, for a time, to find the novelty of his
tattooing both an embarrassment and a source of livelihood. He was
examined by grave learned societies, was presented before several crowned
heads, and submitted his person to intimate examination to any one who
would pay his fee. In 1818 he died in obscurity and poverty in
Valenciennes, his birth place. His historians regret that his precious person
was not preserved in alcohol to delight the inquiring mind of later
generations. The Pacific, it would appear, was early a place of refuge for
men with an insurmountable homesickness for the mud. Melville soon came
to believe that the gifts of civilisation to the South Seas were without
exception very doubtful blessings; he came to be a special pleader for the
barbaric virtues; when these virtues were practised by legitimate barbarians;
but the spectacle of such men as Hardy fell beyond the pale of his unusually
broad sympathies. Though he was despairingly alert to the vices of
Christendom, never was he betrayed into a corrupt hankering to recapitulate
into savagery. Though he excused the cannibalism of the Marquesans as an
amiable weakness, he gazed upon Hardy “with a feeling akin to horror.”
Hardy’s tattooing was to Melville the outward and visible sign of the lowest
degradation to which a mortal, nurtured in a civilisation that had for
thousands of years a pathetically imperfect struggle striven to some
significance above the beast, could possibly descend. “What an impress!”
Melville exclaimed in superlative loathing. “Far worse than Cain’s—his
was perhaps a wrinkle, or a freckle, which some of our modern cosmetics
might have effaced.” But Hardy’s tattooing was to Melville a mark indelible
of the blackest of all betrayals.
More worthy emissaries than the pilot to the port of Tyohee were to
welcome Melville to the Marquesas. The entrance of the Acushnet brought
from the shore a flotilla of native canoes. “Such strange outcries and
passionate gesticulations I never certainly heard or saw before,” Melville
says. “You would have thought the islanders were on the point of flying at
one another’s throats, whereas they were only amiably engaged in

disentangling their boats.” Melville was surprised at the strange absence of
a single woman in the invading party, not then knowing that canoes were
“taboo” to women, and that consequently, “whenever a Marquesan lady
voyages by water, she puts in requisition the paddles of her own fair body.”
As the Acushnet approached within a mile and a half of the foot of the bay,
Melville noticed a singular commotion in the water ahead of the vessel: the
women, swimming out from shore, eager to embrace the advantages of
civilisation. “As they drew nearer,” Melville says, “and as I watched the
rising and sinking of their forms, and beheld the uplifted right arm bearing
above the water the girdle of tappa, and their long dark hair trailing beside
them as they swam, I almost fancied they could be nothing else but so many
mermaids. Under slow headway we sailed right into the midst of these
swimming nymphs, and they boarded us at every quarter; many seizing
hold of the chain-plates and springing into the chains; others, at the peril of
being run over by the vessel in her course, catching at the bob-stays, and
wreathing their slender forms about the ropes, hung suspended in the air.
All of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they
clung dripping with the brine and glowing with the bath, their jet-black
tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half enveloping their otherwise
naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity, laughing
gaily at one another, and chattering away with infinite glee. Nor were they
idle the while, for each performed the simple offices of the toilet for the
other. Their luxuriant locks, wound up and twisted into the smallest possible
compass, were freed from the briny element; the whole person carefully
dried, and from a small little round shell that passed from hand to hand,
anointed with a fragrant oil: their adornments were completed by passing a
few loose folds of white tappa, in a modest cincture, around the waist. Thus
arrayed, they no longer hesitated, but flung themselves lightly over the
bulwarks, and were quickly frolicking about the decks. Many of them went
forward, perching upon the headrails or running out upon the bowsprit,
while others seated themselves upon the taffrail, or reclined at full length
upon the boats.”
The ship was fairly captured, and it yielded itself willing prisoner. In the
evening, after anchor had been struck, the deck was hung with lanterns, and
the women, decked in flowers, danced with “an abandoned voluptuousness”
that was a prelude “to every species of riot and debauchery.” According to

Melville’s account, on board the Acushnet “the grossest licentiousness and
the most shameful inebriety prevailed, with occasional and but short-lived
interruptions, through the whole period of her stay.”
Nor were the French at the Marquesas neglectful of their duties to the
islanders. Admiral Du Petit-Thouars had stationed about one hundred
soldiers ashore, according to Melville’s account. Every other day the troops
marched out in full regalia, and for hours went through all sorts of military
evolutions to impress a congregation of naked cannibals with the superior
sophistications of Christendom. “A regiment of the Old Guard, reviewed on
a summer’s day in the Champs Elysées,” Melville vouches, “could not have
made a more critically correct appearance.” The French had also with them,
to enrich their harvest of savage plaudits, a puarkee nuee, or “big hog”—in
more cultivated language, a horse. One of the officers was commissioned to
prance up and down the beach at full speed on this animal, with results that
redounded to the glory of France. This horse “was unanimously pronounced
by the islanders to be the most extraordinary specimen of zoology that had
ever come under their observation.”
It would be an ungracious presumption to contend that the French, while at
the Marquesas, exhibited to the natives only the sterner side of civilisation.
The behaviour of the French at Tahiti leaves room for the hope that they
were no less gallant at the Marquesas. An officer of the Reine Blanche,
writing at sea on October 10, 1842, of the exploits of his countrymen at
Tahiti, says, in part: “In the evening, more than a hundred women came on
board. At dinner time, the officers and midshipmen invited them gallantly to
their tables; and the repasts, which were very gay, were prolonged
sufficiently late at night, so that fear might keep on board those of the
women who were afraid to sail home by the doubtful light of the stars.” The
last three lines of this letter were suppressed by the Journal de Debats, it is
true, but given in the National and other journals. Three days later the letter
was officially pronounced “inexact” by the Moniteur, which courageously
asserted that “it is utterly false that a frigate has been the theatre of
corruption, in any country whatever; and French mothers may continue to
congratulate themselves that their sons serve in the navy of their country.”
While the Frenchmen at the Marquesas—no less than the Americans, one
hopes with pardonable patriotic jealousy—were giving their mothers at
home cause for congratulation, Melville came to the determination to leave

the ship; “to use the concise, point-blank phrase of the sailors, I had made
up my mind to ‘run away.’” And that his reasons for resolving to take this
step were numerous and weighty, he says, may be inferred from the fact that
he chose rather to risk his fortune among cannibals than to endure another
voyage on board the Acushnet. In Typee he gives a general account of the
captain’s bad treatment of the crew, and his non-fulfilment of agreements.
Life aboard the Acushnet has already been sufficiently expatiated upon.
Melville knew that immediately adjacent to Nukuheva, and only separated
from it by the mountains seen from the harbour, lay the lovely valley of
Happar, whose inmates cherished the most friendly relations with the
inhabitants of Nukuheva. On the other side of Happar, and closely adjoining
it, lay the magnificent valley of the dreaded Typee, the unappeasable
enemies of both these tribes. These Typees enjoyed a prodigious notoriety
all over the islands. The natives of Nukuheva, Melville says, used to try to
frighten the crew of the Acushnet “by pointing to one of their own number
and calling him a Typee, manifesting no little surprise when we did not take
to our heels at so terrible an announcement.” But having ascertained the fact
that the tribes of the Marquesas dwell isolated in the depths of the valleys,
and avoided wandering about the more elevated portions of the islands,
Melville concluded that unperceived he might effect a passage to the
mountains, where he might easily and safely remain, supporting himself on
such fruits as came in his way, until the sailing of the ship. The idea pleased
him greatly. He imagined himself seated beneath a cocoanut tree on the
brow of the mountain, with a cluster of plantains within easy reach,
criticising the ship’s nautical evolutions as she worked her way out of the
harbour, and contrasting the verdant scenery about him with the
recollections of narrow greasy decks and the vile gloom of the forecastle.
Melville at first prided himself that he was the only person on board the
Acushnet sufficiently reckless to attempt an idyllic sojourn on an island of
irreclaimable cannibals. But Toby’s perennially hanging over the side of the
ship, gazing wistfully at the shore in moody isolation, coupled with
Melville’s knowledge of Toby’s hearty detestation of the ship, of his
dauntless courage, and his other engaging traits as companion in high
adventure, led Melville to share with Toby his schemes. A few words won
Toby’s most impetuous co-operation. Plans were rapidly made and ratified

by an affectionate wedding of palms, when, to elude suspicion, each
repaired to his hammock to spend a last night aboard the Acushnet.

In 1855
RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE
Editor of the Sandusky Mirror

On the morrow, with as much tobacco, ship’s biscuit and calico as they
could stow in the front of their frocks, Melville and Toby made off for the
interior of Nukuheva,—but not before Melville “lingered behind in the
forecastle a moment to take a parting glance at its familiar features.” Their
five days of marvellous adventures that landed them finally in the valley of
Typee has abidingly tried the credulity of Melville’s readers—though never
for an instant their patience. After reading these adventures, Stevenson
expressed his slangy approval by hailing Melville as “a howling cheese.” It
has been questioned in passing whether or not the number of days that two
strong male humans, going through incredible exertion, can support
themselves upon a hunk of bread soaked in sweat and ingrained with shreds
of tobacco, must not be fewer than Melville makes out. And did they, in
sober verity, critics have asked, lower themselves down the cliff by
swinging from creeper to creeper with horrid gaps between them—was it as
steep as Melville says, and the creepers as far apart? And did they, on
another occasion, as Melville asserts, break a second gigantic fall by
pitching on the topmost branches of a very high palm tree? During these
thrilling and terrible five days, hardship runs hard on the heels of hardship,
and each obstacle as it presents itself, seems, if possible, more
unsurmountable than the last. There is no way out of this, one says for the
tenth time: but the sagacity and fearless confidence of Toby—to whom let
glory be given—and the manful endurance of Melville through parching
fever and agonising lameness, disappoint the lugubrious reader. On the third
day after their escape, their ardour is cooled to a resolve to forego futile
ramblings for a space. They crawled under a clump of thick bushes, and
pulling up the long grass that grew around, covered themselves completely
with it to endure another downpour. While the exhausted Toby slept through
the violent rain, Melville tossed about in a raging fever, without the heart to
wake Toby when the rain ceased. Chancing to push aside a branch, Melville
was as transfixed with surprised delight as if he had opened a sudden vista
into Paradise. He “looked straight down into the bosom of a valley, which
swept away in long wavy undulations to the blue waters in the distance.
Midway towards the sea, and peering here and there amidst the foliage,
might be seen the palmetto-thatched houses of its inhabitants glistening in
the sun that had bleached them to a dazzling whiteness. The vale was more
than three leagues in length, and about a mile across its greatest width.
Everywhere below me, from the base of the precipice upon whose very

verge I had been unconsciously reposing, the surface of the vale presented a
mass of foliage, spread with such rich profusion that it was impossible to
determine of what description of trees it consisted. But perhaps there was
nothing about the scenery I beheld more impressive than those silent
cascades, whose slender threads of water, after leaping down the steep
cliffs, were lost amidst the rich foliage of the valley. Over all the landscape
there reigned the most hushed repose, which I almost feared to break, lest,
like the enchanted gardens of the fairy tale, a single syllable might dissolve
the spell.” Toby was awakened and called into consultation. With his usual
impetuosity, Toby wanted promptly to descend into the valley before them;
but Melville restrained him, dwelling upon the perilous possibility of its
inhabitants being Typees. Toby was with difficulty reined to
circumspection, and off Melville and his companion started on a wild goose
chase for a valley on the other side of the ridge. So fruitless and
disheartening did this attempt prove, that Melville was reduced to the wan
solace that it was, after all, better to die of starvation in Nukuheva than to
be fed on salt beef, stale water and flinty bread in the forecastle of the
Acushnet. Yet Toby was dauntless. Despite the defeats of the preceding day,
Toby awoke on the following morning as blithe and joyous as a young bird.
Melville’s fever and his swollen leg, however, had left him not so exultant.
“What’s to be done now?” Melville inquired, after their morning repast of a
crumb of sweat-mixed biscuit and tobacco,—and rather doleful was his
inquiry, he confesses.
“Descend into that same valley we descried yesterday,” rejoined Toby, with
a rapidity and loudness of utterance that led Melville to suspect almost that
Toby had been slyly devouring the broadside of an ox in some of the
adjoining thickets. “Come on, come on; shove ahead. There’s a lively lad,”
shouted Toby as he led the way down a ravine that jagged steeply along
boulders and tangled roots down into the valley; “never mind the rocks;
kick them out of the way, as I do; and to-morrow, old fellow, take my word
for it, we shall be in clover. Come on;” and so saying he dashed along the
ravine like a madman.
Thus was piloted down into the heart of barbarism the man who was to
emerge as the first Missionary Polynesia ever sent to Christendom. And on
the chances of Toby’s contagious impetuosity hung the annexation of a new
realm to the kingdom of the imagination and the discovery of a new manner

in the history of letters. For on that day, when Melville and Toby struggled
down that ravine like Belzoni worming himself through the subterranean
passages of the Egyptian catacombs, the Polynesians were without a
competent apologist, and the literary possibilities of the South Seas were
unsuspected.
Literature was, of course, already elaborated with fantastic patterns drawn
from barbarism, and the Indians of Aphra Behn and Voltaire had given
place to the redmen of Cooper. Earlier than this, however, the great
discoverers, in their wealth of records, had given many an account of their
contacts with savage peoples. But one searches in vain among these records
for any very vivid sense that the savage and the Christian belong to the
same order of nature. At best, one gathers the impression that in savagery
God’s image had been multiplied in an excess of contemptible counterfeits.
Melville reports that as late as his day “wanton acts of cruelty are not
unusual on the part of sea captains landing at islands comparatively
unknown. Indeed, it is almost incredible, the light in which many sailors
regard these naked heathens. They hardly consider them human. But it is a
curious fact, that the more ignorant and degraded men are, the more
contemptuously they look upon those whom they deem their inferiors.”
John G. Paton records in his Autobiography how, in 1860, three traders
gleefully told him that to humble the natives of Tanna, and to diminish their
numbers, they had let out on shore at different ports, four men ill with the
measles—an exceedingly virulent disease among savage peoples. “Our
watchwords are,” these jolly traders said, “‘sweep the creatures into the sea,
and let white men occupy the soil.’” This sentiment belongs more to a fixed
human type, than to a period, of course: and that type has frequently taken
to sailing strange seas. In treachery, cruelty, and profligacy, the exploits of
European discoverers contain some of the rosiest pages in the history of
villainy.
These sickening pages of civilised barbarism soon won to the savage ardent
apologists, however, who applied an old technique of libel by imputing to
the unbreeched heathen a touching array of the superior virtues. Montaigne
was among the first to come forward in this capacity. “We may call them
barbarous in regard to reasons rules,” he said, “but not in respect to us that
exceed them in all kinde of barbarisme. Their warres are noble and
generous, and have as much excuse and beautie, as this humane infirmitie

may admit: they ayme at nought so much, and have no other foundation
amongst them, but the meere jelousie of vertue.” Once in full current of
idealisation Montaigne goes on to write as if he soberly believed that
savage peoples were descended from a stock that Eve had conceived by an
angel before the fall. In his dithyramb on the nobilities of savagery,
Montaigne was unhampered by any first-hand dealings with savages, and he
was far too wise ever to betray the remotest inclination to improve his state
by migrating into the bosom of their uncorrupted nobility.
The myth of the “noble savage” was a taking conceit, however, and when
Rousseau taught the world the art of reverie, he taught it also an easy
vagabondage into the virgin forest and into the pure heart of the “natural
man.” In describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing rooms, Taine says
that “The fops dreamed between two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping
naked in the virgin forest.” Rousseau’s savage, “attached to no place,
having no prescribed task, obeying no one, having no other law than his
own will,” was, of course, a wilful backward glance to the vanished
paradise of childhood, not a finding of ethnology. Yet ethnology may prate
as it will, the “noble savage” is a myth especially diverting to the over-
sophisticated, and like dreams of the virgin forest, thrives irrepressibly
among the upholsterings of civilisation. The soft and ardent dreamer, no
less than the sleek and parched imagination of Main Street, find
compensation for the defeats of civilisation in dreams of a primitive
Arcadia. While the kettle is boiling they relax into slippers and make the
grand tour. Chateaubriand—whose life, according to Lemaître, was a
“magnificent series of attitudes”—showed incredible hardihood of
attitudinising in crossing the Atlantic in actual quest of the primitive. In the
forest west of Albany he did pretend to find some satisfaction in wild
landscape. He showed his “intoxication” at the beauties of wild nature by
taking pains to do “various wilful things that made my guide furious.” But
Chateaubriand was less fortunate in his contact with savagery than he was
with nature. His first savages he found under a shed taking dancing lessons
from a little Frenchman, who, “bepowdered and befrizzled” was scraping
on a pocket fiddle to the prancings of “ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames
sauvagesses.” Chateaubriand concludes with a reflection: “Was it not a
crushing circumstance for a disciple of Rousseau?” And it is an indubitable
fact that if the present-day disciples of the South Sea myth would show

Chateaubriand’s hardihood and migrate to Polynesia, they would find
themselves in circumstances no less “crushing.”
Melville was the first competent literary artist to write with authority about
the South Seas. In his day, a voyage to those distant parts was a jaunt not
lightly to be undertaken. In the Pacific there were islands to be discovered,
islands to be annexed, and whales to be lanced. As for the incidental savage
life encountered in such enterprise, that, in Montaigne’s phrase, was there to
be bastardised, by applying it to the pleasures of our corrupted taste. These
attractions of whaling and patriotism—with incidental rites to Priapus—had
tempted more than one man away from the comfort of his muffins, and
more than one returned to give an inventory of the fruits of the temptation.
The knowledge that these men had of Polynesia was ridiculously slight: the
regular procedure was to shoot a few cannibals, to make several marriages
after the manner of Loti. The result is a monotonous series of reports of the
glorious accomplishments of Christians: varied on occasions with lengthy
and learned dissertations on heathendom. But they are invariably writers
with insular imagination, telling us much of the writer, but never violating
the heart of Polynesia.
The Missionaries, discreetly scandalised at the exploitation of unholy flesh,
went valiantly forth to fight the battle of righteousness in the midst of the
enemy. The missionaries came to be qualified by long first-hand contact to
write intimately of the heathen: but their records are redolent with sanctity,
not sympathy. The South Sea vagabonds were the best hope of letters: but
they all seem to have died without dictating their memoirs. William
Mariner, it is true, thanks to a mutiny at the Tongo Islands in 1805, was
“several years resident in those islands:” and upon Mariner’s return, Dr.
John Martin spent infinite patience in recording every detail of savage life
he could draw from Mariner. Dr. Martin’s book is still a classic in its way:
detailed, sober, and naked of literary pretensions. This book is the nearest
approach to Typee that came out of the South Seas before Melville’s time.
So numerous have been the imitators of Melville, so popular has been the
manner that he originated, that it is difficult at the present day to appreciate
the novelty of Typee at the time of its appearance. When we read Mr.
Frederick O’Brien we do not always remember that Mr. O’Brien is playing
“sedulous ape”—there is here intended no discourtesy to Mr. O’Brien—to
Melville, but that in Typee and Omoo Melville was playing “sedulous ape”

to nobody. Only when Typee is seen against the background of A
Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean performed in the years
1796, 1797, 1798 in the Ship Duff (1799) and Mariner’s Tonga (1816)
(fittingly dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, and
companion of Captain Cook in the South Seas) can Melville’s originality
begin to transpire.
This originality lies partly, of course, in the novelty of Melville’s
experience, partly in the temperament through which this experience was
refracted. Melville himself believed his only originality was his loyalty to
fact. He bows himself out of the Preface “trusting that his anxious desire to
speak the ungarnished truth will gain him the confidence of his readers.”
When Melville’s brother Gansevoort offered Typee for publication in
England, it was accepted not as fiction but as ethnology, and was published
as Melville’s Marquesas only after Melville had vouched for its entire
veracity.
Though Melville published Typee upright in the conviction that he had in its
composition been loyal both to veracity and truth, his critics were not prone
to take him at his word. And he was to learn, too, that veracity and truth are
not interchangeable terms. Men do, in fact, believe pretty much what they
find it most advantageous to believe. We live by prejudices, not by
syllogisms. In Typee, Melville undertook to show from first-hand
observation the obvious fact that there are two sides both to civilisation and
to savagery. He was among the earliest of literary travellers to see in
barbarians anything but queer folk. He intuitively understood them, caught
their point of view, respected and often admired it. He measured the life of
the Marquesans against that of civilisation, and wrote: “The term ‘savage’
is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed when I consider the vices,
cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted
atmosphere of a feverish civilisation, I am inclined to think that so far as the
relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan
Islanders sent to the United States as missionaries, might be quite as useful
as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a similar
capacity.” Civilisation is so inured to anathema,—so reassured by it,—
indeed, that Melville could write a vague and sentimental attack upon its
obvious imperfections with the cool assurance that each of his readers,
applying the charges to some neighbour, would approve in self-

righteousness. But one ventures the “ungarnished truth” about any of the
vested interests of civilisation at the peril of his peace in this world and the
next. It was when Melville focussed his charge and wrote “a few passages
which may be thought to bear rather hard upon a reverend order of men”
with incidental reflections upon “that glorious cause which has not always
been served by the proceedings of some of its advocates,” that all the
musketry of the soldiers of the Prince of Peace was aimed at his head.
Melville himself was a man whose tolerance provoked those who sat in
jealous monopoly upon warring sureties to accuse him of license. He
specifies his delight in finding in the valley of Typee that “an unbounded
liberty of conscience seemed to prevail. Those who were pleased to do so
were allowed to repose implicit faith in an ill-favoured god with a large
bottle-nose and fat shapeless arms crossed upon his breast; whilst others
worshipped an image which, having no likeness either in heaven or on
earth, could hardly be called an idol. As the islanders always maintained a
discrete reserve with regard to my own peculiar views on religion, I thought
it would be excessively ill-bred in me to pry into theirs.” This boast of
delicacy did not pass unnoticed by “a reverend order of men.” The vitriolic
rejoinder of the London Missionary Society would seem to indicate that
there may be two versions of “the ungarnished truth.” It should be stated,
however, that the English editions of Typee contain strictures against the
Missionaries that were omitted in the American editions. But even
Melville’s unsanctified critics showed an anxiety to repudiate him. Both
Typee and Omoo were scouted as impertinent inventions, defying belief in
their “cool sneering wit and perfect want of heart.” Melville’s name was
suspiciously examined as being a nom de plume used to cover a cowardly
and supercilious libel. A gentleman signing himself G. W. P. and writing in
the American Review (1847, Vol. IV, pp. 36-46) was scandalised by
Melville’s habit of presenting “voluptuous pictures, and with cool deliberate
art breaking off always at the right point, so as without offending decency,
he may excite unchaste desire.” After discovering in Melville’s writing a
boastful lechery, this gentleman undertakes to discountenance Melville on
three scores: (1) only the impotent make amorous boasts; (2) Melville had
none of Sir Epicure Mammon’s wished-for elixir; (3) the beauty of
Polynesian women is all myth.
Unshaken in the conviction of his loyalty to fact, Melville discovered that
the essence of originality lies in reporting “the ungarnished truth.”

On the subject of “originality” in literature, Melville says in Pierre: “In the
inferior instances of an immediate literary success, in very young writers, it
would be almost invariably observable, that for that instant success they
were chiefly indebted to some rich and peculiar experience in life,
embodied in a book, which because, for that cause, containing original
matter, the author himself, forsooth, is to be considered original; in this
way, many very original books being the product of very unoriginal minds.”
It is none the less true, however, that though Melville and Toby both lived
among the cannibals, it was Melville, not Toby, who wrote Typee.
For four months Melville was held in friendly captivity by the Typees. His
swollen leg was healed by native doctors—but not without prolonged pain
and anxiety—he was fed, he was amused, he was lionised by the valley. His
hosts were savages; they were idolaters, they were inhuman beasts who
licked their lips over the roasted thighs of their enemies; and at the same
time they were crowned with flowers, sometimes exquisite in beauty,
courteous in manners, and engaged all day long in doing not only what they
enjoyed doing, but what, so far as Melville could judge, they had every
right to enjoy doing. With Toby, Melville was consigned to the household of
Kory-Kory. Kory-Kory, though a tried servitor and faithful valet, was,
Melville admits, in his shavings and tattoos, a hideous object to look upon
—covered all over with fish, fowl, and monster, like an illustrated copy of
Goldsmith’s Animated Nature. Kory-Kory’s father, Marheyo, a retired
gentleman of gigantic frame, was an eccentric old fellow, who seems to
have been governed by no fixed principles whatever. He employed the
greater part of his time in throwing up a little shed just outside the house,
tinkering away at it endlessly, without ever appearing to make any
perceptible advance. He would eat, sleep, potter about, with fine contempt
for the proprieties of time or place. “Frequently he might have been seen
taking a nap in the sun at noonday, or a bath in the stream at midnight. Once
I beheld him eighty feet from the ground, in the tuft of a cocoanut tree,
smoking, and often I saw him standing up to the waist in water, engaged in
plucking out the stray hairs of his beard, using a piece of mussel-shell for
tweezers. I remember in particular his having a choice pair of ear-
ornaments, fabricated from the teeth of some sea-monster. These he would
alternately wear and take off at least fifty times in the course of a day, going
and coming from his little hut on each occasion with all the tranquillity
imaginable. Sometimes slipping them through the slits in his ears, he would

seize his spear and go stalking beneath the shadows of the neighbouring
groves, as if about to give a hostile meeting to some cannibal knight. But he
would soon return again, and hiding his weapon under the projecting eaves
of the house, and rolling his clumsy trinkets carefully in a piece of tappa,
would resume his more pacific operations as quietly as if he had never
interrupted them.”
Kory-Kory’s mother was, so Melville reports, the only industrious person in
all the valley of Typee: “bustling about the house like a country landlady at
an unexpected arrival: forever giving the young girls tasks to perform,
which the little huzzies as often neglected; poking into every corner, and
rummaging over bundles of old tappa, or making a prodigious clatter
among the calabashes. She could not have employed herself more actively
had she been left an exceedingly muscular and destitute widow, with an
inordinate supply of young children, in the bleakest part of the civilised
world.” Yet was hers withal the kindliest heart imaginable. “Warm indeed,”
Melville says, “are my remembrances of the dear, good, affectionate old
Tinor!”
There also belonged to the household, three young men, “dissipated, good-
for-nothing, roystering blades of savages,” and several girls. Of these,
Melville has immortalised Fayaway, his most constant companion. He has
anatomised her charms in the manner of his first Fragment from a Writing-
Desk. But it is Fayaway in action, not Fayaway in still life, that survives in
the imagination. At Melville’s intercession, the taboo against women
entering a boat was lifted. Many hours they spent together swimming, or
floating in the canoe: diversions heightened in their heinousness by the fact
that Fayaway for the most part clung to the primitive and summer garb of
Eden—and the costume became her. Nor did Melville’s depravity cease
with his unblushing approval of nakedness. “Strange as it may seem,”
Melville writes in the ’40’s, “there is nothing in which a young and
beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the act of smoking.”
Fayaway not only smoked,—but she smoked a pipe, as they drifted in the
canoe. One day, as they were gliding along, Fayaway “seemed all at once to
be struck with a happy idea. With a wild exclamation of delight, she
disengaged from her person the ample robe of tappa which was knotted
over her shoulder (for the purpose of shielding her from the sun), and
spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the

canoe. We American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars,
but a prettier mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any
craft.” John La Farge has painted Fayaway in this attitude.
And the occupation of Toby during all this? Soon after their arrival, Toby
had been despatched to Nukuheva under pretence of procuring relief for
Melville’s swollen leg, actually to facilitate his and Melville’s escape. Toby
never again returned to Typee. He had been treacherously beguiled on board
a whaler, unable to escape until he left his vessel at New Zealand. “After
some further adventures,” says Melville in The Story of Toby, written in
July, 1846, ten days after the two men discovered each other’s existence
through the instrumentality of Typee, and published as a “sequel” to that
novel, “Toby arrived home in less than two years after leaving the
Marquesas.”
While Melville had the companionship of Toby in Typee, he was even then
eager to get back to civilisation. That savagery was good for savages he
never wearied of contending. But despite the idyllic delights of Typee—an
idyll with a sombre background, however—Melville was never tempted to
resign himself to its vacant animal felicity. Melville, unlike Baudelaire and
Whitman, was not stirred by the advantages of “living with the animals.”
While among them, he evinced a desire neither to adopt their ways, nor to
change them. He made them pop-guns, he astonished them by exhibiting
the miracle of sewing. He tried to teach them to box. “As not one of the
natives had soul enough in him to stand up like a man, and allow me to
hammer away at him, for my own personal satisfaction and that of the king,
I was necessitated to fight with an imaginary enemy, whom I invariably
made to knock under to my superior prowess.”
Among the bachelors of the Ti, the men’s club of the valley, he chatted, he
smoked, he drowsed: he witnessed the Feast of the Calabashes when, for
the livelong day “the drums sounded, the priests chanted, and the multitude
roared and feasted”—a scene reminiscent of a University whole-heartedly
given over to “campus activity.” A mock battle was staged for his diversion.
He entered the funeral fastnesses where the effigies of former heroes
eternally paddled canoes adorned by the skulls of their enemies. He mused
by pools, splashing with laughing bronze nymphs. Yet withal, Melville was
a captive in the valley. His lameness, too, returned. His hosts began to make
friendly but insistent suggestions that he be tattooed—a suggestion

superlatively repugnant to him. He heard, moreover, the clamour of a
cannibal feast, and lifted the cover of a tub under which lay a fresh human
skeleton. Under these circumstances he taught old Marheyo two English
words: Home and Mother. But he did not complete the trinity. Forsan et
haec olim meminisse juvabit. It was time for him to depart.
One profoundly silent noon, as Melville lay lame and miserable under
Kory-Kory’s roof, Mow-Mow, the one-eyed chief, appeared at the door, and
leaning forward towards Melville, whispered: Toby pemi ena—“Toby has
arrived.” That evening Mow-Mow’s dead body floated on the Pacific, a
boat-hook having been mortally hurled at his throat. And it was Melville
who hurled the boat-hook.
An Australian whaler, touching at the harbour of Nukuheva, had been
informed of Melville’s detention in Typee. Desirous of adding to his crew,
the Captain had sailed round thither, and “hove to” off the mouth of the bay.
Chary of the man-eating propensities of the Typees, the Captain sent in a
boat-load of taboo natives from the other harbour, with an interpreter at
their head, to procure Melville’s release. Accompanied by a throng of armed
natives, Melville was carried down to the shore—being too lame to walk
the distance. A gun and an extravagant bounty of powder and calico were
offered for Melville’s release: but this bounty was clamorously and
indignantly rejected. Karakoee, the head of the ransoming party, was
menaced by furious gestures, and forced out into the sea, up to his waist in
the surf. Blows were struck, wounds were given, and blood flowed. In the
excitement of the fray, Melville was left to the guardianship of Marheyo,
Kory-Kory, and Fayaway. Throwing to these three the articles that had been
brought for his ransom, Melville bounded into the boat which was in
immediate readiness to pull off towards the ship. It was not until the boat
was about fifty yards from the shore that the savages recovered from their
astonishment at Melville’s alacrity in escape. Then Mow-Mow and six or
seven warriors rushed into the sea and hurled their javelins at the retreating
boat—and some of the weapons passed as close as was desirable. The wind
was freshening every minute, and was right in the teeth of the retreating
party. Karakoee, who was steering the boat, gave many a look towards a
jutting point of the bay they had to pass. When they came within a hundred
yards of the point, the savages on the shore dashed into the water,
swimming out towards the boat: and by the time Melville’s party reached

the headland, the savages were spread right across the boat’s course. The
rowers got out their knives and held them ready between their teeth.
Melville seized the boat-hook. Mow-Mow, with his tomahawk between his
teeth, was nearest to the boat, ready the next instant to seize one of the oars.
“Even at the moment I felt horror at the act I was to commit; but it was no
time for pity or compunction, and with a true aim, and exerting all my
strength, I dashed the boat-hook at him. I struck him below the throat, and
forced him downward.” Mow-Mow’s body arose in the wake of the boat,
but not to attack again. Another savage seized the gunwale, but the knives
of the rowers so mauled his wrists, that before many moments the boat was
past all the Typees, and in safety. In the closing tableau, Melville fell
fainting into the arms of Karakoee.
Though later, when Melville was a sailor in the United States Navy, he
touched at the Marquesas, he never again set foot within the valley of
Typee. Melville had known the Typees in their uncorrupted glory—strong,
wicked, laughter-loving and clean. Mr. O’Brien visited Typee not many
years ago, to find it pathetically fallen from its high estate. “I found
myself,” he says, “in a loneliness indescribable and terrible. No sound but
that of a waterfall at a distance parted the sombre silence.... Humanity was
not so much absent as gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the
motionless air, which lay like a weight, upon leaf and flower. The thin,
sharp buzzing of the nonos was incessant.” Mr. O’Brien discovered in the
heart of the valley fewer than a dozen people who sat within the houses by
cocoanut-husk fires, the acrid smoke of which daunted the nonos. “They
have clung to their lonely paepaes despite their poverty of numbers and the
ferocity of the nonos. They had clearings with cocoanuts and breadfruits,
but they cared no longer to cultivate them, preferring rather to sit sadly in
the curling fumes and dream of the past. One old man read aloud the Gospel
of St. John in Marquesan, and the others listlessly listened, seeming to drink
in little comfort from the verses, which he recited in the chanting monotone
of their uta.... Nine miles in length is Typee, from a glorious cataract that
leaps over the dark buttress wall where the mountain bounds the valley, to
the blazing beach. And in all this extent of marvellously rich land, there are
now this wretched dozen natives, too old or listless to gather their own
food.”
Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

CHAPTER XI
MUTINY AND MISSIONARIES—TAHITI

“Ah, truant humour. But to me
That vine-wreathed urn of Ver, in sea
Of halcyons, where no tides do flow
Or ebb, but waves bide peacefully
At brim, by beach where palm trees grow
That sheltered Omai’s olive race—
Tahiti should have been the place
For Christ in advent.”

—Herman Melville: Clarel.

It was in the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that Melville made good
his escape from the valley of Typee. The Australian whaler—called by
Melville the Julia—which had broken his four months’ captivity, lay with
her main-topsail aback, about a league from the land. “She turned out to be
a small, slatternly looking craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all
slack and bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of
affairs aboard. Leaning carelessly over the bulwarks were the sailors, wild,
haggard-looking fellows in Scotch caps and faded blue frocks; some of
them with cheeks of mottled bronze, to which sickness soon changes the
rich berry-brown of a seaman’s complexion in the tropics.” So
extraordinary was Melville’s appearance—“a robe of the native cloth was
thrown over my shoulders, my hair and beard were uncut, and I betrayed
other evidences of my recent adventure”—that as the boat came alongside,
a low cry ran fore and aft the deck. Immediately on gaining the deck,
Melville was beset on all sides by questions.
Indeed, never afterwards, it appears, could Melville escape a like curiosity.
Henceforth he was to be “the man who lived among the cannibals.” Nor

does he always seem to have been so uncommunicative as he grew in later
years. In the Preface to Omoo, after recording the fact that he kept no
journal during his wanderings in the South Seas, he says: “The frequency,
however, with which these incidents have been verbally related, has tended
to stamp them upon the memory.” There is novelty in his logic: all twice-
told tales are not always just-so stories. He says, too, in the Preface to
Typee: “The incidents recorded in the following pages have often served,
when ‘spun as a yarn,’ not only to relieve the weariness of many a night-
watch at sea, but to excite the warmest sympathies of the author’s
shipmates.”
Upon being taken aboard the Julia, Melville was almost immediately seen
by the captain, a young, pale, slender, sickly looking creature, who signed
Melville up for one cruise, engaging to discharge him at the next port.
Life on board the Julia was, if anything, worse than life on board the
Acushnet. In the first place, Melville was ill. Not until three months after his
escape from Typee did he regain his normal strength. And, as always,
Melville looked back with regret upon leaving the life he had so wanted to
escape from while he was in the midst of it. “As the land faded from my
sight,” he says, “I was all alive to the change in my condition. But how far
short of our expectations is oftentimes the fulfilment of the most ardent
hopes. Safe aboard of a ship—so long my earnest prayer—with home and
friends once more in prospect, I nevertheless felt weighed down with a
melancholy that could not be shaken off.” Melville felt he was leaving
cannibalism forever—and the departure shot a pang into his heart.
The ship’s company were a sorry lot: reduced by desertion from thirty-two
to twenty souls, and more than half of the remaining were more or less
unwell from a long sojourn in a dissipated port. Some were wholly unfit for
duty; one or two were dangerously ill. The rest managed to stand their
watch, though they could do little. The crew was, for the most part, a typical
whaling crew: “villains of all nations and dyes; picked up in the lawless
Spanish Main, and among the savages of the islands.” The provisions, too,
on board the Julia were notoriously bad, even for a whaler. Melville’s regret
at leaving Typee was not mere wanton sentimentality.
The captain was despised by all aboard. He was commonly called “The
Cabin Boy,” “Paper Jack,” “Miss Guy” and other descriptive titles. Though

sheepish looking, he was a man of still, timid cunning that did not endear
him to Melville.
The mate, John Jermin, was of the efficient race of short thick-set men:
bullet headed, with a fierce little squint out of one eye, and a nose with a
rakish tilt to one side. His was the art of knocking a man down with
irresistible good humour, so the very men he flogged loved him like a
brother. He had but one failing: he abhorred weak infusions, and cleaved
manfully to strong drink. He was never completely sober: and when he was
nearly drunk he was uncommonly obstreperous.
Jermin was master of every man aboard except the ship’s carpenter,—a man
so excessively ugly he went by the name of “Beauty.” As ill-favoured as
Beauty was in person, he was no less ugly in temper: his face had soured
his heart. Melville witnessed an encounter between Jermin and Beauty: an
encounter that showed up clearly the state of affairs on board. While Beauty
was thrashing Jermin in the forecastle, the captain called down the scuttle:
“Why, why, what’s all this about? Mr. Jermin, Mr. Jermin—carpenter,
carpenter: what are you doing down there? Come on deck; come on deck.”
In reply to this, Doctor Long Ghost cried out in a squeak, “Ah! Miss Guy, is
that you? Now, my dear, go right home, or you’ll get hurt.” The captain
dipped his head down the scuttle to make answer, to receive, full in the face,
the contents of a tin of soaked biscuit and tea-leaves. Things were not well
aboard the Julia.
But it was Doctor Long Ghost—he who so mocked the captain—who
figures most largely in Melville’s history: a man remarkable both in
appearance and in personality. He was over six feet—a tower of bones, with
a bloodless complexion, fair hair and a pale unscrupulous grey eye that
twinkled occasionally with the very devil of mischief. At the beginning of
the cruise of the Julia, as ship’s doctor, he had lived in the cabin with the
captain. But once on a time they had got into a dispute about politics, and
the doctor, getting into a rage, had driven his argument home with his fist,
and left the captain on the floor, literally silenced. The captain replied by
shutting him up in his state-room for ten days on a diet of bread and water.
Upon his release he went forward with his chests among the sailors where
he was welcomed as a good fellow and an injured man.

The early history of Doctor Long Ghost he kept to himself; but it was
Melville’s conviction that he had certainly at some time or other spent
money, drunk Burgundy, and associated with gentlemen. “He quoted Virgil,
and talked of Hobbes of Malmsbury, besides repeating poetry by the canto,
especially Hudibras.” In the most casual manner, too, he could refer to an
amour he had in Palermo, his lion hunting before breakfast among the
Kaffirs, and the quality of coffee he had drunk in Muscat.
Melville was in no condition, physically, to engage in the ship’s duties, so
he and Doctor Long Ghost fraternised in the forecastle, where they were
treated by the crew as distinguished guests. There they talked, played chess
—with an outfit of their own manufacture—and there Melville read the
books of the Long Doctor, over and over again, not omitting a long treatise
on the scarlet fever.
At its best, the forecastle is never an ideal abode: but the forecastle of the
Julia—its bunks half wrecked, its filthy sailors’ pantry, and its plague of
rats and cockroaches—must have made the Highlander seem as paradise in
retrospect. The forecastle of the Julia, Melville says, “looked like the
hollow of an old tree going to decay. In every direction the wood was damp
and discoloured, and here and there soft and porous. Moreover, it was
hacked and hewed without mercy, the cook frequently helping himself to
splinters for kindling wood.” The viciousness of the crew of the Julia, did
not, of course, perceptibly enhance the charms of the forecastle. Nor was
Melville’s estate made more enviable when the man in the bunk next to his
went wildly delirious. One night Melville was awakened from a vague
dream of horrors by something clammy resting on him: his neighbour, with
a stark stiff arm reached out into Melville’s bunk, had during the night died.
The crew rejoiced at his death.
For weeks the Julia tacked about among the islands of the South Seas. The
captain was ill, and Jermin steered the Julia, to Tahiti, to arrive off the
island the moment that Admiral Du Petit-Thouars was firing, from the
Reine Blanche, a salute in honour of the treaty he had just forced Pomare to
sign.
But to the astonishment of the crew, Jermin kept the ship at sea, fearing the
desertion of all his men if he struck anchor. His purpose was to set the sick
captain ashore, and to resume the voyage of the Julia at once, to return to

Tahiti after a certain period agreed upon, to take the captain off. The crew
were in no mood to view this manœuvre with indifference. Melville and
Long Ghost cautioned them against the folly of immediate mutiny, and on
the fly-leaf of an old musty copy of A History of the Most Atrocious and
Bloody Piracies, a round-robin was indited, giving a statement of the crew’s
grievances, and concluding with the earnest hope that the consul would at
once come off and see how matters stood. Pritchard, the missionary consul,
was at that time in England; his place was temporarily filled by one Wilson,
son of the well-known missionary of that name, and no honour to his
ancestor. It did not promise well for the crew that Wilson was an old friend
of Captain Guy’s.
The round-robin was the prelude to iniquitous bullying and stupidity on the
part of Wilson, Jermin, and Captain Guy. To the crew, it seemed that justice
was poisoned at the fountain head. They gazed on the bitter waters, did a
stout menagerie prance, and raged into mutiny. Then it was, after one of the
men had all but succeeded in maliciously running the Julia straight upon a
reef, that the good ship was piloted into the harbour of Papeetee, and the
crew—including Melville and the Long Doctor, who were misjudged
because of the company they kept—were for five days and nights held in
chains on board the Reine Blanche. At the end of that time they were tried,
one by one, before a tribunal composed of Wilson and two elderly European
residents. Melville was examined last. One of the elderly gentlemen
condescended to take a paternal interest in Melville. “Come here, my young
friend,” he said; “I’m extremely sorry to see you associated with these bad
men; do you know what it will end in?” Melville was in no mood for smug
and salvationly solicitations. He had already declared that his resolution
with respect to the ship was unalterable: he stuck to this resolution. Wilson
thereupon pronounced the whole crew clean gone in perversity, and steeped
in abomination beyond the reach of clemency. He then summoned a fat old
native, Captain Bob—and a hearty old Bob he proved—giving him
directions to marshal the crew to a place of safe keeping.
Along the Broom Road they were led: and to Melville, escaped from the
forecastle of the Julia and the confined decks of the frigate, the air breathed
spices. “The tropical day was fast drawing to a close,” he says; “and from
where we were, the sun looked like a vast red fire burning in the woodlands

—its rays falling aslant through the endless ranks of trees, and every leaf
fringed with flame.”
About a mile from the village they came to the Calabooza Beretanee—the
English jail.
The jail was extremely romantic in appearance: a large oval native house,
with a dazzling white thatch, situated near a mountain stream that, flowing
from a verdant slope, spread itself upon a beach of small sparkling shells,
and then trickled into the sea. But the jail was ill adapted for domestic
comforts, the only piece of furniture being two stout pieces of timber, about
twenty feet in length, gouged to serve as stocks. John La Farge, in his
Reminiscences of the South Seas, says: “We try to find, by the little river
that ends our walk, on this side of the old French fort, the calaboose where
Melville was shut up. There is no one to help us in our search; no one
remembers anything. Buildings occupy the spaces of woodland that
Melville saw about him. Nothing remains but the same charm of light and
air which he, like all others, has tried to describe and to bring back home in
words. But the beach is still as beautiful as if composed by Claude
Lorraine.”
In this now-departed calaboose, Melville and the rest were kept in very
lenient captivity by Captain Bob. Captain Bob’s notion of discipline was
delightfully vague. He insensibly remitted his watchfulness, and the
prisoners were free to stroll further and further from the Calabooza. After
about two weeks—for days melted deceptively into each other at Tahiti—
the crew was again summoned before Wilson, again to declare themselves
unshaken in their obstinate refusal to sail again with Captain Guy. So back
to the Calabooza they were sent.
The English Missionaries left their cards at the Calabooza in the shape of a
package of tracts; three of the French priests—whom the natives viewed, so
Melville says, as “no better than diabolical sorcerers”—called in person.
One of the priests—called by Melville, Father Murphy—discovered a
compatriot among the crew, and celebrated the discovery by sending a
present of a basket of bread. Such was the persuasion of the gift that, on
Melville’s count, “we all turned Catholics, and went to mass every morning,
much to Captain Bob’s consternation. He threatened to keep us in the
stocks, if we did not desist.”

After three weeks Wilson seems to have begun to suspect that it was not
remotely impossible that he was making a laughing stock of himself in his
futile attempt to break the mutineers into contrition. So off the Julia sailed,
manned by a new crew. But before sailing, Jermin served his old crew the
good turn of having their chests sent ashore. And when each was in
possession of his sea-chest, the Calabooza was thronged with Polynesians,
each eager to take a tayo, or bosom friend.
Though technically still prisoners, Melville and his former shipmates were
allowed a long rope in their wanderings. Melville improved his leisure by
attending, each Sunday, the services held in the great church which Pomare
had built to be baptised in. In Omoo, Melville gives a detailed account of a
typical Sabbath, and then launches into chapters of discussion upon the
fruits of Christianity in Polynesia.
At church Melville had observed, among other puzzlingly incongruous
performances, a young Polynesian blade standing up in the congregation in
all the bravery of a striped calico shirt, with the skirts rakishly adjusted over
a pair of white sailor trousers, and hair well anointed with cocoanut oil,
ogling the girls with an air of supreme satisfaction. And of those who ate of
the bread-fruit of the Eucharist in the morning, he knew several who were
guilty of sad derelictions the same night. Desiring, if possible, to find out
what ideas of religion were compatible with this behaviour, he and the Long
Doctor called upon three sister communicants one evening. While the
doctor engaged the two younger girls, Melville lounged on a mat with
Ideea, the eldest, dallying with her grass fan, and improving his knowledge
of Tahitian.
“The occasion was well adapted to my purpose, and I began.
“‘Ah, Ideea, mickonaree oee?’ the same as drawling out—‘By the by, Miss
Ideea, do you belong to the church?’
“‘Yes, me mickonaree,’ was the reply.
“But the assertion was at once qualified by certain reservations; so curious
that I cannot forbear their relation.
“‘Mickonaree ena’ (church member here), exclaimed she, laying her hand
upon her mouth, and a strong emphasis on the adverb. In the same way, and
with similar exclamations, she touched her eyes and hands. This done, her

whole air changed in an instant; and she gave me to understand, by
unmistakable gestures, that in certain other respects she was not exactly a
‘mickonaree.’ In short, Ideea was

“‘A sad good Christian at the heart—
A very heathen in the carnal part.’”

“The explanation terminated in a burst of laughter, in which all three sisters
joined; and for fear of looking silly, the doctor and myself. As soon as
good-breeding would permit, we took leave.”
It is Melville’s contention that the very traits in the Tahitians which induced
the London Missionary Society to regard them as the most promising
subjects for conversion, were, in fact, the most serious obstruction to their
ever being Christians. “An air of softness in their manners, great apparent
ingenuousness and docility, at first misled; but these were the mere
accompaniments of an indolence, bodily and mental; a constitutional
voluptuousness; and an aversion to the least restraint; which, however fitted
for the luxurious state of nature, in the tropics, are the greatest possible
hindrances to the strict moralities of Christianity.” Of the Marquesans,
Melville says in Typee: “Better it will be for them to remain the happy and
innocent heathens and barbarians that they now are, than, like the wretched
inhabitants of the Sandwich islands, to enjoy the mere name of Christians
without experiencing any of the vital operations of true religion, whilst, at
the same time, they are made the victims of the worst vices and evils of
civilised life.”
Paul Gauguin, in his Intimate Journals, seems to share Melville’s
conviction that the Polynesians are disqualified by nature to experience
“any of the vital operations of the spirit.” In speaking of the attempts of the
missionaries to introduce marriage into Polynesia he remarks cynically: “As
they are going out of the church, the groom says to the maid of honour,
‘How pretty you are!’ And the bride says to the best man ‘How handsome
you are!’ Very soon one couple moves off to the right and another to the
left, deep into the underbrush where, in the shelter of the banana trees and
before the Almighty, two marriages take place instead of one. Monseigneur
is satisfied, and says, ‘We are beginning to civilise them.’”

The good intentions of the Missionaries Melville does not question. But
high faith and low intelligence is a dangerous if not uncommon mating of
qualities. “It matters not,” he says, “that the earlier labourers in the work,
although strictly conscientious, were, as a class, ignorant, and in many
cases, deplorably bigoted: such traits have, in some degree, characterised
the pioneers of all faith. And although in zeal and disinterestedness, the
missionaries now on the island are, perhaps, inferior to their predecessors,
they have, nevertheless, in their own way, at least, laboured hard to make a
Christian people of their charge.”
As a result of this labour idolatry was done away with; the entire Bible was
translated into Tahitian; the morality of the islanders was, on the whole,
improved. These accomplishments Melville freely admits. But in temporal
felicity, “the Tahitians are far worse off now than formerly; and although
their circumstances, upon the whole, are bettered by the missionaries, the
benefits conferred by the latter become utterly insignificant, when
confronted with the vast preponderance of evil brought by other means.”
Melville found that there was still at Tahiti freedom and indolence; torches
brandished in the woods at night; dances under the moon, and women
decked with flowers. But he also found the Missionaries intent upon the
abolition of the native amusements and customs—in their crowning efforts,
decking the women out in hats “said to have been first contrived and
recommended by the missionaries’ wives; a report which, I really trust, is
nothing but a scandal.” To Melville’s eyes, Tahiti was neither Pagan nor
Christian, but a bedraggled bastard cross between the vices of two
incompatible traditions. And in this blend he saw the promise of the certain
extinction of the Polynesians. The Polynesians themselves were not blind to
the doom upon them. Melville had heard the aged Tahitians singing in a low
sad tone a song which ran: “The palm trees shall grow, the coral shall
spread, but man shall cease.”

FIRST HOME OF THE PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES IN TAHITI
From a report of The London Missionary Society, published in 1799.

THE FLEET OF TAHITI
From an engraving after Hodges, the artist who accompanied Captain Cook to the South Seas.

Melville’s plea was that Christendom treat Polynesia with reasonableness,
and Christian charity: perhaps the two rarest qualities in the world. His plea
was not without results; he unloosed upon himself exhibitions of venom of
the whole-hearted sort that enamour a misanthrope to life. The Living Age
(Vol. XXVII) reprinted from the Eclectic Review a tribute which began:
“Falsehood is a thing of almost invincible courage; overthrow it to-day, and
with freshened vigour it will return to the lists to-morrow. Omoo illustrates
this fact. We were under the illusion that the abettors of infidelity and the
partisans of popery had been put to shame by the repeated refutation and
exposure of their slanders against the Protestant Missions in Polynesia; but
Mr. Melville’s production proves that shame is a virtue with which these
gentry are totally unacquainted, and that they are resharpening their missiles
for another onset.” This review then made it its object “to show that his
statements respecting the Protestant Mission in Tahiti are perversions of the
truth—that he is guilty of deliberate and elaborate misrepresentation, and ...
that he is a prejudiced, incompetent, and truthless witness.” It was taken for
granted that Melville was guilty of the heinous crime of being a Catholic.
From this presumption it was easy to understand that Melville’s plea for
sweetness and light was but the vicious ravings of a man “foiled and
disappointed by the rejection of Mariolatry and the worship of wafers and
of images, and of dead men by the Bible-reading Tahitians.” By a
convincing—if not cogent—technique of controversy, Melville’s evidence
was impugned by a discounting of the morals of the witness: a Catholic,
and a disseminator of the “worst of European vices and the most dreadful of
European diseases.”
Melville was twenty-eight years old when he Quixotically championed the
heathen in the name of a transcendental charity which he believed to be
Christian. Amiable Protestant brethren undertook to disabuse him of his
naïve belief that the guardians of the faith of Christendom invariably
regulate their conduct in the spirit of Christ. As Melville grew in wisdom he
grew in disillusion: and his early tilt at the London Missionary Society
contributed to his rapid growth. At the age of thirty-three he wrote in Pierre
—a book planned to show the impracticability of virtue—that “God’s truth
is one thing, and man’s truth another.” He then maintained that the history

of Christendom for the last 1800 years showed that “in spite of all the
maxims of Christ, that history is as full of blood, violence, wrong, and
iniquity of every kind, as any previous portion of the world’s story.” He
says in Clarel:

“The world is portioned out, believe:
The good have but a patch at best,
The wise their corner; for the rest—
Malice divides with ignorance.”

Melville points out that Christ’s teachings seemed folly to the Jews because
Christ carried Heaven’s time in Jerusalem, while the Jews carried Jerusalem
time there. “Did He not expressly say ‘My wisdom is not of this world?’
Whatever is really peculiar in the wisdom of Christ seems precisely the
same folly to-day as it did 1850 years ago.” In Clarel, he goes further, and
calls the world

“a den
Worse for Christ’s coming, since His love
(Perverted) did but venom prove.”

Though such a heretical idea was, to the Protestant brethren, of course,
clean gone on the farthest side of damnation, yet were Melville and these
same brethren working upon an identical major premise: each was
righteously convinced that he was about his Father’s business—each was
attempting to rout the other in the name of Christ. The brethren rode forth in
the surety of triumph; Melville retired within himself convinced that defeat
was not refutation, and that his way had been, withal, the way of Heavenly
Truth. And since his way bore but bitter fruit, he shook the dust of the earth
from his feet, convinced that such soil was designed to nourish only
iniquity. “Where is the earnest and righteous philosopher,” he asks, framing
his question to include himself in that glorious minority, “who looking right
and left, and up and down through all the ages of the world, the present
included; where is there such an one who has not a thousand times been
struck with a sort of infidel idea, that whatever other worlds God may be
Lord of, He is not Lord of this: for else this world would seem to give Him

the lie; so utterly repugnant seem its ways to the instinctively known ways
of Heaven.” In this world, he grew to feel, a wise man resigns himself to the
world’s ways. “When we go to heaven,” he taught, “it will be quite another
thing. There, we can freely turn the left cheek, because the right cheek will
never be smitten. There they can freely give all to the poor, for there there
will be no poor to give to.” And this, he contended, was a salutary doctrine:
“I hold up a practical virtue to the vicious; and interfere not with the eternal
truth, that, sooner or later, downright vice is downright woe.” His milk of
human kindness was not sweetened by the thunder of the Protestant
brethren.
Resigned to the insight that while on earth no wise man aims at heaven
except by a virtuous expediency, he accepted the London Missionary
Society as one of the evils inherent in the universe, and leaving it to its own
fate, looked prophetically forward to the Inter-Church World Movement. In
The Confidence Man he makes one of the characters say: “Missions I would
quicken with the Wall Street spirit. For if, confessedly, certain spiritual ends
are to be gained but through the auxiliary agency of worldly means, then, to
the surer gaining of such spiritual ends, the example of worldly policy in
worldly projects should not by spiritual projectors be slighted. In brief, the
conversion of the heathen, so far, at least, as depending on human effort,
would, by the world’s charity, be let out on contract. So much by bid for
converting India, so much for Borneo, so much for Africa. You see, this
doing good in the world by driblets is just nothing. I am for doing good in
the world with a will. I am for doing good to the world once for all, and
having done with it. Do but think of the eddies and maelstroms of pagans in
China. People here have no conception of it. Of a frosty morning in Hong
Kong, pauper pagans are found dead in the streets like so many nipped peas
in a bin of peas. To be an immortal being in China is no more distinction
than to be a snow-flake in a snow-squall. What are a score or two of
missionaries to such a people? I am for sending ten thousand missionaries
in a body and converting the Chinese en masse within six months of the
debarkation. The thing is then done, and turn to something else.” And in
Clarel:

“But preach and work:
You’ll civilise the barbarous Turk—
Nay, all the East may reconcile:
That done, let Mammon take the wings of even,
And mount and civilise the saints in heaven.”

But when Melville was in Tahiti he harboured less emancipated notions
than he later achieved. He was then to all outward seeming little better than
a beach-comber, disciplined for his participation in a mutiny he and the
Long Doctor had ineffectively tried to prevent, and in the end abandoned by
his ecclesiastical guardians to drift among the natives of Tahiti, and to find
his way back home any way he could.
The authorities at Tahiti left the party at the Calabooza to its own
disintegration: a sore on the island cured not by surgery but by neglect.
Gradually the mutineers melted out of sight.
With the Long Doctor, Melville sailed across to the neighbouring island of
Imeeo, there to hire themselves out as field-labourers to two South Sea
planters: one a tall, robust Yankee, born in the backwoods of Maine, sallow,
and with a long face; the other, a short florid little Cockney. This strange
pair had cleared about thirty acres in the isolation of the wild valley of
Martair, where they worked with invincible energy, and struggling against
all odds to farm in Polynesia, and with Heaven knows what ideas of making
a fortune on their crude plantation.
Melville had tried farming in Pittsfield, and he liked the labour even less in
Polynesia than he did in Christendom. The Long Doctor throve not at all
hoeing potatoes under a tropical sun, all the while saying masses as he
watered the furrows with his sweat. Both Melville and the Long Doctor
enjoyed the hunt they took in the wilds of the mountains: but back to the
mosquitoes, the sweet-potatoes, and the hardships of agriculture, they
decided to launch forth again upon the luck of the open road. What clothes
they had were useless rags. So barefooted, and garbed like comic opera
brigands or mendicant grandees, they started out on a tour of discovery
around the island of Imeeo. After about ten days of pleasant adventure and
hospitality from the natives they arrived at Partoowye to be accepted into
the household of an aristocratic-looking islander named Jeremiah Po-Po,

and his wife Arfretee. This was a household of converts: “Po-Po was, in
truth, a Christian,” Melville says: “the only one, Arfretee excepted, whom I
personally knew to be such, among all the natives of Polynesia.”
Arfretee fitted out Melville and the Doctor each with a new sailor frock and
a pair of trousers: and after a bath, a pleasant dinner, and a nap, they came
forth like a couple of bridegrooms.
Melville was in Partoowye, as guest of Po-Po, for about five weeks. At that
time it was believed that Queen Pomare—who was then in poor health and
spirits, and living in retirement in Partoowye—entertained some idea of
making a stand against the French. In this event, she would, of course, be
glad to enlist all the foreigners she could. Melville and the Long Doctor
played with the idea of being used by Pomare as officers, should she take to
warlike measures. But in this scheme they won little encouragement. For
though Pomare had, previous to her misfortunes, admitted to her levees the
humblest sailor who cared to attend upon Majesty, she was, in her eclipse,
averse to receiving calls.
Shut off from an immediate prospect of interviewing Pomare, Melville
improved his time by studying the native life, and by visiting a whaler in
the harbour—the Leviathan—taking the precaution to secure himself a bunk
in the forecastle should he fail of a four-poster at Court. His heart warmed
to the Leviathan after his first visit of inspection on board. “Like all large,
comfortable old whalers, she had a sort of motherly look:—broad in the
beam, flush decks, and four chubby boats hanging at her breast.” The food,
too, was promising. “My sheath-knife never cut into better sea-beef. The
bread, too, was hard, and dry, and brittle as glass; and there was plenty of
both.” The mate had a likeable voice: “hearing it was as good as a look at
his face.” But Melville still clung to the hope of winning the ear of Pomare.
Although there was, Melville says, “a good deal of waggish comrades’
nonsense” about his and Long Ghost’s expectation of court preferment, “we
nevertheless really thought that something to our advantage might turn up
in that quarter.”
Pomare was then upward of thirty years of age; twice stormily married; and
a good sad Christian again,—after lapses into excommunication; she eked
out her royal exchequer by going into the laundry business, publicly
soliciting, by her agents, the washing of the linen belonging to the officers

of ships touching in her harbours. Her English sister, Queen Victoria, had
sent her a very showy but uneasy headdress—a crown. Having no idea of
reserving so pretty a bauble for coronation days, which came so seldom, her
majesty sported it whenever she appeared in public. To show her familiarity
with European customs, she touched it to all foreigners of distinction—
whaling captains and the like—whom she happened to meet in her evening
walk on the Broom Road.
Melville discovered among Pomare’s retinue a Marquesan warrior,
Marbonna,—a wild heathen who scorned the vices and follies of the
Christian court of Tahiti and the degeneracy of the people among whom
fortune had thrown him. Through the instrumentality of Marbonna, who
officiated as nurse of Pomare’s children, Melville and the Doctor at last
found themselves admitted into the palace of Pomare.
“The whole scene was a strange one,” Melville says; “but what most
excited our surprise was the incongruous assemblage of the most costly
objects from all quarters of the globe. Superb writing-desks of rosewood,
inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl; decanters and goblets of cut glass;
embossed volumes of plates; gilded candelabras; sets of globes and
mathematical instruments; laced hats and sumptuous garments of all sorts
were strewn about among greasy calabashes half-filled with poce, rolls of
old tappa and matting, paddles and fish-spears. A folio volume of Hogarth
lay open, with a cocoanut shell of some musty preparation capsized among
the miscellaneous furniture of the Rake’s apartment.”
While Melville and the Doctor were amusing themselves in this museum of
curiosities, Pomare entered, unconscious of the presence of intruders.
“She wore a loose gown of blue silk, with two rich shawls, one red, the
other yellow, tied about her neck. Her royal majesty was barefooted. She
was about the ordinary size, rather matronly; her features not very
handsome; her mouth voluptuous; but there was a care-worn expression in
her face, probably attributable to her late misfortunes. From her appearance,
one would judge her about forty; but she is not so old. As the Queen
approached one of the recesses, her attendants hurried up, escorted her in,
and smoothed the mats on which she at last reclined. Two girls soon
appeared, carrying their mistress’ repast; and then, surrounded by cut glass
and porcelain, and jars of sweetmeats and confections, Pomare Vahinee I.,

the titular Queen of Tahiti, ate fish and poee out of her native calabashes,
disdaining either knife or spoon.”
The interview between the Queen and her visitors was brief. Long Ghost
strode up bravely to introduce himself. The natives surrounding the Queen
screamed. Pomare looked up, surprised and offended, and waved the Long
Doctor and Melville out of the house. Though Melville was later to view a
South American King, was to win the smile of Victoria and meet Lincoln,
Pomare was the first and only Polynesian Queen he ever saw.
Disappointed at going to court, feeling that they could no longer trespass on
Po-Po’s hospitality, “and then, weary somewhat of life in Imeeo, like all
sailors ashore, I at last pined for the billows.”
The Captain of the Leviathan—a native of Martha’s Vineyard—was
unwilling without persuasion to accept Melville, however. What with
Melville’s associations with Long Ghost, and the British sailor’s frock
Arfretee had given him, the Captain suspected Melville of being from
Sydney: a suspicion not intended as flattery. Unaccompanied by Long
Ghost, Melville finally interviewed the Captain, to find that worthy
mellowed at the close of a spirituous dinner. “After looking me in the eye
for some time, and by so doing, revealing an obvious unsteadiness in his
own visual organs, he begged me to reach forth my arm. I did so;
wondering what on earth that useful member had to do with the matter in
hand. He placed his fingers on my wrist; and holding them there for a
moment, sprang to his feet; and, with much enthusiasm, pronounced me a
Yankee, every beat of my pulse.” Another bottle was called, which the
captain summarily beheaded with the stroke of a knife, commanding
Melville to drain it to the bottom. “He then told me that if I would come on
board his vessel the following morning, I would find the ship’s articles on
the cabin transom.... So, hurrah for the coast of Japan! Thither the ship was
bound.”
The Long Doctor, on second thought, decided to eschew the sea for a space.
A last afternoon was spent with Po-Po and his family. “About nightfall, we
broke away from the generous-hearted household and hurried down to the
water. It was a mad, merry night among the sailors. An hour or two after
midnight, everything was noiseless; but when the first streak of dawn
showed itself over the mountains, a sharp voice hailed the forecastle, and

ordered the ship unmoored. The anchors came up cheerily; the sails were
soon set; and with the early breath of the tropical morning, fresh and
fragrant from the hillsides, we slowly glided down the bay, and we swept
through the opening in the reef.”
Melville never saw or heard from Long Ghost after their parting on that
morning.

CHAPTER XII
ON BOARD A MAN-OF-WAR
“Oh, give me the rover’s life—the joy, the thrill, the whirl! Let
me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into the saddle once
more. I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares; sick of the
dust and reek of towns. Let me hear the clatter of hailstones on
icebergs. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and whinny in thy
spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me with Neptune, O
sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may fall on my coffin! Be
mine the tomb that swallowed up Pharaoh and all his hosts; let
me lie down with Drake, where he sleeps in the sea.”
—Herman Melville: White-Jacket.
In 1898, there appeared the Memories of a Rear-Admiral Who Has Served
for More Than Half a Century in the Navy of the United States. S. R.
Franklin, the author of this volume, had lived a long and useful life, with no
design during his years of activity, it would seem, of bowing himself out of
the world as a man-of-letters. But in the leisure of elderly retirement, he
was persuaded by his friends to get rid of his reminiscences once for all by
putting them into a book. Rear-Admiral Franklin took an inventory of his
rich life, and accepted the challenge. Had he not roamed about the globe
since he was sixteen years of age? And he had known a dozen famous
Admirals, three Presidents, three Emperors, two Popes, five Christian Kings
and a properly corresponding number of Queens, not to mention a whole
army of lesser notables.
In 1842, as midshipman aboard the United States frigate, Franklin cruised
the Pacific. The United States stopped at Honolulu, touched at the
Marquesas. Franklin reports that the Bay of Nukuheva “makes one of the
most beautiful harbours I have ever seen.” But upon the natives he
bestowed the contempt of a civilised man: “for the Marquesans were
cannibals of the worst kind, and no one who desired to escape roasting ever

ventured away from the coast.” The United States did not remain long in
these waters, “where there was nothing to do but look at a lot of half-naked
savages.” So off sailed the frigate to Tahiti, where a queen came aboard.
But Franklin cannot remember whether it was Pomare or some other queen:
“Ladies of that rank were not uncommon in those days in the South Seas.”
Franklin had then been cruising among the islands of the Pacific for some
months, and he was “not sorry when the time came to get under way for the
coast.” Men of Franklin’s type are a credit to civilisation: men proud of
their heritage, but unobtrusive in their pride. Franklin was unmoved by any
sanctimonious hankering to improve the heathen, or by any romantic
anxiety to ease into the mud of barbarism. “Savage and half-civilised life
becomes very irksome,” he says, “when the novelty is worn off.”
“At Tahiti,” he goes on to state, “we picked up some seamen who were on
the Consul’s hands. They were entered on the books of the ship, and
became a portion of the crew. One of the number was Herman Melville,
who became famous afterwards as a writer and an admiralty lawyer. He had
gone to sea for his health, and found himself stranded in the South Pacific. I
do not remember what the trouble was, but he and his comrades had left the
ship of which they were a portion of the crew. Melville wrote a book, well
known in its day, called White-Jacket, which had more influence in
abolishing corporal punishment in the Navy than anything else. This book
was placed on the desk of every member of Congress, and was a most
eloquent appeal to the humane sentiment of the country. As an evidence of
the good it did, a law was passed soon after the book appeared abolishing
flogging in the Navy absolutely, without substituting any other mode of
punishment in its stead; and this was exactly in accord with Melville’s
appeal.”
“I do not think that I remember Melville at all,” Franklin goes on to say;
“occasionally will flash across my memory a maintop-man flitting across
about the starboard gangway with a white jacket on, but there is not much
reality in the picture which it presents to my mind. In his book he speaks of
a certain seaman, Jack Chase, who was Captain of the maintop, of whom I
have a very distinct recollection. He was about as fine a specimen of
seaman as I have ever seen in all my cruising. He was not only that, but he
was a man of intelligence, and a born leader. His top-mates adored him,
although he kept them up to the mark, and made every man do his share of

work. Melville has given him considerable space in his book, and seems to
have had intense admiration for him. He mentions also a number of officers
whom it is not difficult to recognise. The Commanding Officer, who had a
very red face, he called Captain Claret; a small but very energetic
Midshipman, who made himself felt and heard about the decks, he called
Mr. Pert; the Gunner was ‘Old Combustibles.’ He gives no names, but to
any one who served in the Frigate United States it was easy to recognise the
men by their sobriquets. Melville certainly did a grand work in bringing his
ability as a writer and his experience as a seaman to bear upon the
important matter—I mean corporal punishment—which had been the
subject of so much discussion in and out of Congress.”
The essential accuracy of Melville’s account of life on board the Frigate
United States is thus, in the above as in other passages, vouched for by a
Rear-Admiral. Franklin, himself, however, is not exhaustively familiar with
the life and works of Melville, making him an “admiralty lawyer” who went
to sea for his health. And according to Franklin’s account, Melville shipped
on board the United States from Tahiti. According to Melville’s own
account, he left Eimeo—from the harbour of Tamai—not on board a man-
of-war, but on board an American whaler bound for the fishing grounds off
Japan.
The itinerary of Melville’s rovings in the Pacific after he left Tahiti cannot
be stated with any detailed precision. In an Appendix to the American
edition of Typee, Melville says: “During a residence of four months at
Honolulu, the author was in the confidence of an Englishman who was
much employed by his lordship”—Sir George Paulet. In both Typee and
Omoo he speaks of conditions in the Sandwich Islands with the familiarity
of first-hand observation. The Frigate United States sailed from Hampton
Roads early in January, 1842. It doubled the Horn late in February, and
joined the Pacific squadron at Valparaiso. After spending the winter of
1842-3 off Monterey, the United States returned to Callao in the spring, and
sailed for Honolulu, arriving in the early summer of 1843. According to his
own account, Melville left Tahiti in the autumn of 1842. The United States
left Tahiti in the summer of 1843. Melville speaks of revisiting the
Marquesas and Tahiti after the experiences recorded in Typee and Omoo. In
Typee he says: “Between two and three years after the adventures recorded
in this volume, I chanced, while aboard a man-of-war, to touch at these

islands”—the Marquesas. Though in this statement Melville is patently
careless in his chronology, there is no reason to doubt his geography.
According to the hypothesis that offers fewest difficulties—and none of
these at all serious—it would appear that Melville left the Society Islands in
the autumn of 1842, on board a whaler bound for the coast of Japan, to
arrive in Honolulu some time in the early part of 1843, where, according to
Arthur Stedman, he was “employed as a clerk.” In the Introductory Note to
White-Jacket he says: “In the year 1843 I shipped as ‘ordinary seaman’ on
board a United States frigate, then lying in a harbour of the Pacific Ocean.
After remaining in the frigate for more than a year, I was discharged from
the service upon the vessel’s arrival home.” Melville was discharged in
Boston, in October, 1844. It would appear that Melville shipped on board
the United States, from Honolulu, in the summer of 1843, touching again at
the Marquesas and at Tahiti, and returning home by way of the Peruvian
ports.
Of Melville’s experiences between the time of his leaving the Society
Islands and that of his homeward cruise as a sailor in the United States
Navy, nothing is known beyond the meagre details already stated.
In White-Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War (1850) Melville has left a
fuller account, however, of his experiences on board the United States. The
opening of White-Jacket finds Melville at Callao, on the coast of Peru—the
last harbour he touched in the Pacific. In Typee and Omoo he had already
recounted his adventures in the South Seas, with all the crispness and
lucidity of fresh discovery. While on board the United States he returned to
old harbours, and sailed past familiar islands. But White-Jacket is not a
Yarrow Revisited.
On the showing of White-Jacket, Melville’s life in the navy was, perhaps,
the happiest period in his life. It is true that in Typee he wrote: “I will
frankly confess that after passing a few weeks in the valley of the
Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever
before entertained. But, alas, since then I have been one of the crew of a
man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly
overturned all my previous theories.” And in White-Jacket he has many a
very dark word to say for the navy. Sailors, as a class, do, of course,
entertain liberal notions concerning the Decalogue; but in this they
resemble landsmen, both Christian and cannibal. And in Melville’s day—as

before and after—from a frigate’s crew might be culled out men of all
callings and vocations, from a backslidden parson to a broken-down
comedian. It is an old saying that “the sea and the gallows refuse nothing.”
But withal, more than one good man has been hanged. “The Navy,”
Melville says, “is the asylum for the perverse, the home of the unfortunate.
Here the sons of adversity meet the children of calamity, and here the
children of calamity meet the offspring of sin.” According to this version, a
typical man-of-war was a sort of State Prison afloat. “Wrecked on a desert
shore,” Melville says, “a man-of-war’s crew could quickly found an
Alexandria by themselves, and fill it with all the things which go to make
up a capital.” The United States, surely, lacked in none of the contradictions
that go to make up a metropolis: “though boasting some fine fellows here
and there, yet, on the whole, charged to the combings of hatchways with the
spirit of Belial and unrighteousness.” Or it was like a Parisian lodging
house, turned upside down: the first floor, or deck, being rented by a lord;
the second by a select club of gentlemen; the third, by crowds of artisans;
and the fourth—on a man-of-war a basement of indefinite depth, with ugly-
looking fellows gazing out at the windows—by a whole rabble of common
people.
The good or bad temper, the vices and virtues of men-of-war’s men were in
a great degree attributable, Melville states, to their particular stations and
duties aboard ship. Melville congratulated himself upon enjoying one of the
most enviable posts aboard the frigate. It was Melville’s office to loose the
main-royal when all hands were called to make sail: besides his special
offices in tacking ship, coming to anchor, and such like, he permanently
belonged to the starboard watch, one of the two primary grand divisions of
the ship’s company. And in this watch he was a main-top-man; that is, he
was stationed in the main-top, with a number of other seamen, always in
readiness to execute any orders pertaining to the main-mast, from above the
main-yard. In Melville’s time, the tops of a frigate were spacious and cosy.
They were railed in behind so as to form a kind of balcony, that looked
airily down upon the blue, boundless, dimpled, laughing, sunny sea, and
upon the landlopers below on the deck, sneaking about among the guns. It
was a place, too, to test one’s manhood in rough weather. From twenty to
thirty loungers could agreeably recline there, cushioning themselves on old
sails and jackets. In being a main-top-man, Melville prided himself that he
belonged to a fraternity of the most liberal-hearted, lofty-minded, gay,

elastic, and adventurous men on board ship. “The reason for their liberal-
heartedness was, that they were daily called upon to expatiate themselves
all over the rigging. The reason for their lofty-mindedness was, that they
were high lifted above the petty tumults, carping cares, and paltrinesses of
the decks below.” And Melville attributed it to his having been a main-top-
man, and that in the loftiest yard of the frigate, the main-royal-yard, “that I
am now enabled to give such a free, broad, off-hand, bird’s-eye, and more
than all, impartial account of our man-of-war world; withholding nothing;
inventing nothing; nor flattering, nor scandalising any; but meting out to all
—commodore and messenger boy alike—their precise descriptions and
deserts.”
Melville says that the main-top-men, with amiable vanity, accounted
themselves the best seamen in the ship; brothers one and all, held together
by a strong feeling of esprit de corps. Their loyalty was especially centred
in their captain, Jack Chase—a prime favourite and an oracle among the
men. Upon Jack Chase’s instigation they all wore their hats at a peculiar
angle; he instructed them in the tie of their neck handkerchiefs; he protested
against their wearing vulgar dungaree trousers; he gave them lessons in
seamanship. And he solemnly conjured them, with unmitigated detestation,
to eschew the company of any sailor suspected of having served in a
whaler. On board the United States, Melville wisely held his peace
“concerning stove boats on the coast of Japan.”
Melville’s admiration for Jack Chase was perhaps the happiest
wholehearted surrender he ever gave to any human being. Jack Chase was
“a Briton and a true-blue; tall and well-knit, with a clear open eye, a fine
broad brow, and an abounding nut-brown beard. No man ever had a better
heart or a bolder. He was loved by the seamen and admired by the officers;
and even when the captain spoke to him, it was with a slight air of respect.
No man told such stories, sang such songs, or with greater alacrity sprang to
his duty. The main-top, over which he presided, was a sort of oracle of
Delphi; to which many pilgrims ascended, to have their perplexities or
difficulties settled.” Jack was a gentleman. His manners were free and easy,
but never boisterous; “he had a polite, courteous way of saluting you, if it
were only to borrow a knife. He had read all the verses of Byron, all the
romances of Scott; he talked of Macbeth and Ulysses; but above all things
was he an ardent admirer of Camoen’s Lusiad, part of which he could recite

in the original.” He spoke a variety of tongues, and was master of an
incredible richness of Byronic adventure. “There was such an abounding air
of good sense and good feeling about the man that he who could not love
him, would thereby pronounce himself a knave. I thanked my sweet stars
that kind fortune had placed me near him, though under him, in the frigate;
and from the outset, Jack and I were fast friends. Wherever you may be now
rolling over the blue billows, dear Jack, take my best love along with you,”
Melville wrote; “and God bless you, wherever you go.” And this sentiment
Melville cherished throughout his life. Almost the last thing Melville ever
wrote was the dedication of his last novel, Billy Budd—existing only in
manuscript, and completed three months before his death to “Jack Chase,
Englishman, wherever that great heart may now be, Here on earth or
harboured in Paradise, Captain in the war-ship in the year 1843, In the U. S.
Frigate United States.”
In White-Jacket, Melville glows with the same superlative admiration for
Jack Chase that Ouida, or the Duchess, exhibit in portraying their most
irresistible cavaliers; an enthusiasm similar to that of Nietzsche’s for his
Übermensch. So contagious is Melville’s love for his ship-mate that strange
infections seem to have been caught therefrom. Though it is certainly not
true that “all the world loves a lover,” Melville’s affection for Jack Chase
won him at least one rather startling proof that Shakespeare’s dictum is not
absolutely false. The proof came in the following form:
“No 2, Guthuee Port, Arbrooth 13 May 1857
“Herman Melville Esquire
“Author of the white Jacket Mardi and others, Honour’d Sir Let
it not displease you to be addressed by a stranger to your person
not so to your merits, I have read the white jacket with much
pleasure and delight ‘I found it rich in wisdom and brilliant with
beauty, ships and the sea and those who plow it with their
belongings on shore—those subjects are idintified with Herman
Melvil’s name for he has most unquestioneably made them his
own,, No writer not even Marryat himself has observed them
more closely or pictured them more impressively, a delightful
book it is. I long exceedingly to read Mardi, but how or where to
obtain it is the task? I have just now received an invitation to

cross the Atlantic from a Mr and Mrs Weed Malta between
Bolston springs and saratoga Countie, ,, as also from Mr Alexer
Muler my own Cousin, Rose bank Louistown
“I have for this many a day been wishing to see you ‘to hear you
speak to breath the same air in which you dwell’ Are you the
picture of him you so powerfully represent as the Master piece
of all Gods works Jack Chase?—
“write me dear sir and say where Omidi ’sto be gote, I do much
admire the American Authors Washington Irver Mrs Stowe
Allan Edgar Po the Late James Abbott and last though not least
your good self—Did you ever read the history of Jeffery Rudel
he was a young Noble man of Provence and reconed one of the
handsomest and polite persons of his age. he lived in the time of
Richard the first sir named cour de Lion who invited Jeffery to
his court and it was there he first heard of the beauty wit,
learning and virtue of the Countess of Tripoly by which he
became so enamoured that he resolved upon seeing her
purchased a vesel and in opesition to the King and the luxury of
a Court set sail for Tripoly the obgect of his affections realised
his most sanguine expectations.
“were you to cross the atlantic you should receive a cordeial
reception from Mr George Gordon my-beloved & only brother
& I’d bid you welcome to old s’’t Thomas a Becket famed for
kindness to strangers.—
“permite me Dear Sir to subskribe myself your friend although
unseen and at a Distance
“Eliza Gordon

“Heaven first sent letters,
For some wretches aid,
Some banished Lover
Or some Captive maid

“Pope.”

Besides the “Master piece of all Gods works Jack Chase” and his comrades
of the main-top, Melville was fortunate in finding a few other ship-mates to
admire. There was Lemsford, “a gentlemanly young member of the after-
guard,” a poet, to whose effusions Melville was happy to listen. “At the
most unseasonable hours you would behold him, seated apart, in some
corner among the guns—a shot-box before him, pen in hand, and eyes ‘in a
fine frenzy rolling.’ Some deemed him a conjurer; others a lunatic. The
knowing ones said that he must be a crazy Methodist.” Another of
Melville’s friends was Nord. Before Melville knew him, he “saw in his eye
that the man had been a reader of good books; I would have staked my life
on it, that he had seized the right meaning of Montaigne.” With Nord,
Melville “scoured all the prairies of reading; dived into the bosoms of
authors, and tore out their hearts.” Melville’s friend Williams “was a
thorough-going Yankee from Maine, who had been both a pedlar and a
pedagogue in his day. He was honest, acute, witty, full of mirth and good
humour—a laughing philosopher.” Beyond these, Melville was chary of his
friendship, despite the personal intimacies imposed by the crowded
conditions on shipboard. For living on board a man-of-war is like living in a
market, where you dress on the doorsteps and sleep in the cellar.
Yet even on board the United States Melville did find it possible to get
some solitude. “I am of a meditative humour,” he says, “and at sea used
often to mount aloft at night, and, seating myself on one of the upper yards,
tuck my jacket about me and give loose to reflection. In some ships in
which I have done this, the sailors used to fancy that I must be studying
astronomy—which, indeed, to some extent, was the case. For to study the
stars upon the wide, boundless ocean, is divine as it was to the Chaldean
Magi, who observed their revolutions from the plain.”
Melville was not only fortunate in his friends on the top, and above, but
also in the mess to which he belonged: “a glorious set of fellows—Mess
No. 1!—numbering, among the rest, my noble Captain Jack Chase. Out of a
pardonable self-conceit they called themselves the Forty-two-pounder Club;
meaning that they were, one and all, fellows of large intellectual and
corporeal calibre.”
In White-Jacket, Melville’s purpose was to present the variegated life
aboard a man-of-war; to give a vivid sense of the complexity of the typical
daily existence aboard a floating armed city inhabited by five hundred male

human beings. And no one else has ever done this so successfully as has
Melville. “I let nothing slip, however small,” he says; “and feel myself
actuated by the same motive which has prompted many worthy old
chroniclers to set down the merest trifles concerning things that are destined
to pass entirely from the earth, and which, if not preserved in the nick of
time, must infallibly perish from the memories of man. Who knows that this
humble narrative may not hereafter prove the history of an obsolete
barbarism?” For White-Jacket is, certainly, written with no intent to glorify
war. It is a book that a militaristic country would do well to suppress.
“Courage,” Melville teaches therein, “is the most common and vulgar of the
virtues.” Of a celebrated and dauntless fighter he says: “a hero in this
world;—but what would they have called him in the next?” “As the whole
matter of war is a thing that smites common sense and Christianity in the
face,” he contends, “so everything connected with it is utterly foolish,
unchristian, barbarous, brutal, and savouring of the Feejee Islands,
cannibalism, saltpetre, and the devil.”
But Melville’s anti-militaristic convictions in no sense perverted his
astonishingly vital presentation of life on board the United States. Though
in contemplation he despised war, and was open-eyed to the abuses and
iniquity on all sides of him on board the frigate; in actual fact he seems to
have been unusually happy as a sailor in the navy, among his comrades of
the top. The predominant mood of the book is the rollicking good-humour
of high animal spirits.
There were black moments in his pleasant routine, however: the terrible
nipping cold, and blasting gales, and hurricanes of sleet and hail in which
he furled the main-sail in rounding Cape Horn; the flogging he witnessed;
his watches at the cot of his mess-mate Shenley in the subterranean sick-
bay, and Shenley’s death and burial at sea; the barbarous amputation he
witnessed, and the death of the sick man at the hands of the ship’s surgeon
—a scene that Flaubert might well have been proud to have written. And
there were ugly experiences during the cruise that were among the most
lurid in his life.
Throughout the cruise, it seems, for upward of a year he had been an
efficient sailor, alert in duties, circumspect in his pleasures, liked and
respected by his comrades. The ship homeward bound, and he within a few
weeks of being a freeman, he heard the boatswain’s mate bawling his name

at all the hatchways and along the furtherest recesses of the ship: the
Captain wanted him at the mast. Melville’s heart jumped to his throat at the
summons, as he hurriedly asked Fluke, the boatswain’s mate at the fore-
hatchway, what was wanted of him.
“Captain wants you at the mast,” Fluke replied. “Going to flog ye, I guess.”
“For what?”
“My eyes! you’ve been chalking your face, hain’t ye?”
Swallowing down his heart, he saw, as he passed through the gangway to
the dread tribunal of the frigate, the quartermaster rigging the gratings; the
boatswain with his green bag of scourges; the master-at-arms ready to help
off some one’s shirt. On the charge of a Lieutenant, Melville was accused
by the Captain of failure in his duty at his station in the starboard main-lift:
a post to which Melville had never known he was assigned. His solemn
disclaimer was thrown in his teeth, and for a thing utterly unforeseen, and
for a crime of which he was utterly innocent, he was about to be flogged.
“There are times when wild thoughts enter a man’s breast, when he seems
almost irresponsible for his act and his deed,” writes the grandson of
General Peter Gansevoort. “The Captain stood on the weather-side of the
deck. Sideways, on an unobstructed line with him, was the opening of the
lee-gangway, where the side-ladders are suspended in port. Nothing but a
slight bit of sinnate-stuff served to rail in this opening, which was cut right
to the level of the Captain’s feet, showing the far sea beyond. I stood a little
to windward of him, and, though he was a large, powerful man, it was
certain that a sudden rush against him, along the slanting deck, would
infallibly pitch him headforemost into the ocean, though he who so rushed
must needs go over with him. My blood seemed clotting in my veins; I felt
icy cold at the tips of my fingers, and a dimness was before my eyes. But
through that dimness the boatswain’s mate, scourge in hand, loomed like a
giant, and Captain Claret, and the blue sea seen through the opening at the
gangway, showed with an awful vividness. I cannot analyse my heart,
though it then stood still within me. But the thing that swayed me to my
purpose was not altogether the thought that Captain Claret was about to
degrade me, and that I had taken an oath with my soul that he should not.
No, I felt my man’s manhood so bottomless within me, that no word, no
blow, no scourge of Captain Claret could cut me deep enough for that. I but

swung to an instinct within me—the instinct diffused through all animated
nature, the same that prompts even a worm to turn under the heel. The
privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and
inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose.”
Captain Claret ordered Melville to the grating. The ghost of Peter
Gansevoort, awakening in Melville, measured the distance between Captain
Claret and the sea.
“Captain Claret,” said a voice advancing from the crowd. Melville turned to
see who this might be that audaciously interrupted at a juncture like this. It
was a corporal of marines, who speaking in a mild, firm, but extremely
deferential manner, said: “I know that man, and I know that he would not be
found absent from his station if he knew where it was.” This almost
unprecedented speech inspired Jack Chase also to intercede in Melville’s
behalf. But for these timely intercessions, it is very likely that Melville
would have ended that day as a suicide and a murderer. There is no lack of
evidence, both in his writings and in the personal recollections of him that
survive, that the headlong violence of his passion, when deeply stirred,
balked at no extremity. And that day as the scourge hung over him for an
offence he had not committed, he seems to have been as murderously
roused as at any other known moment in his life. Though hating war, he
boasted “the inalienable right to kill”: and the ghost of Mow-Mow, at the
day of final reckoning, can attest that this boast was not lightly given. Like
the whaling Quakers that he so much admired, he was “a pacifist with a
vengeance.”
This scene happened during the run of the United States from Rio to the
Line. At Rio, Melville had gone ashore with Jack Chase and a few other
discreet and gentlemanly top-men. But of the dashing adventures—if any—
that they had on land, Melville is silent: “my man-of-war alone must supply
me with the staple of my matter,” he says; “I have taken an oath to keep
afloat to the last letter of my narrative.”
In so far as fine weather and the ship’s sailing were concerned, the whole
run from Rio to the Line was one delightful yachting. Especially pleasant to
Melville during this run were his quarter watches in the main-top. Removed
from the immediate presence of the officers, he and his companions could
there enjoy themselves more than in any other part of the ship. By day,

many of them were industrious making hats or mending clothes. But by
night they became more romantically inclined. Seen from this lofty perch,
of moonlight nights, the frigate must have been a glorious sight. “She was
going large before the wind, her stun’-sails set on both sides, so that the
canvases on the main-mast and fore-mast presented the appearance of two
majestic, tapering pyramids, more than a hundred feet broad at the base, and
terminating in the clouds with the light cope-stone of the royals. That
immense area of snow-white canvas sliding along the sea was indeed a
magnificent spectacle. The three shrouded masts looked like the apparition
of three gigantic Turkish Emirs striding over the ocean.” From there, too,
the band, playing on the poop, would tempt them to dance; Jack Chase
would well up into song during silent intervals: songs varied by sundry
yarns and twisters of the top-men.
One pleasant midnight, after the United States had crossed the Line and was
running on bravely somewhere off the coast of Virginia, the breeze
gradually died, and an order was given to set the main-top-gallant-stun’-
sail. The halyards not being rove, Jack Chase assigned to Melville that
eminently difficult task. That this was a business demanding unusual sharp-
sightedness, skill, and celerity is evident when it is remembered that the end
of a line, some two hundred feet long, was to be carried aloft in one’s teeth
and dragged far out on the giddiest of yards, and after being wormed and
twisted about through all sorts of intricacies, was to be dropped, clear of all
obstructions, in a straight plumb-line right down to the deck.
“Having reeved the line through all the inferior blocks,” Melville says, “I
went out to the end of the weather-top-gallant-yard-arm, and was in the act
of leaning over and passing it through the suspended jewel-block there,
when the ship gave a plunge in the sudden swells of the calm sea, and
pitching me still further over the yard, threw the heavy skirts of my jacket
right over my head, completely muffling me. Somehow I thought it was the
sail that had flapped, and under that impulse threw up my hands to drag it
from my head, relying upon the sail itself to support me meanwhile. Just
then the ship gave another jerk, and head foremost I pitched over the yard. I
knew where I was, from the rush of air by my ears, but all else was a
nightmare. A bloody film was before my eyes, through which, ghost-like,
passed and repassed my father, mother, and sisters. An unutterable nausea
oppressed me; I was conscious of groping; there seemed no breath in my

body. It was over one hundred feet that I fell—down, down, with lungs
collapsed as in death. Ten thousand pounds of shot seemed tied to my head,
as the irresistible law of gravitation dragged me, head foremost and straight
as a die, towards the infallible centre of the terrequeous globe. All I had
seen, and read, and heard, and all that I had thought and felt in my life—
seemed intensified in one fixed idea in my soul. But dense as this idea was,
it was made up of atoms. Having fallen from the projecting yard-arm end, I
was conscious of a collected satisfaction in feeling, that I should not be
dashed on the deck, but would sink into the speechless profound of the sea.
“With the bloody, blind film before my eyes, there was a still stranger hum
in my head, as if a hornet were there; and I thought to myself, Great God!
this is Death! Yet these thoughts were unmixed with alarm. Like frost-work
that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all my braided, blended
emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm.
“So protracted did my fall seem, that I can even now recall the feeling of
wondering how much longer it would be, ere all was over and I struck.
Time seemed to stand still, and all the worlds seemed poised on their poles,
as I fell, soul-becalmed, through the eddying whirl and swirl of the
Maelstrom air.
“At first, as I have said, I must have been precipitated head foremost; but I
was conscious, at length, of a swift, flinging motion of my limbs, which
involuntarily threw themselves out, so that at last I must have fallen in a
heap. This is more likely, from the circumstance that when I struck the sea,
I felt as if some one had smote me slantingly across the shoulder and along
part of my right side.
“As I gushed into the sea, a thunder-boom sounded in my ear; my soul
seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me with
the billows. The blow from the sea must have turned me, so that I sank
almost feet foremost through a soft, seething, foamy lull. Some current
seemed hurrying me away; in a trance I yielded, and sank deeper and
deeper into the glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm now around
me, flecked by summer lightnings in an azure afar. The horrible nausea was
gone; the bloody, blind film turned a pale green; I wondered whether I was
yet dead, or still dying. But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my

side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again
tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through.
“For one instant an agonising revulsion came over me as I found myself
utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expended; and there I
hung, vibrating in the mid-deep. What wild sounds then rang in my ear!
One was a soft moaning, as of low waves on the beach; the other wild and
heartlessly jubilant, as of the sea in the height of a tempest. Oh soul! thou
then heardest life and death: as he who stands upon the Corinthian shore
hears both the Ionian and the Ægean waves. The life-and-death poise soon
passed; and then I found myself slowly ascending, and caught a dim
glimmering of light. Quicker and quicker I mounted; till at last I bounded
up like a buoy, and my whole head was bathed in the blessed air.”
With his knife, Melville ripped off his jacket, struck out boldly towards the
elevated pole of one of the life-buoys which had been cut away, and was
soon after picked up by one of the cutters from the frigate.
“Ten minutes after, I was safe on board, and, springing aloft, was ordered to
reeve anew the stun’-sail-halyards, which, slipping through the blocks when
I had let go the end, had unrove and fallen to the deck.” Amphitrite had,
indeed, interceded with Neptune, and the sea-gods strove to answer
Melville’s prayer. But Melville always, even in the lowest abyss of despair,
clung passionately to life. And the night he was hurled from the mast he
was hurled from among friends, and into waters that washed the
neighbouring shores of his birth.
Melville’s long wanderings were nearly at an end. With the home port
believed to be broad on their bow, under the stars and a meagre moon in her
last quarter, the main-top-men gathered aloft in the top, and round the mast
they circled, “hand in hand, all spliced together. We had reefed the last top-
sail; trained the last gun; blown the last match; bowed to the last blast; been
tranced in the last calm. We had mustered our last round the capstan; been
rolled to grog the last time; for the last time swung in our hammocks; for
the last time turned out at the sea-gull call of the watch. We had seen our
last man scourged at the gangway; our last man gasp out the ghost in the
stifling sick-bay; our last man tossed to the sharks.”
And there Melville has left this brother band—with the anchor still hanging
from the bow—with the land still out of sight. “I love an indefinite infinite

background,” he says,—“a vast, heaving, rolling, mysterious rear!”

CHAPTER XIII
INTO THE RACING TIDE
“As the vine flourishes, and the grape empurples close up to the
very walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein; so do the
sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its peril.”—
Herman Melville: Pierre.
“Until I was twenty-five,” Melville once wrote to Hawthorne, “I had no
development at all.” When the cable and anchor of the United States were
all clear, and when he bounded ashore on his native soil, Melville was in his
twenty-fifth year. “From my twenty-fifth year,” he wrote Hawthorne, “I
date my life.”
His three years of wandering, crowded as they were with alienating
experiences, had, of course, worked deep changes in him: changes more
radical than in the dizzy whirl of strangely peopled adventures it was
possible for him to gauge. In memory, the fitful fever of the past, deceitfully
seems to strive not. But we delude ourselves when we fancy that it sleeps
well. During his far driftings, Melville had clung reverently to thoughts of
home, his imagination treacherously caressing those very scenes whose
intimate contact had filled him with revulsion. “Do men ever hate the thing
they love?” he asks in White-Jacket, perplexed at the paradox of this
perpetual recoil. He was eternally looking both before and after, but never
with the smug and genial after-dinner optimism of Rabbi Ben Ezra. The
insufficient present was always poisoned, to him, by bitter margins of
pining and regret. In headlong escape from his household gods he had been
landed among South Sea islands that in retrospect he viewed as “authentic
Edens.” Yet even in Paradise did he feel himself an exile, teaching old
Marheyo to say “Home” and “Mother,” converting into sacred words the
countersigns of a former Hell. He tells in White-Jacket, how, with the smell
of tar in his nostrils, out of sight of land, with a stout ship under his feet,
and snuffing the ocean air, in the silence and solitude of the deep, during the
long night watches used to come thronging about his heart “holy home

associations.” And he closes White-Jacket with the reflection that “Life’s a
voyage that’s homeward-bound!” But he sailed with sealed orders.
Of Melville’s impressions upon his return he has left no record. During his
three years of whaling and captivity among cannibals, and mutiny, and
South Sea driftings, and adventures in the Navy, life at home had gone
along in its regular necessary way; and the scenes of his youth, despite their
transformation in his memory, lived on in solid fact unchanged. The
identical trees in the Boston Common blotted out the same patterns against
the New England stars; none of the streets had swerved from off their prim
and angular respectability. His mother he found living in Lansingburg, just
out from Albany, N. Y. There was the same starched calico smell to his
sister’s dresses, the same clang-tint to his mother’s voice. Such was the
calibre of his imagination, that he must have found life at Lansingburg
unbelievably like he knew it must be, yet very different from what he was
prepared to find.
His brothers must have first appeared intimate strangers to him. His elder
brother, Gansevoort, had given up his hat and fur shop, was well established
in law and had won a creditable name for himself in politics. His younger
brother, Allan, was beginning a successful legal career, with his name
emblazoned on a door at 10 Wall Street. Maria was, after all, a Gansevoort;
she was not too proud to keep her brothers reminded that she had borne
sons. Melville’s youngest brother, Tom, had sprung from boyhood into the
self-conscious maturity of youth.
From vagabondage in Polynesia to the stern yoke of self-supporting
citizenship was a dizzy transition. But Melville did not clear it at a bound.
The very violence of the impact between the two antipodal types of
experience for a time must have stunned Melville to their incompatibility.
Tanned with sea-faring, exuberant in health, rosy with the after-glow of his
proud companionship with Jack Chase, and the respect and affection he had
won from his associates on board the United States, he was effulgent with
amazing tales—the enviable hero of endless incredible adventures. His
home-coming may well have been not only a staggering, but a joyous
adventure. For he entered Lansingburg trailing clouds of glory. He was
panoplied in romance; and though bodily he was in a suburb of Albany, his
companion image was the distant adventurer he saw mirrored in the
admiring and jealous imagination of his friends. With what melancholy—if

any—he viewed this reflected image, and to what degree he was, Narcissus-
wise, conscious of its irony, we do not know. But if Typee and Omoo be any
index of his mood, he returned home happier and wholesomer than at any
other period of his life. Before many years, unsolved problems of his youth
were to reassert themselves, heightened in difficulty and in pertinacity. Yet
for a time, at least, so it would appear, he reaped very substantial benefits
from his escape beyond civilisation.
According to J. E. A. Smith, Melville was soon beset by his enthralled and
wide-eyed friends to put his experiences into a book. Even if such a
challenge had never been made, it is difficult to see how Melville could
have escaped plunging into literature. For the hankering for letters had
earlier stirred in Melville’s blood,—a hankering that he had before
succumbed to, swathing a vacuity of experience in the grave-wrappings of
rhetoric and prolixity. Now he was rich in matter; because of the very
straitened circumstances of his family, he was faced again by the necessity
of earning some money if he stayed at home; and in so far as we know, he
was untempted to venture forth either as vagabond or efficiency expert.
Soon after his arrival home he must have settled down to composition. For
the manuscript of Typee was bought in London by John Murray, by an
agreement dated December, 1845.
At the time of the completion of Typee, Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, was
starting for London as Secretary to the American Legation under Minister
McLane. Gansevoort threw Typee in among his luggage, to try its luck
among British publishers. Whether Typee had previously been refused in
the United States has not yet transpired. In any event, John Murray bought
the English rights to print a thousand copies of Typee—a purchase that cost
him £100. Murray did not close the sale, however, until he was assured that
Typee was a sober account of actual experiences. Typee appeared in two
parts in Murray’s “Colonial and Home Library.” Part I appeared on
February 26, 1846; Part II on April 1 of the same year.
Encouraged by the temerity of John Murray, Wiley and Putnam of New
York bought the American rights for Typee. And by an agreement made in
England, Typee appeared simultaneously in New York and London: in
America under the title, Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life During Four
Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas. In 1849, Harper Brothers