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.”