an account of a long voyage around the Horn, and various experiences
in the Spanish settlements of California where American boats traded
Yankee calico and trinkets for hides. Written from the point of view
of a sailor, Dana’s story gave no picture of unalloyed pleasure and
adventure; but there was quite enough exotic charm in the California
picture to make a healthy, adventurous lad forget about the floggings,
the brutality, the heroic difficulties of rounding Cape Horn. One has
no proof that Melville read Dana’s book as soon as it came out; but
nine years later, he referred to the author as “my friend Dana,” and
the chances are that Two Years Before the Mast gave Melville just the
fillip he needed to determine on a wider, farther jaunt into the South
Seas.
The wildness and misanthropy of Melville’s joining a whaler in the
depth of winter, with the certainty of having to endure a long
sea-voyage, may easily be exaggerated: it would be a mistake, I think,
to apply to the boyish impulse, which he shared with a thousand other
mothers’ sons, the dark words of the opening chapter of Moby-Dick:
“With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword;
I quietly take to the ship.” In Moby-Dick Melville was supremely
an artist, with an eye constantly upon the dramatic values of his
story; and in the very first paragraph, no, in the first sentence, he
establishes the mood in which the whole book is written. Every bit
of factual material Melville uses there is bent to his purpose; and
though Moby-Dick is biographic of Melville at thirty-two, in the
sense that it discloses every nook and corner of his imagination--one
must not make the mistake of reading back from it into the Melville of
twenty-one, strapping, healthy, restless, impetuous, and blind to his
deepest impulses.
The only certainly objective part of his account of himself in
Moby-Dick is his announcement that he had little or no money in his
purse, and nothing particular to interest him on shore. Melville was
preparing himself for something; but he was not at all sure for what;
and in those distracted hours before the feet are set definitely upon
the road to maturity he chose the most obvious goal before him--that
of adventure in the more watery part of the world. He did not run away
from home: he was already disattached. He did not retreat from hard
“reality”: his voyage to Liverpool had taught him what to expect as
a common seaman. In the light of Melville’s earliest promptings and
suggestions, his father’s trips, his uncle’s arduous voyages, his own
infinite curiosities, stirred by the strange sails and sailors he had
encountered in Liverpool, there is nothing mysterious in either his
mood or his purpose. The “Invisible Police Officer of the Fates” knew
more about the reason for Melville’s voyage than he himself did.
The whale, perhaps, had already seized Melville’s imagination;
he hints as much in the first chapter of Moby-Dick; but one must
accept this hint circumspectly; for in Redburn Melville tells how
disappointed he was when he first saw whales from the Highlander.
“Can these be whales? Monstrous whales such as I had heard of!... It
was a bitter disappointment, from which one was long in recovering. I
lost all respect for whales!... From that day whales fell greatly in
my estimation.” I suspect that the whale was important; but that the
distant voyage mattered even more. At all events, Melville, some time
in December, 1840, made his way to New Bedford, and on January 3, 1841,
he left land behind him.
New Bedford, a town of twelve thousand inhabitants, was already the
centre of the whaling industry, a port full of industry and piety,
great columned mansions set out on lawns, and benign elms, and iron
greyhounds guardedly couchant, and ship-chandler’s shops and dingy
little nautical inns, and a rough waterfront that was not altogether
puritanic nor of New England. Spots and patches of that New Bedford
remain today: the great mansions on County Street are still impressive:
the iron greyhounds and deer are unabashed: even the newer streets,
except around the dingy factory-slums, are lined with trees: the
Seamen’s Bethel is bright with new paint and elegant graining: the
chowders and the fish dishes are above the average, especially in
the poorer restaurants: but around these patches stretch the dismal
shopping thoroughfares, and the dismaler factory districts where an
impoverished population, French-Canadian, Portuguese, Italian, minds
the looms of vast prison-factories, dumped by the laws of chance and
political economy over a lawless landscape of dingy wooden houses.
The whale has become a memory. The gold rush of 1849 resulted in
a vast secession of whaling-men, lured from the South Seas to the
gold-diggings, and the discovery of petroleum in 1859 introduced a
cheaper substitute for whale-oil, whilst the manufacture of spring
steel took the place of whalebone for corsets. The Confederate blockade
under Simms and the sinking of the Stone Whaling Fleet in Charleston
Harbor, whose failure Melville was in due time mournfully to celebrate,
resulted in a large loss of tonnage; and, finally, the manufacture of
cotton for profit attracted capital more readily than the uncertainties
of the sea. All these things heaped together, and the mechanical
improvements of harpoons and harpoon guns and steam vessels and
launches, could not offset them.
Melville saw the whale’s day of glory; and that day was soon done.
There is a real whaling-ship embedded in concrete at South Dartmouth,
and an admirable reproduction on half scale in the Historical
Society’s museum; there are numerous prints and whaling treatises in
the New Bedford Library--Moby-Dick itself is bound in whaleskin, first
edition--and there is a tank labelled sperm oil on the waterfront:
in the museum collections there are models, log books, trinkets,
ornaments, scrimshaw work, tools, harpoons, Polynesian and African
loot, and names like Pease and Coffin still survive, in positions
more or less commanding, in New Bedford, and on Marthas Vineyard and
Nantucket. But there are no whaling-ships in New Bedford now: the
Norwegians maintain the trade; for the American masters of Leviathan
abandoned their calling in the years after the Civil War. The whaler is
to New Bedford what the Conestoga wagon is to Pittsburgh--a romantic
compensation for a dreary and untidy and depauperate provincial life.
The vessel on which Melville shipped was the Acushnet of Fairhaven,
sailing from New Bedford. The master was Valentine Pease; but one
must not look for Queequeg and Tashtego and the Parsee in this boat:
the motley crew of the Pequod was, perhaps, a possibility; but the
actual ship list shows twenty-one Americans, three Portuguese, and one
Englishman. For the first time, Herman Melville enters our vision with
a definable external appearance: forgetting the beard of his later
portraits, one is conscious of a small straight nose, high forehead,
full, mobile, sensitive lips, and, most curious of all, remote, cold
green-blue eyes, that, in this big head, below a shock of dark-brown
hair, have the canny, speculative look of the whale himself. His
complexion in the ship’s list is given as dark--which may merely mean
that he was used to the outdoors and well tanned by the sun. His
height, at twenty-one, was five feet nine and a half inches.
This is the sober-hilarious lad who scanned the tablets in the Seaman’s
Bethel and noted all the young men who had met their death fighting
weather and whales on remote seas: this is the young writer who
listened to the pedantic-looking Chaplain Mudge, and transformed him,
through later acquaintance with Father Taylor of Boston, into Father
Mapple in Moby-Dick: this is the secretive fellow who put down his
place of residence as Fairhaven, the little village across the river
where he had taken lodging. Does he sometimes look dour and grim around
the mouth? Perhaps; but he is as elastic as an india-rubber ball, and
he will bound back with a joke and a smile: and it will take more than
a little jouncing to break down that quizzical reserve.
We leave Herman Melville in New Bedford, and we do not really pick
him up again until he is in the South Seas, sailing towards the line,
one of a dissatisfied company on a harsh, uncomfortable ship, under a
brutal master. The ship stopped at Rio de Janeiro and at the Galapagos
Islands; and probably on the coast of Peru: there he picked up sights
and yarns that served him well in a later period; and in spite of the
bad food, the mean-spirited crew, and the inhuman treatment of the
sick, conditions about which every decent non-professional writer,
like Browne and Dana, justly complained, the voyage had not been a
lost one. For the man there are misfortunes, bitter ones, laming
ones. For the writer, who wishes to heighten his consciousness of
existence, to relive other men’s lives, and to share with them the
deeper realities of their experience, there are no misfortunes. Every
disappointment, every trial, has its revelation. The crew of the
Acushnet was an ill-fated one: ten years later Melville found out from
one of them, Hubbard, what had become of them: the record is one of
desertion, suicide, murder, or a miserable death from syphilis; and the
ship itself foundered in the very year he wrote Moby-Dick: but this
catalogue of misfortunes does not exhaust the matter.
Melville undoubtedly chafed at the monotonous routine and the salt
horse and hard-tack, varied though it might occasionally be by bananas
and breadfruit: in the meanwhile, however, he had jumped into boats and
gone in pursuit of the whale: he had helped to dismember its carcass:
he had chopped up blubber and watched the fire in the try-works:
he had observed his shipmates whittling and carving in wood and in
whalebone all sorts of curious tools, ornaments, and fetiches, work
that was often done with a more sure aesthetic touch than any of the
contemporary arts could show in America; for these whaling implements,
particularly the jagging-wheels, are worthy to have a place alongside
the handsome coverlets and the hooked rugs of the forties in a museum
of American folk-arts. Weaving mats, with the slow methodical motion of
the weaver, his thoughts would solidify into new patterns; or aloft,
on lookout duty, in the bland air of the tropics, he would gaze into
his own mind, still, gently heaving, fathomless, like the waters around
him, and be lulled into a feeling of oneness with the circumambient
world, not with the ship’s crew or the captain, but that remoter world
of infinite space and unthinkable time which somehow, in these moments
of solitude, seemed so much nearer to him.
These thoughts have no images and are not framed in words; Melville
must wait long before, in any way, he can find word or fable to express
them; but though he himself, as observer, was no more conscious of his
growth than a child is conscious of the passage of stars in the sky
during the daytime, these were growing-days for him. The routine of
the ship was in itself a varied education: every sailor was a bit of a
musician and a weaver and an artist and a ropemaker and a blacksmith
and an athlete: thought, when it existed at all, had the benefit of
those manual exercises and bodily rhythms which, quite literally,
increase a man’s grasp and range--a true gymnosophy.
“If by any possibility,” Melville said in Moby-Dick, “there be any as
yet undiscovered thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute
in that small but high hushed world which I might not unreasonably be
ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a
man might rather have done than 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.”
Melville was not wide of the mark: these broad-bottomed ships, slow,
even sailers, cut off for six months at a time from the distractions of
any port, were in truth the best of universities for a young man, still
not out of adolescence, to retire into: they were a sort of profane
cloister. The regular routine, the monastic discipline, yes, even the
restricted diet, were all favourable to a vivid and purposive inner
life--all the more so because a lick of bad weather or a sudden chase
after the whale confronted Melville peremptorily with the demands of
reality, and broke the routine sufficiently to avoid the torpor and
complacent lassitude that dogs all restricted lives.
2
As the Acushnet approached the Marquesas in order to renew water and
to procure fresh food, Melville made plans to escape her. Conditions
were intolerable, and he had learned that there was no definite
terminus to the voyage: he had already endured a year and a half, and
he might have to hover somewhere between the tropics and the poles, if
the oil barrels did not fill up quickly enough, for three, four, even
five years. At twenty-two, he did not dare to squander so much of his
life: he had ties at home, and did not wish to be buried in a floating
coffin. Perhaps this tedious prospect determined Melville as much as
the inhuman treatment; perhaps the sight of Nukuheva itself, its bold
headlands, with the surf beating against the cliffs, its deep inlets
with thickly wooded valleys, separated by the bare spurs of formidable
mountains, made him ache for solid ground. There is a form of
homesickness one must call land-sickness, and perhaps Melville had it.
Did the naked maidens who swam aboard when the ship came to port make
the scene seem doubly attractive to Melville and to his companion,
Toby? Was he pleasantly shocked and intoxicated by those brown bodies,
and stirred, as well as repelled, by the open debauchery of the nights
they spent aboard ship? Melville does not tell us. The cruelty and the
hardship and the tedium and the green jungle and the abrupt mountains
and the brown maidens doubtless all played a part in the adventure
and gave heat to it: at all events, Toby and Melville made speedy
use of their shore-leave, and set out to escape for a while into the
interior, till they could make away again on another ship. Their plans
miscarried. After dire hardship, sleeping in dank ravines, leaping from
tree-trunk to tree-top down gorges, they found themselves in the valley
of a dreaded tribe, the Typees, whose very name meant eater of men.
Melville stayed among the Typees for four months, with a leg that
had become lamed and infected in making the escape. The people he
was thrown among were suspected of ferocity and cannibalism; that
is to say, like a good many savage tribes, they fought a species of
extravagant and ritualistic battle with their enemies, the Happars, and
retired from the fray usually fit enough in flesh and limb to fight
another time. As for the cannibalism, at the very end of his stay,
Melville had reason to think that one of their feasts was culminating
in the extreme delicacy of Long Pig: but up to that time he had had an
exemplary vegetarian diet of breadfruit and cocoanut and various fine
elaborations of these staples; and but for the anxiety of losing Toby,
who disappeared completely, after going in search of medical aid for
Melville’s leg, and the further anxiety of not knowing whether he was
being treated as a distinguished visitor, entitled to the services of
a young man-servant, Kory-Kory, and royal attentions from Mehevi, the
chief, or whether he was being fattened for the sacrifice, like the
god-apparent among the Aztecs--but for these things all was serene.
If life were merely a matter of getting a living in the physical
sense, as Western Civilization had come largely to believe, then the
Typees were in a higher state of civilization than New York or Paris
or London had achieved. The Typees were a sort of perpetually endowed
leisure class; their food fell from the trees; their water flowed
at their feet; their garments, of pounded bark, tappa, were a sport
to make, and with less attention than they would have to give to a
fitting from a Bond Street tailor or dressmaker, they were made; their
days were torpid and free from care, like those of a _rentier_ with
gilt-edge government bonds; and though they had ceremonial observances
and religious feasts and wars, the symbol never stood between them and
their physical life: they did not whine about their sins and cry to
God: even in their sexual life, there was rivalry without jealousy,
and marriage without physical fidelity: almost the only desire they
were accustomed to repress was the typical Western desire for a little
repression!
The first whaleman Melville had ever met, on his trip to Liverpool,
had raised a doubt about the value of civilized society. “And what’s
the use of being snivelized,” he used to say. “Snivelized chaps only
learns the way to take on ’bout life and snivel. You don’t see any
Methodist chaps feelin’ dreadful about their souls; you don’t see any
damned beggars and pesky constables in Madagasky.... Blast Ameriky, I
say.” Melville could appreciate this among the Typees. “There were,” he
says, “none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity
of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no
foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no
debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers,
perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description; no assaults
and battery attorneys to foment discord, backing their clients into
a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; no poor relations
everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber and diminishing the
elbow-room at the family table; no destitute widows with their children
starving on the cold charities of the world; no debtors’ prisons;
no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or, to sum up all in one
word--No Money! That ‘root of all evil’ was not to be found in the
valley. In this secluded abode of happiness there were no cross old
women, no cruel step-dames, no withered spinsters, no lovesick maidens,
no sour bachelors, no inattentive husbands, no melancholy young men, no
blubbering youngsters and no squalling brats. All was mirth, fun, and
high good humour. Blue devils, hypochondria, and doleful dumps went and
hid themselves among the nooks and crannies of the rocks.”
By this process of exclusion, Melville tells us much about his
experience and the effect it had on him. “Civilization,” he discovered,
“does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she had not even her
full share of them.... If truth and justice and the better principles
of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how
are we to account for the social condition of the Typees?” Small
wonder that Melville’s contemporaries in the money-warrens of the West
thought that he was inventing these people out of whole cloth! But
it was not by the mere absence of ugly and harassing things that the
Valley of the Typees was flecked with sunlight and warm, rose-violet
shadows; there were positive pleasures as well; above all things, there
was beauty, the constant beauty of splendid forms, undisguised by
clothes, beauty so simple and statuesque that, in later years, it gave
Melville an immediate clue to Greek sculpture. There were many happy
afternoons; afternoons that he spent in bathing with a parcel of brown
river nymphs; afternoons when, once he had got the taboo lifted, he
paddled idly in a canoe with Fayaway, a lovely girl in his household,
who was his constant companion; there were evenings spent watching the
dancers in the hula-hula grounds, swaying, arching, gliding, swimming,
whirling in an ecstasy of sensuous enjoyment that threatened to rob
this “quiet, sober-minded, modest young man” of all his studious
inhibitions; and there were days of contrast, spent with masculine
gravity in the company of Mehevi and his attendant warriors, feasting
heavily, with no cloying reminder of the other sex. Life itself became
the most beautiful of rituals: its duties were games, its necessities
were pastimes. Rivalry, enmity, jealousy, hardship, violence were all
transposed to the realm of art, where, instead of defeating life, they
added to its enjoyment.
True: these people were simple to the point of childishness: they could
become excited, young and greybeards alike, over a popgun that Melville
devised; but did not the Western World have its popguns, too: did
not the crowds on Broadway turn out for a fire or a soldiers’ parade
with the same naïve delight? It was true, too, that these islanders
had taboos, whose meaning Melville could never quite understand: they
seemed as capricious as the flight of a bat, and like that flight, were
determined doubtless by some imperceptible fact or belief that belonged
to the insect order of rationality: but the taboos did not strike many
of the essential elements of life. A man might be taboo against the
assaults of his enemies and so might venture among them freely as a
messenger, like the good fellow who abetted Melville’s final rescue,
or the canoe might be taboo against women using it--a comical male
reservation--but food and clothing were not made taboo to the destitute
by the laws of property, nor were men and women condemned to an acrid
chastity by sexual taboos which had also arisen very largely out of
laws and customs connected with the succession of property. There was
no theft where every one could help himself, and no vice where virtue
made such simple and rational demands.
Melville had a healthy capacity to adapt himself to a situation;
and he was not ill at ease, little though this life resembled the
world of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association,
which the missionaries were introducing with the help of biblical
pocket-handkerchiefs, pious exhortations, cheap Manchester rags, ugly
bedizenments, and the sense of bitter sin that naturally accompanies
the horrors of venereal disease. Had it not been for the infection in
his leg, the uncertainty as to his eventual fate, and the plain desire
of some of his native friends to make a thorough Typee of him, by a
spirited application of tattooing, there is no telling how long he
might have stayed, or how thoroughly he might have been lulled into
forgetfulness of his Western connections.
In Mardi Melville pictured Hautia, the symbol of sensual oblivion, as
the constant beckoner of the hero; and Hautia must have pressed him
hard in Typee. Nevertheless, Yillah, who represented the spiritual
quest, had already stirred him up before he started on his voyage,
and in the end, Yillah must have reminded him of activities that
found no answering chord among his happy, kindly Typee captors. When
that ghastly devil with his tattooing implements made advances to
him, Melville felt his quintessential foreignness. People wore queer
clothes in Albany, perhaps, but thank heaven, they did not permanently
discolour the flesh. Fayaway was lovely to look at, lovely to court,
and perhaps lovelier to possess: but no man in full command of his
faculties ever looked forward to a lifetime of such possession as
sufficient reason for not committing suicide. Kory-Kory, his ugly
man-servant, was as faithful as Sancho Panza; King Mehevi was as
gracious as Francis I; one might even say a good word about tattooing
and man-eating: they were matters of taste, perhaps; but inevitably,
Melville felt a little out of it; and neither love-making nor bachelor
companionship could quite make up for his spiritual isolation.