aid, hobbled down to the shore: a boatload of tabooed Kanakas had come
with presents of calico and a musket to ransom the captive. The Typees
were unwilling to part with Melville, and the boat was about to pull
off without him, when, in the midst of the clamour, he broke away
and threw himself into the arms of his rescuers, escaping only after
he himself had killed a ferocious old chief, hot in pursuit, who in
a happier and more apathetic day had been kind to him. Fayaway and
Hautia’s bliss lay behind him; Fayaway clutching a piece of calico
Melville had thrown her for consolation: Yillah lay in an unfathomable
distance beyond, and what stood between was a tortured filthy life in
a broken-down whaler, whose planks were rotting and whose hold swarmed
with cockroaches and rats. Many a time during the next two years,
Melville must have regretted leaving Fayaway’s arms! Yes: and she must
have regretted Melville, for a little later an American traveller,
Henry Augustus Wise, discovered a brown maid from the valley of Typee,
named Fayaway, working as maid-of-all-work to the French commissary
of the garrison at Nukuheva--a proper snivelized anti-climax to the
unsullied tropical summer of Melville’s residence and courtship among
the Typees.
3
A harsh captain is a bad fellow to sail under, but a weak captain
is worse. When Melville came to on the Julia, a drab little barque,
with a jaunty way of catching the wind, he found himself under the
orders of an uncertain cockney landsman from Melbourne, with a crew
of discontented scalawags, and a roving commission to hunt whales or
seals or pick up a living somehow on the South Seas. Paper Jack, as
the men called this landlubber of a captain, signed him on for one
cruise, with the stipulation that he be discharged at the next port;
and when Melville looked around him, he discovered that between the
slack disorder of the Little Jule and the tyranny of the Acushnet he
had little to choose.
The physician on board, Dr. Long Ghost, had parted company with the
captain and had made his bunk in the forecastle. The mate, a hale,
bullet-headed fellow with a kind heart and a heavy fist, John Jermin
by name, was always half-seas-over; the captain was one of those
watchful, ineffectual, capriciously determined men who achieved the
dignity of isolation and got the semblance of obedience by never
delivering an order through his own mouth. Without any success in
whaling, the ship remained at sea, lest by lying in harbour and
replenishing its provisions it might incidentally lose the whole crew
by desertion.
Melville was contemptuous of the captain, he admired the bluff,
bustling Jermin, and he fell in with the doctor, who was an educated
man, as naturally as one globule of mercury will coalesce with another
as soon as they touch. The doctor was a capital fellow to finish off
Melville’s education and to while away the sleepy hours of the night:
“he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy,
and associated with gentlemen. As for his learning, he quoted Virgil,
and talked of Hobbes of Malmesbury, besides repeating poetry by the
Canto, especially Hudibras. He was, moreover, a man who had seen the
world. In the easiest possible way he could refer to an amour he had
in Palermo, his lion-hunting before breakfast among the Caffres, and
the quality of the coffee he had drunk in Muscat.” Such a man did not
merely bring authentic reports of books and conversations; he was
himself a picaresque library, and he who ran with him had much to read.
This was the sort of acquaintance Melville could never have picked up
in Albany, nor in New York: one first must become an outcast before he
can have the privilege of such company.
The captain became seriously ill; and he purposed to send his men to
sea under command of Jermin while he recuperated on shore. Heartily
sick of the voyage, the crew rebelled at the notion, and when the ship
lay off the harbour of Papeetee, they sent a round robin to the English
consul, stating their grievances and petitioning to be put ashore.
Wilson, the consul, would not hear of it: to cow them into submission,
he delivered them over to the French frigate, La Reine Blanche, that
lay in the harbour; and for five days and nights Melville had a chance
to live on a French man-of-war and to observe the contrast between
French customs and character, and the American and English ways he was
used to; but the imprisonment was only a demonstration; and the ship
returned so that Wilson might again utter his ultimatum to the crew.
The upshot of it was that the crew was put inside the British jail, the
Calabooza Beretanee, under the surveillance of a huge, brown Polynesian
dignitary; and after a few weeks of their semi-confinement, the Julia
went off without them; and they finally found themselves at liberty
among the miscellaneous riff-raff that haunted the shores of these
tropical islands.
During the next couple of months, Melville lived the life of a rover,
in the company of Dr. Long Ghost, visiting among the natives, working
for a brief period on a Polynesian farm, for a tall robust Yankee
born in the backwoods of Maine, and finally trying, unsuccessfully,
to advance their fortunes in the court of Queen Pomaree. It was a
rambling, roving, thoroughly outlandish mode of life which must
have had the episodic and incredible quality of a dream: there was
a complete absence of pressure and direction; Melville drifted from
one islet in Imeeo to another as a leaf driven by chance breezes will
drift on the surface of a still pond. Thrown among the superficially
converted Christians of Tahiti, Melville observed no advance over
the untainted pagans of Typee; quite the contrary. “So far as mere
temporal felicity was concerned, the Tahitians are far worse off now
than formerly. Years ago brought to a stand, where all that is corrupt
in barbarism and civilization unite, to the exclusion of the virtues
of either state ... they must here remain stationary until utterly
extinct.”
Away from the purlieus of the Christian “mickonaree” Melville enjoyed
the lazy, savage life. The air was relaxing; but for a young American,
bred in Albany and Pittsfield, the danger was that he might bless his
braces, and damn his relaxes too opprobriously; so, on the whole,
one must count these months of rambling and laziness and observation
as good ones for Melville. Some of the dreamy, unexpected quality of
them went, no doubt, into the fantasy of Mardi when he came to write
it: Omoo, which records the actuality, and Mardi, which utters the
dream, are the morning and night of the same day. Through it all,
Melville kept his shape; he was still a quizzical, modest, slightly
sentimental, sober-minded young man: when he beholds the beautiful wife
of a sugar-planter, mounted gallantly on a white pony, his emotions
are touched by distant adoration and curiosity, just as they might
have been in Lansingburgh; and one suspects that he plagued more than
one incipient brown sweetheart with a far too respectful and brotherly
reserve. Five years later, Melville still remembered how the sugar
planter’s wife had captivated him: when he thinks back to this trivial
incident he sets it apart in a chapter; and he remembers, too, the
brown feminine mockery at his attempts to be sentimental. There is no
likelihood that this young man will succumb to Queen Hautia: he is
always on guard. If he needs any advice at this period it is that of
Koheleth: Be not righteous over-much: why shouldst thou destroy thyself?
4
Whether Melville judged better of his third whaling captain, the
Vineyarder, whom he finally fell in with, he does not tell: whether he
tired of whaling off the coast of Japan one does not know either. One
has a glimpse of him working as a clerk for four months in Honolulu,
the capital of the Sandwich Islands, among the fine dwelling-houses,
the hotels, the barber-shops, the offices, of the whites; and there
one’s knowledge ends. By the summer of 1843 he had shipped aboard the
frigate, United States, upon its homeward voyage. The free, vagrant,
uncertain life of the rover was over: he was in the Navy now. Melville
had not done more than pick up a bare living, certainly, for when
he was in Callao, about to equip himself for the terrible exposure
of rounding the Horn, he could get no pea-jacket from the purser,
and apparently could not afford to purchase one on shore: so he
manufactured a white jacket for himself out of a white duck frock,
folded and padded, cold comfort enough in dry weather, and colder
comfort in wet, when the jacket was so absorbent his shipmates would
cruelly stand up against him, to get rid of their own moisture.
Melville was as sick of adventure as Ulysses himself. When he heard
the words, “Up anchor! Man the capstan: we’re homeward bound,” from
the gruff boatswain, the words ran through his veins like golden wine.
Now the little daily current of anxiety was over: there were a few new
ropes to learn; but a strong, eager fellow, always ready to bear a
hand, always prompt to spring to his post, is pretty sure of getting
a good word from his immediate superiors, even though it is not an
audible one; and with the big ship’s company, the work itself was
not so onerous but that there was time for long chats and lengthier
meditations, particularly if one belonged to the maintop. Melville knew
the value of height and seclusion to stimulate the inward eye: climbing
a high tower, he wrote in The Encantadas, is the best way to see the
country around one; and at sea, he would climb the mast: that was his
watch-tower and his cloister.
The Navy of Melville’s day was not unlike the Navy of today: these
saurian institutions do not add to the quantity of brains in their
brain-pan, nor do they change the quality of their tissue: it was
bound up by red tape, precedent, a stupefying routine, and a set
of regulations designed to establish and maintain the authority of
those marginal officers who may have neither seamanship nor the gift
of command. In addition to the abuses that still exist in the Navy,
some of which are inevitable by the mere act of regimentation and by
an existence that is purposeless except in terms of slaughter and
bellicose action, there was in Melville’s time the further iniquity
of flogging. Melville’s words against this institution are in bold
contrast to Dana’s. Dana was one of those cautious friends of a cause
whose timid counsel is far harder to dispose of than the practices of
its enemies: he minced and compromised, and, dealing only with merchant
sailors, still recommended merely that flogging be mitigated. To
Melville flogging was a degradation of humanity; if discipline could
not be maintained without it, discipline was degrading; if the navy
of a free community could not be maintained without it, navies were
degrading: let us get rid of all these things together.
Life on the man-of-war was difficult and capricious still. Through the
mere punctilio of an officer in charge, Melville was unable to give his
white jacket a coat of paint; and he suffered from terrible exposure
in the journey round the Horn; but after the comparative solitude of
his savage Polynesian existence, with just a stray soul for company,
the ship had something of the stir and variety of a metropolis: it
contained people like Nord, a man of mystery and romance, who, Melville
suspected sympathetically, had been bolted in the mill of adversity:
and there was Lemsford, the poet, who conceived platitudes in Dionysiac
ecstasy, and above all, there was Jack Chase, the captain of the
maintop, a simple, hearty, beautiful soul, who gave young Melville all
a father could have given him; and to whom Melville clung, at sea,
and later, in memory--a starved orphan, finding in Jovian Chase all
that his father’s death, and his father’s marble image, denied him.
The hours spent with Chase on the maintop were happy hours indeed;
and no less so were those that Melville spent with books, Walpole’s
Letters and the Jew of Malta and Volpone, as well as earlier books
of travel and adventure, such as Morgan’s History of Algiers, and
Knox’s Captivity in Ceylon. Coming as they did, after a long period
of abstention and thirst, these books had a profound influence upon
Melville: and they give his literary pedigree. Through his experience
of life, he broke away by necessity from the weak romantics of his
youth, and, seeking the nearest parallels to his own adventures and
meditations and visions, he found them in the Elizabethan dramatists
and the seventeenth-century travellers and literary philosophers.
Melville’s genius followed two separate lines of growth, which joined
in Moby-Dick: one of them was that of Marlowe and Webster, with their
untrammelled emotions, their stertorous vitality, and their keen
transposition of dream into reality and of reality into dream--the
other was that of Knox’s Captivity, direct, honest, well ballasted. Had
not these books been in the ship’s library, Melville might have taken
much longer to find himself. Jack Chase himself added to Melville’s
literary education: he could recite the Lusiad by heart, and Camoëns
made a vivid impression on Melville. In two of his last poems he
assumed Camoëns’ personality.
“Mind you, White-Jacket,” Jack Chase would say, “there are many
great men in the world besides commodores and captains. I’ve that
there, White-Jacket”--touching his forehead--“which under happier
skies--perhaps in yon solitary star there, peeping down from those
clouds--might have made a Homer of me. But Fate is Fate, White-Jacket;
and we Homers who happen to be captains of the tops must write our Odes
in our hearts and publish them in our heads.” Did Melville smile at
Chase’s conceit, or was he already meditating his own odes and epics?
When he wrote Typee, he explained that the incidents of it had been
imprinted in his memory by being told over and over again; and one can
imagine a hundred places where Melville might have found less incentive
to literary activity than he found in the library and the maintop of
the U. S. frigate United States.
There were three main events in the voyage. Two of these experiences
involved deep personal humiliation. One was the time he was called to
the mast and condemned to the scourge for being absent from his post
at general quarters, a post to which he had never to his knowledge
been assigned: in a panic of righteous anger, he measured the distance
between himself and the captain, and had the blind impulse to rush
him overboard, and end his own life, too, rather than undergo the
degradation of this punishment. By a miracle, he was saved from this
fate through the courageous intercession of a corporal of the marines,
who spoke up in his behalf and got the order remitted. The other
humiliation was the massacre of the beards, when, by the capricious
order of “Captain Claret,” the autocrat of the United States, even the
oldest veteran, just completing his last voyage, was ordered to shave
his beard; and when he would not submit to it, was flogged and put in
irons. No one can feel the inner resentment occasioned by such an order
who has not been subject to a similar indignity; on such occasions, the
spirit boils in helpless rebellion. In civilian life, only the poor and
the outcast know this experience; but in every large and regimented
organization, military or commercial, such affronts to human dignity
and autonomy are commonplace; they characterize the system, rather than
the men who conduct it. Had Captain Claret not, on the whole, been a
lenient officer, Melville would have had a hundred other occasions for
this feeling. In gauging Melville’s conduct at a later period, one must
not forget these humiliations; their effect was cumulative.
But the crowning adventure of the voyage happened when the United
States was off the capes of Virginia in a calm sea: the ship gave a
sudden lurch and he was thrown from the yard-arm into the water. Let
him tell the story for himself:
“With a 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 frostwork that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all
my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm....
As I gushed into the sea, a thunderboom 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 down
with a glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm 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 agonizing 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.... 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.” Melville was rescued; but not before he had rid himself of his
white jacket forever; the ominous whiteness that he found later in
Moby-Dick was accentuated, perhaps, by his memory of that “accursed
jacket” which had delivered him up to the elements, rather than
protected him, and in the moment of extremity, had nearly proved his
shroud.
To have faced life and death, not as abstractions, but as concrete
events, when a sinew less of resolution would have meant his
extinction, in a stove boat off the coast of Japan, at the hands of
the pursuant Typees, or enveloped in the white jacket at sea: to have
thrown himself among strange men, and to have kept his own shape,
always set apart a little by culture and breeding, but never rebuffed
for a feebleness or an unmanliness or inability to bear a hand: to
feel the wild throb of a ship in a gale, sea-wracked but magnificent,
creaking, whining, wind-whistling, slapping into a trough of wave or
climbing dizzily on to a crest, and to feel a wilder, louder, more
victorious throb within: to have been attracted by the languors and
sensuous jollities of a savage life, but still more attracted by all
that civilisation had left with him, in hints and promises, Homer
and Dante and Shakespeare and Cervantes: to have left home a boy,
innocent and unspoiled, and to have returned a man, toughened, bronzed,
firm-fibred, and full of mixed knowledge, yet still essentially
innocent and unspoiled--all this had happened to Melville. He had left
America to seek adventures. Now he had found adventures; and he left
that behind, left the South Seas and the whaleman’s joys and hardships,
and the man-of-war’s settled routine, to pursue adventure farther, but
on a higher plane.
There comes a time--it is the beginning of manhood or womanhood--when
one realizes that adventure is as humdrum as routine unless one
assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows
within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is
empty, just as empty in the forecastle of a whaler as in the chamber
of a counting-house; it is not what one does, but in a manifold
sense, what one _realizes_, that keeps existence from being vain and
trivial. Mankind moves about in worlds not realized: Wordsworth’s
phrase expresses a profound reality, and Melville himself suggests
a similar idea in Mardi, when the philosopher points out that ages
hence people may realize more keenly what has happened today than our
own contemporaries do. It is the artist, the knower, the sayer, who
realizes human experience, who takes the raw lump of ore we find in
nature, smelts it, refines it, assays it, and stamps it into coins
that can pass from hand to hand and make every man who touches them
the richer. “No man can live for another” is a true doctrine as far
as experience goes; but it is the opposite of true in the life of
realization; for into this fuller and more durable apprehension of
experience goes our whole social heritage, all the forms and symbols
that have aided human expression in the past, the cumulative effect of
many cultures and many different modes of life. Those who absorb and
reflect and meditate and relate, play an important part in the economy
of society; and life is abrupt and incomplete when that part is not
performed.
Melville had travelled far and had experienced much; he had run the
gamut, or rather, the gauntlet of every sort of human experience
except the normal and easy and domestic one promised him by birth
and parentage. He will never be a school teacher, a professor, a
ship captain, a lawyer, a political leader; however necessary these
occupations, there is nothing in Melville’s training or temperament
that moves him in one of these directions. What is left? What is left
is something he has been silently preparing himself for all along: he
must become a writer. Though the society to which he returned, unlike
Jack Chase and other humble listeners to Melville’s yarns, regarded
that function as a trivial one, compared to accomplishments in a
dissociated world of action, and by its contemptuous regard and its
dissociation, deprived it of sustenance and made much of it in fact
trivial, here is the occupation which will gain in a hundred ways by
his experiences.
Melville must have had more than a dim anticipation of this career when
he stepped ashore, at Boston, in October, 1844; and had he known where
it would lead him he might well have shrunk from following it further.
His physical adventures were to be welcomed as romantic myths, and
his mental adventures were to be denounced as blasphemies. In short,
“the indefinite Navy Commissioners, so far out of sight aloft,” had
a mission in store for Melville that Hardy’s ironic President of the
Immortals might have concocted in a sinister moment.
CHAPTER THREE: TROPICAL SUMMER
In 1844, when Herman Melville landed in Boston, provincial American
society was in that state of uneasy transformation which means either
a vaster accomplishment or destruction; and in 1844 it was still
possible to think that the result would not be, fatally, destruction.
The Mexican War loomed ahead, thanks partly to the itch of Southern
planters to extend the territory under cotton, abetted by the belief
of men like Seward that by a process of territorial aggrandizement and
conquest the conflict between Northern and Southern economic interests
could be diverted. The American state had already acquired the desire
to crown itself with glory and prestige by conquering one of its
disordered neighbours--a process which mixed an ineffable air of virtue
with the proud consciousness that we had chosen an opponent who could
not possibly lick us.
Already something that aggravated the economic conflict had appeared
on the horizon, a breach between the several states over the ancient
metaphysical question of the one and the many, somewhat confused by
doubts as to whether free institutions could flourish alongside an
empire committed to slavery and expansion. These doubts must have
been even more confusing to a neutral observer, since cities like
Charleston and New Orleans, for all their slavery, were less depressing
and barbarous than such proud emporia as New York and such dingy
manufacturing hives as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There was so much
right and wrong on both sides of Mason and Dixon’s line that the
question could only be decided by furious men of action, who would
decisively pound their fist into one side of the scale or the other in
order to make weight and register a conclusion.