Chapter TWO: Sea-Drift

In 1840, Richard Henry Dana published Two Years Before the Mast. It was 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.

The moment for escape at last came. Melville, sadly in need of medical 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.