CHAPTER X

MAN-EATING EPICURES--THE MARQUESAS

“‘Why, they are cannibals!’ said Toby on one occasion when I

eulogised the tribe. ‘Granted,’ I replied, ‘but a more humane,

gentlemanly and amiable set of epicures do not probably exist in the

Pacific.’”

--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Typee_.

It was sunset when the _Acushnet_ came within sight of the loom of

the mountains of the Marquesas. Innumerable sea-fowls, screaming and

whirling in spiral tracts had, for some days previous, been following

the vessel as harbingers from land. As the ship drew nearer to green

earth, several of man-of-war’s-hawks, with their blood-red bills and

raven plumage, had circled round the ship in diminishing circles

until Melville was able distinctly to mark the strange flashing of

their eyes; and then, as if satisfied by their observations, they

would sail up into the air as if to carry sinister warning on ahead.

Then,--driftwood on the oily swells; and finally had come the glad

announcement from aloft--given with that peculiar prolongation of sound

that a sailor loves--“Land ho!”

After running all night with a light breeze straight for the island,

the _Acushnet_ was in easy distance of the shore by morning. But

as the _Acushnet_ had approached the island from the side opposite

to Tyohee--christened by Captain Porter, Melville remembered,

Massachusetts Bay,--they were obliged to sail some distance along

the shore. Melville was surprised not to find “enamelled and softly

swelling plains, shaded over by delicious groves, and watered by

purling brooks.” Instead he found himself cruising along a bold

rock-bound coast, dashed high against by the beating surf, and broken

here and there into deep inlets that offered sudden glimpses of

blooming valleys, deep glens, waterfalls and waving groves. As the ship

sailed by the projecting and rocky headlands with their short inland

vistas of new and startling beauty, one of the sailors exclaimed to

Melville, pointing with his hand in the direction of the treacherous

valley: “There--there’s Typee. Oh, the bloody cannibals, what a meal

they’d make of us if we were to take it into our heads to land! but

they say they don’t like sailors’ flesh, it’s too salt. I say, matey,

how should you like to be shoved ashore there, eh?” Melville shuddered

at the question, he says, little thinking that within the space of a

few weeks he would actually be a captive in that self-same valley.

Towards noon they swung abreast of their harbour. No description can

do justice to its beauty, Melville tells us. But its beauty was to him

not an immediate discovery. All that he saw was the tri-coloured flag

of France trailing over the stern of six vessels, whose black hulls and

bristling broadsides floated incongruously in that tranquil bay.

The first emissary from the shore to welcome the _Acushnet_ was a

visitor in that interesting state of intoxication when a man is amiable

and helpless: a south-sea vagabond, once a lieutenant in the English

navy, recently appointed pilot to the harbour by the invincible French.

He was aided by some benevolent person out of his whale-boat into

the _Acushnet_, and though utterly unable to stand erect or navigate

his own body, he magnanimously proffered to steer the ship to a good

anchorage: a feat Captain Pease did for himself, despite the amazing

volubility of the visitor in contrary commands.

This renegade from Christendom and humanity was of a type not

infrequently met with in accounts of the South Seas. At Hannamanoo,

Melville came across another such--a white man in the South Sea

girdle, and tattooed on the face, living among a tribe of savages

and apparently settled for life, so perfectly satisfied seemed he

with his circumstances. This man was an Englishman,--Lem Hardy he

called himself,--who had deserted from a trading brig touching at

Hannamanoo for wood and water some ten years previous. Aboard the

_Acushnet_ he told his history. “Thrown upon the world a foundling,

his paternal origin was as much a mystery to him as the genealogy of

Odin; and scorned by everybody, he fled the parish workhouse when a

boy, and launched upon the sea. He had followed it for several years,

a dog before the mast, and now he had thrown it up forever.” He had

gone ashore as a sovereign power, armed with a musket and a bag of

ammunition, and soon became, what he was when Melville found him,

military leader of the tribe, war-god of the entire island, living

under the sacred protection of an express edict of the taboo, his

person inviolable forever. In _Iles Marquises, ou Nouka-Hiva, Histoire,

Géographie, Mœurs et Considérations Générales_ (Paris, 1843) by

Vincendon-Dumoulin and Desgraz is to be found (pages 356-359) a history

of two more of these vagabonds: one Joseph Cabri, a Frenchman, and one

E. Roberts, an Englishman. Cabri returned to Europe, for a time, to

find the novelty of his tattooing both an embarrassment and a source of

livelihood. He was examined by grave learned societies, was presented

before several crowned heads, and submitted his person to intimate

examination to any one who would pay his fee. In 1818 he died in

obscurity and poverty in Valenciennes, his birth place. His historians

regret that his precious person was not preserved in alcohol to

delight the inquiring mind of later generations. The Pacific, it would

appear, was early a place of refuge for men with an insurmountable

homesickness for the mud. Melville soon came to believe that the

gifts of civilisation to the South Seas were without exception very

doubtful blessings; he came to be a special pleader for the barbaric

virtues; when these virtues were practised by legitimate barbarians;

but the spectacle of such men as Hardy fell beyond the pale of his

unusually broad sympathies. Though he was despairingly alert to the

vices of Christendom, never was he betrayed into a corrupt hankering to

recapitulate into savagery. Though he excused the cannibalism of the

Marquesans as an amiable weakness, he gazed upon Hardy “with a feeling

akin to horror.” Hardy’s tattooing was to Melville the outward and

visible sign of the lowest degradation to which a mortal, nurtured in a

civilisation that had for thousands of years a pathetically imperfect

struggle striven to some significance above the beast, could possibly

descend. “What an impress!” Melville exclaimed in superlative loathing.

“Far worse than Cain’s--_his_ was perhaps a wrinkle, or a freckle,

which some of our modern cosmetics might have effaced.” But Hardy’s

tattooing was to Melville a mark indelible of the blackest of all

betrayals.

More worthy emissaries than the pilot to the port of Tyohee were to

welcome Melville to the Marquesas. The entrance of the _Acushnet_

brought from the shore a flotilla of native canoes. “Such strange

outcries and passionate gesticulations I never certainly heard or saw

before,” Melville says. “You would have thought the islanders were on

the point of flying at one another’s throats, whereas they were only

amiably engaged in disentangling their boats.” Melville was surprised

at the strange absence of a single woman in the invading party, not

then knowing that canoes were “taboo” to women, and that consequently,

“whenever a Marquesan lady voyages by water, she puts in requisition

the paddles of her own fair body.”

As the _Acushnet_ approached within a mile and a half of the foot of

the bay, Melville noticed a singular commotion in the water ahead of

the vessel: the women, swimming out from shore, eager to embrace the

advantages of civilisation. “As they drew nearer,” Melville says,

“and as I watched the rising and sinking of their forms, and beheld

the uplifted right arm bearing above the water the girdle of tappa,

and their long dark hair trailing beside them as they swam, I almost

fancied they could be nothing else but so many mermaids. Under slow

headway we sailed right into the midst of these swimming nymphs, and

they boarded us at every quarter; many seizing hold of the chain-plates

and springing into the chains; others, at the peril of being run over

by the vessel in her course, catching at the bob-stays, and wreathing

their slender forms about the ropes, hung suspended in the air. All

of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where

they clung dripping with the brine and glowing with the bath, their

jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half enveloping

their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage

vivacity, laughing gaily at one another, and chattering away with

infinite glee. Nor were they idle the while, for each performed the

simple offices of the toilet for the other. Their luxuriant locks,

wound up and twisted into the smallest possible compass, were freed

from the briny element; the whole person carefully dried, and from a

small little round shell that passed from hand to hand, anointed with

a fragrant oil: their adornments were completed by passing a few loose

folds of white tappa, in a modest cincture, around the waist. Thus

arrayed, they no longer hesitated, but flung themselves lightly over

the bulwarks, and were quickly frolicking about the decks. Many of

them went forward, perching upon the headrails or running out upon the

bowsprit, while others seated themselves upon the taffrail, or reclined

at full length upon the boats.”

The ship was fairly captured, and it yielded itself willing prisoner.

In the evening, after anchor had been struck, the deck was hung with

lanterns, and the women, decked in flowers, danced with “an abandoned

voluptuousness” that was a prelude “to every species of riot and

debauchery.” According to Melville’s account, on board the _Acushnet_

“the grossest licentiousness and the most shameful inebriety prevailed,

with occasional and but short-lived interruptions, through the whole

period of her stay.”

Nor were the French at the Marquesas neglectful of their duties to the

islanders. Admiral Du Petit-Thouars had stationed about one hundred

soldiers ashore, according to Melville’s account. Every other day

the troops marched out in full regalia, and for hours went through

all sorts of military evolutions to impress a congregation of naked

cannibals with the superior sophistications of Christendom. “A

regiment of the Old Guard, reviewed on a summer’s day in the Champs

Elysées,” Melville vouches, “could not have made a more critically

correct appearance.” The French had also with them, to enrich their

harvest of savage plaudits, a _puarkee nuee_, or “big hog”--in more

cultivated language, a horse. One of the officers was commissioned to

prance up and down the beach at full speed on this animal, with results

that redounded to the glory of France. This horse “was unanimously

pronounced by the islanders to be the most extraordinary specimen of

zoology that had ever come under their observation.”

It would be an ungracious presumption to contend that the French, while

at the Marquesas, exhibited to the natives only the sterner side of

civilisation. The behaviour of the French at Tahiti leaves room for

the hope that they were no less gallant at the Marquesas. An officer

of the _Reine Blanche_, writing at sea on October 10, 1842, of the

exploits of his countrymen at Tahiti, says, in part: “In the evening,

more than a hundred women came on board. At dinner time, the officers

and midshipmen invited them gallantly to their tables; and the repasts,

which were very gay, were prolonged sufficiently late at night, so

that fear might keep on board those of the women who were afraid to

sail home by the doubtful light of the stars.” The last three lines of

this letter were suppressed by the _Journal de Debats_, it is true,

but given in the _National_ and other journals. Three days later the

letter was officially pronounced “inexact” by the _Moniteur_, which

courageously asserted that “it is utterly false that a frigate has been

the theatre of corruption, in any country whatever; and French mothers

may continue to congratulate themselves that their sons serve in the

navy of their country.”

While the Frenchmen at the Marquesas--no less than the Americans, one

hopes with pardonable patriotic jealousy--were giving their mothers

at home cause for congratulation, Melville came to the determination

to leave the ship; “to use the concise, point-blank phrase of the

sailors, I had made up my mind to ‘run away.’” And that his reasons

for resolving to take this step were numerous and weighty, he says,

may be inferred from the fact that he chose rather to risk his fortune

among cannibals than to endure another voyage on board the _Acushnet_.

In _Typee_ he gives a general account of the captain’s bad treatment

of the crew, and his non-fulfilment of agreements. Life aboard the

_Acushnet_ has already been sufficiently expatiated upon.

Melville knew that immediately adjacent to Nukuheva, and only separated

from it by the mountains seen from the harbour, lay the lovely valley

of Happar, whose inmates cherished the most friendly relations with

the inhabitants of Nukuheva. On the other side of Happar, and closely

adjoining it, lay the magnificent valley of the dreaded Typee, the

unappeasable enemies of both these tribes. These Typees enjoyed a

prodigious notoriety all over the islands. The natives of Nukuheva,

Melville says, used to try to frighten the crew of the _Acushnet_

“by pointing to one of their own number and calling him a Typee,

manifesting no little surprise when we did not take to our heels at so

terrible an announcement.” But having ascertained the fact that the

tribes of the Marquesas dwell isolated in the depths of the valleys,

and avoided wandering about the more elevated portions of the islands,

Melville concluded that unperceived he might effect a passage to the

mountains, where he might easily and safely remain, supporting himself

on such fruits as came in his way, until the sailing of the ship. The

idea pleased him greatly. He imagined himself seated beneath a cocoanut

tree on the brow of the mountain, with a cluster of plantains within

easy reach, criticising the ship’s nautical evolutions as she worked

her way out of the harbour, and contrasting the verdant scenery about

him with the recollections of narrow greasy decks and the vile gloom of

the forecastle.

Melville at first prided himself that he was the only person on board

the _Acushnet_ sufficiently reckless to attempt an idyllic sojourn

on an island of irreclaimable cannibals. But Toby’s perennially

hanging over the side of the ship, gazing wistfully at the shore in

moody isolation, coupled with Melville’s knowledge of Toby’s hearty

detestation of the ship, of his dauntless courage, and his other

engaging traits as companion in high adventure, led Melville to

share with Toby his schemes. A few words won Toby’s most impetuous

co-operation. Plans were rapidly made and ratified by an affectionate

wedding of palms, when, to elude suspicion, each repaired to his

hammock to spend a last night aboard the _Acushnet_.

[Illustration: In 1855

RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE

Editor of the _Sandusky Mirror_]

On the morrow, with as much tobacco, ship’s biscuit and calico as they

could stow in the front of their frocks, Melville and Toby made off for

the interior of Nukuheva,--but not before Melville “lingered behind

in the forecastle a moment to take a parting glance at its familiar

features.” Their five days of marvellous adventures that landed them

finally in the valley of Typee has abidingly tried the credulity of

Melville’s readers--though never for an instant their patience.

After reading these adventures, Stevenson expressed his slangy approval

by hailing Melville as “a howling cheese.” It has been questioned in

passing whether or not the number of days that two strong male humans,

going through incredible exertion, can support themselves upon a hunk

of bread soaked in sweat and ingrained with shreds of tobacco, must

not be fewer than Melville makes out. And did they, in sober verity,

critics have asked, lower themselves down the cliff by swinging from

creeper to creeper with horrid gaps between them--was it as steep

as Melville says, and the creepers as far apart? And did they, on

another occasion, as Melville asserts, break a second gigantic fall by

pitching on the topmost branches of a very high palm tree? During these

thrilling and terrible five days, hardship runs hard on the heels of

hardship, and each obstacle as it presents itself, seems, if possible,

more unsurmountable than the last. There is no way out of this, one

says for the tenth time: but the sagacity and fearless confidence

of Toby--to whom let glory be given--and the manful endurance of

Melville through parching fever and agonising lameness, disappoint the

lugubrious reader. On the third day after their escape, their ardour

is cooled to a resolve to forego futile ramblings for a space. They

crawled under a clump of thick bushes, and pulling up the long grass

that grew around, covered themselves completely with it to endure

another downpour. While the exhausted Toby slept through the violent

rain, Melville tossed about in a raging fever, without the heart to

wake Toby when the rain ceased. Chancing to push aside a branch,

Melville was as transfixed with surprised delight as if he had opened a

sudden vista into Paradise. He “looked straight down into the bosom of

a valley, which swept away in long wavy undulations to the blue waters

in the distance. Midway towards the sea, and peering here and there

amidst the foliage, might be seen the palmetto-thatched houses of its

inhabitants glistening in the sun that had bleached them to a dazzling

whiteness. The vale was more than three leagues in length, and about a

mile across its greatest width. Everywhere below me, from the base of

the precipice upon whose very verge I had been unconsciously reposing,

the surface of the vale presented a mass of foliage, spread with such

rich profusion that it was impossible to determine of what description

of trees it consisted. But perhaps there was nothing about the scenery

I beheld more impressive than those silent cascades, whose slender

threads of water, after leaping down the steep cliffs, were lost amidst

the rich foliage of the valley. Over all the landscape there reigned

the most hushed repose, which I almost feared to break, lest, like the

enchanted gardens of the fairy tale, a single syllable might dissolve

the spell.” Toby was awakened and called into consultation. With his

usual impetuosity, Toby wanted promptly to descend into the valley

before them; but Melville restrained him, dwelling upon the perilous

possibility of its inhabitants being Typees. Toby was with difficulty

reined to circumspection, and off Melville and his companion started

on a wild goose chase for a valley on the other side of the ridge.

So fruitless and disheartening did this attempt prove, that Melville

was reduced to the wan solace that it was, after all, better to die

of starvation in Nukuheva than to be fed on salt beef, stale water

and flinty bread in the forecastle of the _Acushnet_. Yet Toby was

dauntless. Despite the defeats of the preceding day, Toby awoke on the

following morning as blithe and joyous as a young bird. Melville’s

fever and his swollen leg, however, had left him not so exultant.

“What’s to be done now?” Melville inquired, after their morning repast

of a crumb of sweat-mixed biscuit and tobacco,--and rather doleful was

his inquiry, he confesses.

“Descend into that same valley we descried yesterday,” rejoined Toby,

with a rapidity and loudness of utterance that led Melville to suspect

almost that Toby had been slyly devouring the broadside of an ox in

some of the adjoining thickets. “Come on, come on; shove ahead. There’s

a lively lad,” shouted Toby as he led the way down a ravine that jagged

steeply along boulders and tangled roots down into the valley; “never

mind the rocks; kick them out of the way, as I do; and to-morrow, old

fellow, take my word for it, we shall be in clover. Come on;” and so

saying he dashed along the ravine like a madman.

Thus was piloted down into the heart of barbarism the man who was to

emerge as the first Missionary Polynesia ever sent to Christendom. And

on the chances of Toby’s contagious impetuosity hung the annexation

of a new realm to the kingdom of the imagination and the discovery

of a new manner in the history of letters. For on that day, when

Melville and Toby struggled down that ravine like Belzoni worming

himself through the subterranean passages of the Egyptian catacombs,

the Polynesians were without a competent apologist, and the literary

possibilities of the South Seas were unsuspected.

Literature was, of course, already elaborated with fantastic patterns

drawn from barbarism, and the Indians of Aphra Behn and Voltaire had

given place to the redmen of Cooper. Earlier than this, however, the

great discoverers, in their wealth of records, had given many an

account of their contacts with savage peoples. But one searches in

vain among these records for any very vivid sense that the savage and

the Christian belong to the same order of nature. At best, one gathers

the impression that in savagery God’s image had been multiplied in an

excess of contemptible counterfeits. Melville reports that as late

as his day “wanton acts of cruelty are not unusual on the part of

sea captains landing at islands comparatively unknown. Indeed, it is

almost incredible, the light in which many sailors regard these naked

heathens. They hardly consider them human. But it is a curious fact,

that the more ignorant and degraded men are, the more contemptuously

they look upon those whom they deem their inferiors.” John G. Paton

records in his _Autobiography_ how, in 1860, three traders gleefully

told him that to humble the natives of Tanna, and to diminish their

numbers, they had let out on shore at different ports, four men ill

with the measles--an exceedingly virulent disease among savage peoples.

“Our watchwords are,” these jolly traders said, “‘sweep the creatures

into the sea, and let white men occupy the soil.’” This sentiment

belongs more to a fixed human type, than to a period, of course: and

that type has frequently taken to sailing strange seas. In treachery,

cruelty, and profligacy, the exploits of European discoverers contain

some of the rosiest pages in the history of villainy.

These sickening pages of civilised barbarism soon won to the savage

ardent apologists, however, who applied an old technique of libel by

imputing to the unbreeched heathen a touching array of the superior

virtues. Montaigne was among the first to come forward in this

capacity. “We may call them barbarous in regard to reasons rules,”

he said, “but not in respect to us that exceed them in all kinde of

barbarisme. Their warres are noble and generous, and have as much

excuse and beautie, as this humane infirmitie may admit: they ayme

at nought so much, and have no other foundation amongst them, but

the meere jelousie of vertue.” Once in full current of idealisation

Montaigne goes on to write as if he soberly believed that savage

peoples were descended from a stock that Eve had conceived by an angel

before the fall. In his dithyramb on the nobilities of savagery,

Montaigne was unhampered by any first-hand dealings with savages, and

he was far too wise ever to betray the remotest inclination to improve

his state by migrating into the bosom of their uncorrupted nobility.

The myth of the “noble savage” was a taking conceit, however, and

when Rousseau taught the world the art of reverie, he taught it also

an easy vagabondage into the virgin forest and into the pure heart of

the “natural man.” In describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing

rooms, Taine says that “The fops dreamed between two madrigals of

the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” Rousseau’s

savage, “attached to no place, having no prescribed task, obeying no

one, having no other law than his own will,” was, of course, a wilful

backward glance to the vanished paradise of childhood, not a finding of

ethnology. Yet ethnology may prate as it will, the “noble savage” is a

myth especially diverting to the over-sophisticated, and like dreams

of the virgin forest, thrives irrepressibly among the upholsterings

of civilisation. The soft and ardent dreamer, no less than the sleek

and parched imagination of Main Street, find compensation for the

defeats of civilisation in dreams of a primitive Arcadia. While the

kettle is boiling they relax into slippers and make the grand tour.

Chateaubriand--whose life, according to Lemaître, was a “magnificent

series of attitudes”--showed incredible hardihood of attitudinising

in crossing the Atlantic in actual quest of the primitive. In the

forest west of Albany he did pretend to find some satisfaction in

wild landscape. He showed his “intoxication” at the beauties of wild

nature by taking pains to do “various wilful things that made my guide

furious.” But Chateaubriand was less fortunate in his contact with

savagery than he was with nature. His first savages he found under a

shed taking dancing lessons from a little Frenchman, who, “bepowdered

and befrizzled” was scraping on a pocket fiddle to the prancings of

“ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” Chateaubriand

concludes with a reflection: “Was it not a crushing circumstance for

a disciple of Rousseau?” And it is an indubitable fact that if the

present-day disciples of the South Sea myth would show Chateaubriand’s

hardihood and migrate to Polynesia, they would find themselves in

circumstances no less “crushing.”

Melville was the first competent literary artist to write with

authority about the South Seas. In his day, a voyage to those distant

parts was a jaunt not lightly to be undertaken. In the Pacific

there were islands to be discovered, islands to be annexed, and

whales to be lanced. As for the incidental savage life encountered

in such enterprise, that, in Montaigne’s phrase, was there to be

bastardised, by applying it to the pleasures of our corrupted taste.

These attractions of whaling and patriotism--with incidental rites

to Priapus--had tempted more than one man away from the comfort of

his muffins, and more than one returned to give an inventory of

the fruits of the temptation. The knowledge that these men had of

Polynesia was ridiculously slight: the regular procedure was to

shoot a few cannibals, to make several marriages after the manner of

Loti. The result is a monotonous series of reports of the glorious

accomplishments of Christians: varied on occasions with lengthy and

learned dissertations on heathendom. But they are invariably writers

with insular imagination, telling us much of the writer, but never

violating the heart of Polynesia.

The Missionaries, discreetly scandalised at the exploitation of unholy

flesh, went valiantly forth to fight the battle of righteousness

in the midst of the enemy. The missionaries came to be qualified

by long first-hand contact to write intimately of the heathen: but

their records are redolent with sanctity, not sympathy. The South Sea

vagabonds were the best hope of letters: but they all seem to have died

without dictating their memoirs. William Mariner, it is true, thanks

to a mutiny at the Tongo Islands in 1805, was “several years resident

in those islands:” and upon Mariner’s return, Dr. John Martin spent

infinite patience in recording every detail of savage life he could

draw from Mariner. Dr. Martin’s book is still a classic in its way:

detailed, sober, and naked of literary pretensions. This book is the

nearest approach to _Typee_ that came out of the South Seas before

Melville’s time. So numerous have been the imitators of Melville, so

popular has been the manner that he originated, that it is difficult

at the present day to appreciate the novelty of _Typee_ at the time of

its appearance. When we read Mr. Frederick O’Brien we do not always

remember that Mr. O’Brien is playing “sedulous ape”--there is here

intended no discourtesy to Mr. O’Brien--to Melville, but that in

_Typee_ and _Omoo_ Melville was playing “sedulous ape” to nobody. Only

when _Typee_ is seen against the background of _A Missionary Voyage to

the Southern Pacific Ocean performed in the years 1796, 1797, 1798 in

the Ship Duff_ (1799) and Mariner’s _Tonga_ (1816) (fittingly dedicated

to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, and companion of

Captain Cook in the South Seas) can Melville’s originality begin to

transpire.

This originality lies partly, of course, in the novelty of Melville’s

experience, partly in the temperament through which this experience

was refracted. Melville himself believed his only originality was his

loyalty to fact. He bows himself out of the Preface “trusting that

his anxious desire to speak the ungarnished truth will gain him the

confidence of his readers.”

When Melville’s brother Gansevoort offered _Typee_ for publication

in England, it was accepted not as fiction but as ethnology, and was

published as _Melville’s Marquesas_ only after Melville had vouched for

its entire veracity.

Though Melville published _Typee_ upright in the conviction that he had

in its composition been loyal both to veracity and truth, his critics

were not prone to take him at his word. And he was to learn, too, that

veracity and truth are not interchangeable terms. Men do, in fact,

believe pretty much what they find it most advantageous to believe. We

live by prejudices, not by syllogisms. In _Typee_, Melville undertook

to show from first-hand observation the obvious fact that there are two

sides both to civilisation and to savagery. He was among the earliest

of literary travellers to see in barbarians anything but queer folk.

He intuitively understood them, caught their point of view, respected

and often admired it. He measured the life of the Marquesans against

that of civilisation, and wrote: “The term ‘savage’ is, I conceive,

often misapplied, and indeed when I consider the vices, cruelties,

and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere

of a feverish civilisation, I am inclined to think that so far as the

relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan

Islanders sent to the United States as missionaries, might be quite as

useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a

similar capacity.” Civilisation is so inured to anathema,--so reassured

by it,--indeed, that Melville could write a vague and sentimental

attack upon its obvious imperfections with the cool assurance that each

of his readers, applying the charges to some neighbour, would approve

in self-righteousness. But one ventures the “ungarnished truth” about

any of the vested interests of civilisation at the peril of his peace

in this world and the next. It was when Melville focussed his charge

and wrote “a few passages which may be thought to bear rather hard

upon a reverend order of men” with incidental reflections upon “that

glorious cause which has not always been served by the proceedings of

some of its advocates,” that all the musketry of the soldiers of the

Prince of Peace was aimed at his head. Melville himself was a man whose

tolerance provoked those who sat in jealous monopoly upon warring

sureties to accuse him of license. He specifies his delight in finding

in the valley of Typee that “an unbounded liberty of conscience seemed

to prevail. Those who were pleased to do so were allowed to repose

implicit faith in an ill-favoured god with a large bottle-nose and fat

shapeless arms crossed upon his breast; whilst others worshipped an

image which, having no likeness either in heaven or on earth, could

hardly be called an idol. As the islanders always maintained a discrete

reserve with regard to my own peculiar views on religion, I thought it

would be excessively ill-bred in me to pry into theirs.” This boast

of delicacy did not pass unnoticed by “a reverend order of men.” The

vitriolic rejoinder of the London Missionary Society would seem to

indicate that there may be two versions of “the ungarnished truth.” It

should be stated, however, that the English editions of _Typee_ contain

strictures against the Missionaries that were omitted in the American

editions. But even Melville’s unsanctified critics showed an anxiety

to repudiate him. Both _Typee_ and _Omoo_ were scouted as impertinent

inventions, defying belief in their “cool sneering wit and perfect want

of heart.” Melville’s name was suspiciously examined as being a _nom

de plume_ used to cover a cowardly and supercilious libel. A gentleman

signing himself G. W. P. and writing in the _American Review_ (1847,

Vol. IV, pp. 36-46) was scandalised by Melville’s habit of presenting

“voluptuous pictures, and with cool deliberate art breaking off always

at the right point, so as without offending decency, he may excite

unchaste desire.” After discovering in Melville’s writing a boastful

lechery, this gentleman undertakes to discountenance Melville on three

scores: (1) only the impotent make amorous boasts; (2) Melville had

none of Sir Epicure Mammon’s wished-for elixir; (3) the beauty of

Polynesian women is all myth.

Unshaken in the conviction of his loyalty to fact, Melville discovered

that the essence of originality lies in reporting “the ungarnished

truth.”

On the subject of “originality” in literature, Melville says in

_Pierre_: “In the inferior instances of an immediate literary success,

in very young writers, it would be almost invariably observable, that

for that instant success they were chiefly indebted to some rich and

peculiar experience in life, embodied in a book, which because, for

that cause, containing original matter, the author himself, forsooth,

is to be considered original; in this way, many very original books

being the product of very unoriginal minds.” It is none the less true,

however, that though Melville and Toby both lived among the cannibals,

it was Melville, not Toby, who wrote _Typee_.

For four months Melville was held in friendly captivity by the Typees.

His swollen leg was healed by native doctors--but not without prolonged

pain and anxiety--he was fed, he was amused, he was lionised by

the valley. His hosts were savages; they were idolaters, they were

inhuman beasts who licked their lips over the roasted thighs of their

enemies; and at the same time they were crowned with flowers, sometimes

exquisite in beauty, courteous in manners, and engaged all day long in

doing not only what they enjoyed doing, but what, so far as Melville

could judge, they had every right to enjoy doing. With Toby, Melville

was consigned to the household of Kory-Kory. Kory-Kory, though a tried

servitor and faithful valet, was, Melville admits, in his shavings and

tattoos, a hideous object to look upon--covered all over with fish,

fowl, and monster, like an illustrated copy of Goldsmith’s _Animated

Nature_. Kory-Kory’s father, Marheyo, a retired gentleman of gigantic

frame, was an eccentric old fellow, who seems to have been governed

by no fixed principles whatever. He employed the greater part of his

time in throwing up a little shed just outside the house, tinkering

away at it endlessly, without ever appearing to make any perceptible

advance. He would eat, sleep, potter about, with fine contempt for

the proprieties of time or place. “Frequently he might have been

seen taking a nap in the sun at noonday, or a bath in the stream at

midnight. Once I beheld him eighty feet from the ground, in the tuft of

a cocoanut tree, smoking, and often I saw him standing up to the waist

in water, engaged in plucking out the stray hairs of his beard, using

a piece of mussel-shell for tweezers. I remember in particular his

having a choice pair of ear-ornaments, fabricated from the teeth of

some sea-monster. These he would alternately wear and take off at least

fifty times in the course of a day, going and coming from his little

hut on each occasion with all the tranquillity imaginable. Sometimes

slipping them through the slits in his ears, he would seize his spear

and go stalking beneath the shadows of the neighbouring groves, as if

about to give a hostile meeting to some cannibal knight. But he would

soon return again, and hiding his weapon under the projecting eaves

of the house, and rolling his clumsy trinkets carefully in a piece of

tappa, would resume his more pacific operations as quietly as if he had

never interrupted them.”

Kory-Kory’s mother was, so Melville reports, the only industrious

person in all the valley of Typee: “bustling about the house like a

country landlady at an unexpected arrival: forever giving the young

girls tasks to perform, which the little huzzies as often neglected;

poking into every corner, and rummaging over bundles of old tappa,

or making a prodigious clatter among the calabashes. She could not

have employed herself more actively had she been left an exceedingly

muscular and destitute widow, with an inordinate supply of young

children, in the bleakest part of the civilised world.” Yet was hers

withal the kindliest heart imaginable. “Warm indeed,” Melville says,

“are my remembrances of the dear, good, affectionate old Tinor!”

There also belonged to the household, three young men, “dissipated,

good-for-nothing, roystering blades of savages,” and several girls. Of

these, Melville has immortalised Fayaway, his most constant companion.

He has anatomised her charms in the manner of his first _Fragment from

a Writing-Desk_. But it is Fayaway in action, not Fayaway in still

life, that survives in the imagination. At Melville’s intercession, the

taboo against women entering a boat was lifted. Many hours they spent

together swimming, or floating in the canoe: diversions heightened in

their heinousness by the fact that Fayaway for the most part clung to

the primitive and summer garb of Eden--and the costume became her.

Nor did Melville’s depravity cease with his unblushing approval of

nakedness. “Strange as it may seem,” Melville writes in the ’40’s,

“there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more

advantage than in the act of smoking.” Fayaway not only smoked,--but

she smoked a pipe, as they drifted in the canoe. One day, as they were

gliding along, Fayaway “seemed all at once to be struck with a happy

idea. With a wild exclamation of delight, she disengaged from her

person the ample robe of tappa which was knotted over her shoulder (for

the purpose of shielding her from the sun), and spreading it out like

a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe. We

American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a

prettier mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any craft.”

John La Farge has painted Fayaway in this attitude.

And the occupation of Toby during all this? Soon after their arrival,

Toby had been despatched to Nukuheva under pretence of procuring relief

for Melville’s swollen leg, actually to facilitate his and Melville’s

escape. Toby never again returned to Typee. He had been treacherously

beguiled on board a whaler, unable to escape until he left his vessel

at New Zealand. “After some further adventures,” says Melville in

_The Story of Toby_, written in July, 1846, ten days after the two

men discovered each other’s existence through the instrumentality of

_Typee_, and published as a “sequel” to that novel, “Toby arrived home

in less than two years after leaving the Marquesas.”

While Melville had the companionship of Toby in Typee, he was even then

eager to get back to civilisation. That savagery was good for savages

he never wearied of contending. But despite the idyllic delights of

Typee--an idyll with a sombre background, however--Melville was never

tempted to resign himself to its vacant animal felicity. Melville,

unlike Baudelaire and Whitman, was not stirred by the advantages of

“living with the animals.” While among them, he evinced a desire

neither to adopt their ways, nor to change them. He made them pop-guns,

he astonished them by exhibiting the miracle of sewing. He tried to

teach them to box. “As not one of the natives had soul enough in him

to stand up like a man, and allow me to hammer away at him, for my own

personal satisfaction and that of the king, I was necessitated to

fight with an imaginary enemy, whom I invariably made to knock under to

my superior prowess.”

Among the bachelors of the Ti, the men’s club of the valley, he

chatted, he smoked, he drowsed: he witnessed the Feast of the

Calabashes when, for the livelong day “the drums sounded, the priests

chanted, and the multitude roared and feasted”--a scene reminiscent of

a University whole-heartedly given over to “campus activity.” A mock

battle was staged for his diversion. He entered the funeral fastnesses

where the effigies of former heroes eternally paddled canoes adorned by

the skulls of their enemies. He mused by pools, splashing with laughing

bronze nymphs. Yet withal, Melville was a captive in the valley. His

lameness, too, returned. His hosts began to make friendly but insistent

suggestions that he be tattooed--a suggestion superlatively repugnant

to him. He heard, moreover, the clamour of a cannibal feast, and lifted

the cover of a tub under which lay a fresh human skeleton. Under these

circumstances he taught old Marheyo two English words: _Home_ and

_Mother_. But he did not complete the trinity. _Forsan et haec olim

meminisse juvabit._ It was time for him to depart.

One profoundly silent noon, as Melville lay lame and miserable under

Kory-Kory’s roof, Mow-Mow, the one-eyed chief, appeared at the door,

and leaning forward towards Melville, whispered: _Toby pemi ena_--“Toby

has arrived.” That evening Mow-Mow’s dead body floated on the Pacific,

a boat-hook having been mortally hurled at his throat. And it was

Melville who hurled the boat-hook.

An Australian whaler, touching at the harbour of Nukuheva, had been

informed of Melville’s detention in Typee. Desirous of adding to his

crew, the Captain had sailed round thither, and “hove to” off the

mouth of the bay. Chary of the man-eating propensities of the Typees,

the Captain sent in a boat-load of taboo natives from the other

harbour, with an interpreter at their head, to procure Melville’s

release. Accompanied by a throng of armed natives, Melville was

carried down to the shore--being too lame to walk the distance. A

gun and an extravagant bounty of powder and calico were offered for

Melville’s release: but this bounty was clamorously and indignantly

rejected. Karakoee, the head of the ransoming party, was menaced by

furious gestures, and forced out into the sea, up to his waist in

the surf. Blows were struck, wounds were given, and blood flowed. In

the excitement of the fray, Melville was left to the guardianship of

Marheyo, Kory-Kory, and Fayaway. Throwing to these three the articles

that had been brought for his ransom, Melville bounded into the boat

which was in immediate readiness to pull off towards the ship. It

was not until the boat was about fifty yards from the shore that the

savages recovered from their astonishment at Melville’s alacrity in

escape. Then Mow-Mow and six or seven warriors rushed into the sea and

hurled their javelins at the retreating boat--and some of the weapons

passed as close as was desirable. The wind was freshening every minute,

and was right in the teeth of the retreating party. Karakoee, who was

steering the boat, gave many a look towards a jutting point of the bay

they had to pass. When they came within a hundred yards of the point,

the savages on the shore dashed into the water, swimming out towards

the boat: and by the time Melville’s party reached the headland, the

savages were spread right across the boat’s course. The rowers got

out their knives and held them ready between their teeth. Melville

seized the boat-hook. Mow-Mow, with his tomahawk between his teeth, was

nearest to the boat, ready the next instant to seize one of the oars.

“Even at the moment I felt horror at the act I was to commit; but it

was no time for pity or compunction, and with a true aim, and exerting

all my strength, I dashed the boat-hook at him. I struck him below the

throat, and forced him downward.” Mow-Mow’s body arose in the wake of

the boat, but not to attack again. Another savage seized the gunwale,

but the knives of the rowers so mauled his wrists, that before many

moments the boat was past all the Typees, and in safety. In the closing

tableau, Melville fell fainting into the arms of Karakoee.

Though later, when Melville was a sailor in the United States Navy,

he touched at the Marquesas, he never again set foot within the

valley of Typee. Melville had known the Typees in their uncorrupted

glory--strong, wicked, laughter-loving and clean. Mr. O’Brien visited

Typee not many years ago, to find it pathetically fallen from its high

estate. “I found myself,” he says, “in a loneliness indescribable and

terrible. No sound but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the

sombre silence.... Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a

feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a

weight, upon leaf and flower. The thin, sharp buzzing of the _nonos_

was incessant.” Mr. O’Brien discovered in the heart of the valley fewer

than a dozen people who sat within the houses by cocoanut-husk fires,

the acrid smoke of which daunted the _nonos_. “They have clung to their

lonely _paepaes_ despite their poverty of numbers and the ferocity of

the _nonos_. They had clearings with cocoanuts and breadfruits, but

they cared no longer to cultivate them, preferring rather to sit sadly

in the curling fumes and dream of the past. One old man read aloud the

_Gospel of St. John_ in Marquesan, and the others listlessly listened,

seeming to drink in little comfort from the verses, which he recited in

the chanting monotone of their _uta_.... Nine miles in length is Typee,

from a glorious cataract that leaps over the dark buttress wall where

the mountain bounds the valley, to the blazing beach. And in all this

extent of marvellously rich land, there are now this wretched dozen

natives, too old or listless to gather their own food.”

Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!