CHAPTER V

DISCOVERIES ON TWO CONTINENTS

“If you read of St. Peter’s, they say, and then go and visit it, ten

to one, you account it a dwarf compared to your high-raised ideal.

And, doubtless, Jonah himself must have been much disappointed when

he looked up to the domed midriff surmounting the whale’s belly, and

surveyed the ribbed pillars around him. A pretty large belly, to be

sure, thought he, but not so big as it might have been.”

--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Redburn_.

The merchantman on which Melville shipped was not a Liverpool liner,

or packet-ship, plying in connection with a sisterhood of packets.

She was a _regular trader_ to Liverpool; sailing upon no fixed days,

and acting very much as she pleased, being bound by no obligation of

any kind, though in all her voyages ever having New York or Liverpool

for her destination. Melville’s craft was not a greyhound, not a very

fast sailer. The swifter of the packet ships then made the passage

in fifteen or sixteen days; the _Highlander_, travelling at a more

matronly pace, was out on the Atlantic a leisurely month.

“It was very early in the month of June that we sailed,” says Melville;

“and I had greatly rejoiced that it was that time of year; for it

would be warm and pleasant upon the ocean I thought; and my voyage

would be like a summer excursion to the seashore for the benefit of

the salt water, and a change of scene and society.” But the fact was

not identical with Melville’s fancy, and before many days at sea, he

found it a galling mockery to remember that his sisters had promised

to tell all enquiring friends that he had gone “_abroad_”: “just as if

I was visiting Europe on a tour with my tutor.” Though his thirty days

at sea considerably disabused him--for the time--of the unmitigated

delights of ocean travel in the forecastle; still always in the vague

and retreating distance did he hold to the promise of some stupendous

discovery still in store. Finally, one morning when he came on deck, he

was thrilled to discover that he was, in sober fact, within sight of

a foreign land: a shore-line that in imagination he transformed into

the seacoast of Bohemia. “A foreign country actually visible!” But as

he gazed ashore, disillusion ran hot upon the heels of his romantic

expectations.

“Was that Ireland? Why, there was nothing remarkable about that;

nothing startling. If _that’s_ the way a foreign country looks, I might

as well have stayed at home. Now what, exactly, I had fancied the shore

would look like, I can not say; but I had a vague idea that it would be

something strange and wonderful.”

The next land they sighted was Wales. “It was high noon, and a long

line of purple mountains lay like a bank of clouds against the east.

But, after all, the general effect of these mountains was mortifyingly

like the general effect of the Kaatskill Mountains on the Hudson River.”

It was not until midnight of the third day that they arrived at the

mouth of the Mersey. Before the following daybreak they took the first

flood.

“Presently, in the misty twilight, we passed immense buoys, and caught

sight of distant objects on shore, vague and shadowy shapes, like

Ossian’s ghosts.” And then it was that Melville found leisure to lean

over the side, “trying to summon up some image of Liverpool, to see how

the reality would answer to my concept.”

As the day advanced, the river contracted, and in the clear morning

Melville got his first sharp impression of a foreign port.

“I beheld lofty ranges of dingy ware-houses, which seemed very

deficient in the elements of the marvellous; and bore a most unexpected

resemblance to the ware-houses along South Street in New York.

There was nothing strange, nothing extraordinary about them. There

they stood; a row of calm and collected ware-houses; very good and

substantial edifices, doubtless, and admirably adapted to the ends had

in view by the builders: but yet, these edifices, I must confess, were

a sad and bitter disappointment to me.”

Melville was six weeks in Liverpool. Of this part of his adventure, he

says in _Redburn_: “I do not mean to present a diary of my stay there.

I shall here simply record the general tenor of the life led by our

crew during that interval; and will proceed to note down, at random,

my own wanderings about town, and impressions of things as they are

recalled to me now after the lapse of so many (twelve) years.”

Not the least important detail of these six weeks is the fact that

Melville and his ship-mates were very well fed at the sign of the

Baltimore Clipper. “The roast beef of Old England abounded; and so

did the immortal plum-puddings and the unspeakably capital gooseberry

pies.” Owing to the strict but necessary regulations of the Liverpool

docks, no fire of any kind was allowed on board the vessels within

them. And hence, though the sailors of the _Highlander_ slept in the

forecastle, they were fed ashore at the expense of the ship’s owners.

This, in a large crew remaining at Liverpool more than six weeks, as

the _Highlander_ did, formed no inconsiderable item in the expenses of

the voyage. The Baltimore Clipper was one of the boarding houses near

the docks which flourished on the appetite of sailors. At the Baltimore

Clipper was fed not only the crew of the _Highlander_, but, each in

a separate apartment, a variety of other crews as well. Since each

crew was known collectively by the name of its ship, the shouts of the

servant girls running about at dinner time mustering their guests must

have been alarming to an uninitiated visitor.

“Where are the _Empresses of China_?--Here’s their beef been smoking

this half-hour”--“Fly, Betty, my dear, here come the _Panthers_”--“Run,

Molly, my love; get the salt-cellars for the _Splendids_”--“You, Peggy,

where’s the _Siddons’_ pickle-pot?”--“I say, Judy, are you never coming

with that pudding for the _Sultans_?”

It was to the Baltimore Clipper that Jackson immediately led the

ship’s crew when they first sprang ashore: up this street and down

that till at last he brought them to their destination in a narrow

lane filled with boarding-houses, spirit-vaults and sailors. While

Melville’s shipmates were engaged in tippling and talking with

numerous old acquaintances of theirs in the neighbourhood who thronged

about the door, he sat alone in the dining-room appropriated to the

_Highlanders_ “meditating upon the fact that I was now seated upon an

English bench, under an English roof, in an English tavern, forming an

integral part of the British empire.”

Melville examined the place attentively. “It was a long narrow little

room, with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out upon

a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall, the top of which

was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles stuck into mortar. A

dull lamp swung overhead, placed in a wooden ship suspended from the

ceiling. The walls were covered with a paper, representing an endless

succession of vessels of all nations continually circumnavigating the

apartment. From the street came a confused uproar of ballad-singers,

bawling women, babies, and drunken sailors.”

It was during this disenchanting examination that the realisation began

to creep chillingly over Melville that his prospect of seeing the

world as a sailor was, after all, but very doubtful. It seems never

to have struck him before that sailors but hover about the edges of

terra-firma; that “they land only upon wharves and pier-heads, and

their reminiscences of travel are only a dim recollection of a chain of

tap-rooms surrounding the globe.”

Melville’s six weeks in Liverpool offered him, however, opportunity

to make slightly more extended observations. During these weeks he

was free to go where he pleased between four o’clock in the afternoon

and the following dawn. Sundays he had entirely at his own disposal.

But withal, it was an excessively limited and distorted version of

England that was open for his examination. Except for his shipmates,

his very distant cousin, the Earl of Leven and Melville and Queen

Victoria and such like notables, he knew by name no living soul in

the British Isles. And neither his companions in the forecastle,

nor the remote and elaborately titled strangers of Melville House,

offered encouragement of an easy and glowing intimacy. With but three

dollars as his net capital--money advanced him in Liverpool by the

ship--and without a thread of presentable clothing on his back, he

could not hope promiscuously to ingratiate himself either by his purse

or the adornments of his person. Thus lacking in the fundamentals of

friendship, his native charms stood him in little stead. So alone he

walked the streets of Liverpool and gratuitously saw the sights.

While on the high seas, Melville had improved his fallow hours by

poring over an old guide-book of Liverpool that had descended to him

from his father. This old family relic was to Melville cherished with

a passionate and reverent affection. Around it clustered most of the

fond associations that are the cords of man. It had been handled by

Allan amid the very scenes it described; it bore some “half-effaced

miscellaneous memoranda in pencil, characteristic of a methodical

mind, and therefore indubitably my father’s”: jottings of “a strange,

subdued, old, midsummer interest” to Melville. And on the fly-leaves

were crabbed inscriptions, and “crayon sketches of wild animals and

falling air-castles.” These decorations were the handiwork of Melville

and his brothers and sisters and cousins. Of his own contributions,

Melville says: “as poets do with their juvenile sonnets, I might write

under this horse, ‘_Drawn at the age of three years_,’ and under

this autograph, ‘_Executed at the age of eight_.’” This guide-book

was to Melville a sacred volume, and he expresses a wish that he

might immortalise it. Addressing this unpretentious looking little

green-bound, spotted and tarnished guide-book, he exclaims: “Dear book!

I will sell my Shakespeare, and even sacrifice my old quarto Hogarth,

before I will part from you. Yes, I will go to the hammer myself, ere

I send you to be knocked down in the auctioneer’s scrambles. I will,

my beloved; till you drop leaf from leaf, and letter from letter, you

shall have a snug shelf somewhere, though I have no bench for myself.”

To the earlier manuscript additions to this guide-book, Melville added,

while on the Atlantic, drawings of ships and anchors, and snatches of

Dibdin’s sea-poetry. And as he lay in his bunk, with the aid of this

antiquated volume he used to take “pleasant afternoon rambles through

the town, down St. James street and up Great George’s, stopping at

various places of interest and attraction” so familiar seemed the

features of the map. But in this vagabondage of reverie he was but

preparing for himself a poignant disillusionment. Lying in the dim,

reeking forecastle, with his head full of deceitful day-dreams, he

was being tossed by the creaking ship towards a bitter awakening. The

Liverpool of the guide-book purported to be the Liverpool of 1808. The

Liverpool of which Melville dreamed was, of course, without date and

local habitation. When Melville found himself face to face with the

solid reality of the Liverpool of 1837, he was offered an object-lesson

in mutability. As the brute facts smote in the face of his cherished

sentimentalisings, he sat his concrete self down on a particular shop

step in a certain street in Liverpool, reflected on guide-books and

luxuriated in disenchantment. “Guide-books,” he then came to see, “are

the least reliable books in all literature: and nearly all literature,

in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our

fathers went; but how few of those former places can their posterity

trace.” In the end he sealed his moralising by the pious reflection

that “there is one Holy Guide-Book that will never lead you astray if

you but follow it aright.” There can be no doubt that the ghost of

Allan, retracing its mundane haunts at that moment trailed its shadowy

substance through the offspring of its discarded flesh.

If this same paternal ghost, recognising its kinship with this

obstruction of blood and bone, tracked in futile affection at

Melville’s heels through Liverpool, only a posthumous survival of its

terrestrial Calvinism could have spared it an agonised six weeks; only

the sardonic optimism of a faith in predestination could have saved

Allan’s shade from consternation and fear at the chances of Melville’s

flesh. Or it may be that Allan was sent as a disembodied spectator

to haunt Melville’s wake, by way of penance for his pre-ghostly

theological errors. In any event, Melville, on occasion, took Allan

through the most hideous parts of Liverpool. Of evenings they strolled

through the narrow streets where the sailors’ boarding-houses were.

“Hand-organs, fiddlers, and cymbals, plied by strolling musicians,

mixed with the songs of seamen, the babble of women and children, and

groaning and whining of beggars. From the various boarding-houses

proceeded the noise of revelry and dancing: and from the open

casements leaned young girls and old women chattering and laughing

with the crowds in the middle of the street.” In the vicinity were

“notorious Corinthian haunts which in depravity are not to be matched

by anything this side of the pit that is bottomless.” Along Rotten-row,

Gibraltar-place and Boodle-alley Melville surveyed the “sooty and

begrimed bricks” of haunts of abomination which to Melville’s boyish

eyes (seen through the protecting lens of Allan’s ghost) had a

“reeking, Sodom-like and murderous look.” Melville excuses himself in

the name of propriety from particularising the vices of the residents

of this quarter; “but kidnappers and resurrectionists,” he declares,

“are almost saints and angels to them.”

Melville satirically pictures himself as pathetically innocent to the

iniquities of the flesh and the Devil when he left home to view the

world. He was, he says, a member both of a Juvenile Total Abstinence

Association and of an Anti-Smoking Society organised by the Principal

of his Sunday School. With dire compunctions of conscience--which had

been considerably weakened by sea-sickness--Melville had his first

swig of spirits--administered medicinally to him by a paternal old

tar,--before they were many hours out upon the Atlantic. But neither

on the high seas nor in England does he seem to have been prematurely

tempted by the bottle. And this, for the adequate reason that united

to his innocence of years, his very limited finances spared him the

solicitations of toping companions as well as the luxury of precocious

solitary tippling. Though at the beginning of the voyage he refused the

friendly offer of a cigar, he less austerely eschewed tobacco by the

time he again struck land. Melville did not, throughout his life, hold

so strictly to the puritanical prohibitions of his boyhood.

[Illustration: A PAGE FROM ONE OF MELVILLE’S JOURNALS]

The youthful member of the Anti-Smoking Society came in later years to

be a heroic consumer of tobacco, and the happiest hours of his life

were haloed with brooding blue haze. “Nothing so beguiling,” he wrote

in 1849, “as the fumes of tobacco, whether inhaled through hookah,

narghil, chibouque, Dutch porcelain, pure Principe, or Regalia.”

On another occasion he expressed a desire to “sit cross-legged and

smoke out eternity.” And the youthful pillar of the Juvenile Total

Abstinence Association, growing in wisdom as he took on years, lived to

do regal penance for his unholy childhood pledge. His avowed refusal to

believe in a Temperance Heaven would seem to imply a conviction that it

is only the damned who never drink. In his amazing novel _Mardi_--which

won him acclaim in France as “_un Rabelais Americain_”--wine flows

in ruddy and golden rivers. And the most brilliantly fantastic

philosophising, the keenest wit of the demi-gods that lounge through

this wild novel, are concomitant upon the heroic draining of beaded

bumpers. In _Mardi_, Melville celebrates the civilising influences of

wine with the same devout and urbane affection to be found in Horace

and Meredith. On occasion, however, he seems to share Baudelaire’s

conviction that “one should be drunk always”--and drunk on wine in

the manner of the best period. He quotes with approval the epitaph

of Cyrus the Great: “I could drink a great deal of wine, and it did

me a great deal of good.” In _Clarel_ he asks: “At Cana, who renewed

the wine?” In the riotous chapter wherein “Taji sits down to Dinner

with five-and-twenty Kings, and a royal Time they have,” there is an

exuberant tilting of calabashes that would have won the esteem even of

Socrates and Pantagruel. One wonders if Rabelais, in his youth, did not

belong to some Juvenile Total Abstinence Society, or if Socrates, who

both lived and died over a cup, had not as a boy committed an equally

heinous sacrilege to Dionysus.

On board the _Highlander_ Melville was too young yet to have come to

a sense of the iniquity of the deadly virtues. He was not thereby,

however, tempted to the optimism of despair that preaches that because

God is isolated in His Heaven, all is right with the world. Even

at seventeen Melville had keenly felt that much in the world needs

mending. And at seventeen--more than at any other period--he felt

moved to exert himself to set the world aright. Ashipboard, the field

of his operations being very limited, he cast a missionary eye upon

the rum-soaked profanity and lechery of his ship-mates. “I called to

mind a sermon I had once heard in a church in behalf of sailors,”

says Melville, “when the preacher called them strayed lambs from the

fold, and compared them to poor lost children, babes in the wood, or

orphans without fathers or mothers.” Overflowing with the milk of human

kindness at the sad condition of these amiable outcasts, Melville,

during his first watch, made bold to ask one of them if he was in the

habit of going to church. The sailor answered that “he had been in

a church once, some ten or twelve years before, in London, and on a

week-day had helped to move the Floating Chapel round the Battery from

North River.” This first and last effort of Melville’s to evangelise a

shipmate ended in winning Melville hearty ridicule. “If I had not felt

so terribly angry,” he says, “I should certainly have felt very much

like a fool. But my being so angry prevented me from feeling foolish,

which is very lucky for people in a passion.” Though Melville made no

further effort to save the souls of his shipmates, his own seems not

to have been jeopardised by any hankering after the instruments of

damnation.

As has been said, he was without friends, both ashipboard and later

ashore; a complete absence of companionship that on occasion inspired

him with a parched desire for some friend to whom to say “how sweet

is solitude.” He craved in his isolation, he says, “to give his whole

soul to another; in its loneliness it was yearning to throw itself

into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend.” In _Redburn_,

Melville spends a generous number of pages in celebrating his encounter

with a good-for-nothing but courtly youth whom he calls Harry Bolton.

“He was one of those small, but perfectly formed beings with curling

hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been born in cocoons. His

complexion was a mantling brunette, feminine as a girl’s; his feet

were small; his hands were white; and his eyes were large, black and

womanly: and, poetry aside, his voice was as the sound of a harp.” How

much of Harry Bolton is fact, how much fiction, is impossible to tell.

The most significant thing about him is Melville’s evident affection

for him, no matter who made him. In _Redburn_, this engaging dandy

kidnaps Melville, and takes him for a mysterious night up to London:

a night spent, to Melville’s consternation, in a gambling palace of

the sort that exists only in the febrile and envious imagination of

vitriolic puritans. In his description of this escapade, Melville owes

more, perhaps, to his early spiritual guides than to any first-hand

observation. This flight to London in _Redburn_, its abrupt reversal,

and the escape to America of Harry Bolton, may, of course, all be

founded on sober fact. But there is a lack of verisimilitude in the

recounting that prompts to the suspicion that in this part of the

narrative, Melville is making brave and unconvincing concessions to

romance. Not, of course, that Melville in his youth was incapable of

the wild impetuosity of suddenly leaving his ship and running up to

London with an engagingly romantic stranger: he did more impulsive and

far more surprising things than that before he died. But his account

of this adventure in _Redburn_ reads hollow and false. Harry Bolton

must be discounted as myth until he is more cogently substantiated as

history.

In Liverpool Melville seems to have spent his leisure in company with

his thoughts, wandering along the docks and about the city. Each

Sunday morning he went regularly to church; Sunday afternoons he spent

walking in the neighbouring country. His most vivid impressions of

Liverpool were of the terrible poverty he saw, and it is doubtful if

there is a more ruthless piece of realism in the language than his

account in _Redburn_ of the slow death through starvation of the mother

and children that Melville found lying in a cellar, and whose lives

he tried in vain to save. The green cold bodies in the morgue, the

ragpickers, the variety of criminals that haunt the shadows of the

docks: these too came in for characterisation.

The noblest sight that Melville found in England, it would seem,

was the truck-horses he saw round the docks. “So grave, dignified,

gentlemanly and courteous did these fine truck horses look--so full

of calm intelligence and sagacity, that often I endeavoured to get

into conversation with them as they stood in contemplative attitudes

while their loads were preparing.” And Melville admired the truckmen

also. “Their spending so much of their valuable lives in the high-bred

company of their horses seems to have mended their manners and improved

their taste; but it has also given to them a sort of refined and

unconscious aversion to human society.” Though Melville grew to a most

uncomplimentary rating of the human biped, he always cherished a very

deep reverence for some of his four-footed brothers. “There are unknown

worlds of knowledge in brutes,” he wrote; “and whenever you mark a

horse, or a dog, with a peculiarly mild, calm, deep-seated eye, be sure

he is an Aristotle or a Kant, tranquilly speculating upon the mysteries

in man.”

The trip back across the Atlantic, after six weeks in Liverpool,

though longer than the out-bound passage, was for Melville less of

an ordeal. He was no longer a bewildered stranger in the forecastle

or in the riggings, so he turned his eye to other parts of the ship.

It was the steerage of the _Highlander_ packed with its four or five

hundred emigrants, that gave him most bitter occasion to reflect

on the criminal nature of the universe. Because of insufficient

provisions in food for an unexpectedly prolonged voyage, the dirty

weather, and the absence of the most indispensable conveniences,

these emigrants suffered almost incredible hardships. Before they

had been at sea a week, to hold one’s head down the fore hatchway,

Melville says, was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool.

The noisome confinement in this close unventilated and crowded

den, and the deprivation of sufficient food, helped by personal

uncleanliness, brought on a malignant fever among the emigrants. The

result was the death of some dozens of them, a panic throughout the

ship, and a novel indulgence in spasmodic devotions. “Horrible as the

sights of the steerage were, the cabin, perhaps, presented a scene

equally despairing. Trunks were opened for Bibles; and at last, even

prayer-meetings were held over the very tables across which the loud

jest had been so often heard.”

But with the coming of fair winds and fine weather the pestilence

subsided, and the ship steered merrily towards New York. The steerage

was cleaned thoroughly with sand and water. The place was then

fumigated, and dried with pieces of coal from the gallery: so that when

the _Highlander_ streamed into New York harbour no stranger would have

imagined, from her appearance, that the _Highlander_ had made other

than a tidy and prosperous voyage. “Thus, some sea-captains take good

heed that benevolent citizens shall not get a glimpse of the true

condition of the steerage while at sea.”

As they came into the Narrows, “no more did we think of the gale and

the plague; nor turn our eyes upward to the stains of blood still

visible on the topsail, whence Jackson had fallen. Oh, he who has never

been afar, let him once go from home, to know what home is. Hurra!

Hurra! and ten thousand times hurra! down goes our anchor, fathoms down

into the free and independent Yankee mud, one handful of which was now

worth a broad manor in England.”

Melville spent the greater part of the night “walking the deck

and gazing at the thousand lights of the city.” At sunrise, the

_Highlander_ warped into a berth at the foot of Wall street, and the

old ship was knotted, stem and stern, to the pier. This knotting of

the ship was the unknotting of the bonds of the sailors; for, the ship

once fast to the wharf, Melville and his shipmates were free. So with

a rush and a shout they bounded ashore--all but Melville. He went

down into the forecastle and sat on a chest. The ship he had loathed,

while he was imprisoned in it, grew lovely in his eyes when he was

free to bid it forever farewell. In the tarry old den he sat, the only

inhabitant of the deserted ship but for the mate and the rats. He sat

there and let his eyes linger over every familiar old plank. “For the

scene of suffering is a scene of joy when the suffering is past,” he

says, inverting the reflection of Dante; “and the silent reminiscence

of hardship departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.”

According to this philosophy, the more accumulated and overwhelming the

hardships we survive, the richer and sweeter will be the ensuing hours

of thoughtful recollection. For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.

And pleasure’s crown of pleasure is remembering sorrier things. So

indoctrinated, Melville should have viewed the concluding scene with

the captain of the _Highlander_, on the day the sailors drew their

wages, with eternal thanksgiving.

“Seated in a sumptuous arm-chair, behind a lustrous inlaid desk, sat

Captain Riga, arrayed in his City Hotel suit, looking magisterial

as the Lord High Admiral of England. Hat in hand, the sailors stood

deferentially in a semi-circle before him, while the captain held the

ship-papers in his hand, and one by one called their names; and in

mellow bank notes--beautiful sight!--paid them their wages.... The

sailors, after counting their cash very carefully, and seeing all was

right, and not a bank-note was dog-eared, in which case they would have

demanded another, salaamed and withdrew, leaving me face to face with

the Paymaster-general of the Forces.”

Melville stood awhile, looking as polite as possible, he says, and

expecting every moment to hear his name called. But no such name

did he hear. “The captain, throwing aside his accounts, lighted a

very fragrant cigar, took up the morning paper--I think it was the

_Herald_--threw his leg over one arm of the chair, and plunged into the

latest intelligence from all parts of the world.”

Melville hemmed, and scraped his foot to increase the disturbance. The

Paymaster-general looked up. Melville demanded his wages. The captain

laughed, and taking a long inspiration of smoke, removed his cigar, and

sat sideways looking at Melville, letting the vapour slowly wriggle and

spiralise out of his mouth.

“Captain Riga,” said Melville, “do you not remember that about four

months ago, my friend Mr. Jones and myself had an interview with you in

this very cabin; when it was agreed that I was to go out in your ship,

and receive three dollars per month for my services? Well, Captain

Riga, I have gone out with you, and returned; and now, sir, I’ll thank

you for my pay.”

“Ah, yes, I remember,” said the captain. “_Mr. Jones!_ Ha! Ha! I

remember Mr. Jones: a very gentlemanly gentleman; and stop--_you_, too,

are the son of a wealthy French importer; and--let me think--was not

your great-uncle a barber?”

“No!” thundered Melville, his Gansevoort temper up.

Captain Riga suavely turned over his accounts. “Hum, hum!--yes, here it

is: Wellingborough Redburn, at three dollars a month. Say four months,

that’s twelve dollars: less three dollars advanced in Liverpool--that

makes it nine dollars; less three hammers and two scrapers lost

overboard--that brings it to four dollars and a quarter. I owe you four

dollars and a quarter, I believe, young gentleman?”

“So it seems,” said Melville with staring eyes.

“And now let me see what you owe me, and then we’ll be able to square

the yards, Monsieur Redburn.”

“Owe him!” Melville confesses to thinking; “what do I owe him but a

grudge.” But Melville concealed his resentment. Presently Captain Riga

said: “By running away from the ship in Liverpool, you forfeited your

wages, which amount to twelve dollars; and there has been advanced to

you, in money, hammers and scrapers, seven dollars and seventy-five

cents; you are therefore indebted to me for precisely that sum. I’ll

thank you for the money.” He extended his open palm across the desk.

The precise nature of Melville’s eloquence at this juncture of his

career has not been recorded. Penniless, he left the ship, to trail

after his shipmates as they withdrew along the wharf to stop at a

sailors’ retreat, poetically denominated “The Flashes.” Here they all

came to anchor before the bar.

“Well, maties,” said one of them, at last--“I s’pose we shan’t see each

other again:--come, let’s splice the mainbrace all round, and drink to

the _last voyage_.”

And so they did. Then they shook hands all round, three times three,

and disappeared in couples through the several doorways.

Melville stood on the corner in front of “The Flashes” till the last

of his shipmates was out of sight. Then he walked down to the Battery,

and within a stone’s throw of the place of his birth, sat on one of the

benches, under the summer shade of the trees. It was a quiet, beautiful

scene, he says; full of promenading ladies and gentlemen; and through

the fresh and bright foliage he looked out over the bay, varied with

glancing ships. “It would be a pretty fine world,” he thought, “if I

only had a little money to enjoy it.” He leaves it ambiguous whether or

not he imbibed his optimism at “The Flashes.” Equally veiled does he

leave the mystery by which he came by the money to pay his passage on

the steamboat up to Albany: a trip he took that afternoon. “I pass over

the reception I met with at home; how I plunged into embraces, long and

loving,” he says:--“I pass over this.”

For the home we return to, is never the home that we leave, and the

more desperate the leave-taking, the more bathetic the return.