CHAPTER VIII
LEVIATHAN
“At the battle of Breviex in Flanders, my glorious old gossiping
ancestor Froissart informs me, ten good knights, being suddenly
unhorsed, fell stiff and powerless to the plain, fatally encumbered
by their armour. Whereupon the rascally burglarious peasants, their
foes, fell to picking their visors; as burglars, locks; as oystermen
oysters; to get at their lives. But all to no purpose. And at last
they were fain to ask aid of a blacksmith; and not till then were
the inmates of the armour despatched. Days of chivalry these, when
gallant chevaliers died chivalric deaths! Yes, they were glorious
times. But no sensible man, given to quiet domestic delights, would
exchange his warm fireside and muffins, for a heroic bivouac, in a
wild beechen wood, of a raw gusty morning in Normandy; every knight
blowing his steel-gloved fingers, and vainly striving to cool his
cold coffee in his helmet.”
HERMAN MELVILLE: _Mardi_.
It was the same Edmund Burke who movingly mourned the departure of
the epic virtues of chivalry, who in swift generalities celebrated
the heroic enterprise of the hunters of leviathan. But Burke viewed
both whaling and knight-errantry from a safe remove of time or place,
and the crude everyday realities of each he smothered beneath billows
of gorgeous generalisation. Burke offers a notable instance wherein
romance and rhetoric conspired to glorify two human activities that
are glorious only in expurgation. Piracy is picturesque in its
extinction, and to the snugly domesticated imagination there is both
virtue and charm in cut-throats and highwaymen. Even the perennial
newspaper accounts of massacre and rape doubtless serve to keep sweet
the blood of many a benevolent pew-holder. The incorrigible tendency
of the imagination to extract sweet from the bitter, honey from the
carcass of the lion, makes an intimate consideration of the filthy
soil from which some of its choicest illusions spring, downright
repugnant to wholesomemindedness. Intimately considered, both whaling
and knight-errantry were shabby forms of the butchering business. Their
virtues were but the nobler vices of barbarism: vices that take on a
semblance of nobility only when measured against the deadly virtues of
emasculated righteousness. In flight from the deadly virtues, Melville
was precipitated into the reeking barbarism of the forecastle of a
whaling ship. Whaling he applied as a counter-irritant to New England
decorum, and he seems to have smarted much during the application. He
was blessed with a high degree of the resilience of youthful animal
vigour, it is true; and there is solace for all suffering, the godly
tell us--omitting the ungodly solaces of madness and suicide. It will
be seen that whaling prompted Melville to extreme measures. The full
hideousness of his life on board the _Acushnet_ has not yet transpired.
The chief whaling communities--those of Nantucket and Buzzard’s
Bay--were originally settled by Quakers. The inhabitants of these
districts in general retained in an uncommon measure throughout the
golden age of whaling, the peculiarities of the Quaker. Never perhaps
in the history of the world has there been mated two aspects of life
more humorously incompatible than whale-hunting and Quakerism. This
mating produced, however, a race of the most sanguinary of all sailors;
a race of fighting Quakers: in Melville’s phrase, “Quakers with a
vengeance.” Though refusing from conscientious scruples to bear arms
against land invaders, yet these same Quakers inimitably invaded the
Atlantic and the Pacific; and though sworn foes to human bloodshed,
yet did they, in their straight-bodied coats, spill tons and tons of
leviathan gore. And so, as Melville goes on to point out, “there are
instances among them of men who, named with Scripture names, and in
childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of
the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these
unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.”
The two old Quaker captains of _Moby-Dick_, Bildad and Peleg, are
typical of the race that made Nantucket and New Bedford the greatest
whaling ports in all history. Peleg significantly divides all good
men into two inclusive categories: “pious good men, like Bildad,”
and “swearing good men--something like me.” The “swearing good men,”
Melville would seem to imply, in sacrificing piety to humanity, while
standing lower in the eyes of God, stood higher in the hearts of their
crew. Though Bildad never swore at his men, so Melville remarks, “he
somehow got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out
of them.”
Typical of the cast of mind of the whaling Quaker is Captain Bildad’s
farewell to ship’s company on board the ship in which he was chief
owner: “God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping. Be careful in
the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooners;
good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent, within the
year. Don’t forget your prayers, either. Don’t whale it too much a’
Lord’s day, men; but don’t miss a fair chance either; that’s rejecting
Heaven’s good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it
was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask,
beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye!”
The old log-books most frequently begin: “A journal of an intended
voyage from Nantucket by God’s permission.” And typical is the closing
sentence of the entry in George Gardener’s journal for Saturday,
January 21, 1757: “So no more at Present all being in health by the
Blessing of God but no whale yet.”
At first, the New England vessels were manned almost entirely by
American-born seamen, including a certain proportion of Indians and
coast-bred negroes. But as the fishery grew, and the number of vessels
increased, the supply of hands became inadequate. Macy says that as
early as about 1750 the Nantucket fishery had attained such proportions
that it was necessary to secure men from Cape Cod and Long Island to
man the vessels. Goode says: “Captain Isaiah West, now eighty years
of age (in 1880), tells me that he remembers when he picked his crew
within a radius of sixty miles of New Bedford; oftentimes he was
acquainted, either personally or through report, with the social
standing or business qualifications of every man on his vessel; and
also that he remembers the first foreigner--an Irishman--that shipped
with him, the circumstance being commented on at that time as a
remarkable one.” Time was, however, when it was easy to gather at New
Bedford or New London a prime crew of tall and stalwart lads from the
fishing coast and from the farms of the interior of New England. Maine
furnished a great many whalemen, and for a long time the romance of
whaling held out a powerful fascination for adventurous farmer boys of
New Hampshire, Vermont, and Upper New York. During Melville’s time the
farms of New England still supplied a contingent of whalers. In writing
of New Bedford he says: “There weekly arrive in this town scores of
green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory
in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows
who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the
whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they
came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look
there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath-knife.
Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.” Of
course, these farm-boys were of the verdant innocence Melville paints
them when they signed the ship’s papers, not knowing a harpoon from
a handspike. It is a curious paradox in the history of whaling,--a
paradox best elaborated by Verrill,--that the ship’s crew were almost
never sailors. The captain, of course, the officers and the harpooners
were usually skilled and efficient hands. But so filthy was the work
aboard the whaler, and so perilous; so brutal the treatment of the
crew, and so hazardous the actual earnings, that competent deep-water
sailors stuck to the navy or the merchant marine. When Melville shipped
from Honolulu as an “ordinary seaman in the United States Navy,” he
soon found occasion “to offer up thanksgiving that in no evil hour had
I divulged the fact of having served in a whaler; for having previously
marked the prevailing prejudice of men-of-war’s-men to that much
maligned class of mariners, I had wisely held my peace concerning stove
boats on the coast of Japan.” And in _Redburn_ he says “that merchant
seamen generally affect a certain superiority to ‘blubber-boilers,’ as
they contemptuously style those who hunt the leviathan.”
When the farmer lads came down to the sea no more in adequate numbers,
the whaleships were forced to fill their crews far from home, and to
take what material they could get. Shipping offices, with headquarters
at the whaling ports, employed agents scattered here and there in
the principal cities, especially in the Middle West and the interior
of New England. These agents received ten dollars for each man they
secured for the ship’s crew. Besides this, each agent was paid for
the incidental expenses of transportation, board, and outfit of every
man shipped. By means of lurid advertisements and circulars, these
agents with emancipated conscience, made glowing promises to the
desperate and the ignorant. Each prospective whaleman was promised a
“lay” of the ship’s catch. For in the whaling business, no set wages
were paid. All hands, including the captain, received certain shares
of the profits called “lays.” The size of the lay was proportioned to
the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the
ship’s company. The captain usually received a lay of from one-twelfth
to one-eighteenth; green hands about the one-hundred-and-fiftieth.
What lay Melville received is not known. Bildad is inclined to think
that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay was not too much for
Ishmael; but Bildad was a “pious good man.” Peleg, the “swearing good
man,” after a volcanic eruption with Bildad, puts Ishmael down for
the three hundredth lay. Though this may exemplify the relation that,
in Melville’s mind, existed between profanity and kindness, it tells
us, unfortunately, nothing of the prospective earnings of Melville’s
whaling. Of one thing, however, we can be fairly certain: Melville did
not drive a shrewd and highly profitable bargain. The details of his
life bear out his boast: “I am one of those that never take on about
princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board
and lodge me, while I put up at the grim sign of the Thunder Cloud.”
Each prospective whaler, besides being assured a stated fraction
of the ship’s earnings, was by the agents promised an advance of
seventy-five dollars, an outfit of clothes, as well as board and
lodging until aboard ship. From this imaginary seventy-five dollars
were deducted all the expenses which the agent defrayed, as well as
the ten dollars head payment. By a shameless perversion of exaggerated
charges, a really competent outfitter managed to ship his embryo
whalemen without a cent of the promised advance. The agent who shipped
J. Ross Browne and his unfortunate friend, was a suave gentleman of
easy promises. “Whaling, gentlemen, is tolerably hard at first,”
Browne makes him say, “but it’s the finest business in the world
for enterprising young men. Vigilance and activity will insure you
rapid promotion. I haven’t the least doubt but you’ll come home boat
steerers. I sent off six college students a few days ago, and a poor
fellow who had been flogged away from home by a vicious wife. A whaler,
gentlemen, is a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a
school for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy! There’s nothing
like it. You can see the world; you can see something of life.”
The first half of one of the truest and most popular of whaling
chanteys, a lyric which must have been sung with heartfelt conviction
by thousands of whalemen, runs:
’Twas advertised in Boston,
New York and Buffalo,
Five hundred brave Americans
A-whaling for to go.
They send you to New Bedford,
The famous whaling port;
They send you to a shark’s store
And board and fit you out.
They send you to a boarding-house
For a time to dwell.
The thieves there, they are thicker
Than the other side of Hell.
They tell you of the whaling ships
A-going in and out.
They swear you’ll make your fortune
Before you’re five months out.
The second half of this ballad celebrates the hardships of life aboard
ship: the poor food and the brutality of the officers. With this
side of whaling we know that Melville was familiar. But of the usual
preliminaries of whaling recounted by Browne and summarised in the
chantey, Melville says not a word, either in _Moby-Dick_ or elsewhere.
Nor does tradition or history supplement this autobiographical
silence. On this point, we know nothing. Surely it would be intensely
interesting to know how far egotism conspired with art in guiding
Melville in the writing of the masterful beginning of _Moby-Dick_.
No matter by what process Melville found his way to the _Acushnet_,
the whaling fleet was, indeed, at the time of his addition to it, “a
place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the
dissipated, an asylum for the needy.” J. Ross Browne was warned before
his sailing that New Bedford “was the sink-hole of iniquity; that the
fitters were all blood-suckers, the owners cheats, and the captains
tyrants.”
Though the arraignment was incautiously comprehensive, Browne
confesses to have looked back upon it as a sound warning. The boasted
advantages of whaling were not selfishly withheld from any man, no
matter what the race, or the complexion of his hide or his morals.
The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, English, Scotch,
Irish, in fact, men of almost every country of Europe, and this with
no jealous discrimination against Asia, Africa, or the Islands of the
Pacific, were drawn upon by the whale fleet during the days of its
greatest prosperity. “And had I not been, from my birth, as it were, a
cosmopolite,” Melville remarks parenthetically in _Redburn_. It would
have been difficult for him to find a more promising field for the
exercise of this inherited characteristic, than was whaling in 1841:
and this, indeed, without the nuisance of leaving New Bedford. “In
thoroughfares nigh the docks,” he says, “any considerable seaport will
frequently offer to view the queerest nondescripts from foreign ports.
Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will
sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not unknown to
Lascars and Malays; and in Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees
have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water street
and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but
in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners;
savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.
It makes a stranger stare.” It will be remembered that Ishmael spends
his first night in New Bedford in bed with one of these very cannibals;
and on the following morning, in a spirit of amiable and transcendent
charity, goes down on his knees with his tattooed bed-fellow before a
portable wooden deity: an experience fantastic and highly diverting,
nor at all outside the bounds of possibility. It is a fact to chasten
the optimism of apostles of the promiscuous brotherhood of man, that as
the whaling crews grew in cosmopolitanism, they made no corresponding
advances towards the Millennium. Had Nantucket and New Bedford but
grown to the height of their whaling activities in the fourth century,
they might have sent enterprising agents to the African desert to
tempt ambitious cenobites with offers of undreamed-of luxuries of
mortification. These holy men might have worked miracles in whaling,
and transformed the watery wilderness of the Pacific into a floating
City of God. But in the nineteenth century of grace, the kennel-like
forecastle of the whaler was the refuge not of the athletic saint, but
of the offscourings of all races, the discards of humanity, and of
this fact there is no lack of evidence. Nor did Melville’s ship-mates,
on the whole, seem to have varied this monotony. There survives this
record in his own hand:
“_What became of the ship’s company on the whale-ship ‘Acushnet,’
according to Hubbard who came back home in her (more than a four
years’ voyage) and visited me in Pittsfield in 1850._
“_Captain Pease_--returned & lives in asylum at the Vineyard.
“_Raymond_, 1st Mate--had a fight with the Captain & went ashore at
Payta.
“_Hall_, 2nd Mate--came home & went to California.
“_3rd Mate_, Portuguese, went ashore at Payta.
“_Boatswain_, either ran away or killed at Ropo one of the Marquesas.
“_Smith_, went ashore at Santa, coast of Peru, afterwards committed
suicide at Mobile.
“_Barney_, boatswain, came home.
“_Carpenter_, went ashore at Mowee half dead with disreputable
disease.
“_The Czar._
“_Tom Johnson_, black, went ashore at Mowee, half dead (ditto) & died
at the hospital.
“_Reed_, mulatto--came home.
“_Blacksmith_, ran away at San Francisco.
“_Blackus_, little black, ditto.
“_Bill Green_, after several attempts to run away, came home in the
end.
“_The Irishman_, ran away, coast of Colombia.
“_Wright_, went ashore half dead at the Marquesas.
“_Jack Adams_ and _Jo Portuguese_ came home.
“_The Old Cook_, came home.
“_Haynes_, ran away aboard of a Sidney ship.
“_Little Jack_, came home.
“_Grant_, young fellow, went ashore half dead, spitting blood, at
Oahu.
“_Murray_, went ashore, shunning fight at Rio Janeiro.
“_The Cooper_, came home.”
Of the twenty-seven men who went out with the ship, only the Captain,
the Second Mate, a Boatswain, the Cook, the Cooper and six of the
mongrel crew (one of which made several futile attempts to escape)
came back home with her. The First Mate had a fight with the Captain
and left the ship; the Carpenter and four of the crew went ashore to
die, two at least with venereal diseases, another went ashore spitting
blood, another to commit suicide.
[Illustration: SPERM WHALING. THE CAPTURE.
Drawing by A. Van Beest, R. Swain Gifford and Benj. Russell, 1850.]
[Illustration: ONE OF SIX WHALING PRINTS. LONDON, 1750.]
With this company Melville was intimately imprisoned on board the
_Acushnet_ for fifteen months. Of the everyday life of Melville in
this community we know little enough. In _Moby-Dick_ Melville has left
voluminous accounts of the typical occupations of whaling but beyond
this nothing certainly to be identified as derived from life on the
_Acushnet_. The ship’s company on board the _Pequod_, in so far as is
known, belong as purely to romance as characters of fiction can. It
doubtless abbreviates the responsibilities of the custodians of public
morals, that the staple of conversation on board the _Acushnet_, the
scenes enacted in the forecastle and elsewhere in the ship, shall
probably never be known. In _Typee_ Melville says of the crew of
the _Acushnet_, however: “With a very few exceptions, our crew was
composed of a parcel of dastardly and mean-spirited wretches, divided
among themselves, and only united in enduring without resistance the
unmitigated tyranny of the captain.”
Of the “very few exceptions” that Melville spares the tribute of
contemptuous damnation, one alone does he single out for portraiture.
“He was a young fellow about my own age,” says Melville in _Typee_, of
a seventeen-year-old shipmate, “for whom I had all along entertained
a great regard; and Toby, such was the name by which he went among
us, for his real name he would never tell us, was every way worthy
of it. He was active, ready, and obliging, of dauntless courage, and
singularly open and fearless in the expression of his feelings. I
had on more than one occasion got him out of scrapes into which this
had led him; and I know not whether it was from this cause, or a
certain congeniality of sentiment between us, that he had always shown
a partiality for my society. We had battled out many a long watch
together, beguiling the weary hours with chat, song, and story, mingled
with a good many imprecations upon the hard destiny it seemed our
common fortune to encounter.”
Toby, like Melville, had evidently not been reared from the cradle to
the life of the forecastle; a fact that, despite his anxious effort,
Toby could not entirely conceal. “He was one of that class of rovers
you sometimes meet at sea,” says Melville, “who never reveal their
origin, never allude to home, and go rambling over the world as if
pursued by some mysterious fate they cannot possibly elude.”
By the spell of the senses, too, Melville was attracted to Toby. “For
while the greater part of the crew were as coarse in person as in
mind,” says Melville, “Toby was endowed with a remarkably prepossessing
exterior. Arrayed in his blue frock and duck trousers, he was as smart
a looking sailor as ever stepped upon a deck; he was singularly small
and slightly made, with great flexibility of limb. His naturally dark
complexion had been deepened by exposure to the tropical sun, and a
mass of jetty locks clustered about his temples, and threw a darker
shade into his large black eyes.”
There is preserved among Melville’s papers a lock of hair, unusually
fine and soft in texture, but not so much “jetty” as of a rich
red-black chestnut colour, and marked “a lock of Toby’s hair,” and
dated 1846 the year of the publication of _Typee_. When Melville and
Toby parted in the Marquesas, each came to think that the other had
most likely been eaten by the cannibals. Upon the publication of
_Typee_, Toby was startled into delight to learn of Melville’s survival
and to rub his eyes at the flattering portrayal of himself. In a letter
of his to Melville, dated June 16, 1856, he says: “I am still proud of
the immortality with which you have invested me.” The extent of the
first extremity of his pride is not recorded. But in his first flush
of immortality he seems to have sent Melville a lock of his hair, an
amiable vanity, perhaps, at Melville’s celebration of his personal
charms.
There survives with the lock of hair a daguerreotype of Toby, also of
1846. There are also two other photographs: the three strewn over a
period of thirty years. These three photographs make especially vivid
the regret at the lack of any early picture of Melville. Melville’s
likeness is preserved only in bearded middle-age: and such portraiture
gives no more idea of his youthful appearance than does Toby’s
washed-out maturity suggest his Byronic earlier manner. There is
every indication that Melville was a young man of a very conspicuous
personal charm. From his books one forms a vivid image of him in the
freshness and agility and full-bloodedness of his youth. To bring this
face to face with the photographs of his middle age is a challenge to
the loyalty of the imagination. All known pictures of Melville postdate
his creative period. They are pictures of Melville the disenchanted
philosopher. As pictures of Melville the adventurer and artist, they
survive as misleading posthumous images.
Of Toby’s character, Melville says: “He was a strange wayward being,
moody, fitful, and melancholy--at times almost morose. He had a quick
and fiery temper too, which, when thoroughly roused, transported him
into a state bordering on delirium. No one ever saw Toby laugh. I mean
in the hearty abandonment of broad-mouthed mirth. He did sometimes
smile, it is true; and there was a good deal of dry, sarcastic humour
about him, which told the more from the imperturbable gravity of his
tone and manner.”
After escaping from the _Acushnet_ with Melville into the valley of
Typee, Toby in course of time found himself back to civilisation, where
the history of his life that he kept so secret aboard the _Acushnet_
came more fully to be known.
“TOBY”
RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE
[Illustration:
In 1846]
[Illustration:
In 1865
]
Toby, or Richard Tobias Greene, was, according to notices in Chicago
papers at the time of his death on August 24, 1892, born in Dublin,
Ireland, in 1825. He was as a child brought to America by his father,
who settled in Rochester, New York, where Toby “took public school
and academic courses.” Before he was seventeen he shipped aboard the
_Acushnet_, there to fall in with Melville and to accompany him into
the uncorrupted heart of cannibalism. Toby returned to civilisation
to study law with John C. Spencer, “the noted attorney whose son was
executed for mutiny at Canandaigua, New York,” and was, in time,
admitted to the bar. He relinquished jurisprudence for journalism,
and was for some indefinite period editor of the _Buffalo Courier_.
He restlessly varied his activities by assisting in constructing the
first telegraph line west of New York State, and opened the first
telegraph office in Ohio, at Sandusky. For some years he published the
_Sandusky Mirror_. In 1857 he moved to Chicago and took a place on
the _Times_. With the Civil War he enlisted in the 6th Infantry of
Missouri and for three years was “trusted clerk at General Grant’s
headquarters.” He was discharged June, 1864, to enlist again October
19, 1864, in the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. With the end of the war
he returned to Chicago, ruined in health. Yet he continued to exert
himself as a public-minded citizen, and at his funeral were “many
fellow Masons, comrades from the G.A.R. and others who came to pay
their respects to the late traveller, editor and soldier.”
After the publication of _Typee_ there were delighted exchanges of
recognition and gratitude between him and Melville. And though these
two men grew further and further apart with years, there continued
between them an irregular correspondence and a pathetic loyalty to
youthful associations: felicitations that grew to be as conscientious
and hollow as the ghastly amiabilities of a college reunion. Toby’s
son, born in 1854, he named Herman Melville Greene (a compliment to
Melville adopted by some of his later shipmates in the navy); and
Melville presented his namesake with a spoon--the gift he always made
to namesakes. Toby’s nephew was named Richard Melville Hair, and
another spoon was shipped west. In 1856 Toby wrote Melville he had
read Melville’s most recent book, _Piazza Tales_. Toby’s critical
efforts exhausted themselves in the comment: “_The Encantadas_ called
up reminiscences of the _Acushnet_, and days gone by.” In 1858, when
Melville was lecturing about the country, Toby addressed a dutiful
letter to his “Dear Old Shipmate,” asking that Melville visit him
while in Cleveland. If the visit was ever made, it has not transpired.
In 1860 Toby wrote to Melville: “Hope you enjoy good health and can
yet stow away five shares of duff! I would be delighted to see you
and ‘freshen the nip’ while you would be spinning a yarn as long as
the main-top bowline.” In acknowledgment Melville during the year
following sent Toby the gift of a spoon. In reply Toby observes: “My
mind often reverts to the many pleasant moonlight watches we passed
together on the deck of the _Acushnet_ as we whiled away the hours
with yarn and song till eight bells.” Even to the third generation
Toby’s descendants were “proud of the immortality” with which Melville
had invested Toby. Miss Agnes Repplier has written on _The Perils of
Immortality_. There are perils, too, in immortalisation.
But in the days of Toby’s unredeemed immortality on board the
_Acushnet_ before he joined the Masons and the Grand Army of the
Republic, Toby was to Melville a singularly grateful variation to the
filth and hideousness and brutality of the human refuse with which he
cruised the high seas in search of oil and bone.
Melville was fifteen months on board the _Acushnet_; and for the last
six months of this period he was out of sight of land; cruising “some
twenty degrees to the westward of the Gallipagos”--“cruising after the
sperm-whale under the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the
billows of the wide-rolling Pacific--the sky above, the sea around, and
nothing else.”
The ship itself was, at the expiration of this period, deplorable in
appearance. The paint on her sides, burnt up by the scorching sun,
was puffed up and cracked. She trailed weeds after her; about her
stern-piece an unsightly bunch of barnacles had formed; and every
time she rose on a sea, she showed her copper torn away, or hanging
in jagged strips. The only green thing in sight aboard her was the
green paint on the inside of the bulwarks, and that, to Melville, was
of “a vile and sickly hue.” The nearest suggestion of the grateful
fragrance of the loamy earth, was the bark which clung to the wood used
for fuel--bark gnawed off and devoured by the Captain’s pig--and the
mouldy corn and the brackish water in the little trough before which
the solitary tenant of the chicken-coop stood “moping all day long on
that everlasting one leg of his.”
The usage on board in Melville’s ship, as in that of J. Ross Browne
and many another, had been tyrannical in the extreme. In _Typee_
he says: “We had left both law and equity on the other side of the
Cape.” And Captain Pease, arbitrary and violent, promptly replied to
all complaints and remonstrances with the butt-end of a hand-spike,
“so convincingly administered as effectually to silence the aggrieved
party.”
“The sick had been inhumanly neglected; the provisions had been doled
out in scanty allowance.” The provisions on board the _Acushnet_
had consisted chiefly of “delicate morsels of beef and pork, cut
on scientific principles from every part of the animal and of all
conceivable shapes and sizes, carefully packed in salt and stored away
in barrels; affording a never-ending variety in their different degrees
of toughness, and in the peculiarities of their saline properties.
Choice old water, too, two pints of which were allowed every day to
every soul on board; together with ample store of sea-bread, previously
reduced to a state of petrification, with a view to preserve it either
from decay or consumption in the ordinary mode, were likewise provided
for the nourishment and gastronomic enjoyment of the crew.” Captain
Davis, in his _Nimrod of the Sea_, suggests that petrification is not
the worst state of ship’s-biscuits; he recounts how with mellower fare
“epicures on board hesitate to bite the ship-bread in the dark, and the
custom is to tap each piece as you break it off, to dislodge the large
worms that breed there.”
The itinerary of this fifteen months’ cruise is not known. In
_Moby-Dick_ Melville says: “I stuffed a shirt or two into my
carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the
Pacific.” In _Omoo_, Melville speaks of “an old man-of-war’s-man whose
acquaintance I had made at Rio de Janeiro, at which place the ship
touched in which I sailed from home.” In _White-Jacket_ and _Omoo_ he
speaks of whaling off the coast of Japan. And in _Moby-Dick_, in a
passage that reads like an excerpt from the Book of Revelations, he
indicates a more frigid whereabouts: “I remember the first albatross
I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the
Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the
overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a
regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman
bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings,
as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings
shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s
ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange
eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its
wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the
miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at
that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that
darted through me then. But at last I awoke; when the white fowl flew
to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!”
But what waters the _Acushnet_ sailed, and what shores she touched
before she dropped anchor in the Marquesas, little positively is known.
The last eighteen or twenty days, however, during which time the light
trade winds silently swept the _Acushnet_ towards the Marquesas, were
to Melville, when viewed in retrospect, “delightful, lazy, languid.”
Land was ahead! And with the refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass
in prospect, Melville and the whole ship’s company resigned themselves
to a disinclination to do anything, “and spreading an awning over the
forecastle, slept, ate, and lounged under it the livelong day.” The
promise of the ship’s at last breaking through the inexorable circle
of the changeless horizon into the fragrance of firm and loamy earth,
gave Melville an eye for the sea-scape he had formerly abhorred. “The
sky presented a clear expanse of the most delicate blue, except along
the skirts of the horizon, where you might see a thin drapery of pale
clouds which never varied their form or colour. The long, measured,
dirge-like swell of the Pacific came rolling along, with its surface
broken by little tiny waves, sparkling in the sunshine. Every now and
then a shoal of flying fish, scared from the water under the bows,
would leap into the air, and fall the next moment like a shower of
silver into the sea.”
In later years, memory treacherously transformed this watery
environment upon which Melville and Toby had vented their youthful and
impotent imprecations. From his farm in the Berkshire Hills, he looked
back regretfully upon his rovings over the Pacific, and by a pathetic
fallacy, convinced himself that in them “the long supplication of my
youth was answered.” The spell of the Pacific descended upon him not
while he was cruising the Pacific, however, but while he was busy upon
his farm in Pittsfield, “building and patching and tinkering away in
all directions,” as he described his activities to Hawthorne.
Strangely jumbled anticipations haunted Melville, he says, as drowsing
on the silent deck of the _Acushnet_ he was being borne towards land:
towards the Marquesas, one of the least known islands in the Pacific.
“The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does
the very name spirit up!” exclaims Melville in excited prospect.
“Naked houris--cannibal banquets--groves of cocoa-nut--coral
reefs--tattooed chiefs--and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted
with bread-fruit-trees--carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue
waters--savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols--_heathenish rites
and human sacrifices_.”
After fifteen months aboard the _Acushnet_, Melville was ripe to
discover alluring Edenic beauties in tropical heathendom. And in the
end, so intolerable was the prospect of dragging out added relentless
days under the guardianship of Captain Pease, that as a last extremity,
Melville preferred to risk the fate of Captain Cook, and find a
strolling cenotaph in the bellies of a tribe of practising cannibals.