That was youth, that was the flower of youth, the glory of it, the adventure accomplished. It had been much to me, it is much to me. It had been much to my friend; it was nothing to him now. I was getting old, yet the thing [the voyage] comes back to me, it is my youth, I am young in it. It is my friend who is old; it is he who has lost his youth, it has gone from him, it is dead, he has lived his vision.
Herman Melville
Literary leviathan
Six months at sea! Yes reader, as I live six months out of sight of land cruising after the sperm whale beneath 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!
Melville’s Ty-Pee
If ever there was a man who suffered for his art it was Herman Melville. The reason so much of his seafaring prose evokes scenes so vividly is that much of what he described he lived through. When Melville writes of ‘six months at sea’ he speaks from his own knowledge of what it was like to spend months on end drifting across the Pacific in search of sperm whales, having signed up for a five-year trip aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1840. Yet he did far more than simply cruise for whales: misadventures included everything from several weeks of captivity among a cannibal tribe in the Marquesas to taking part in a full-blown mutiny in Tahiti. Little wonder that Melville later reflected on his departure from his home as, ‘the point when I began to live.’
Perhaps the reason that Melville’s nautical writing has such an earthy and accessible feel to the reader is because during his entire seafaring career, which stretched from 1839 through to 1844, he served as an ordinary or able seaman. These are two of the lowest ranking roles aboard a ship and gave his writings a clear empathy with the underdog. They also meant he was able to evoke with great eloquence the bawdiness, tedium, humour and camaraderie found in a ship’s fo’cs’le. Yet, although Melville came to be a champion of the ordinary man, in his youth few would have dreamed that he would have moved in such circles long enough to empathise with the lower classes. Herman was born in 1819 into a family of both wealth and gentility. His father, Alan and his mother, Maria could trace their lineage back to the early settlers of North America, and their families had ancestors who had served with distinction in the War of Independence and had the medals to prove it. Such pedigree was important to Americans looking to forge some kind of heritage of their own and it commanded respect. Even in his most servile roles aboard a ship, Melville was always aware of where he came from and the pedigree of his family.
His early upbringing in New York would have seemed happy to the youngster, yet there was always a crisis lurking below the surface. Alan Melville was a charismatic man who ran a business importing fine luxury goods from overseas. In the course of his business he travelled abroad frequently, and often held his children spellbound with tales of far-flung places on his return. By 1829 however it was evident that he had overreached himself financially and, as the creditors closed in, the family were forced to move from their New York City home and resettle in Albany in upstate New York. Alan was hellbent on winning back the Melville fortune and continued to borrow heavily from members of his influential and wealthy family. Unfortunately, his efforts were in vain and the extreme stress of the situation led to his untimely death at the age of 50. He left his widow penniless and with the burden of eight children to feed. This fall from grace and descent into poverty had a profound effect on young Herman and played a great part in shaping the angry young man who turned his back on society and headed off to sea in search of adventure.
Prior to this, Melville had tried to make a fist of being a landsman, but seemed thwarted at every turn. He was an educated man and this should, in theory, have given him a step up the ladder, yet attempts at working as a teacher and a traineeship as an engineer both ended fruitlessly. In 1839, at the age of 20, Melville determined to go to sea. It is unclear what first drew him down to the water, for although there was some history of nautical adventuring among the Melvilles and his mother’s family, the Gansevoorts, there was no direct family member for Melville to latch on to. What is unquestionably true is that he was an adventurous young man and his father’s tales of foreign lands probably inspired him. His experiences during his first voyage were part fictionalised in his later novel Redburn, and it is probable that the book’s eponymous hero speaks for Melville when he states: ‘Sad disappointments in several plans; the necessity of doing something for myself united to a naturally roving disposition had conspired within me to send me to sea.’
Melville signed on for his first position aboard the St Lawrence, ship-rigged and 119ft long. She was engaged in the transatlantic trade between New York and Liverpool. At the time, this run was almost entirely in the hands of US ship owners and their vessels had gained a reputation for hard driving and fine seamanship that ensured smart passages and maximum work from a crew. Shipping lines such as the Black Ball and Black Cross companies were providing regular and relatively swift passages across the Atlantic long before steamships swept them aside. Although the St Lawrence traded regularly between New York and Liverpool, she was not owned by any of the famous shipping lines and was likely considered a slower vessel than the regular packet ships. Her captain, Oliver Brown, was in charge of 17 crew including Melville, who would have been regarded as a ‘greenhorn’ by the rest of the crew. Melville was fortunate to sail from New York in the month of June, for this ensured a relatively gentle crossing. A midwinter traverse of this desolate, ice-strewn stretch of water would have been a far more unpleasant undertaking. Nevertheless, Melville would have faced a very testing time on this first voyage, for a tall ship can seem a very bewildering place to the novice, presenting an absolute maze of ropes, and all manner of alien phrases as this passage from Redburn illustrates:
People who have never gone to sea for the first time as sailors, cannot imagine how puzzling and confounding it is. It must be like going into a barbarous country, where they speak a strange dialect, dress in strange clothes, and live in strange houses. For sailors have their own names, even for things that are familiar ashore; and if you call a thing by its shore name, you are laughed at for an ignoramus and a landlubber.
It is also highly likely that Melville was both seasick and homesick. In Redburn, he uses the departure of the St Lawrence (renamed Highlander in the novel) as a chance to ponder on better times in New York, when he and his family had been used to easy privilege. Certainly, the early stages of this voyage would have been a humbling experience, for Melville was really the lowest of the low aboard the St Lawrence.
He was also being forced to mix with men he would have always been told were far inferior to him socially, and their rather coarse manners probably grated with this sensitive, well to do young man. Most of all, however, he was probably simply terrified of the towering masts and yards that he was expected to climb, as he recalls in Redburn:
My heart was like lead, and I felt bad enough, Heaven knows; but then, there was plenty of work to be done, which kept my thoughts from becoming too much for me … When I looked up at the high, giddy masts, and thought how often I must be going up and down them, I thought sure enough that some luckless day or other, I would certainly fall overboard and be drowned. And then, I thought of lying down at the bottom of the sea, stark alone, with the great waves rolling over me, and no one in the wide world knowing that I was there. And I thought how much better and sweeter it must be, to be buried under the pleasant hedge that bounded the sunny south side of our village grave-yard, where every Sunday I had used to walk after church in the afternoon; and I almost wished I was there now; yes, dead and buried in that churchyard. All the time my eyes were filled with tears, and I kept holding my breath, to choke down the sobs, for indeed I could not help feeling as I did, and no doubt any boy in the world would have felt just as I did then.
In writing of Melville’s experiences aboard the St Lawrence, it would be very handy to simply take Redburn as gospel. Certainly Melville presented this as autob
iographical, but much written in the book must be taken with a pinch of salt, for there are several notable incidents within the text – such as the loss of a man overboard – which simply did not happen. Nevertheless, much of the emotion, such as that expressed in the previous paragraph, is clearly real enough and written with genuine feeling. The same is true of Melville’s other more famous reminisces, Ty-Pee and Omoo which, although based on his own memories, are often shamelessly embellished. Yet, by careful study, it is possible to tease the truth out of Melville’s tales. It is also important to enjoy them as they should be enjoyed; salty yarns spun by a master storyteller.
Melville was evidently a smart seaman, for on this first voyage, he does not seem to have fallen afoul of the mate too seriously. American ships of this era were gaining a fearful reputation for ill treatment of men and the fulcrum of this was generally the mate. A ‘bucko’ mate would get work done aboard by a constant regime of ‘hazing’ the men into submission, often with the use of force. In this violent world it was frequently the weakest that were singled out. On this voyage you would expect it to be Melville. Fortunately, apart from a few snide words from the crew regarding his privileged background, Melville’s first trip seems to have been free from any such unpleasantness.
In this atmosphere, doubtless aided by the clement weather, Melville was able to enjoy himself and the heady freedom and poetry in motion that is a sailing ship at sea. It is clear that the sea and all of its wilful charm seduced the youngster, as this passage from Redburn illustrates:
At last we hoisted the stun’-sails up to the top-sail yards, and as soon as the vessel felt them, she gave a sort of bound like a horse, and the breeze blowing more and more, she went plunging along, shaking off the foam from her bows, like foam from a bridle-bit. Every mast and timber seemed to have a pulse in it that was beating with Me and joy; and I felt a wild exulting in my own heart, and felt as if I would be glad to bound along so round the world.
Then was I first conscious of a wonderful thing in me, that responded to all the wild commotion of the outer world; and went reeling on and on with the planets in their orbits, and was lost in one delirious throb at the center of the All. A wild bubbling and bursting was at my heart, as if a hidden spring had just gushed out there; and my blood ran tingling along my frame, like mountain brooks in spring freshets.
Yes I yes! give me this glorious ocean life, this salt-sea life, this briny, foamy life, when the sea neighs and snorts, and you breathe the very breath that the great whales respire! Let me roll around the globe, let me rock upon the sea; let me race and pant out my life, with an eternal breeze astern, and an endless sea before!
The St Lawrence was 28 days crossing the Atlantic, which is probably about par for the course in this leisurely age. Even the smartest packet ship struggled to make the trip in under 20 days at this time and it wasn’t until the advent of the clippers a decade later that passage times were dramatically reduced. The St Lawrence proceeded to Liverpool where her cargo of cotton bales was to be unloaded. Melville’s first impression of Liverpool was distinctly underwhelming, as he noted:
Looking shoreward, I beheld lofty ranges of dingy ware-houses, which seemed very deficient in the elements of the marvelous; 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 plain, matter-of-fact ware-houses, nevertheless, and that was all that could be said of them.
To be sure, I did not expect that every house in Liverpool must be a Leaning Tower of Pisa, or a Strasbourg Cathedral; but yet, these edifices I must confess, were a sad and bitter disappointment to me.
Given that most of New York’s warehouses and buildings at this time would doubtless have aped the British style, it is not so surprising that the buildings looked near identical, but his disappointment is understandable. After this came a six-week wait for a new freight to be secured. This was a comfortable time for the sailors of the St Lawrence who were able to relax ashore in a boarding house at the expense of the ship owner. This was a very unusual state of affairs and came about due to safety regulations in Liverpool forbidding the lighting of fires aboard vessels in port. This would have been a real trial for visiting sailors, as cooking and heating aboard were rendered impossible. Fortunately for American sailors, the US consul had dictated that they must be lodged and fed ashore for the duration of the stay, so Melville resided in a humble guest house in the centre of Liverpool. This must have been a considerable expense to the owners of the St Lawrence and it is easy to perceive why many crewmembers were encouraged to desert ship. Indeed, many of the men were siphoned off into the establishments of the many ‘land sharks’ and ‘crimps’ who haunted the back alleys of Liverpool and whose only aim was to drug a sailor and bundle him aboard a new ship, bound to god knows where, in exchange for a modest commission from the skipper of the recruiting ship. The next thing the ‘Shanghaied’ sailor knew he would be waking up at sea with a sore head bound on a voyage to distant lands.
Melville was far too savvy to fall into such a trap, however, and devoted much of his time to exploring the mighty city of Liverpool and taking in the squalid deprivation and heady opulence of this great trading city in equal measure. While the ship was idle, the crew was required to do little other than the bare minimum aboard, even loading, when a cargo of steel bars finally arrived, was in the hands of the Liverpool stevedores. Thus Melville padded the narrow streets and walked in the footsteps of his father, who had visited the city in very different circumstances.
After six weeks’ leisure, the St Lawrence was once again loaded and ready to go. She carried with her 32 passengers, who were probably Irish emigrants looking to escape the grinding poverty of their own blight-stricken land. Off Ireland, Melville relates a comic scene whereby many of the passengers became overexcited as they believed the new world was in sight and, by measure, equally disillusioned when it was revealed that this was actually their homeland.
The return trip was an arduous 48-day slog back across the Atlantic, as the St Lawrence battled with light headwinds. The westerly passage across the Atlantic is generally slower than the run eastward and it must have come as a blessed relief to all aboard when she finally arrived in New York with passengers and crew alive and well. It was a common occurrence for a substantial portion of the emigrants to expire on this tough passage, but with only 32 passengers, life aboard the St Lawrence was comfortable enough. The voyage was at an end, and Melville had proven himself a competent seaman. He must have hoped to head home and spin a few yarns about the trip, but there was no respite for the youngster, who returned to discover that his mother was in even more severe financial straits and had been forced to sell furniture in order to cover the mortgage repayments.
Melville was therefore unable to bask in the glory of his great adventure and instead went straight back to work teaching in a school with the aim of providing his mother with some extra funds. Unfortunately, the school seems to have been most erratic in paying its teachers. No doubt it was suffering due to the economic depression that afflicted the US during this period and it wasn’t long before the frustrated young teacher was once more dreaming of the sea and adventure. Reading Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast had also fired Melville’s imagination. The book narrated a trip from Boston around Cape Horn to San Francisco and back. Dana was a Harvard graduate who had shipped aboard the brig Pilgrim as ordinary seaman for health reasons. His subsequent book was a big hit and contains some deeply evocative descriptions. His narration of the rounding of Cape Horn makes one shiver just to read it and, as Melville himself later noted, ‘must have been written with an icicle’.
Melville began to cast around for a ship, and news of a boom in the price of sperm whale oil pushed him in the direction of the whaling fleet. He headed to Fairhaven,
Massachusetts where he signed on as an ordinary seaman aboard the whaler Acushnet, commanded by Captain Valentine Pease Jr. The Acushnet was a new ship, 104ft in length, somewhat squat and stumpy in design, but also setting a good spread of canvas. Her hull was painted black with a white line down each side punctuated by painted gun ports, which at the time were used to discourage pirates, or in the Acushnet’s case South Sea islanders, by giving the impression that the vessel was a man-of-war. The ship was bound around Cape Horn in search of the sperm whale, noted as the most fearsome of all the leviathans that waft their way peacefully across our oceans. The voyage would endure until the hold of the Acushnet was full of barrels of sperm oil. This could take up to four or five years. Initially she was probably fully provisioned to be able to sail for a full year afloat without touching land, although it was customary for captains to pause at natural provisioning points such as Rio in order to top up these supplies.
Given that the sperm whale was believed to be one of the most dangerous creatures of the deep, there had to be extenuating reasons to seek out the great leviathan, and they were that his head was full of spermaceti, or sperm oil. This clear, yellowish liquid – technically a form of wax – was in high demand during the mid-1800s, both as a lubricant for machinery and also as an illuminant, as it burns with a bright, odourless flame. Demand for sperm oil reached a peak during the 1850s, when a gallon of the stuff could fetch $1.50 on the open market. The Acushnet would aim to fill her holds with around 2,000 barrels of this oil. Given that the average sperm whale holds between 25 and 40 barrels worth of the precious oil within its head, you get some idea of the magnitude of the task awaiting the crew, who were expected to lower the whaling boats rain or shine to capture these mighty creatures.
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