Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  † He was to enroll for a short time in 1835 at the Albany Classical School, and, in the fall of 1836, briefly once more at the Academy, where he apparently acquired some Latin.

  CHAPTER 2

  GOING NATIVE

  1.

  On January 3, 1841, aboard the whaleship Acushnet, Herman Melville embarked on a journey that, for purposes of biography, might as well have been to the far side of the moon. For young men who found themselves without prospects, the Pacific beckoned, as Charles Olson once remarked, like “another West, prefigured in the Plains.” Cruising this vast half-charted territory and tracking down its wild beasts was a great adventure that conferred on the hunters a certain glamour and even sexual prestige; on Nantucket, center of the American whaling industry, there was talk among young women that the most satisfying husbands were those who had proved their virility by going to sea to kill whales.

  Whaling also offered the more practical reward of paid room and board. Since compensation was calculated according to a system by which each crew member contracted to receive an assigned fraction, or “lay,” of the revenue the ship brought in, there was little prospect of earning much. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael signs up for the three hundredth lay (0.3 percent), while his Polynesian friend Queequeg, after demonstrating his skill with a harpoon, does better: he gets the ninetieth lay, or a little more than 1 percent. These were meager wages, and, like sharecroppers later in the century, whalemen typically saw most of their promised profit evaporate in interest payments on “loans” received at the outset of their service in the form of clothing, tools, bedding, and the like.

  Something like two thirds of whaleship crews deserted at one stopover port or another, forfeiting what little pay they could expect if they had seen the voyage through, so that the shipmates with whom a whaleman set sail were unlikely to be the same with whom he came home. Of the twenty-five men who embarked in 1841 with Melville aboard the Acushnet, eleven returned on the same ship in 1844. In Typee, when Melville tells how he deserted one whaleship and, after a few weeks of beachcombing, joined the crew of another, he was describing a common pattern of what amounted to hitchhiking through the Pacific.

  Owners and officers, on the other hand, stood to make a tidy sum. In New Bedford and Nantucket, veteran captains and even mates were known to retire to grand houses overlooking the harbor from which they once had sailed. In the fast-expanding American market, whaling was big business. Before the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859 made the whaling industry almost instantly obsolete, the clean and bright-burning oil produced by whale blubber was in high demand as fuel for household lamps, streetlights, lighthouses, locomotive headlights, and just about every form of artificial illumination. It supplied lubricant for factory machinery, sewing machines, and clocks. The whale’s hairy bristle was used in brooms and brushes; and before the invention of artificial plastics, whalebone—which becomes flexible when heated and retains its formed shape upon cooling—was used for such everyday items as canes, corset stays, and umbrella ribs. Already during the eighteenth century, the pearly white wax (spermaceti) extracted from the sperm whale’s head had been refined for use in hair-dressings as well as in superior candles, of which Benjamin Franklin was an early champion. “You will find,” he wrote to a friend in 1751, “that they … maybe held in the hand, even in hot weather, without softning; that their Drops do not make Grease spots like those from common candles; that they last much longer, and need little or no Snuffing.” But the greatest treasure was to be found in the whale’s gut: ambergris, a foul black liquid that oxidizes when exposed to air and becomes a pleasant-smelling wax that, once refined, was used as a fixative for perfume.

  The world of whaleships was a world of pent-up longings—a tale told in sailors’ songs and even in the scrimshaw objects that whalemen whittled during long nightwatches. Toothpicks, whistles, and pipe-tampers were carved out of whale teeth in the form of a woman’s leg, which the user could suck or fondle in the absence of the real thing. Into whale’s teeth were carved images of women with legs invitingly spread; ships were adorned with female figureheads whose bare breasts jutted toward the sea, and sailors wrote in their journals about how they loved to “ride” the ship, “in raptures with her … motions … as she plunges and rears her proud head.” In Moby-Dick, Melville alludes to the frustration of men with women much on their minds but nowhere to be seen. “Where’s your girls,” demands one sailor miserably alone at night. “Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d’ye do? Partners! I must have partners!” Fed up with the substitutional satisfactions of masturbation, this fellow wishes that “all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with them evermore! There’s naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!—as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.” When one veteran of an actual whaling voyage, whose memoir Melville read in 1849, wrote of “the deprivations peculiar to whalemen in long voyages,” he was not talking about dietary restrictions. The sperm whale, after all, was so named because of the milky fluid contained in its head, which, in its color and viscosity, resembled semen.

  A whaler’s walking companion (list of illustrations 2.1)

  Scrimshaw Fantasy: “What’s my juicy little pear at home doing right now? Crying its eyes out?—Giving a party to the last arrived group of harpooneers, I dare say.” Moby-Dick, chapter 29 (list of illustrations 2.2)

  Though not exactly a closed-shop business—the ships were open to blacks and Indians and others shut out from trades closer to home—whaling had a certain inbred intimacy, as if the few thousand whalemen cruising the world at any one time had been dispersed from a handful of villages where everyone knew everyone else.* Many whalemen were really boys. In fact, as one historian has written, “New England mothers sent their sons to kill whales in the Pacific Ocean at an age when modern parents would think twice about letting them have the car for a weekend.” Among Nantucket families there was a “clannish commitment to the hunt,” and though shipowners by 1850 more often recruited crews by using professional contractors than by relying on local word of mouth, “there were still skippers [able] to remember the days when they knew the father of every man in their crew.”

  But if whaling was a family affair, it was also the first international industry dominated by the United States. With a characteristic flourish, Melville declared in Moby-Dick that “Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years.” This was an inflated claim, but according to a survey published in Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine & Commercial Review in 1849, two thirds of the worldwide fleet of about 1,000 whaleships were, in fact, American, of which 249 vessels sailed out of New Bedford and another 69 out of Nantucket. As Melville remarks, the whaling fleet replicated the labor system by which America’s canals and transcontinental railroad were being built. “The native American”—by which he meant native-born whites—“liberally provide the brains, and the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.” During his whaling years, the officers to whom Melville owed obedience were sometimes men of social rank comparable to his own, while the men with whom he worked, ate, and slept included semiliterate sailors, as he put it in Moby-Dick, from “all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth.”

  In fact, Melville and his shipmates were among the last men to hunt and kill whales by drawing close to the animal, piercing it with a thrown harpoon, then stabbing at it till it bled to death. Whaling could be as dangerous as war. A male sperm whale, which can weigh as much as 60 tons and reach a length of over 60 feet, can hold its breath for up to 90 minutes, dive to depths of 3,000 feet, and propelled by its gigantic tail (respectful whalers called it “the hand of God”) reach swimming speeds of 20 knots. And since the public had a romantic sense of whale killing as it often has of war, the men who dared to hunt these creatures became a species of culture hero. Their images appeared on
the covers of books of maritime tales and poems and their exploits were celebrated in traveling stage shows, as when Captain E. C. Williams toured the country in the 1850s presenting his “Illustrated and Muscular Lecture … on the Leviathan Hunt in the South Seas,” complete with rigged whaleboat, painted ocean panoramas, and actors performing the hunt while mood music played in the background. Like the Wild West shows that became popular later in the century, these celebrations were memorials to a vanishing world.

  Although whaling continued in something like its traditional form until the early twentieth century, within a few years of the publication of Moby-Dick it had already become less hazardous and glamorous since whaleships were increasingly equipped with harpoon guns that could deliver an explosive charge at a range of 50 meters. Well aimed, such a missile killed upon impact, leaving the whaleman mainly with the inglorious job of dissecting the shattered corpse into its edible and salable parts.

  2.

  After six months at sea, while the Acushnet lay at anchor in early July in Nukuheva harbor in the Marquesan Islands in the South Pacific, Melville deserted with a shipmate and spent about a month among the inhabitants of the Typee Valley in what he later called “indulgent captivity.” The island of Nukuheva (as the Polynesian name is usually spelled in English transliteration) is shaped something like a Bundt cake: a circular landmass ringed by steep hills that rise straight out of the sea and then drop sharply into an interior cavity. Ancestors of the island’s inhabitants, who numbered about eighty thousand when Melville landed there, had probably arrived some two thousand years before the Spanish, in a bloody raid, made the place known to Europeans in 1595. The next recorded encounter, under the English captain James Cook, would not take place until 180 years later.

  Dispersed among villages along the inlets and bays that penetrate the coastal hills, as well as farther inland in tribal groupings, the native population of Nukuheva depended for sustenance on rain blowing in on the trade winds from the southeast. There are no freshwater springs, but in times of ample rainfall the water flows down from higher elevations in streams and waterfalls. In times of drought, the natives lived on stores of breadfruit, and were known to invade the villages of neighboring tribes for the purpose of sacrificing captives to the rain gods.

  These mutually hostile people spoke a common Polynesian dialect comprehensible to one another and to the natives of Tahiti and Hawaii, but they possessed no written language. Warriors of the Typee (or Taipi) Tribe were rumored to practice cannibalism on their enemies and known for their ferocity—a temperament suggested in the frightful human faces that stare out of multiple eyes carved on both sides of the bludgeoning end of their war clubs. As marks of martial achievement, they decorated themselves with tattoos so dense and intricate that untinted flesh was hardly visible on veteran warriors, who wore earrings made of whale teeth and arranged their hair in tufts that looked to Western eyes like the devil’s horns.

  Marquesan war club. On a visit to Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne in 1851, Melville, according to the Hawthornes’ son, Julian, gave a vivid account of “a fight which he had seen on an island in the Pacific, between some savages … performed with a heavy club.” And now “where is that club,” Sophia wanted to know. (list of illustrations 2.3)

  In what is sometimes considered the first act of American imperialism, Captain David Porter, while conducting raids on the British Pacific whaling fleet as part of a harassment campaign during the War of 1812, had sailed into Nukuheva harbor and claimed the island for the United States. But Porter’s claim was never formalized by Congress, and it went unacknowledged by the British and French, for whom Nukuheva remained a contested, if minor, prize. Just weeks before Melville’s arrival aboard the Acushnet, the island had been reclaimed for Louis Philippe of France by Admiral Dupetit-Thouars, and Melville witnessed French warships lobbing shells ashore in order to put down any acts, or thoughts, of resistance.

  When Melville came ashore on this beckoning and threatening island, he brought with him his shipmate Toby Greene, with whom he had struck up a friendship around the “cordial detestation” they shared for the ship’s captain. Toby was to become an important figure in Melville’s life because he not only accompanied him on his first island adventure but also, five years later, while working as a sign painter in Buffalo, came to Melville’s defense when the first reviewers of Typee charged his friend with having made up his stories out of whole cloth. “Leaning … against the bulwarks and buried in thought,” Toby was a brooder who regarded the world with a “dry, sarcastic humor,” as when he assigned the name “Jack Nastyface” to a crewman whose skin (in Greene’s phrase) was as “rough as a MacAdamized road.”

  But if Toby Greene had a role to play in Melville’s future, he was reticent about his own past. He was “one of that class of rovers you sometimes meet at sea, 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.” Having discovered their affinities during long nights on deck, the two young men made a pact to desert together at the first opportunity, which arrived in the form of a day of liberty ashore. They then fled quickly into the hills in order to elude any search party that might be sent after them, expecting to hack their way through to one of the reputedly friendly villages of the Happar Tribe. But the brush and brambles were so thick that they could sometimes measure their progress only in inches, and after several exhausting days, having lost their bearings and much of their morale, they found themselves among the dreaded Typees.

  Toby Greene (list of illustrations 2.4)

  To make matters worse, Melville injured his leg during the climb. As his condition deteriorated, the two agreed that Toby should return by canoe to Nukuheva harbor in hopes of bringing back help from any Westerners they could find, even at risk of being caught by agents of the Acushnet. As it turned out, four years would pass before Melville again saw Toby Greene, who, when they met in upstate New York in the summer of 1846, claimed he had reached the beach, found a few white men with boats and guns, and hired one of them, an Irishman “who had resided on the Island for some time,” to go back and bring Melville out. This scoundrel apparently had pocketed the money and done nothing in return. Melville, meanwhile, having regained his mobility and sensing that his hosts had no intention of letting him go, lingered for a few weeks before breaking away and returning to his starting point on his own. There, on August 9, he resumed his journey on the Australian whaler Lucy Ann, which had dropped anchor at Nukuheva while the captain looked for men with whom to replenish his own crew depleted by desertions. Such, in bald summary, was the experience that Melville was to draw upon for his first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life.

  3.

  A “small, slatternly looking craft,” the Lucy Ann proved to be even less comfortable than the Acushnet. When the ship reached Tahiti for resupply in mid-September 1842, Melville, having joined another crew revolt, was briefly imprisoned ashore as a mutineer under authority of the British consul. During the day, supervision was lax in the “calabooza,” as the makeshift prison was called; but at night he and his fellow inmates were compelled to sleep with their legs locked in stocks by the ankles, though their native guards allowed them to lie on piles of leaves and furnished them with wooden headrests of the kind they themselves used for pillows. After a couple of weeks of halfheartedly enforced incarceration, he was released to wander Tahiti and the neighboring island of Eimeo, where he worked as a field hand. His new employers were a New Englander and a Londoner trying to make money by supplying whaleships with sweet potatoes and other fresh produce that sailors relied on for preventing scurvy and rickets.

  Melville’s second book, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, picks up the story aboard the Lucy Ann, which he calls the Julia. After recounting the mutiny, the imprisonment, and what was, in effect, his second desertion, he recalled with affection the pair of expatriate entrepreneurs who set him to hoeing and lugging potatoes i
n his new island refuge: Zeke, who spoke with “a twang like a cracked viol” acquired in the backwoods of Maine; and the Cockney companion Melville called Shorty, who “clipped the aspirate from every word beginning with one.” But the charm of working for Zeke and Shorty soon wore off in the tropical sun, and in November 1842 Melville moved on again. This time he shipped aboard the Charles and Henry, a whaleship out of Nantucket, which after months of fruitful hunting arrived in April 1843 at the port of Lahaina, West Maui, in what was then known as the Sandwich Islands and today is called Hawaii. Along with a copy of The Child’s Robinson Crusoe, the ship’s library was stocked with wholesome books, including an anti-gambling tract called Victims of Gaming and A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity by Sylvester Graham, inventor of the cracker that still bears his name and that was promoted in the nineteenth century for its anti-aphrodisiac properties.

  It is doubtful whether Graham crackers—or anything with comparably calming effects—were available. From Lahaina, Melville made his way to Honolulu, a town of some ten thousand inhabitants where prostitutes were more plentiful than missionaries in what was a favorite port of call for the nineteenth-century equivalents of sex tourists. There he stayed three months, working at odd jobs including a stint as a bowling pin setter. (In White-Jacket, he was to describe a sailor’s triumphant performance in a shipboard theatrical as a “ten-stroke.”) On August 17, 1843, he enlisted as an ordinary seaman in the U.S. Navy and shipped aboard the frigate United States, landing at Boston nearly fourteen months later, on October 3, 1844.

  This was the rough itinerary that supplied Melville with the experiences he was eventually to tap for the outburst of work that included Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and White-Jacket (for Redburn, he returned for his material to his earlier voyage to Liverpool), and that culminated in the publication of Moby-Dick some seven years after his return home. Melville’s four years at sea were the seedtime for his imagination. But there survives only a single scrap actually written during this time, and the most we can glean from it is that, despite the fact (as he wrote in Omoo) that “a man of any education before the mast is always looked upon with dislike,” he was evidently held in favor by his fellow sailors. During the troubles at Tahiti, one of them, an illiterate man named Henry Smyth, asked him to write a message to a sick friend imprisoned aboard a nearby French frigate for his role in a mutiny: