On Board the Lucy Ann
September 25th 1842
Dear George,
On arriving here the other day I was sorry to hear that you were verry ill on board the French Frigate.—I should like verry much to go and see you but I cannot possibly as I can not be allowed to:—so I take the liberty to write you a few lines.—You know we all agreed to hang out on your account when we came aboard from the Corvette—but it so happened that those who talked loudest were the first to return to their duty. I was the last one that went forward, and would not have turned to at all, but that I found it was of no use,—so after being in double irons some time I thought it best to go forward & do my duty as usual
You must remember me to Peter
I do not know that I have any thing further to say to you
I often think of you & I & Young Smith have often talked about you during the night watches at sea
—Good bye
My Dear George
Hoping you will be soon at liberty
I remain Yours & c
Henry Smyth
We shall never know how faithfully this letter transcribes Smyth’s words, but it affords a glimpse of Melville as an amanuensis with characteristically uncertain spelling. Perhaps the dashes mark pauses when he held his pen poised while Smyth pondered how to express himself to his absent friend. Besides a few mentions in family correspondence of letters sent to or received from Herman (since lost), this bit of ventriloquism is the only trace we have of him during his nearly four years before the mast.†
4.
When Melville jumped ship at Nukuheva, he brought with him, along with Toby Greene, a wad of tobacco and a roll of cloth that he stuffed into his trousers for use as barter with the natives. He was also equipped with a few ideas about what kind of people the Pacific islanders would turn out to be.
When he and Toby scrambled through the brush to the top of a coastal hill and made the arduous descent into the valley, they were going to a place visited previously by only a few Westerners, some of whom had never come back. According to sailors’ lore, those men had stayed on because they had found there a paradise of sexually compliant women from whom no sane man would wish to escape; according to other reports, they did not return because they had been murdered and eaten. Melville was never one of those “students versed more in their tomes / Than life” (as he described them much later, in his poem Clarel), and it was not till after he had returned home that he did any systematic reading about the South Seas—so these kinds of stories, both enticing and frightening, were just about all he knew about where he was going. They had the effect of urging him on to see for himself what “the olden voyagers had so glowingly described.”
The two men hatched their plan out of nervous hopes in which curiosity competed with fear. What they hoped for were “naked houris” (Melville was required by his publisher, John Wiley, to change this phrase in the manuscript of Typee to “lovely houris”) and “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.” What they feared were “cannibal banquets” and “savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols—heathenish rites and human sacrifices.” These “strangely jumbled anticipations” had come to them not only from old salts and young braggarts aboard ship but also from popular magazines, lectures, and even schoolbooks they had studied as children. It was a time, as the historian Michael Rogin has put it, when “the contrast between ‘savagery’ and ‘civilization’ dominated the … American imagination.” Press and pulpits poured forth a steady stream of commentary on the nature of savages—mostly provoked by the problem or plight (depending on one’s point of view) of Indians, who were victims of a process that today we would call “ethnic cleansing” but that in those days was called “removal.”
A few people in antebellum America spoke, without much effect, of white conquerors as “pseudo … civilized” plunderers, who wanted to steal land from people weaker than themselves; but the official line was that the white man’s expansion first across North America and then, by the 1840s, into the Pacific, was literally a godsend: a divinely ordained step leading humankind out of darkness into light. As for those who, like Melville, left home to encounter primitive peoples in remote corners of the earth—whether they were missionaries, military men, traders, whalers, or glorified pirates—they took with them, as one scholar puts it, “their lives … in their baggage.” And so it is useful to inspect Melville’s “baggage” in order to get a sense of what he left behind and what he brought home with him.
Melville’s firsthand knowledge of so-called primitive people was very small. Like others who made the voyage out, he was inclined to conflate the attitudes and practices of one exotic people with those of another, and there is a sense in which, despite his ignorance, he thought he knew where he was going. Many writers before him had noted among North American Indian tribes “the wondrous custom of offering maidens of the village to distinguished visitors,” a custom that sailors to the Pacific had reason to hope would be honored in whatever culture they encountered. As for Melville himself, he had glimpsed only a few Indians here and there: Indian men working as longshoremen on the docks where his father had done business, Indian women working in New York or Albany as seamstresses, servants, or prostitutes. On his trip west in 1840, he had seen Ojibways and Winnebagos walking the streets of Buffalo and encamped along the shores of Lake Erie; in White-Jacket he reports seeing a Sioux warrior displaying the severed hands of recently scalped enemies. These were borderland Indians struggling to survive by hawking skins, flints, baskets, or, in some cases, themselves to the very people who had destroyed their former existence.
The process of destruction seemed irreversible, though one pretext for the removal of Indians was the illusory assurance that they would find sanctuary in the west. If he is “to be found in any of his savage grandeur,” James Fenimore Cooper wrote as early as 1828, “the Indian must now be chiefly sought west of the Mississippi.” “The West” has always been the place to which Americans try to banish their problems, and Indians certainly qualified as one. In Cooper’s novels, written between the late 1820s and early 1840s, there are essentially two types of Indians: degraded descendants of ancient warlike Indians who slink around the edges of white settlements, and noble prairie Indians, who have a Roman stoicism and dignity. Cooper likens the former to dogs feeding on scraps from the master’s table and celebrates the latter as people who live as their forebears had lived, wild and free, beyond the reach of white settlement, if only for the moment.
By heading into the Pacific, Melville was taking the ultimate trip west—to a place where uncontaminated savages could be witnessed at first hand, as was hardly possible any longer in the continental United States, at least not for a young man who needed to get paid en route. When he left, the expulsion of Indians from their ancestral lands along the eastern seaboard was in its final stages, justified by the claim, as a Vermont lawyer put it in 1839, that “Indians’ bones must enrich the soil before the plough of civilized man can open it.” Efforts to resist, from Indians and whites alike, proved of little avail. The most conspicuous instance was that of the Cherokee Tribe, whose rights to lands in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama had been affirmed and reaffirmed by treaties and courts, but who were forcibly removed westward in the 1830s to join their tribesmen “already established in prosperity” (the words of the commanding officer, Winfield Scott) beyond the Mississippi. Among the Cherokee, the route of their “emigration” (also General Scott’s term) came to be known as “the Trail of Tears.”
Melville had no more than a boy’s glancing awareness of these events, or of their prevalent explanations; but he could hardly look at a newspaper without catching some reference, anointed with crocodile tears, to the removal of primitive peoples as the price to be paid for the spread of civilization. While a few public figures expressed more than ritual regret about what was happening—�
��it is impossible to conceive of a community more miserable, more wretched,” Henry Clay said of the Cherokee on the Senate floor in 1835—most seemed to agree that their relocation was not only inevitable but for the best. And since some self-exculpating theory is always useful to justify self-interested actions, Americans in Melville’s time were full of talk about their superiority to the various dark peoples whom they felt entitled to displace. In the later 1840s, even opponents of the imperialist war with Mexico (in this case, the liberal Boston minister Theodore Parker) did not doubt “the superior ideas and … better civilization” of the “Anglo-Saxon race,” though Parker preferred that Mexico be civilized “by the schoolmaster [rather] than the cannon.”
This attitude of racial superiority continues to flicker in our own time, but by the mid-twentieth century, when it became disreputable among educated people, it was rarely stated openly or frankly. Conventional in Melville’s time, it was shared by religion and science, by the educated and the ignorant, by advocates and opponents of Indian removal and slavery, in both the North and the South.
According to the most advanced students at that time, the human species was distributed among five races: American Indian; Caucasian (a term coined by the German ethnologist Johann Blumenbach in 1781); Mongolian; Ethiopian; and Malay. Although it was customary to associate differences of color and feature among the races with corresponding mental and moral differences, the Bible taught “that of one blood God had made all the nations” (Acts 17:26). And since the biblical story of Creation precluded the notion that human beings derived from multiple origins, even the most resolute racialists of Melville’s day had to fall back on some sort of environmental explanation for human difference. There was, in other words, a kind of agnosticism in the air on the theoretical question of whether the differences between civilized and savage people, however stark, were written into their respective natures or were attributes that could be learned and unlearned.
In practice there was considerable agreement about who stood where in the hierarchy of cultures. If, for example, pro-slavery southerners such as William Gilmore Simms believed that the Ethiopian, or Negro, was designed to be nothing more than an “implement in the hand of [white] civilization,” the anti-slavery New Englander Ralph Waldo Emerson was no less convinced, at least as a young man, that “nature has plainly assigned different degrees of intellect to … different races, and [that] the barriers between them are insurmountable.” In Melville’s America, there were differences in the intensity with which these platitudes were expressed and in the political lessons drawn from them; but the hierarchy itself—which in fact hardened as slavery came under pressure from humanitarian reformers—was almost universally accepted.
5.
These ideas were among the items that Melville packed in his baggage for his visit to the “Malay” race, but the trip triggered a debate within his mind over what they were worth. What he expected to encounter was a race of savages little better than children, people stuck—to use a psychoanalytic term that came into currency much later—in a state of arrested development. Though they did not yet possess this vocabulary, Melville’s immediate predecessors, and most of his contemporaries, understood the history of mankind as a universal process of advancement that moved at different speeds in different places, and that somehow skipped over certain peoples and left them mired in the primitive past. Commentators of a naturalist bent counted the effects of climate and terrain among the reasons for human disparities, while others more religiously inclined looked to divine design as the sole and total cause. Some believed that primitive peoples could be lifted into civilization by education and training. Others doubted it. Whatever the putative cause or remedy, there was general agreement that certain races were equipped for advancement and others were not.
Civilization, in other words, was the process by which human beings suppress their instincts and turn into self-controlled citizens. “Savage” was the name for people incapable of self-suppression (“Tahitians,” as Melville wrote rather casually in Omoo, “can hardly be said to reflect; they are all impulse”), people who continued to live in a scavenger’s relation to nature, under the open sky or in portable shelters, plucking their daily needs from whatever grew or roamed in the wild. As one of Melville’s contemporaries, Horace Bushnell, put it in a speech to the Home Missionary Society in 1847, Indians are “a wild race of nomads,” who “think it no degradation to do before the woods and wild animals what in the presence of a cultivated state they would blush to perpetrate.” They make no distinction between public and private. They have no science, only superstition, and so their “fireside stories,” as Francis Parkman wrote in 1851, are full of “wild recitals of necromancy and witchcraft—men transformed to beasts, and beasts transformed to men, animated trees, and birds who spoke with human tongue.” They cultivate nothing. The relation between the idea of cultivation and the emerging notion of “culture” (a word used increasingly in Melville’s time as a synonym for civilization) was strong since, as the horticultural metaphor implies, human beings require fertilization and pruning no less than do livestock or crops.
For Europeans, such discussions were parlor talk. The practice of enslaving “inferior” peoples had been formally abolished in the British Empire in 1833, and even while it lasted, slavery was, for its beneficiaries in the home country, little more than an unpleasant rumor. By the time an English gentleman stirred sugar into his tea or had his servant fold his linen, the role of some faraway slave in producing these luxuries had been forgotten—or, more likely, had never been much thought about. As for that vaunted invention of the Enlightenment mind, the Noble Savage, if he existed at all, he was a distant colonial subject of whom a few examples had been brought back from the tropics and put on exhibition in London or Paris.
For Americans, however, even in Melville’s day, the idea of the primitive cut closer to home. The savage past did not seem superseded, as Europeans lost no opportunity in pointing out, and Americans could never be quite sure where they stood in the continuum that ran from savage to civilized. When Captain David Porter, for example, recorded his voyage to the Marquesas in his journal—which Melville read while working on Typee—he complained that France “attached to us no more merit than [it] would have given to one of the natives for being born there.”
A good example of the classic Enlightenment account of how the civilizing process was supposed to work may be found in a book by an eighteenth-century Scotsman named James Monboddo that was still widely read in Melville’s time. The Origin and Progress of Language (1773) described how, as history advances, the “will and pleasure” of individuals gradually submits to “public wisdom”:
First, we see men living together in herds, like cattle or horses … carrying on some common business, such as fishing or hunting.… Next, we see them submitting to government, but only upon certain occasions; and particularly for the purpose of self-defense.… The next stage of civil society … is that of the Indians of North America, who have a government in time of peace as well as war.… The last stage of civil society, in which the progression ends, is that most perfect form of polity, which, to all the advantages of the governments last mentioned, joins the care of the education of the youth, and of the private lives of the citizens; neither of which is left to the will and pleasure of each individual, but both are regulated by public wisdom. Such was the government of antient Sparta, and such were all the plans of government devised by Plato and other philosophers.
Reading this account of how man evolves from “frugivore to a cannibal to a civilized being” is like walking through the Hall of Man in an old-style Museum of Natural History, with its sequence of dioramas that starts with a caveman in animal skins and ends with astronauts in pressure suits. It has the tableau quality of an exhibition behind glass; it is disconnected from the viewer, to be admired from behind the rope and concluded with a visit to the souvenir shop. It is about a process that was finished long ago. Still, in spite of it
self, there are hints of self-questioning: If man had reached his highest point of development in the ancient past, at Sparta and Athens, what has happened since? Does civilization move steadily upward, or reach and then stall on a plateau? Or might it be a cyclical affair of rise and fall?
Here, composed some fifty years later, is another version of the same universal human history—this one by an American, namely, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it in a letter to a friend near the end of his life, in 1824, when Melville was five years old:
Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly, towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subsisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day.
Melville: His World and Work Page 8