Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

Swallowing down his heart, he saw, as he passed through the gangway to the dread tribunal of the frigate, the quartermaster rigging the gratings; the boatswain with his green bag of scourges; the master-at-arms ready to help off some one’s shirt. On the charge of a Lieutenant, Melville was accused by the Captain of failure in his duty at his station in the starboard main-lift: a post to which Melville had never known he was assigned. His solemn disclaimer was thrown in his teeth, and for a thing utterly unforeseen, and for a crime of which he was utterly innocent, he was about to be flogged.

“There are times when wild thoughts enter a man’s breast, when he seems almost irresponsible for his act and his deed,” writes the grandson of General Peter Gansevoort. “The Captain stood on the weather-side of the deck. Sideways, on an unobstructed line with him, was the opening of the lee-gangway, where the side-ladders are suspended in port. Nothing but a slight bit of sinnate-stuff served to rail in this opening, which was cut right to the level of the Captain’s feet, showing the far sea beyond. I stood a little to windward of him, and, though he was a large, powerful man, it was certain that a sudden rush against him, along the slanting deck, would infallibly pitch him headforemost into the ocean, though he who so rushed must needs go over with him. My blood seemed clotting in my veins; I felt icy cold at the tips of my fingers, and a dimness was before my eyes. But through that dimness the boatswain’s mate, scourge in hand, loomed like a giant, and Captain Claret, and the blue sea seen through the opening at the gangway, showed with an awful vividness. I cannot analyse my heart, though it then stood still within me. But the thing that swayed me to my purpose was not altogether the thought that Captain Claret was about to degrade me, and that I had taken an oath with my soul that he should not. No, I felt my man’s manhood so bottomless within me, that no word, no blow, no scourge of Captain Claret could cut me deep enough for that.

I but swung to an instinct within me—the instinct diffused through all animated nature, the same that prompts even a worm to turn under the heel. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose.”

“Captain Claret,” said a voice advancing from the crowd. Melville turned to see who this might be that audaciously interrupted at a juncture like this. It was a corporal of marines, who speaking in a mild, firm, but extremely deferential manner, said: “I know that man, and I know that he would not be found absent from his station if he knew where it was.” This almost unprecedented speech inspired Jack Chase also to intercede in Melville’s behalf. But for these timely intercessions, it is very likely that Melville would have ended that day as a suicide and a murderer. There is no lack of evidence, both in his writings and in the personal recollections of him that survive, that the headlong violence of his passion, when deeply stirred, balked at no extremity. And that day as the scourge hung over him for an offence he had not committed, he seems to have been as murderously roused as at any other known moment in his life. Though hating war, he boasted “the inalienable right to kill”: and the ghost of Mow-Mow, at the day of final reckoning, can attest that this boast was not lightly given. Like the whaling Quakers that he so much admired, he was “a pacifist with a vengeance.”

This scene happened during the run of the United States from Rio to the Line. At Rio, Melville had gone ashore with Jack Chase and a few other discreet and gentlemanly top-men. But of the dashing adventures—if any—that they had on land, Melville is silent: “my man-of-war alone must supply me with the staple of my matter,” he says; “I have taken an oath to keep afloat to the last letter of my narrative.”

In so far as fine weather and the ship’s sailing were concerned, the whole run from Rio to the Line was one delightful yachting. Especially pleasant to Melville during this run were his quarter watches in the main-top. Removed from the immediate presence of the officers, he and his companions could there enjoy themselves more than in any other part of the ship. By day, many of them were industrious making hats or mending clothes. But by night they became more romantically inclined. Seen from this lofty perch, of moonlight nights, the frigate must have been a glorious sight. “She was going large before the wind, her stun’-sails set on both sides, so that the canvases on the main-mast and fore-mast presented the appearance of two majestic, tapering pyramids, more than a hundred feet broad at the base, and terminating in the clouds with the light cope-stone of the royals. That immense area of snow-white canvas sliding along the sea was indeed a magnificent spectacle. The three shrouded masts looked like the apparition of three gigantic Turkish Emirs striding over the ocean.” From there, too, the band, playing on the poop, would tempt them to dance; Jack Chase would well up into song during silent intervals: songs varied by sundry yarns and twisters of the top-men.

One pleasant midnight, after the United States had crossed the Line and was running on bravely somewhere off the coast of Virginia, the breeze gradually died, and an order was given to set the main-top-gallant-stun’-sail. The halyards not being rove, Jack Chase assigned to Melville that eminently difficult task. That this was a business demanding unusual sharp-sightedness, skill, and celerity is evident when it is remembered that the end of a line, some two hundred feet long, was to be carried aloft in one’s teeth and dragged far out on the giddiest of yards, and after being wormed and twisted about through all sorts of intricacies, was to be dropped, clear of all obstructions, in a straight plumb-line right down to the deck.

“Having reeved the line through all the inferior blocks,” Melville says, “I went out to the end of the weather-top-gallant-yard-arm, and was in the act of leaning over and passing it through the suspended jewel-block there, when the ship gave a plunge in the sudden swells of the calm sea, and pitching me still further over the yard, threw the heavy skirts of my jacket right over my head, completely muffling me. Somehow I thought it was the sail that had flapped, and under that impulse threw up my hands to drag it from my head, relying upon the sail itself to support me meanwhile. Just then the ship gave another jerk, and head foremost I pitched over the yard. I knew where I was, from the rush of air by my ears, but all else was a nightmare. A bloody film was before my eyes, through which, ghost-like, passed and repassed my father, mother, and sisters. An unutterable nausea oppressed me; I was conscious of groping; there seemed no breath in my body. It was over one hundred feet that I fell—down, down, with lungs collapsed as in death. Ten thousand pounds of shot seemed tied to my head, as the irresistible law of gravitation dragged me, head foremost and straight as a die, towards the infallible centre of the terrequeous globe. All I had seen, and read, and heard, and all that I had thought and felt in my life—seemed intensified in one fixed idea in my soul. But dense as this idea was, it was made up of atoms.

“With the bloody, blind film before my eyes, there was a still stranger hum in my head, as if a hornet were there; and I thought to myself, Great God! this is Death! Yet these thoughts were unmixed with alarm. Like frost-work that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm.

“So protracted did my fall seem, that I can even now recall the feeling of wondering how much longer it would be, ere all was over and I struck. Time seemed to stand still, and all the worlds seemed poised on their poles, as I fell, soul-becalmed, through the eddying whirl and swirl of the Maelstrom air.

“At first, as I have said, I must have been precipitated head foremost; but I was conscious, at length, of a swift, flinging motion of my limbs, which involuntarily threw themselves out, so that at last I must have fallen in a heap. This is more likely, from the circumstance that when I struck the sea, I felt as if some one had smote me slantingly across the shoulder and along part of my right side.

“As I gushed into the sea, a thunder-boom sounded in my ear; my soul seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me with the billows. The blow from the sea must have turned me, so that I sank almost feet foremost through a soft, seething, foamy lull. Some current seemed hurrying me away; in a trance I yielded, and sank deeper and deeper into the glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm now around me, flecked by summer lightnings in an azure afar. The horrible nausea was gone; the bloody, blind film turned a pale green; I wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying. But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through.

“For one instant an agonising revulsion came over me as I found myself utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expended; and there I hung, vibrating in the mid-deep. What wild sounds then rang in my ear! One was a soft moaning, as of low waves on the beach; the other wild and heartlessly jubilant, as of the sea in the height of a tempest. Oh soul! thou then heardest life and death: as he who stands upon the Corinthian shore hears both the Ionian and the Ægean waves. The life-and-death poise soon passed; and then I found myself slowly ascending, and caught a dim glimmering of light. Quicker and quicker I mounted; till at last I bounded up like a buoy, and my whole head was bathed in the blessed air.”

“Ten minutes after, I was safe on board, and, springing aloft, was ordered to reeve anew the stun’-sail-halyards, which, slipping through the blocks when I had let go the end, had unrove and fallen to the deck.” Amphitrite had, indeed, interceded with Neptune, and the sea-gods strove to answer Melville’s prayer. But Melville always, even in the lowest abyss of despair, clung passionately to life. And the night he was hurled from the mast he was hurled from among friends, and into waters that washed the neighbouring shores of his birth.

Melville’s long wanderings were nearly at an end. With the home port believed to be broad on their bow, under the stars and a meagre moon in her last quarter, the main-top-men gathered aloft in the top, and round the mast they circled, “hand in hand, all spliced together. We had reefed the last top-sail; trained the last gun; blown the last match; bowed to the last blast; been tranced in the last calm. We had mustered our last round the capstan; been rolled to grog the last time; for the last time swung in our hammocks; for the last time turned out at the sea-gull call of the watch. We had seen our last man scourged at the gangway; our last man gasp out the ghost in the stifling sick-bay; our last man tossed to the sharks.”