Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

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.

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.”