Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

It was in the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that Melville made good his escape from the valley of Typee. The Australian whaler—called by Melville the Julia—which had broken his four months’ captivity, lay with her main-topsail aback, about a league from the land. “She turned out to be a small, slatternly looking craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of affairs aboard. Leaning carelessly over the bulwarks were the sailors, wild, haggard-looking fellows in Scotch caps and faded blue frocks; some of them with cheeks of mottled bronze, to which sickness soon changes the rich berry-brown of a seaman’s complexion in the tropics.” So extraordinary was Melville’s appearance—“a robe of the native cloth was thrown over my shoulders, my hair and beard were uncut, and I betrayed other evidences of my recent adventure”—that as the boat came alongside, a low cry ran fore and aft the deck. Immediately on gaining the deck, Melville was beset on all sides by questions.

Indeed, never afterwards, it appears, could Melville escape a like curiosity. Henceforth he was to be “the man who lived among the cannibals.” Nor does he always seem to have been so uncommunicative as he grew in later years. In the Preface to Omoo, after recording the fact that he kept no journal during his wanderings in the South Seas, he says: “The frequency, however, with which these incidents have been verbally related, has tended to stamp them upon the memory.” There is novelty in his logic: all twice-told tales are not always just-so stories. He says, too, in the Preface to Typee: “The incidents recorded in the following pages have often served, when ‘spun as a yarn,’ not only to relieve the weariness of many a night-watch at sea, but to excite the warmest sympathies of the author’s shipmates.”

Life on board the Julia was, if anything, worse than life on board the Acushnet. In the first place, Melville was ill. Not until three months after his escape from Typee did he regain his normal strength. And, as always, Melville looked back with regret upon leaving the life he had so wanted to escape from while he was in the midst of it. “As the land faded from my sight,” he says, “I was all alive to the change in my condition. But how far short of our expectations is oftentimes the fulfilment of the most ardent hopes. Safe aboard of a ship—so long my earnest prayer—with home and friends once more in prospect, I nevertheless felt weighed down with a melancholy that could not be shaken off.” Melville felt he was leaving cannibalism forever—and the departure shot a pang into his heart.

The ship’s company were a sorry lot: reduced by desertion from thirty-two to twenty souls, and more than half of the remaining were more or less unwell from a long sojourn in a dissipated port. Some were wholly unfit for duty; one or two were dangerously ill. The rest managed to stand their watch, though they could do little. The crew was, for the most part, a typical whaling crew: “villains of all nations and dyes; picked up in the lawless Spanish Main, and among the savages of the islands.” The provisions, too, on board the Julia were notoriously bad, even for a whaler. Melville’s regret at leaving Typee was not mere wanton sentimentality.

The mate, John Jermin, was of the efficient race of short thick-set men: bullet headed, with a fierce little squint out of one eye, and a nose with a rakish tilt to one side. His was the art of knocking a man down with irresistible good humour, so the very men he flogged loved him like a brother. He had but one failing: he abhorred weak infusions, and cleaved manfully to strong drink. He was never completely sober: and when he was nearly drunk he was uncommonly obstreperous.

Jermin was master of every man aboard except the ship’s carpenter,—a man so excessively ugly he went by the name of “Beauty.” As ill-favoured as Beauty was in person, he was no less ugly in temper: his face had soured his heart. Melville witnessed an encounter between Jermin and Beauty: an encounter that showed up clearly the state of affairs on board. While Beauty was thrashing Jermin in the forecastle, the captain called down the scuttle: “Why, why, what’s all this about? Mr. Jermin, Mr. Jermin—carpenter, carpenter: what are you doing down there? Come on deck; come on deck.” In reply to this, Doctor Long Ghost cried out in a squeak, “Ah! Miss Guy, is that you? Now, my dear, go right home, or you’ll get hurt.” The captain dipped his head down the scuttle to make answer, to receive, full in the face, the contents of a tin of soaked biscuit and tea-leaves. Things were not well aboard the Julia.

But it was Doctor Long Ghost—he who so mocked the captain—who figures most largely in Melville’s history: a man remarkable both in appearance and in personality. He was over six feet—a tower of bones, with a bloodless complexion, fair hair and a pale unscrupulous grey eye that twinkled occasionally with the very devil of mischief. At the beginning of the cruise of the Julia, as ship’s doctor, he had lived in the cabin with the captain. But once on a time they had got into a dispute about politics, and the doctor, getting into a rage, had driven his argument home with his fist, and left the captain on the floor, literally silenced. The captain replied by shutting him up in his state-room for ten days on a diet of bread and water. Upon his release he went forward with his chests among the sailors where he was welcomed as a good fellow and an injured man.

The early history of Doctor Long Ghost he kept to himself; but it was Melville’s conviction that he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy, and associated with gentlemen. “He quoted Virgil, and talked of Hobbes of Malmsbury, besides repeating poetry by the canto, especially Hudibras.” In the most casual manner, too, he could refer to an amour he had in Palermo, his lion hunting before breakfast among the Kaffirs, and the quality of coffee he had drunk in Muscat.

Melville was in no condition, physically, to engage in the ship’s duties, so he and Doctor Long Ghost fraternised in the forecastle, where they were treated by the crew as distinguished guests. There they talked, played chess—with an outfit of their own manufacture—and there Melville read the books of the Long Doctor, over and over again, not omitting a long treatise on the scarlet fever.

At its best, the forecastle is never an ideal abode: but the forecastle of the Julia—its bunks half wrecked, its filthy sailors’ pantry, and its plague of rats and cockroaches—must have made the Highlander seem as paradise in retrospect. The forecastle of the Julia, Melville says, “looked like the hollow of an old tree going to decay. In every direction the wood was damp and discoloured, and here and there soft and porous. Moreover, it was hacked and hewed without mercy, the cook frequently helping himself to splinters for kindling wood.” The viciousness of the crew of the Julia, did not, of course, perceptibly enhance the charms of the forecastle. Nor was Melville’s estate made more enviable when the man in the bunk next to his went wildly delirious. One night Melville was awakened from a vague dream of horrors by something clammy resting on him: his neighbour, with a stark stiff arm reached out into Melville’s bunk, had during the night died. The crew rejoiced at his death.

For weeks the Julia tacked about among the islands of the South Seas. The captain was ill, and Jermin steered the Julia, to Tahiti, to arrive off the island the moment that Admiral Du Petit-Thouars was firing, from the Reine Blanche, a salute in honour of the treaty he had just forced Pomare to sign.

But to the astonishment of the crew, Jermin kept the ship at sea, fearing the desertion of all his men if he struck anchor. His purpose was to set the sick captain ashore, and to resume the voyage of the Julia at once, to return to Tahiti after a certain period agreed upon, to take the captain off. The crew were in no mood to view this manœuvre with indifference. Melville and Long Ghost cautioned them against the folly of immediate mutiny, and on the fly-leaf of an old musty copy of A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies, a round-robin was indited, giving a statement of the crew’s grievances, and concluding with the earnest hope that the consul would at once come off and see how matters stood. Pritchard, the missionary consul, was at that time in England; his place was temporarily filled by one Wilson, son of the well-known missionary of that name, and no honour to his ancestor. It did not promise well for the crew that Wilson was an old friend of Captain Guy’s.

The round-robin was the prelude to iniquitous bullying and stupidity on the part of Wilson, Jermin, and Captain Guy. To the crew, it seemed that justice was poisoned at the fountain head. They gazed on the bitter waters, did a stout menagerie prance, and raged into mutiny. Then it was, after one of the men had all but succeeded in maliciously running the Julia straight upon a reef, that the good ship was piloted into the harbour of Papeetee, and the crew—including Melville and the Long Doctor, who were misjudged because of the company they kept—were for five days and nights held in chains on board the Reine Blanche. At the end of that time they were tried, one by one, before a tribunal composed of Wilson and two elderly European residents. Melville was examined last. One of the elderly gentlemen condescended to take a paternal interest in Melville. “Come here, my young friend,” he said; “I’m extremely sorry to see you associated with these bad men; do you know what it will end in?” Melville was in no mood for smug and salvationly solicitations. He had already declared that his resolution with respect to the ship was unalterable: he stuck to this resolution. Wilson thereupon pronounced the whole crew clean gone in perversity, and steeped in abomination beyond the reach of clemency. He then summoned a fat old native, Captain Bob—and a hearty old Bob he proved—giving him directions to marshal the crew to a place of safe keeping.

Along the Broom Road they were led: and to Melville, escaped from the forecastle of the Julia and the confined decks of the frigate, the air breathed spices. “The tropical day was fast drawing to a close,” he says; “and from where we were, the sun looked like a vast red fire burning in the woodlands—its rays falling aslant through the endless ranks of trees, and every leaf fringed with flame.”

The jail was extremely romantic in appearance: a large oval native house, with a dazzling white thatch, situated near a mountain stream that, flowing from a verdant slope, spread itself upon a beach of small sparkling shells, and then trickled into the sea. But the jail was ill adapted for domestic comforts, the only piece of furniture being two stout pieces of timber, about twenty feet in length, gouged to serve as stocks. John La Farge, in his Reminiscences of the South Seas, says: “We try to find, by the little river that ends our walk, on this side of the old French fort, the calaboose where Melville was shut up. There is no one to help us in our search; no one remembers anything. Buildings occupy the spaces of woodland that Melville saw about him. Nothing remains but the same charm of light and air which he, like all others, has tried to describe and to bring back home in words. But the beach is still as beautiful as if composed by Claude Lorraine.”

In this now-departed calaboose, Melville and the rest were kept in very lenient captivity by Captain Bob. Captain Bob’s notion of discipline was delightfully vague. He insensibly remitted his watchfulness, and the prisoners were free to stroll further and further from the Calabooza. After about two weeks—for days melted deceptively into each other at Tahiti—the crew was again summoned before Wilson, again to declare themselves unshaken in their obstinate refusal to sail again with Captain Guy. So back to the Calabooza they were sent.

The English Missionaries left their cards at the Calabooza in the shape of a package of tracts; three of the French priests—whom the natives viewed, so Melville says, as “no better than diabolical sorcerers”—called in person. One of the priests—called by Melville, Father Murphy—discovered a compatriot among the crew, and celebrated the discovery by sending a present of a basket of bread. Such was the persuasion of the gift that, on Melville’s count, “we all turned Catholics, and went to mass every morning, much to Captain Bob’s consternation. He threatened to keep us in the stocks, if we did not desist.”

After three weeks Wilson seems to have begun to suspect that it was not remotely impossible that he was making a laughing stock of himself in his futile attempt to break the mutineers into contrition. So off the Julia sailed, manned by a new crew. But before sailing, Jermin served his old crew the good turn of having their chests sent ashore. And when each was in possession of his sea-chest, the Calabooza was thronged with Polynesians, each eager to take a tayo, or bosom friend.

Though technically still prisoners, Melville and his former shipmates were allowed a long rope in their wanderings. Melville improved his leisure by attending, each Sunday, the services held in the great church which Pomare had built to be baptised in. In Omoo, Melville gives a detailed account of a typical Sabbath, and then launches into chapters of discussion upon the fruits of Christianity in Polynesia.

At church Melville had observed, among other puzzlingly incongruous performances, a young Polynesian blade standing up in the congregation in all the bravery of a striped calico shirt, with the skirts rakishly adjusted over a pair of white sailor trousers, and hair well anointed with cocoanut oil, ogling the girls with an air of supreme satisfaction. And of those who ate of the bread-fruit of the Eucharist in the morning, he knew several who were guilty of sad derelictions the same night. Desiring, if possible, to find out what ideas of religion were compatible with this behaviour, he and the Long Doctor called upon three sister communicants one evening. While the doctor engaged the two younger girls, Melville lounged on a mat with Ideea, the eldest, dallying with her grass fan, and improving his knowledge of Tahitian.

“‘Mickonaree ena’ (church member here), exclaimed she, laying her hand upon her mouth, and a strong emphasis on the adverb. In the same way, and with similar exclamations, she touched her eyes and hands. This done, her whole air changed in an instant; and she gave me to understand, by unmistakable gestures, that in certain other respects she was not exactly a ‘mickonaree.’ In short, Ideea was