Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

“And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”

In 1892, the year after Melville’s death, Arthur Stedman wrote a “Biographical and Critical Introduction” to Typee. During the final years of Melville’s sedulous isolation, Arthur Stedman was—with the minor exception of the late Dr. Titus Munson Coan, whose Missionary parentage Melville seems never to have quite forgiven him—the single man who clung to Melville with any semblance of personal loyalty. Stedman was unwavering in his belief that in his earlier South Sea novels, Melville had attained to his highest achievement: an achievement that entitled Melville to more golden opinions, Stedman believed, than Melville ever reaped from a graceless generation. To Stedman—as to Dr. Coan—Melville’s later development into mysticism and metaphysics was a melancholy perversity to be viewed with a charitable forbearance, and forgiven in the fair name of Fayaway. Dr. Coan repeatedly used to recount, with a sigh at his frustration, how he made persistent attempts to inveigle Melville into Polynesian reminiscences, always to be rebuffed by Melville’s invariable rejoinder: “That reminds me of the eighth book of Plato’s Republic.” This was a signal for silence and leave-taking. What was the staple of Stedman’s conversation is not known. But despite the fact that Melville was to him a crabbed and darkly shadowed hieroglyph, he clung to Melville with a personal loyalty at once humorous and pathetic. Melville to him was the “man who lived with the cannibals,” and merited canonisation because of this intimacy with unholy flesh.

Stedman published in the New York World for October 11, 1891, a tribute to his dead friend, significantly headed: “Marquesan” Melville. A South Sea Prospero who Lived and Died in New York. The Island Nymphs of Nukuheva’s Happy Valley. While Stedman was not necessarily responsible for this caption, it is, nevertheless, a just summary of the fullest insight he ever got into Melville’s life and works. The friendship between Petrarch and Boccaccio is hardly less humorous than the relationship between Melville and Stedman; and surely Melville has suffered more, in death, if not in life, from the perils of friendship than did Petrarch: more even than did Baudelaire from the damaging admiration of Gautier. When one’s enemy writes a book, one’s reputation is less likely to be jeopardised by literary animosity than it is by the best superlatives of self-appointed custodians of one’s good name. But as Francis Thompson has observed, it is a principle universally conceded that, since the work of a great author is said to be a monument, the true critic does best evince his taste and sense by cutting his own name on it. Critical biographers have contrived a method to hand themselves down to posterity through the gods of literature, as did the Roman emperors through the gods of Olympus—by taking the heads off their statues, and clapping on their own instead. Criticism is a perennial decapitation.

“I have a fancy,” says Stedman, in his Biographical and Critical Introduction, “that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast which revived the spirit of adventure in Melville’s breast. That book was published in 1840, and was at once talked of everywhere. Melville must have read it at the time, mindful of his own experience as a sailor. At any rate, he once more signed a ship’s articles, and on January 1, 1841, sailed from New Bedford harbour in the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific Ocean and the sperm fishery.”

In the second part of this statement, Stedman attempts to stick to the letter: but there is a flaw in his text. That Melville sailed in the Acushnet is corroborated by a statement in the journal of Melville’s wife; in the record surviving in Melville’s handwriting, headed “what became of the ship’s company on the whaleship Acushnet, according to Hubbard, who came back in her (more than a four years’ voyage) and visited me in Pittsfield in 1850;” as well as by surviving letters written by Richard Tobias Greene, the Toby of Typee.

The roster of Melville’s ship is preserved in Alexander Starbuck’s bulky History of the American Whale Fishery from its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (published by the author, Waltham, Mass., 1878). Starbuck rates the Acushnet as a ship of 359 tons, built in 1840. Her managing owners are reported as having been Bradford Fuller & Co. Under command of Captain Pease she sailed from Fairhaven, bound for the whaling grounds of the Pacific, on January 3, 1841, and returned to Fairhaven on May 13, 1845, laden with 850 barrels of sperm oil, 1350 barrels of whale oil, and 13500 pounds of whale-bone. On July 18, 1845, she started upon her second voyage, under command of Captain Rogers, to return June 7, 1848, stocked with 500 barrels of sperm oil, 800 barrels of whale oil, and 6000 pounds of whale-bone. On December 4, 1847, she had a boat stove by a whale, with the loss of the third mate and four of the crew. Her third voyage, begun August 31, 1848, under command of Captain Bradley, was her last. As by some malicious fatality, the Acushnet was lost on St. Lawrence Island on August 31, 1851, within a month of the time when Melville brought Moby-Dick to its tragic close.

Between Stedman’s and Starbuck’s accounts of the time and place of Melville’s sailing there is a discrepancy of half a mile and two days. This discrepancy, however, does not necessarily impugn Stedman’s accuracy. Fairhaven is just across the Acushnet river from New Bedford, and “sailing from New Bedford” may be like “sailing from New York”—which is often in reality “sailing from Hoboken.”

Stedman dates Melville’s sailing January 1; Starbuck, January 3. Melville launches the hero of Moby-Dick neither from New Bedford nor from Fairhaven, but from Nantucket. Ishmael begins his fatal voyage aboard the Pequod on December 25; and there is a fitting irony in the fact that on the day that celebrates the birth of the Saviour of mankind, the Pequod should sail forth to slay Moby-Dick, the monstrous symbol and embodiment of unconquerable evil.

That Dana’s book should have fired Melville to an impetuous and romantic jaunt to the South Seas, though an ill-favoured statement, is Stedman’s very own. When a boy concludes the Christmas holidays by a mid-winter plunge into the filthy and shabby business of whaling; when a young man inaugurates the year not among the familiar associations of the gods of his hearth, but among semi-barbarous strangers of the forecastle of a whaler: to make such a shifting of whereabouts a sign of jolly romantic exuberance, is engagingly naïve in its perversity.

Just what specific circumstances were the occasion of Melville’s escape into whaling will probably never be known: what burst of demoniac impulse, either of anger, or envy, or spite; what gnawing discontent; what passionate disappointment; what crucifixion of affection; what blind impetuosity; what sinister design. But in the light of his writings and the known facts of his life it seems likely that his desperate transit was made in the mid-winter of his discontent. That the reading of Dana’s book should have filled his head with a mere adolescent longing for brine-drenched locomotion and sent him gallantly off to sea is a surmise more remarkable for simplicity than insight.

Melville never wearies of iterating his “itch for things remote.” Like Thoreau, he had a “naturally roving disposition,” and of the two men it is difficult to determine which achieved a wider peregrination. It was Thoreau’s proud boast: “I have travelled extensively in Concord.” He believed that Concord, with its sylvan environment, was a microcosm “by the study of which the whole world could be comprehended,” and so, this wildest of civilised men seldom strayed beyond its familiar precincts. His was a heroic provincialism, that cost him little loss either in worldliness or in wisdom. Though his head went swimming in the Milky Way, his feet were well-rooted in New England sod. “One world at a time” was the programme he set himself for digesting the universe: and he looked into the eyes of this world with cold stoical serenity.

Melville made no such capitulation with reality. Between the obdurate world of facts and his ardent and unclarified desires there was always, to the end of his life, a blatant incompatibility. Alongside the hard and cramping world of reality, and in more or less sharp opposition to it, he set up a fictitious world, a world of heart’s desire; and unlike Thoreau, he hugged his dream in jealous defiance of reality. It is, of course, an ineradicable longing of man to repudiate the inexorable restrictions of reality, and return to the happy delusion of omnipotence of early childhood, an escape into some land of heart’s desire. Goethe compared the illusions that man nourishes in his breast to the population of statues in ancient Rome which were almost as numerous as the population of living men. Most men keep the boundaries between these two populations distinct: a separation facilitated by the usual dwindling of the ghostly population. Flaubert once observed that every tenth-rate provincial notary had in him the debris of a poet. As Wordsworth complains, as we grow away from childhood, the vision fades into the light of common day. Thoreau clung to his visions; but they were, after all, cold-blooded and well-behaved visions. And by restricting himself to “one world at a time,” by mastering his dream, he mastered reality. Alcott declared that Thoreau thought he dwelt in the centre of the universe, and seriously contemplated annexing the rest of the planet to Concord. The delicacy of the compliment to the rest of the planet has never been adequately appreciated.

Melville’s more violent and restive impulses never permitted him to feel any such flattering attachment to his whereabouts, whether it was Albany, Liverpool, Lima, Tahiti or Constantinople. Like Rousseau, who confessed himself “burning with desire without any definite object,” Melville always felt himself an exile from the seacoast of Bohemia. But his nostalgia, his indefinite longing for the unknown, was not, in any literal sense, “homesickness” at all. As Aldous Huxley has observed:

That Melville came to no very pleasant haven of refuge in the forecastle of the Acushnet is borne out by his drastic preference to be eaten by cannibals rather than abide among the sureties of the ship and her company. That he “left the ship, being oppressed with hard fare and hard usage, in the summer of 1842 with a companion, Richard T. Greene (Toby) at the bay of Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands” is the statement in the journal of his wife vividly elaborated in Typee.

Of Melville’s history aboard the Acushnet there is no straightforward account. Redburn, Typee, Omoo and White-Jacket are transparent chapters in autobiography. From his experiences on board the Acushnet Melville draws generously in Moby-Dick: but these experiences do not for one moment pretend to be the whole of the literal truth. Only an insanity as lurid as Captain Ahab’s would mistake Moby-Dick for a similarly reliable report of personal experiences. Moby-Dick is, indeed, an autobiography of adventure; but adventure upon the highest plane of spiritual daring. Incidentally, it also offers the fullest, and truest, and most readable history of an actual whaling cruise ever written. But it is not a “scientific” history. The “scientific” historian, proudly unreadable, thanks God that he has no style to tempt him out of the strict weariness of counting-house inventories; and in despair of presenting the truth, he boasts a make-shift veracity. The truest historians are, of course, the poets—and their histories are “feigned.” Melville, writing in the capacity of poet, was licensed in the best interests of truth to expurgate reality.

And though Captain Ahab’s hunt of the abhorred Moby-Dick belongs as essentially to the realm of poetry as does the quest of the Holy Grail, it is, withal, in its lower reaches, so broadly based on a foundation of solid reality that it is possible, by considering Moby-Dick in double conjunction with the few facts explicitly known of Melville during the period of his whaling cruise, and the wealth of facts known of whaling in general, to block in, with a considerable degree of certainty, the contours of his experiences aboard the Acushnet.

By all odds, the chief chapter in the history of whaling is the story of its rise and practical extinction in the Southern New England States. In this limited geographical area, trade in “oil and bone” was pursued with an alacrity, an enterprise and a prosperity unparalleled in the world’s history. When, in 1841, Melville boarded the Acushnet, American whaling, after a development through nearly two centuries, was within a decade of its highest development, within two decades of its precipitous decay. The doom of whale-oil lamps and sperm candles was ultimately decided in 1859 with the opening of the first oil well in Pennsylvania, and sealed by the Civil War. Melville knew American whaling at the prime of its golden age, and taking it at its crest, he raised it in fiction to a dignity and significance incomparably higher than it ever reached in literal fact.

At the beginning of Moby-Dick, Melville culls from the most incongruous volumes an anthology of comments upon Leviathan, beginning with the Mosaic comment “And God created great whales,” and ending, after eclectic quotations from Pliny, Lucian, Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne, Spenser, Hobbes, Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Paley, Blackstone, Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, Darwin, and dozens of others (including an excerpt “From ‘Something’ Unpublished”) ends on the old whale song:

Rather than conventionally distribute his quotations throughout the book as chapter headings, Melville offers them all in a block at the beginning of the volume, somewhat after the manner of Franklin’s grace said over the pork barrel. And extraordinarily effective is this device of Melville’s in stirring the reader’s interest to a sense of the wonder and mystery of this largest of all created live things, of the wild and distant seas wherein he rolls his island bulk; of the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds. Even before the reader comes to the superb opening paragraph of Moby-Dick, the great flood-gates of the wonder-world are swung open, and into his inmost soul, as into Melville’s, “two by two there float endless processions of the whale, and midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”

There is but one attempt at a comprehensive history of whaling: Walter S. Tower’s A History of the American Whale Fishery (Philadelphia, 1907). This slender volume first makes a rapid survey of the sources and proceeds from these to a cautious selection of the outstanding documented facts which by “economic interpretation” it presents as a consecutive story. Devoid of literary pretension, it is admirable in accuracy, compactness and clarity. The most comprehensive popular treatment of American whaling is to be found in Hyatt Verrill’s The Real Story of the Whaler (1916): a more exuberant but less workmanly book than Tower’s. Representative shorter surveys are to be found both in Winthrop L. Martin’s very able The American Merchant Marine (1902) and Willis J. Abbot’s American Merchant Ships and Sailors (1902).

Although the literature of whaling extends by repeated dilutions from “economic interpretations” to infant books, the classical sources for this extended literature tally less than a score. The great work on the Fisheries and Fishing Industries of the United States, prepared under the direction of G. Brown Goode in 1884, contains two articles on whaling of the first magnitude of importance: Whalemen, Vessels, Apparatus and Methods of the Whale Fishery and a History of the Present Condition of the Whale Fishery. The facts presented in these last two encyclopædic treatments are drawn principally from Alexander Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1874, published in 1876, and C. M. Scammon’s Marine Mammals of the North Western Coast of North America, with an Account of the American Whale Fishery, published in 1874. Lorenzo Sabine’s Report on the Principal Fisheries of the American Seas, published in 1870, while prior to the monumental works of Starbuck and Scammon in date of publication, enjoys no other priority. The most complete and detailed treatment of the origin and early development of whaling is to be found in William Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions, dated 1820. Scoresby—“the justly renowned,” according to Melville; “the excellent voyager”—was an English naval officer, and in his discussion of the whale fishery he deals solely with the European and principally with the British industry. But Scoresby’s book is principally a classic as regards the earlier history of whaling.

Scoresby seems to have convinced all later historians in this field of the folly of further research. Melville knew Scoresby’s book—“I honour him for a veteran,” Melville confesses—and drew from its erudition in Moby-Dick. Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket, published in 1836, is one of the few important original sources for the history of whaling, and the most readable. Melville expresses repeated indebtedness to Macy. Macy’s record has the tang of first-hand experience, and the flavour of local records. Because of the fact that many of the records from which this fine old antiquary of whales drew have since been destroyed by fire, his book enjoys the heightened authority of being a unique source. According to Anatole France, the perplexities of historians begin where events are related by two or by several witnesses, “for their evidence is always contradictory and always irreconcilable.” The fire at Nantucket blazed a royal road to truth. Daniel Ricketson, in his History of New Bedford (1850) attempted to emulate Macy. And though Ricketson’s sources, as Macy’s, have been largely destroyed by fire, his authority, though irrefutable in so far as it goes, is less detailed and comprehensive.

Of published personal narrative of whale-hunting, Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Ship Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket, published in 1821, as well as F. D. Bennett’s two-volume Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, published 1833-36, were drawn from by Melville in Moby-Dick. The account of the sinking of the Essex is important as being the source from which Melville borrowed, with superb transformation, the catastrophe with which he closes Moby-Dick. The sinking of the Essex—recounted in Moby-Dick—is the first and best known instance of a ship being actually sent to the bottom by the ramming of an infuriated whale, and in its sequel it is one of the most dreadful chapters of human suffering in all the hideous annals of shipwreck. “I have seen Owen Chase,” Melville says in Moby-Dick, “who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy: I have read his plain and faithful narrative: I have conversed with his son; and all within a few miles of the scene of the tragedy.” Melville may here be using a technique learned from Defoe.

Though in Moby-Dick Melville makes several references to J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes on a Sojourn on the Island of Zanzibar, mildly praising some of his drawings while reprobating their reproduction, he owes no debt to J. Ross Browne. Melville and Browne wrote of whaling with purposes diametrically opposed. Melville gloried in the romance of whales, and horsed on Leviathan, through a briny sunset dove down through the nether-twilight into the blackest haunted caverns of the soul. Browne provokes no such rhetorical extravagance of characterisation. He sat soberly and firmly down on a four-legged chair before a four-legged desk and wrote up his travels. “My design,” he says, “is simply to present to the public a faithful delineation of the life of a whaleman. In doing this, I deem it necessary that I should aim rather at the truth itself than at mere polish of style.” So Browne made a virtue of necessity, and convinced that “history scarcely furnishes a parallel for the deeds of cruelty” then “prevalent in the whale fishery,” he sent his book forth “to show in what manner the degraded condition of a portion of our fellow-creatures can be ameliorated.” In a study of Melville’s life, Browne is important as presenting an ungarnished account of typical conditions aboard a whaler at the time Melville was cruising in the Acushnet. Useful in the same way are R. Delano’s Wanderings and Adventures;

Though whales and Pilgrim Fathers would, at first blush, seem to belong to two mutually repugnant orders of nature, yet were they, by force of circumstance, early thrown into a warring intimacy. And strangely enough, in this armed alliance, it was the whale who made the first advances. Richard Mather, who came to Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635, records in his journal, according to Sabine, the presence off the New England coast of “mighty whales spewing up water in the air like the smoke of a chimney ... of such incredible bigness that I will never wonder that the body of Jonah could be in the belly of a whale.” From this and other evidence it seems undoubted that in early colonial days whales were undaunted by the strict observances of the Pilgrims, and browsed in great numbers, even on Sabbath, within the sight of land. Yet, despite this open violation of Scripture, the resourceful Puritan pressed them into the service of true religion. Believing that