Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

“When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you, the transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.”

When, at the age of seventeen, Melville cut loose from his mother, his kind cousins and aunts, and sympathising sisters, he was stirred by motives of desperation, and by the immature delusion that happiness lies elusive and beckoning, just over the world’s rim. It was a drastic escape from the intolerable monotony of prosaic certainties and aching frustrations. “Sad disappointments in several plans which I had sketched for my future life,” says Melville, “the necessity of doing something for myself, united with a naturally roving disposition, conspired within me, to send me to sea as a sailor.”

In Redburn: His First Voyage. Being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman (1849) Melville has left what is the only surviving record of his initial attempt “to sail beyond the sunset.” Luridly vivid and exuberant was his imagination, flooding the world of his childhood and fantastically transmuting reality. At the time of his first voyage, Melville was, it is well to remember, a boy of seventeen. He was not old enough, not wise enough, to regard his dreams as impalpable projections of his defeated desires: desires inflamed by what Dr. Johnson called the “dangerous prevalence of imagination,” and which, in “sober probability” could find no actual satisfaction. Had Melville been a nature of less impetuosity, or of less abundant physical vitality, he might have moped tamely at home and “yearned.” But with the desperate Quixotic enterprise of a splendid but embittered boy, he sallied forth into the unknown to put his dreams to the test. When it was reported to Carlyle that Margaret Fuller made boast: “I accept the universe,” unimpressed he remarked: “Gad! she’d better.” Melville, when only seventeen, had not yet come to Carlyle’s dyspeptic resignation to the cosmic order. “As years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pause, then,” so Melville says, in substance, in a passage on elderly whales, “in the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life, do sulky old souls go about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying their prayers.” Lacking Dr.

Johnson’s elderly wisdom, Melville believed there to be some correlation between happiness and geography. He was not willing to take resignation on faith. Not through “spontaneous striving towards development,” but through necessity and hard contact with nature and men does the recalcitrant dreamer accept Carlyle’s dictum. With drastic experience, most men come at last to have a little commonsense knocked into their heads,—and a good bit of imagination knocked out, as Wordsworth, for one, discovered.

Melville’s recourse to the ocean in 1837, as that of Richard Henry Dana’s three years before, was a heroic measure, calculated either to take the nonsense out of both of them, or else to drive them straight either to suicide, madness, or rum-soaked barbarism. To both boys, it was a crucial test that would have ruined coarser or weaker natures. Dana came from out the ordeal purged and strengthened, toned up to the proper level, and no longer too fine for everyday use. Though as years went by, so says C. F. Adams, his biographer, “the freshness of the great lesson faded away, and influences which antedated his birth and surrounded his life asserted themselves, not for his good.”

Because of lack of contemporary evidence, the immediate influences of Melville’s first experience in the forecastle, cannot be so positively stated. Redburn, the only record of the adventure, was not written until twelve years after Melville had experienced what it records. Extraordinarily crowded was this intervening span of twelve years. But despite the fulness of intervening experience—or, maybe, because of it—the universe still stuck in his maw: it was a bolus on which he gagged. Redburn is written in embittered memory of Melville’s first hegira. In the words of Mr. H. S. Salt: “It is a record of bitter experience and temporary disillusionment—the confessions of a poor, proud youth, who goes to sea ‘with a devil in his heart’ and is painfully initiated into the unforeseen hardships of a sea-faring life.” In 1849 he was still unadjusted to unpalatable reality, and in Redburn he seems intent upon revenging himself upon his early disillusion by an inverted idealism,—by building for himself, “not castles, but dungeons in Spain,”—as if, failing to reach the moon, he should determine to make a Cynthia of the first green cheese. And this inverted idealism he achieves most effectively by recording with photographic literalness the most hideous details of his penurious migration. His romantic realism—reminding one of Zola and certain pages out of Rousseau—he alternates with malicious self-satire, and its obverse gesture, obtrusive self-pity.

To those austere and classical souls who are proudly impatient of this style of writing, it must be insisted with what Arnold called “damnable iteration” that Redburn purports to be the confessions of a seventeen-year-old lad. Autobiographically, the book is, of course, of superlative interest. But despite its unaccountable neglect, and Melville’s ostentation of contempt for it, it is none the less important, in the history of letters, as a very notable achievement. Mr. Masefield and W. Clark Russell alone, of competent critics, seem to have been aware of its existence. It is Redburn that Mr. Masefield confesses to loving best of Melville’s writings: this “boy’s book about running away to sea.” Mr. Masefield thinks, however, that “one must know New York and the haunted sailor-town of Liverpool to appreciate that gentle story thoroughly.”

When Melville wrote Redburn in 1849, there was no book exactly like it in our literature, its only possible forerunners being Nathaniel Ames’ A Mariner’s Sketches (1830) and Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840). The great captains had written of their voyages, it is true; or when they themselves left no record, their literary laxity was usually corrected by the querulousness of some member of their ship’s company. Great compilations such as Churchill’s, or Harris’, or Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation: made by sea or overland to the remotest and farthest different quarters of the earth at any time within the Compass of these 1600 years, or no less luxuriously entitled works, such as the fine old eighteenth century folio of Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street Robbers, etc., To which is added, A Genuine Account of the Voyages and Plunders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, interspersed with several diverting tales, and pleasant songs, and adorned with the Heads of the Most Remarkable Villains, curiously Engraven, are monuments to the prodigious wealth of the early literature of sea adventure. The light of romance colours these maritime exploits, and even upon the maturest gaze there still lingers something of the radiance with which the ardent imagination of boyhood gilds the actions and persons of these fierce sea-warriors, treacherous, cruel and profligate miscreants though the most picturesque of them were.

But these hardy adventurers were men of action; men proud of their own exploits, but untouched by any corrupt self-consciousness of their Gilbert-and-Sullivan, or Byronic possibilities; men untempted to offer any superfluous encouragement to the deep blue sea to “roll.” And though many of them—Captain Cook, for example—ran away to sea to ship before the mast, they in later years betray no temptings to linger with attention over their days of early obscurity. Even The Book of Things Forgotten passes over the period of Cook’s life in the forecastle. He began as an apprentice, he ended as a mate. That is all. As regards the life he led as a youth on board the merchant ship there is no account: a silence that forces Walter Besant in his Captain Cook to a page or two of surmise as a transition to more notable sureties. An appreciation of the romance of the sea, and of the humbler details of the life of the common sailor is one of our most recent sophistications.

In fiction, it is true, Smollett had his sailors, as did Scott, and Marryat, and Cooper,—to mention only the most notable names. Provoked to originality by a defiant boast, Cooper wrote the earliest first-rate sea-novel: a story concerning itself exclusively with the sea. Remarkable is the clearness and accuracy of his description of the manœuvres of his ships. He makes his vessels “walk the waters like a thing of life.” “I have loved ships as I have loved men,” says Melville. And Cooper before him, as Conrad after him, have by similar love given personality to vessels. Among his company of able seamen, Cooper has his Long Tom Coffin: and these are more picturesque, and perhaps more real than his Lord Geoffrey Cleveland, his Admiral Bluewater, his Griffith, and his other quarterdeck people. But sea-life as Cooper knew it was sea-life as seen from the quarterdeck, and from the quarterdeck of the United States navy.

Marryat, it is true, makes his Newton Foster a merchant sailor. But Marryat knew nothing of the hidden life of the merchant service. He had passed his sea-life in the ships of the States, and he knew no more of what passed in a merchantman’s forecastle than the general present day land intelligence knows of what passes in a steamer’s engine room. Dana and Melville were the first to lift the hatch and show the world what passes in a ship’s forecastle. Dana disclosed these secrets in a single volume; Melville in a number of remarkable narratives, the first of which was Redburn.

Dana’s is a trustworthy and matter-of-fact account in the form of a journal; a vigorous, faithful, modest narrative. With very little interest exhibited in the feeling of his own pulse, he recounts the happenings aboard the ship from day to day. Melville’s account is more vivid because more intimate. As is the case with George Borrow, his eye is always riveted upon himself. He minutely amplifies his own emotions and sensations, and with an incalculable gain over Dana in descriptive vividness. One would have to be colour blind to purple patches to fail to recognise in Redburn streaks of the purest Tyrean dye. Between Melville and Dana the answer is obvious as to “who fished the murex up?”

“It was with a heavy heart and full eyes,” says Melville, “that my mother parted from me; perhaps she thought me an erring and a wilful boy, and perhaps I was; but if I was, it had been a hard-hearted world, and hard times that had made me so.”

Dressed in a hunting jacket; one leg of his trousers adorned with an ample and embarrassing patch; armed with a fowling piece which his older brother Gansevoort had given him, in lieu of cash, to sell in New York; without a penny in his pocket: Melville arrived in New York on a fine rainy day in the late spring of 1837. Dripping like a seal, and garbed like a housebreaker, he walked across town to the home of a friend of Gansevoort’s, where he was dried, warmed and fed.

Philo of Judea has descended to posterity blushing because he had a body. Melville survives, rosy in animality: but his was never Philo’s scarlet of shame. Melville was a boy of superb physical vigour: and his blackest plunges of discouragement and philosophical despair were always wholesomely amenable to the persuasions of food and drink. It was Carlyle’s conviction that with stupidity and a good digestion man can bear much: had Melville been gifted with stupidity, he would have needed only regular meals to convert him into a miracle of cheerful endurance. “There is a savour of life and immortality in substantial fare,” he later wrote; “we are like balloons, which are nothing till filled.” When Melville sat down to the well-stocked table at his friend’s house in New York he was a very miserable boy. But his misery was not invulnerable. “Every mouthful pushed the devil that had been tormenting me all day farther and farther out of me, till at last I entirely ejected him with three successive bowls of Bohea. That night I went to bed thinking the world pretty tolerable after all.”

At that time, and indeed until as recently as thirty years ago, the water front of a great sea-port town like New York showed a towering forest of tall and tapering masts reaching high up above the roofs of the water-side buildings, crossed with slender spars hung with snowy canvas, and braced with a maze of cordage: a brave sight that Melville passes over in morose silence. He postpones until his arrival in Liverpool the spicing of his account with the blended smells of pitch, and tar, and old-ropes, and wet-wood, and resin and the sharp cool tang of brine. Nor does Melville pause to conjure up the great bowsprits and jib-booms that stretched across the street that passed the foot of the slips. Though Melville has left a detailed description of the Liverpool docks—not failing to paint in with a dripping brush the blackest shadows of the low life framing that picturesque scene—it was outside his purpose to give any hint of the maritime achievement of the merchant service in which he was such an insignificant unit.

The maritime achievement of the United States was then almost at the pinnacle of its glory. At that time, the topsails of the United States flecked every ocean, and their captains courageous left no lands unvisited, no sea unexplored. From New England in particular sailed ships where no other ships dared to go, anchoring where no one else ever dreamed of looking for trade. And so it happened, as Ralph D. Paine in his The Old Merchant Marine has pointed out, that “in the spicy warehouses that overlooked Salem Harbour there came to be stored hemp from Luzon, gum copal from Zanzibar, palm oil from Africa, coffee from Arabia, tallow from Madagascar, whale oil from the Antarctic, hides and wool from the Rio de la Plata, nutmeg and cloves from Malaysia.” With New England originality and audacity, Boston shipped cargoes of ice to Calcutta. And for thirty years a regular trade in Massachusetts ice remained active and lucrative: such perishable freight out upon a four or five months’ voyage across the fiery Equator, doubling Da Gama’s cape and steering through the furnace heat of the Indian Ocean. In those days the people of the Atlantic seacoast from Maryland northward found their interests vitally allied with maritime adventure. There was a generous scattering of sea-faring folk among Melville’s forebears of our early national era; and Melville’s father, an importing merchant, owed his fortunes in important part, to the chances of the sea. The United States, without railroads, and with only the most wretched excuses for post-roads, were linked together by coasting ships.

And thousands of miles of ocean separated Americans from the markets in which they must sell their produce and buy their luxuries. Down to the middle of the last century, one of the most vital interests of the United States was in the sea: an interest that deeply influenced the thought, the legislature and the literature of our people. And during this period, as Willis J. Abbott, in his American Merchant Ships and Sailors has noted, “the sea was a favourite career, not only for American boys with their way to make in the world, but for the sons of wealthy men as well. That classic of New England seamanship Two Years Before the Mast was not written until the middle of the 19th century, and its author went to sea, not in search of wealth, but of health. But before the time of Richard Henry Dana, many a young man of good family and education—a Harvard graduate, like him, perhaps—bade farewell to a home of comfort and refinement and made his berth in a smoky, fetid forecastle to learn the sailor’s calling. There was at that time less to engage the activities and arouse the ambitions of youth than now, and the sea offered a most promising career.... Ships were multiplying fast, and no really lively and alert seaman need stay long in the forecastle.” The brilliant maritime growth of the United States, after a steady development for two hundred years, was, when Melville sailed in 1837, within twenty-five years of its climax.

It was to reach its peak in 1861, when the aggregate tonnage belonging to the United States was but a little smaller than that of Great Britain and her dependencies, and nearly as large as the combined tonnage of all other nations of the world, Great Britain excepted. Vanished fleets and brave memories—a chronicle of America which had written its closing chapters before the Civil War!

But this state of affairs,—if, indeed, he was even vaguely conscious of its existence,—left Melville at the time of his first shipping, completely cold. It is doubtless true that Maria would have respected him more if he had attempted to justify his sea-going by assuring her that at that time it was to no degree remarkable for seamen to become full-fledged captains and part owners at the age of twenty-one, or even earlier. And Maria would have listened impressed to such cogent evidence as the case of Thomas T. Forbes, for example, who shipped before the mast at the age of thirteen, and was commander of the Levant at twenty; or the case of William Sturges, afterwards the head of a firm which at one time controlled half the trade between the United States and China, who shipped at seventeen, and was a captain and manager in the China trade at nineteen. But such facts touched Melville not at all. “At that early age,” he says, “I was as unambitious as a man of sixty.” Melville’s brother, Tom, came to be a sea-captain. Melville’s was a different destiny.

So he trudged with his friend among the boats along the water front, where, after some little searching, they hit upon a ship for Liverpool. In the cabin they found the suave and bearded Captain, dapperly dressed, and humming a brisk air as he promenaded up and down: not such a completely odious creature, despite Melville’s final contempt for him. The conversation was concluded by Melville signing up as a “boy,” at terms not wildly lucrative for Melville.

Melville’s next move was to sell his gun: an experience which gives him occasion to discourse on pawn shops and the unenviable hardships of paupers. With the two and a half dollars that he reaped by the sale of his gun, and in almost criminal innocence of the outfit he would need, he bought a red woollen shirt, a tarpaulin hat, a belt, and a jack-knife. In his improvidence, he was ill provided, indeed, with everything calculated to make his situation aboard ship at all comfortable, or even tolerable. He was without mattress or bed-clothes, or table-tools; without pilot-cloth jackets, or trousers, or guernsey frocks, or oil-skin suits, or sea-boots and the other things which old seamen used to carry in their chests. As he himself says, his sea-outfit was “something like that of the Texan rangers, whose uniform, they say, consists of a shirt collar and a pair of spurs.” His purchases made, he did a highly typical thing: “I had only one penny left, so I walked out to the end of the pier, and threw the penny into the water.”

That night, after dinner, Melville went to his room to try on his red woollen shirt before the glass, to see what sort of a looking sailor he would make. But before beginning this ritual before the mirror, he “locked the door carefully, and hung a towel over the knob, so that no one could peep through the keyhole.” It is said that throughout his life Melville clung to this practice of draping door-knobs. “As soon as I got into the shirt,” Melville goes on to say, “I began to feel sort of warm and red about the face, which I found was owing to the reflection of the dyed wool upon my skin. After that, I took a pair of scissors and went to cutting my hair, which was very long. I thought every little would help in making me a light hand to run aloft.”

Next morning, before he reached the ship, it began raining hard, so it was plain there would be no getting to sea that day. But having once said farewell to his friends, and feeling a repetition of the ceremony would be awkward, Melville boarded the ship, where a large man in a large dripping pea-jacket, who was calking down the main-hatches, directed him in no cordial terms to the forecastle. Rather different was Dana’s appearance on board the brig Pilgrim on August 14, 1834, “in full sea-rig, with my chest containing an outfit for a two or three years’ voyage.” Nor did Dana begin in the forecastle.

In the dark damp stench of that deserted hole, Melville selected an empty bunk. In the middle of this he deposited the slim bundle of his belongings, and penniless and dripping spent the day walking hungry among the wharves: a day’s peregrination that he recounts with vivid and remorseless realism.

At night he returned to the forecastle, where he met a thick-headed lad from Lancaster of about his own years. Glad of any companionship, Melville and this lubber boy crawled together in the same bunk. But between the high odour of the forecastle, the loud snoring of his bed-fellow, wet, cold and hungry, he went up on deck, where he walked till morning. When the groceries on the wharf opened, he went to make a breakfast of a glass of water. This made him qualmish. “My head was dizzy, and I went staggering along the walk, almost blind.”

By the time Melville got back to the ship, everything was in an uproar. The pea-jacket man was there ordering about men in the riggings, and people were bringing off chickens, and pigs, and beef, and vegetables from the shore. Melville’s initial task was the cleaning out of the pig-pen; after this he was sent up the top-mast with a bucket of a thick lobbered gravy, which slush he dabbed over the mast. This over, and, in the increasing bustle everything having been made ready to sail, the word was passed to go to dinner fore and aft. “Though the sailors surfeited with eating and drinking ashore did not touch the salt beef and potatoes which the black cook handed down into the forecastle: and though this left the whole allowance to me; to my surprise, I found that I could eat little or nothing; for now I only felt deadly faint, but not hungry.”

Only a lunatic, of course, would expect to find very commodious or airy quarters, any drawing-room amenities, Chautauqua uplift, or Y.M.C.A. insipidities aboard a merchantman of the old sailing days. Nathaniel Ames, a Harvard graduate who a little before Melville’s time shipped before the mast, records that on his first vessel, men seeking berths in the forecastle were ordered to bring certificates of good character from their clergymen: an unusual requirement, surely. In more than one memoir, there is mention of a “religious ship”: an occasional mention that speaks volumes for the heathenism of the majority. Dana says of one of the mates aboard the Pilgrim: “He was too easy and amiable for the mate of a merchantman. He was not the man to call a sailor a ‘son of a bitch’ and knock him down with a hand-spike.” And J. Grey Jewell, sometime United States Consul at Singapore, in his book Among Our Sailors makes a sober and elaborately documented attempt to strip the life of a sailor of its romantic glamour, to show that it is not a “round of fun and frolic and jollity with the advantages of seeing many distant lands and people thrown in”: an effort that would seem to be unnecessary except to boy readers of Captain Marryat and dime thrillers.

Melville’s shipmates were, it goes without saying, rough and illiterate men. With typical irony, he says that with a good degree of complacency and satisfaction he compared his own character with that of his shipmates: “for I had previously associated with persons of a very discreet life, so that there was little opportunity to magnify myself by comparing myself with my neighbours.” In a more serious mood, he says of sailors as a class: “the very fact of their being sailors argues a certain restlessness and sensualism of character, ignorance, and depravity. They are deemed almost the refuse of the earth; and the romantic view of them is principally had through romances.” And their chances of improvement are not increased, he contends, by the fact that “after the vigorous discipline, hardships, dangers and privations of a voyage, they are set adrift in a foreign port, and exposed to a thousand enticements, which, under the circumstances, would be hard even for virtue to withstand, unless virtue went about on crutches.” It was a tradition for centuries fostered in the naval service that the sailor was a dog, a different human species from the landsman, without laws and usages to protect him. This tradition survived among merchant sailors as an unhappy anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an American Congress was reluctant to bestow upon seamen the decencies of existence enjoyed by the poorest labourer ashore. Melville’s shipmates did not promise to be men of the calibre of which Maria Gansevoort would have approved.

With his ship, the Highlander, streaming out through the Narrows, past sights rich in association to his boyish recollection; streaming out and away from all familiar smells and sights and sounds, Melville found himself “a sort of Ishmael in the ship, without a single friend or companion, and I began to feel a hatred growing up in me against the whole crew.” In other words, Melville was a very homesick boy. But he blended common sense with homesickness. “My heart was like lead, and I felt bad enough, Heaven knows; but I soon learnt that sailors breathe nothing about such things, but strive their best to appear all alive and hearty.” And circumstances helped him live up to this gallant insight. For, as he says, “there was plenty of work to be done, which kept my thoughts from becoming too much for me.”

Melville was a boy of stout physical courage, game to the marrow, and in texture of muscle and bone a worthy grandson of General Gansevoort. What would have ruined a sallow constitution, he seems to have thriven upon. “Being so illy provided with clothes,” he says, “I frequently turned into my bunk soaking wet, and turned out again piping hot and smoking like a roasted sirloin, and yet was never the worse for it; for then, I bore a charmed life of youth and health, and was daggerproof to bodily ill.” With alacrity and good sportsmanship, he went at his duties. Before he had been out many days, he had outlived the acute and combined miseries of homesickness and seasickness; the colour was back in his cheeks, he is careful to observe with Miltonic vanity. Soon he was taking especial delight in furling the top-gallant sails and royals in a hard wind, and in hopping about in the riggings like a Saint Jago’s monkey. “There was a wild delirium about it,” he says, “a fine rushing of the blood about the heart; and a glad thrilling and throbbing of the whole system, to find yourself tossed up at every pitch into the clouds of a stormy sky, and hovering like a judgment angel between heaven and earth; both hands free, with one foot in the rigging, and one somewhere behind you in the wind.”

The food, of course, was neither dainty nor widely varied: an unceasing round of salt-pork, stale beef, “duff,” “lobscouse,” and coffee. “The thing they called coffee,” says Melville with keen descriptive effort, “was the most curious tasting drink I ever drank, and tasted as little like coffee as it did like lemonade; though, to be sure, it was generally as cold as lemonade. But what was more curious still, was the different quality and taste of it on different mornings. Sometimes it tasted fishy, as if it were a decoction of Dutch herring; and then it would taste very salt, as if some old horse or sea-beef had been boiled in it; and then again it would taste a sort of cheesy, as if the captain had sent his cheese-parings forward to make our coffee of; and yet another time it would have such a very bad flavour that I was almost ready to think some old stocking heel had been boiled in it. Notwithstanding the disagreeableness of the flavour, I always used to have a strange curiosity every morning to see what new taste it was going to have; and I never missed making a new discovery and adding another taste to my palate.”

Withal, Melville might have fared much worse, as contemporaneous accounts more than adequately prove. Even in later days, Frank T. Bullen was able to write: “I have often seen the men break up a couple of biscuits into a pot of coffee for breakfast, and after letting it stand for a minute or two, skim off the accumulated scum of vermin from the top—maggots, weevils, etc., to the extent of a couple of tablespoonsful, before they could shovel the mess into their craving stomachs.” Melville never complains of maggots or weevils in his biscuits, nor does he complain of being stinted food; during this period, both common enough complaints. The cook, it is true, did not sterilise everything he touched. “I never saw him wash but once,” says Melville, “and that was at one of his own soup pots one dark night when he thought no one saw him.” But as has already been imputed to Melville for righteousness, his was not a squeamish stomach, and despite the usual amount of filth on board the Highlander, his meals seem to have gone off easily enough. He has left this pleasant picture of the amenities of food-taking: “the sailors sitting cross-legged at their chests in a circle, and breaking the hard biscuit, very sociably, over each other’s heads, which was very convenient, indeed, but gave me the headache, at least for the first four or five days till I got used to it; and then I did not care much about it, only it kept my hair full of crumbs; and I had forgot to bring a fine comb and brush, so I used to shake my hair out to windward over the bulwarks every evening.”

Though the forecastle was, to characterise it quietly, a cramped and fetid hole, dimly lighted and high in odour, Melville came to be sufficiently acclimated to it to enjoy lying on his back in his bunk during a forenoon watch below, reading while his messmates slept. His bunk was an upper one, and right under the head of it was a bull’s-eye, inserted into the deck to give light. Here he read an account of Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, and a large black volume on Delirium Tremens: Melville’s share in the effects of a sailor whose bunk he occupied, who had, in a frenzy of drunkenness, hurled himself overboard. Here Melville also struggled to read Smith’s Wealth of Nations. “But soon I gave it up for lost work,” says Melville; “and thought that the old backgammon board we had at home, lettered on the back The History of Rome, was quite as full of matter, and a great deal more entertaining.”

The forecastle, however, was not invariably the setting for scenes so idyllic. Drunkenness there was aplenty, especially at the beginning of the voyage both from New York and from Liverpool. Of the three new men shipped at Liverpool, two were so drunk they were unable to engage in their duties until some hours after the boat quit the pier; but the third, down on the ship’s papers as Miguel Saveda, had to be carried in by a crimp and slung into a bunk where he lay locked in a trance. To heighten the discomforts of the forecastle, there was soon added to the stench of sweated flesh, old clothes, tobacco smoke, rum and bilge, a new odour, attributed to the presence of a dead rat. Some days before, the forecastle had been smoked out to extirpate the vermin over-running her: a smoking that seemed to have been fatal to a rodent among the hollow spaces in the side planks. “At midnight, the larboard watch, to which I belonged, turned out; and instantly as every man waked, he exclaimed at the now intolerable smell, supposed to be heightened by the shaking up of the bilge-water, from the ship’s rolling.