Chapter 4

Whether Melville judged better of his third whaling captain, the Vineyarder, whom he finally fell in with, he does not tell: whether he tired of whaling off the coast of Japan one does not know either. One has a glimpse of him working as a clerk for four months in Honolulu, the capital of the Sandwich Islands, among the fine dwelling-houses, the hotels, the barber-shops, the offices, of the whites; and there one’s knowledge ends. By the summer of 1843 he had shipped aboard the frigate, United States, upon its homeward voyage. The free, vagrant, uncertain life of the rover was over: he was in the Navy now. Melville had not done more than pick up a bare living, certainly, for when he was in Callao, about to equip himself for the terrible exposure of rounding the Horn, he could get no pea-jacket from the purser, and apparently could not afford to purchase one on shore: so he manufactured a white jacket for himself out of a white duck frock, folded and padded, cold comfort enough in dry weather, and colder comfort in wet, when the jacket was so absorbent his shipmates would cruelly stand up against him, to get rid of their own moisture.

Melville was as sick of adventure as Ulysses himself. When he heard the words, “Up anchor! Man the capstan: we’re homeward bound,” from the gruff boatswain, the words ran through his veins like golden wine. Now the little daily current of anxiety was over: there were a few new ropes to learn; but a strong, eager fellow, always ready to bear a hand, always prompt to spring to his post, is pretty sure of getting a good word from his immediate superiors, even though it is not an audible one; and with the big ship’s company, the work itself was not so onerous but that there was time for long chats and lengthier meditations, particularly if one belonged to the maintop. Melville knew the value of height and seclusion to stimulate the inward eye: climbing a high tower, he wrote in The Encantadas, is the best way to see the country around one; and at sea, he would climb the mast: that was his watch-tower and his cloister.

The Navy of Melville’s day was not unlike the Navy of today: these saurian institutions do not add to the quantity of brains in their brain-pan, nor do they change the quality of their tissue: it was bound up by red tape, precedent, a stupefying routine, and a set of regulations designed to establish and maintain the authority of those marginal officers who may have neither seamanship nor the gift of command. In addition to the abuses that still exist in the Navy, some of which are inevitable by the mere act of regimentation and by an existence that is purposeless except in terms of slaughter and bellicose action, there was in Melville’s time the further iniquity of flogging. Melville’s words against this institution are in bold contrast to Dana’s. Dana was one of those cautious friends of a cause whose timid counsel is far harder to dispose of than the practices of its enemies: he minced and compromised, and, dealing only with merchant sailors, still recommended merely that flogging be mitigated. To Melville flogging was a degradation of humanity; if discipline could not be maintained without it, discipline was degrading; if the navy of a free community could not be maintained without it, navies were degrading: let us get rid of all these things together.

Life on the man-of-war was difficult and capricious still. Through the mere punctilio of an officer in charge, Melville was unable to give his white jacket a coat of paint; and he suffered from terrible exposure in the journey round the Horn; but after the comparative solitude of his savage Polynesian existence, with just a stray soul for company, the ship had something of the stir and variety of a metropolis: it contained people like Nord, a man of mystery and romance, who, Melville suspected sympathetically, had been bolted in the mill of adversity: and there was Lemsford, the poet, who conceived platitudes in Dionysiac ecstasy, and above all, there was Jack Chase, the captain of the maintop, a simple, hearty, beautiful soul, who gave young Melville all a father could have given him; and to whom Melville clung, at sea, and later, in memory—a starved orphan, finding in Jovian Chase all that his father’s death, and his father’s marble image, denied him. The hours spent with Chase on the maintop were happy hours indeed; and no less so were those that Melville spent with books, Walpole’s Letters and the Jew of Malta and Volpone, as well as earlier books of travel and adventure, such as Morgan’s History of Algiers, and Knox’s Captivity in Ceylon. Coming as they did, after a long period of abstention and thirst, these books had a profound influence upon Melville: and they give his literary pedigree. Through his experience of life, he broke away by necessity from the weak romantics of his youth, and, seeking the nearest parallels to his own adventures and meditations and visions, he found them in the Elizabethan dramatists and the seventeenth-century travellers and literary philosophers. Melville’s genius followed two separate lines of growth, which joined in Moby-Dick: one of them was that of Marlowe and Webster, with their untrammelled emotions, their stertorous vitality, and their keen transposition of dream into reality and of reality into dream—the other was that of Knox’s Captivity, direct, honest, well ballasted. Had not these books been in the ship’s library, Melville might have taken much longer to find himself. Jack Chase himself added to Melville’s literary education: he could recite the Lusiad by heart, and Camoëns made a vivid impression on Melville. In two of his last poems he assumed Camoëns’ personality.

“Mind you, White-Jacket,” Jack Chase would say, “there are many great men in the world besides commodores and captains. I’ve that there, White-Jacket”—touching his forehead—“which under happier skies—perhaps in yon solitary star there, peeping down from those clouds—might have made a Homer of me. But Fate is Fate, White-Jacket; and we Homers who happen to be captains of the tops must write our Odes in our hearts and publish them in our heads.” Did Melville smile at Chase’s conceit, or was he already meditating his own odes and epics? When he wrote Typee, he explained that the incidents of it had been imprinted in his memory by being told over and over again; and one can imagine a hundred places where Melville might have found less incentive to literary activity than he found in the library and the maintop of the U. S. frigate United States.

There were three main events in the voyage. Two of these experiences involved deep personal humiliation. One was the time he was called to the mast and condemned to the scourge for being absent from his post at general quarters, a post to which he had never to his knowledge been assigned: in a panic of righteous anger, he measured the distance between himself and the captain, and had the blind impulse to rush him overboard, and end his own life, too, rather than undergo the degradation of this punishment. By a miracle, he was saved from this fate through the courageous intercession of a corporal of the marines, who spoke up in his behalf and got the order remitted. The other humiliation was the massacre of the beards, when, by the capricious order of “Captain Claret,” the autocrat of the United States, even the oldest veteran, just completing his last voyage, was ordered to shave his beard; and when he would not submit to it, was flogged and put in irons. No one can feel the inner resentment occasioned by such an order who has not been subject to a similar indignity; on such occasions, the spirit boils in helpless rebellion. In civilian life, only the poor and the outcast know this experience; but in every large and regimented organization, military or commercial, such affronts to human dignity and autonomy are commonplace; they characterize the system, rather than the men who conduct it. Had Captain Claret not, on the whole, been a lenient officer, Melville would have had a hundred other occasions for this feeling. In gauging Melville’s conduct at a later period, one must not forget these humiliations; their effect was cumulative.

But the crowning adventure of the voyage happened when the United States was off the capes of Virginia in a calm sea: the ship gave a sudden lurch and he was thrown from the yard-arm into the water. Let him tell the story for himself:

“With a 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 frostwork that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm.... As I gushed into the sea, a thunderboom 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 down with a glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm 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 agonizing 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.... 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.” Melville was rescued; but not before he had rid himself of his white jacket forever; the ominous whiteness that he found later in Moby-Dick was accentuated, perhaps, by his memory of that “accursed jacket” which had delivered him up to the elements, rather than protected him, and in the moment of extremity, had nearly proved his shroud.

To have faced life and death, not as abstractions, but as concrete events, when a sinew less of resolution would have meant his extinction, in a stove boat off the coast of Japan, at the hands of the pursuant Typees, or enveloped in the white jacket at sea: to have thrown himself among strange men, and to have kept his own shape, always set apart a little by culture and breeding, but never rebuffed for a feebleness or an unmanliness or inability to bear a hand: to feel the wild throb of a ship in a gale, sea-wracked but magnificent, creaking, whining, wind-whistling, slapping into a trough of wave or climbing dizzily on to a crest, and to feel a wilder, louder, more victorious throb within: to have been attracted by the languors and sensuous jollities of a savage life, but still more attracted by all that civilisation had left with him, in hints and promises, Homer and Dante and Shakespeare and Cervantes: to have left home a boy, innocent and unspoiled, and to have returned a man, toughened, bronzed, firm-fibred, and full of mixed knowledge, yet still essentially innocent and unspoiled—all this had happened to Melville. He had left America to seek adventures. Now he had found adventures; and he left that behind, left the South Seas and the whaleman’s joys and hardships, and the man-of-war’s settled routine, to pursue adventure farther, but on a higher plane.

There comes a time—it is the beginning of manhood or womanhood—when one realizes that adventure is as humdrum as routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is empty, just as empty in the forecastle of a whaler as in the chamber of a counting-house; it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes, that keeps existence from being vain and trivial. Mankind moves about in worlds not realized: Wordsworth’s phrase expresses a profound reality, and Melville himself suggests a similar idea in Mardi, when the philosopher points out that ages hence people may realize more keenly what has happened today than our own contemporaries do. It is the artist, the knower, the sayer, who realizes human experience, who takes the raw lump of ore we find in nature, smelts it, refines it, assays it, and stamps it into coins that can pass from hand to hand and make every man who touches them the richer. “No man can live for another” is a true doctrine as far as experience goes; but it is the opposite of true in the life of realization; for into this fuller and more durable apprehension of experience goes our whole social heritage, all the forms and symbols that have aided human expression in the past, the cumulative effect of many cultures and many different modes of life. Those who absorb and reflect and meditate and relate, play an important part in the economy of society; and life is abrupt and incomplete when that part is not performed.

Melville had travelled far and had experienced much; he had run the gamut, or rather, the gauntlet of every sort of human experience except the normal and easy and domestic one promised him by birth and parentage. He will never be a school teacher, a professor, a ship captain, a lawyer, a political leader; however necessary these occupations, there is nothing in Melville’s training or temperament that moves him in one of these directions. What is left? What is left is something he has been silently preparing himself for all along: he must become a writer. Though the society to which he returned, unlike Jack Chase and other humble listeners to Melville’s yarns, regarded that function as a trivial one, compared to accomplishments in a dissociated world of action, and by its contemptuous regard and its dissociation, deprived it of sustenance and made much of it in fact trivial, here is the occupation which will gain in a hundred ways by his experiences.

Melville must have had more than a dim anticipation of this career when he stepped ashore, at Boston, in October, 1844; and had he known where it would lead him he might well have shrunk from following it further. His physical adventures were to be welcomed as romantic myths, and his mental adventures were to be denounced as blasphemies. In short, “the indefinite Navy Commissioners, so far out of sight aloft,” had a mission in store for Melville that Hardy’s ironic President of the Immortals might have concocted in a sinister moment.

CHAPTER THREE: TROPICAL SUMMER

In 1844, when Herman Melville landed in Boston, provincial American society was in that state of uneasy transformation which means either a vaster accomplishment or destruction; and in 1844 it was still possible to think that the result would not be, fatally, destruction. The Mexican War loomed ahead, thanks partly to the itch of Southern planters to extend the territory under cotton, abetted by the belief of men like Seward that by a process of territorial aggrandizement and conquest the conflict between Northern and Southern economic interests could be diverted. The American state had already acquired the desire to crown itself with glory and prestige by conquering one of its disordered neighbours—a process which mixed an ineffable air of virtue with the proud consciousness that we had chosen an opponent who could not possibly lick us.

Already something that aggravated the economic conflict had appeared on the horizon, a breach between the several states over the ancient metaphysical question of the one and the many, somewhat confused by doubts as to whether free institutions could flourish alongside an empire committed to slavery and expansion. These doubts must have been even more confusing to a neutral observer, since cities like Charleston and New Orleans, for all their slavery, were less depressing and barbarous than such proud emporia as New York and such dingy manufacturing hives as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There was so much right and wrong on both sides of Mason and Dixon’s line that the question could only be decided by furious men of action, who would decisively pound their fist into one side of the scale or the other in order to make weight and register a conclusion.

If slavery showed a dark countenance, beautifully kalsomined by the most solicitous Christian hypocrisy, industrialism showed a dingy one. The little water-driven mill-wheel, which greatly lightened the domestic labour of the early nineteenth-century farm, and which served equally to operate the small mill or factory, had only a brief day of social efficiency: by 1850, Melville could encounter a factory in the Berkshire Hills, turning rags into paper, and call it a Tartarus of Maids. Mechanical instruments, so far from diminishing the amount of servile labour in the world, threatened to turn all industrial operations into a form of servitude: in this middle period, craftsmanship of the hand decayed, and craftsmanship of the machine was subjugated by the demand for the cheap, the shoddy, the ephemeral. The mills at Lowell, which Dickens described with admiration in 1837, were already huge, and it was only by contrast with Bradford or Leeds that they could be called tolerable. In the forties, the concentration of coal and iron was slowly giving Pittsburgh a pre-eminence over the old iron mines and furnaces scattered about the countryside in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Railroads, first laid where capital and immediate convenience dictated, were now joining along strategic lines of communication, following coast and inland water routes: as the stage-coach disappeared, and the inns ceased to get patronage, the inner parts of the country became inaccessible and they gradually ran down: only the railroad thread prospered.

Was this a triumph or a débâcle, this coming of industrialism, this volcanic intrusion of new methods of living, new means of communication, new habits of work? When one thinks of the countrysides that ran down, the forests that were wantonly destroyed, the soils that were depleted, the towns that were jerry-built and burned and jerry-built again, the public lands that were thrown into the laps of speculators, the industrial population that was starved and depressed in dingy cities, one sees that there is no easy answer to this question; and certainly none of the economists has ever been impartial enough as accountant to tell whether the final result for civilization was a gain or a loss, and if so, how much was gained and how much lost, and where these things happened. But when Melville came back to America, industrialism was a value in itself: people encouraged it as the patrons of the Renaissance encouraged art, not doubting that the activity was a great one, and made for a higher civilization.

It is perhaps a little absurd to speak of such disparate things as Attica and the North Atlantic states in the same breath: but these regions, between 1820 and 1860, which coincided with Melville’s birth and maturity, were in many respects in the same situation as Attica between the birth of Socrates and the death of Plato. An old provincial culture, closely bound to the land, was being overthrown by a new order based upon trade and imperialistic enterprise and military expeditions in support of the prestige of the state; and, at this moment of dissolution, the spirit fulfilled itself in a sudden outburst which expressed, in a new form, all that was valuable in the old culture, with an additional energy, derived partly from the seething activities of the new life that was inimical to it and already threatened it. The gap between Sophocles and Menander was no greater than the gap between Melville and Mark Twain: both these Americans roughed it and travelled much and gave accounts of their adventures; but their feeling and their vision belonged to different worlds.

In the America of the forties there was a sense of poignant expectation which was also a fulfilment. Emerson was giving his lectures on the Times, Thoreau was making his experiment at Walden Pond: warm spirits with thin and fantastic notions about the ideal life were discussing Fourier, welcoming the writings of Cabet, trying by a single gesture to regenerate the morals of society, to get an easier living, reform the diet, and alter the institution of matrimony—absurd, rickety people they were, no doubt, but Bronson Alcott’s preference for the sun-touched fruits and vegetables has turned out not to be so fantastic in fact as it sounds in theory; and if it is possible now to eat food which does not lead inevitably to gout and indigestion, to wear clothes that do not stifle and constrict the human body, and to think candidly about institutions which were once too sacred for rational thought, we owe these improvements not a little to the passionate women who dared to wear trousers and the comical men who listened patiently to Dr. Graham’s famous lecture on the benefits of bran bread and squashes.

In 1844 this mixture in society of new and old, provincial and metropolitan, free and servile, vital and mechanical, was still a turbid one: the elements had not settled; contrast and comparison were difficult; and people stood for one or the other, chiefly by intuition, while perhaps a good part of the population sought both: they wanted the old privileges of birth and the new ones of opportunity, the old stability and order, and all the new fields to conquer and the new positions to occupy. Melville belonged by temperament and shade of interest to the order that was passing, and not to the chaos and dissolution that was to come; still, in so far as he was aware of the change, he accepted it and even took a little pleasure in it, as when he anticipated from the progress of invention that fifty years hence it would be a commonplace for an American to spend the week-end in Honolulu.