Chapter 5

Every boat is a little world, every ship a Noah’s ark; but the vessel on which Melville worked his way contained more than its share, perhaps, of the battered and unvarnished furniture of human society, from Captain Riga himself, sleek, bland, affable, cunning, a lap-dog in port and a mastiff at sea, to Jackson, the depraved wreck of a man who, not through any physical strength, but through a sort of Satanic energy, ruled the forecastle.

The contrast between the sisterly society of Lansingburgh, clean and very chaste, and the ugly, dirty, promiscuously vile company of the forecastle was as acute as the difference between the feather-beds of his home and the hard, bug-ridden planks on which he was forced to sleep. A greenhorn in men, a greenhorn in work, Herman met face to face the uncouth cruelty of men whose own hides had been blackened by hardship and mean living, and who flayed every new comer until he was equally able to stand the misery and depression.

With the exception of Jackson, these men were not innately unkind: they had simply been brutalized. The Greenlander brought Herman Jamaica rum the first time he was seasick, helping him to recover and incidentally making him break his pledge of total abstinence; and though they resented his nice language and his earnest moralizings, which marked him off as a member of that inimical social class out of which captains are hewn, they gradually learned to tolerate him when they found that he was ready to work with a will and tumble out of his bunk at call. But, at best, it was hard for Melville to get the hang of the ship’s ways: climbing aloft was terrifying at first; and slushing down the masts and spars with old grease was disgusting. He would have liked to chat with Captain Riga in a friendly way and discuss his prospects in the world and what one might find at Liverpool: surely, a gentleman would appreciate the plight of a gentleman’s son, and perhaps he would even cozen Herman with something tasty to eat, as an offset to the hogwash and hard-tack of the forecastle: Herman was a little surprised when he dolled himself up for a sociable call to find the mate stamping with astonished outrage when he discovered Herman’s purpose in time to turn him back. What a disillusion to find that there is an impassable gulf between skipper and crew, a gulf that even gentlemen’s sons cannot cross on any pretext!

There were few books on board: a dream-book and a copy of the Wealth of Nations which his brother’s friend had solicitously given Herman, for his self-improvement, on the eve of departure; but the sailors, who had been to Gibraltar and Canton and Valparaiso and Bombay, just as Herman might have ventured to Coenties Slip or Hoboken, were a complete library of Voyages and Travels around the World. The names they uttered in such a casual way were magical; but the world they moved in was grim and formidable; a hand with delirium tremens jumped overboard and drowned before the boat was much beyond the Hook: shipwreck, mouldy bread, hard weather, mutiny, did not sound so romantic if one had been in the thick of it; and as for the sailors’ fonder recollections, these stories were as tasteless as duff: did the bar-girl in Hamburg have blue eyes or black: what a nice time Max the Greenlander had had with the young ladies in Stockholm: who kept the Foul Anchor Tavern at Portsmouth at such and such a time? They had seen so much and taken in so little, travelling with their bodies, not with their minds: they knew chiefly the sameness of sailor’s stews and purchased caresses, and to them one city was like another and one girl was like another: the best port was that which promised the longest and fullest oblivion.

The ship itself was the strangest port of all. Pails were buckets: pegs were plugs: floors were decks: “Yes, sir” was “Ay, ay, sir”: in addition to all these new habits and ways, one must grasp new handles for old ones. The ropes needed a dictionary in themselves: every knot and reef had a name. The accent of this world was gruff: Herman had never dreamed that a malign, cur-faced rascal like Jackson, who swore he would swipe him off the rigging if Herman got in his way, could exist in real life; nor could he have imagined the uncouthness of men to whom life at its best was simply hard work, hard words, hard fare, fornication, drunkenness and sleep. Herman was shocked: but the sea gave him what the sailors did not: there were good moments when the sails were hoisted to the breeze and the ship responded: every mast and timber seemed to have a pulse in it, and as the ship picked up speed, he felt a wild exulting in his own heart. “Then,” says Melville, “I was first conscious of a wonderful thing in me, that responded to all the wild commotion of the outer world and went reeling on and on with the planets in their orbits, and was lost in one delirious throb at the center of the All. A wild bubbling and bursting at my heart, as if a hidden spring gushed out there.... But how soon these raptures abated, when after a brief idle interval, we were again set to work, and I had a vile commission to clean out the chicken coops, and make up the beds of the pigs in the long boats. Miserable dog’s life is this of the sea: commanded like a slave and set to work like an ass: vulgar and brutal men lording it over me, as if I were an African in Alabama.”

What a contrast Herman Melville felt between the wholeness he felt within, in response to wind and sea and sky, and the crass deformities of the world outside, among cruel men, grasping men, lecherous men, men sick and stunted in the soul, like the strayed seeds that creep up through some cranny in the barnyard floor and become livid spindly plants, unnourished by sunlight! It was a trial; but not altogether a fruitless one. He had it in him to deal easily with life aboard ship. Ill provided with clothes, a shrinking moleskin jacket being his chief protection, his body was sound enough to furnish its own warmth. “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 dangerproof to bodily ill.” This testing and priming of his physical capacities was a great experience for Melville; and though in the end he was to pay a heavy penalty for excessive exposure, the confidence he achieved must have toned up his whole being.

Even dirty work and humiliation have, in retrospect, a power to sustain a man: for if one has faced the worst indignities of life, if one knows what it is to be poor and hungry and cold and friendless and beset by hostile men, nothing that lies in store can really daunt one: once one has touched the extremities of pain and misery, all the lesser tribulations of life become small. Perhaps the best proof of this fact is Melville’s small concern for money or authority in later life, although it was poverty that drove him to sea, and only a position of power on ship would have lifted his lot. He never went after these things, never sought to improve his condition by their aid; and though in the end, he struggled for a living and got it dearly, he never sought for more than a living: he did not seek compensation in wealth, ease, luxury, power.