Chapter 2

As the Acushnet approached the Marquesas in order to renew water and to procure fresh food, Melville made plans to escape her. Conditions were intolerable, and he had learned that there was no definite terminus to the voyage: he had already endured a year and a half, and he might have to hover somewhere between the tropics and the poles, if the oil barrels did not fill up quickly enough, for three, four, even five years. At twenty-two, he did not dare to squander so much of his life: he had ties at home, and did not wish to be buried in a floating coffin. Perhaps this tedious prospect determined Melville as much as the inhuman treatment; perhaps the sight of Nukuheva itself, its bold headlands, with the surf beating against the cliffs, its deep inlets with thickly wooded valleys, separated by the bare spurs of formidable mountains, made him ache for solid ground. There is a form of homesickness one must call land-sickness, and perhaps Melville had it. Did the naked maidens who swam aboard when the ship came to port make the scene seem doubly attractive to Melville and to his companion, Toby? Was he pleasantly shocked and intoxicated by those brown bodies, and stirred, as well as repelled, by the open debauchery of the nights they spent aboard ship? Melville does not tell us. The cruelty and the hardship and the tedium and the green jungle and the abrupt mountains and the brown maidens doubtless all played a part in the adventure and gave heat to it: at all events, Toby and Melville made speedy use of their shore-leave, and set out to escape for a while into the interior, till they could make away again on another ship. Their plans miscarried. After dire hardship, sleeping in dank ravines, leaping from tree-trunk to tree-top down gorges, they found themselves in the valley of a dreaded tribe, the Typees, whose very name meant eater of men.

Melville stayed among the Typees for four months, with a leg that had become lamed and infected in making the escape. The people he was thrown among were suspected of ferocity and cannibalism; that is to say, like a good many savage tribes, they fought a species of extravagant and ritualistic battle with their enemies, the Happars, and retired from the fray usually fit enough in flesh and limb to fight another time. As for the cannibalism, at the very end of his stay, Melville had reason to think that one of their feasts was culminating in the extreme delicacy of Long Pig: but up to that time he had had an exemplary vegetarian diet of breadfruit and cocoanut and various fine elaborations of these staples; and but for the anxiety of losing Toby, who disappeared completely, after going in search of medical aid for Melville’s leg, and the further anxiety of not knowing whether he was being treated as a distinguished visitor, entitled to the services of a young man-servant, Kory-Kory, and royal attentions from Mehevi, the chief, or whether he was being fattened for the sacrifice, like the god-apparent among the Aztecs—but for these things all was serene.

If life were merely a matter of getting a living in the physical sense, as Western Civilization had come largely to believe, then the Typees were in a higher state of civilization than New York or Paris or London had achieved. The Typees were a sort of perpetually endowed leisure class; their food fell from the trees; their water flowed at their feet; their garments, of pounded bark, tappa, were a sport to make, and with less attention than they would have to give to a fitting from a Bond Street tailor or dressmaker, they were made; their days were torpid and free from care, like those of a rentier with gilt-edge government bonds; and though they had ceremonial observances and religious feasts and wars, the symbol never stood between them and their physical life: they did not whine about their sins and cry to God: even in their sexual life, there was rivalry without jealousy, and marriage without physical fidelity: almost the only desire they were accustomed to repress was the typical Western desire for a little repression!

The first whaleman Melville had ever met, on his trip to Liverpool, had raised a doubt about the value of civilized society. “And what’s the use of being snivelized,” he used to say. “Snivelized chaps only learns the way to take on ’bout life and snivel. You don’t see any Methodist chaps feelin’ dreadful about their souls; you don’t see any damned beggars and pesky constables in Madagasky.... Blast Ameriky, I say.” Melville could appreciate this among the Typees. “There were,” he says, “none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description; no assaults and battery attorneys to foment discord, backing their clients into a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; no poor relations everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber and diminishing the elbow-room at the family table; no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no debtors’ prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or, to sum up all in one word—No Money! That ‘root of all evil’ was not to be found in the valley. In this secluded abode of happiness there were no cross old women, no cruel step-dames, no withered spinsters, no lovesick maidens, no sour bachelors, no inattentive husbands, no melancholy young men, no blubbering youngsters and no squalling brats. All was mirth, fun, and high good humour. Blue devils, hypochondria, and doleful dumps went and hid themselves among the nooks and crannies of the rocks.”

By this process of exclusion, Melville tells us much about his experience and the effect it had on him. “Civilization,” he discovered, “does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she had not even her full share of them.... If truth and justice and the better principles of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how are we to account for the social condition of the Typees?” Small wonder that Melville’s contemporaries in the money-warrens of the West thought that he was inventing these people out of whole cloth! But it was not by the mere absence of ugly and harassing things that the Valley of the Typees was flecked with sunlight and warm, rose-violet shadows; there were positive pleasures as well; above all things, there was beauty, the constant beauty of splendid forms, undisguised by clothes, beauty so simple and statuesque that, in later years, it gave Melville an immediate clue to Greek sculpture. There were many happy afternoons; afternoons that he spent in bathing with a parcel of brown river nymphs; afternoons when, once he had got the taboo lifted, he paddled idly in a canoe with Fayaway, a lovely girl in his household, who was his constant companion; there were evenings spent watching the dancers in the hula-hula grounds, swaying, arching, gliding, swimming, whirling in an ecstasy of sensuous enjoyment that threatened to rob this “quiet, sober-minded, modest young man” of all his studious inhibitions; and there were days of contrast, spent with masculine gravity in the company of Mehevi and his attendant warriors, feasting heavily, with no cloying reminder of the other sex. Life itself became the most beautiful of rituals: its duties were games, its necessities were pastimes. Rivalry, enmity, jealousy, hardship, violence were all transposed to the realm of art, where, instead of defeating life, they added to its enjoyment.

True: these people were simple to the point of childishness: they could become excited, young and greybeards alike, over a popgun that Melville devised; but did not the Western World have its popguns, too: did not the crowds on Broadway turn out for a fire or a soldiers’ parade with the same naïve delight? It was true, too, that these islanders had taboos, whose meaning Melville could never quite understand: they seemed as capricious as the flight of a bat, and like that flight, were determined doubtless by some imperceptible fact or belief that belonged to the insect order of rationality: but the taboos did not strike many of the essential elements of life. A man might be taboo against the assaults of his enemies and so might venture among them freely as a messenger, like the good fellow who abetted Melville’s final rescue, or the canoe might be taboo against women using it—a comical male reservation—but food and clothing were not made taboo to the destitute by the laws of property, nor were men and women condemned to an acrid chastity by sexual taboos which had also arisen very largely out of laws and customs connected with the succession of property. There was no theft where every one could help himself, and no vice where virtue made such simple and rational demands.

Melville had a healthy capacity to adapt himself to a situation; and he was not ill at ease, little though this life resembled the world of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association, which the missionaries were introducing with the help of biblical pocket-handkerchiefs, pious exhortations, cheap Manchester rags, ugly bedizenments, and the sense of bitter sin that naturally accompanies the horrors of venereal disease. Had it not been for the infection in his leg, the uncertainty as to his eventual fate, and the plain desire of some of his native friends to make a thorough Typee of him, by a spirited application of tattooing, there is no telling how long he might have stayed, or how thoroughly he might have been lulled into forgetfulness of his Western connections.

In Mardi Melville pictured Hautia, the symbol of sensual oblivion, as the constant beckoner of the hero; and Hautia must have pressed him hard in Typee. Nevertheless, Yillah, who represented the spiritual quest, had already stirred him up before he started on his voyage, and in the end, Yillah must have reminded him of activities that found no answering chord among his happy, kindly Typee captors. When that ghastly devil with his tattooing implements made advances to him, Melville felt his quintessential foreignness. People wore queer clothes in Albany, perhaps, but thank heaven, they did not permanently discolour the flesh. Fayaway was lovely to look at, lovely to court, and perhaps lovelier to possess: but no man in full command of his faculties ever looked forward to a lifetime of such possession as sufficient reason for not committing suicide. Kory-Kory, his ugly man-servant, was as faithful as Sancho Panza; King Mehevi was as gracious as Francis I; one might even say a good word about tattooing and man-eating: they were matters of taste, perhaps; but inevitably, Melville felt a little out of it; and neither love-making nor bachelor companionship could quite make up for his spiritual isolation.

The moment for escape at last came. Melville, sadly in need of medical aid, hobbled down to the shore: a boatload of tabooed Kanakas had come with presents of calico and a musket to ransom the captive. The Typees were unwilling to part with Melville, and the boat was about to pull off without him, when, in the midst of the clamour, he broke away and threw himself into the arms of his rescuers, escaping only after he himself had killed a ferocious old chief, hot in pursuit, who in a happier and more apathetic day had been kind to him. Fayaway and Hautia’s bliss lay behind him; Fayaway clutching a piece of calico Melville had thrown her for consolation: Yillah lay in an unfathomable distance beyond, and what stood between was a tortured filthy life in a broken-down whaler, whose planks were rotting and whose hold swarmed with cockroaches and rats. Many a time during the next two years, Melville must have regretted leaving Fayaway’s arms! Yes: and she must have regretted Melville, for a little later an American traveller, Henry Augustus Wise, discovered a brown maid from the valley of Typee, named Fayaway, working as maid-of-all-work to the French commissary of the garrison at Nukuheva—a proper snivelized anti-climax to the unsullied tropical summer of Melville’s residence and courtship among the Typees.