Chapter 3

A harsh captain is a bad fellow to sail under, but a weak captain is worse. When Melville came to on the Julia, a drab little barque, with a jaunty way of catching the wind, he found himself under the orders of an uncertain cockney landsman from Melbourne, with a crew of discontented scalawags, and a roving commission to hunt whales or seals or pick up a living somehow on the South Seas. Paper Jack, as the men called this landlubber of a captain, signed him on for one cruise, with the stipulation that he be discharged at the next port; and when Melville looked around him, he discovered that between the slack disorder of the Little Jule and the tyranny of the Acushnet he had little to choose.

The physician on board, Dr. Long Ghost, had parted company with the captain and had made his bunk in the forecastle. The mate, a hale, bullet-headed fellow with a kind heart and a heavy fist, John Jermin by name, was always half-seas-over; the captain was one of those watchful, ineffectual, capriciously determined men who achieved the dignity of isolation and got the semblance of obedience by never delivering an order through his own mouth. Without any success in whaling, the ship remained at sea, lest by lying in harbour and replenishing its provisions it might incidentally lose the whole crew by desertion.

Melville was contemptuous of the captain, he admired the bluff, bustling Jermin, and he fell in with the doctor, who was an educated man, as naturally as one globule of mercury will coalesce with another as soon as they touch. The doctor was a capital fellow to finish off Melville’s education and to while away the sleepy hours of the night: “he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy, and associated with gentlemen. As for his learning, he quoted Virgil, and talked of Hobbes of Malmesbury, besides repeating poetry by the Canto, especially Hudibras. He was, moreover, a man who had seen the world. In the easiest possible way he could refer to an amour he had in Palermo, his lion-hunting before breakfast among the Caffres, and the quality of the coffee he had drunk in Muscat.” Such a man did not merely bring authentic reports of books and conversations; he was himself a picaresque library, and he who ran with him had much to read. This was the sort of acquaintance Melville could never have picked up in Albany, nor in New York: one first must become an outcast before he can have the privilege of such company.

The captain became seriously ill; and he purposed to send his men to sea under command of Jermin while he recuperated on shore. Heartily sick of the voyage, the crew rebelled at the notion, and when the ship lay off the harbour of Papeetee, they sent a round robin to the English consul, stating their grievances and petitioning to be put ashore. Wilson, the consul, would not hear of it: to cow them into submission, he delivered them over to the French frigate, La Reine Blanche, that lay in the harbour; and for five days and nights Melville had a chance to live on a French man-of-war and to observe the contrast between French customs and character, and the American and English ways he was used to; but the imprisonment was only a demonstration; and the ship returned so that Wilson might again utter his ultimatum to the crew. The upshot of it was that the crew was put inside the British jail, the Calabooza Beretanee, under the surveillance of a huge, brown Polynesian dignitary; and after a few weeks of their semi-confinement, the Julia went off without them; and they finally found themselves at liberty among the miscellaneous riff-raff that haunted the shores of these tropical islands.

During the next couple of months, Melville lived the life of a rover, in the company of Dr. Long Ghost, visiting among the natives, working for a brief period on a Polynesian farm, for a tall robust Yankee born in the backwoods of Maine, and finally trying, unsuccessfully, to advance their fortunes in the court of Queen Pomaree. It was a rambling, roving, thoroughly outlandish mode of life which must have had the episodic and incredible quality of a dream: there was a complete absence of pressure and direction; Melville drifted from one islet in Imeeo to another as a leaf driven by chance breezes will drift on the surface of a still pond. Thrown among the superficially converted Christians of Tahiti, Melville observed no advance over the untainted pagans of Typee; quite the contrary. “So far as mere temporal felicity was concerned, the Tahitians are far worse off now than formerly. Years ago brought to a stand, where all that is corrupt in barbarism and civilization unite, to the exclusion of the virtues of either state ... they must here remain stationary until utterly extinct.”

Away from the purlieus of the Christian “mickonaree” Melville enjoyed the lazy, savage life. The air was relaxing; but for a young American, bred in Albany and Pittsfield, the danger was that he might bless his braces, and damn his relaxes too opprobriously; so, on the whole, one must count these months of rambling and laziness and observation as good ones for Melville. Some of the dreamy, unexpected quality of them went, no doubt, into the fantasy of Mardi when he came to write it: Omoo, which records the actuality, and Mardi, which utters the dream, are the morning and night of the same day. Through it all, Melville kept his shape; he was still a quizzical, modest, slightly sentimental, sober-minded young man: when he beholds the beautiful wife of a sugar-planter, mounted gallantly on a white pony, his emotions are touched by distant adoration and curiosity, just as they might have been in Lansingburgh; and one suspects that he plagued more than one incipient brown sweetheart with a far too respectful and brotherly reserve. Five years later, Melville still remembered how the sugar planter’s wife had captivated him: when he thinks back to this trivial incident he sets it apart in a chapter; and he remembers, too, the brown feminine mockery at his attempts to be sentimental. There is no likelihood that this young man will succumb to Queen Hautia: he is always on guard. If he needs any advice at this period it is that of Koheleth: Be not righteous over-much: why shouldst thou destroy thyself?