Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
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.”
Next day, accompanied by his brother’s friend, whose true name Melville
disguises under the anonymity of Jones, Melville walked down to the
water front.
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.
“Pray, captain,” said Melville’s amiable bungling friend, “how much do
you generally pay a handsome fellow like this?”
“Well,” said the captain, looking grave and profound, “we are not so
particular about beauty, and we never give more than three dollars to
a green lad.”
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