Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
as I got into the shirt,” Melville goes on to say, “I began to feel
sort of warm and red about the face, which I found was owing to the
reflection of the dyed wool upon my skin. After that, I took a pair of
scissors and went to cutting my hair, which was very long. I thought
every little would help in making me a light hand to run aloft.”
Next morning, before he reached the ship, it began raining hard, so it
was plain there would be no getting to sea that day. But having once
said farewell to his friends, and feeling a repetition of the ceremony
would be awkward, Melville boarded the ship, where a large man in a
large dripping pea-jacket, who was calking down the main-hatches,
directed him in no cordial terms to the forecastle. Rather different
was Dana’s appearance on board the brig _Pilgrim_ on August 14, 1834,
“in full sea-rig, with my chest containing an outfit for a two or three
years’ voyage.” Nor did Dana begin in the forecastle.
In the dark damp stench of that deserted hole, Melville selected an
empty bunk. In the middle of this he deposited the slim bundle of his
belongings, and penniless and dripping spent the day walking hungry
among the wharves: a day’s peregrination that he recounts with vivid
and remorseless realism.
At night he returned to the forecastle, where he met a thick-headed
lad from Lancaster of about his own years. Glad of any companionship,
Melville and this lubber boy crawled together in the same bunk. But
between the high odour of the forecastle, the loud snoring of his
bed-fellow, wet, cold and hungry, he went up on deck, where he walked
till morning. When the groceries on the wharf opened, he went to make
a breakfast of a glass of water. This made him qualmish. “My head was
dizzy, and I went staggering along the walk, almost blind.”
By the time Melville got back to the ship, everything was in an uproar.
The pea-jacket man was there ordering about men in the riggings, and
people were bringing off chickens, and pigs, and beef, and vegetables
from the shore. Melville’s initial task was the cleaning out of the
pig-pen; after this he was sent up the top-mast with a bucket of a
thick lobbered gravy, which slush he dabbed over the mast. This over,
and, in the increasing bustle everything having been made ready to
sail, the word was passed to go to dinner fore and aft. “Though the
sailors surfeited with eating and drinking ashore did not touch the
salt beef and potatoes which the black cook handed down into the
forecastle: and though this left the whole allowance to me; to my
surprise, I found that I could eat little or nothing; for now I only
felt deadly faint, but not hungry.”
Only a lunatic, of course, would expect to find very commodious or airy
quarters, any drawing-room amenities, Chautauqua uplift, or Y.M.C.A.
insipidities aboard a merchantman of the old sailing days. Nathaniel
Ames, a Harvard graduate who a little before Melville’s time shipped
before the mast, records that on his first vessel, men seeking berths
in the forecastle were ordered to bring certificates of good character
from their clergymen: an unusual requirement, surely. In more than one
memoir, there is mention of a “religious ship”: an occasional mention
that speaks volumes for the heathenism of the majority. Dana says of
one of the mates aboard the _Pilgrim_: “He was too easy and amiable
for the mate of a merchantman. He was not the man to call a sailor a
‘son of a bitch’ and knock him down with a hand-spike.” And J. Grey
Jewell, sometime United States Consul at Singapore, in his book _Among
Our Sailors_ makes a sober and elaborately documented attempt to strip
the life of a sailor of its romantic glamour, to show that it is not a
“round of fun and frolic and jollity with the advantages of seeing many
distant lands and people thrown in”: an effort that would seem to be
unnecessary except to boy readers of Captain Marryat and dime thrillers.
Melville’s shipmates were, it goes without saying, rough and illiterate
men. With typical irony, he says that with a good degree of complacency
and satisfaction he compared his own character with that of his
shipmates: “for I had previously associated with persons of a very
discreet life, so that there was little opportunity to magnify myself
by comparing myself with my neighbours.” In a more serious mood, he
says of sailors as a class: “the very fact of their being sailors
argues a certain restlessness and sensualism of character, ignorance,
and depravity. They are deemed almost the refuse of the earth; and the
romantic view of them is principally had through romances.” And their
chances of improvement are not increased, he contends, by the fact
that “after the vigorous discipline, hardships, dangers and privations
of a voyage, they are set adrift in a foreign port, and exposed to a
thousand enticements, which, under the circumstances, would be hard
even for virtue to withstand, unless virtue went about on crutches.”
It was a tradition for centuries fostered in the naval service that
the sailor was a dog, a different human species from the landsman,
without laws and usages to protect him. This tradition survived among
merchant sailors as an unhappy anachronism even into the twentieth
century, when an American Congress was reluctant to bestow upon seamen
the decencies of existence enjoyed by the poorest labourer ashore.
Melville’s shipmates did not promise to be men of the calibre of which
Maria Gansevoort would have approved.
With his ship, the _Highlander_, streaming out through the Narrows,
past sights rich in association to his boyish recollection; streaming
out and away from all familiar smells and sights and sounds, Melville
found himself “a sort of Ishmael in the ship, without a single friend
or companion, and I began to feel a hatred growing up in me against
the whole crew.” In other words, Melville was a very homesick boy. But
he blended common sense with homesickness. “My heart was like lead,
and I felt bad enough, Heaven knows; but I soon learnt that sailors
breathe nothing about such things, but strive their best to appear all
alive and hearty.” And circumstances helped him live up to this gallant
insight. For, as he says, “there was plenty of work to be done, which
kept my thoughts from becoming too much for me.”
Melville was a boy of stout physical courage, game to the marrow, and
in texture of muscle and bone a worthy grandson of General Gansevoort.
What would have ruined a sallow constitution, he seems to have thriven
upon. “Being so illy provided with clothes,” he says, “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 daggerproof
to bodily ill.” With alacrity and good sportsmanship, he went at his
duties. Before he had been out many days, he had outlived the acute
and combined miseries of homesickness and seasickness; the colour was
back in his cheeks, he is careful to observe with Miltonic vanity.
Soon he was taking especial delight in furling the top-gallant sails
and royals in a hard wind, and in hopping about in the riggings like
a Saint Jago’s monkey. “There was a wild delirium about it,” he says,
“a fine rushing of the blood about the heart; and a glad thrilling and
throbbing of the whole system, to find yourself tossed up at every
pitch into the clouds of a stormy sky, and hovering like a judgment
angel between heaven and earth; both hands free, with one foot in the
rigging, and one somewhere behind you in the wind.”
The food, of course, was neither dainty nor widely varied: an unceasing
round of salt-pork, stale beef, “duff,” “lobscouse,” and coffee. “The
thing they called _coffee_,” says Melville with keen descriptive
effort, “was the most curious tasting drink I ever drank, and tasted
as little like coffee as it did like lemonade; though, to be sure, it
was generally as cold as lemonade. But what was more curious still, was
the different quality and taste of it on different mornings. Sometimes
it tasted fishy, as if it were a decoction of Dutch herring; and then
it would taste very salt, as if some _old horse_ or sea-beef had been
boiled in it; and then again it would taste a sort of cheesy, as if
the captain had sent his cheese-parings forward to make our coffee of;
and yet another time it would have such a very bad flavour that I was
almost ready to think some old stocking heel had been boiled in it.
Notwithstanding the disagreeableness of the flavour, I always used to
have a strange curiosity every morning to see what new taste it was
going to have; and I never missed making a new discovery and adding
another taste to my palate.”
Withal, Melville might have fared much worse, as contemporaneous
accounts more than adequately prove. Even in later days, Frank T.
Bullen was able to write: “I have often seen the men break up a couple
of biscuits into a pot of coffee for breakfast, and after letting it
stand for a minute or two, skim off the accumulated scum of vermin
from the top--maggots, weevils, etc., to the extent of a couple of
tablespoonsful, before they could shovel the mess into their craving
stomachs.” Melville never complains of maggots or weevils in his
biscuits, nor does he complain of being stinted food; during this
period, both common enough complaints. The cook, it is true, did not
sterilise everything he touched. “I never saw him wash but once,” says
Melville, “and that was at one of his own soup pots one dark night when
he thought no one saw him.” But as has already been imputed to Melville
for righteousness, his was not a squeamish stomach, and despite the
usual amount of filth on board the _Highlander_, his meals seem to
have gone off easily enough. He has left this pleasant picture of the
amenities of food-taking: “the sailors sitting cross-legged at their
chests in a circle, and breaking the hard biscuit, very sociably, over
each other’s heads, which was very convenient, indeed, but gave me the
headache, at least for the first four or five days till I got used to
it; and then I did not care much about it, only it kept my hair full of
crumbs; and I had forgot to bring a fine comb and brush, so I used to
shake my hair out to windward over the bulwarks every evening.”
Though the forecastle was, to characterise it quietly, a cramped
and fetid hole, dimly lighted and high in odour, Melville came to
be sufficiently acclimated to it to enjoy lying on his back in his
bunk during a forenoon watch below, reading while his messmates
slept. His bunk was an upper one, and right under the head of it was
a bull’s-eye, inserted into the deck to give light. Here he read an
account of _Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea_, and a large black volume
on _Delirium Tremens_: Melville’s share in the effects of a sailor
whose bunk he occupied, who had, in a frenzy of drunkenness, hurled
himself overboard. Here Melville also struggled to read Smith’s _Wealth
of Nations_. “But soon I gave it up for lost work,” says Melville; “and
thought that the old backgammon board we had at home, lettered on the
back _The History of Rome_, was quite as full of matter, and a great
deal more entertaining.”
The forecastle, however, was not invariably the setting for scenes so
idyllic. Drunkenness there was aplenty, especially at the beginning of
the voyage both from New York and from Liverpool. Of the three new men
shipped at Liverpool, two were so drunk they were unable to engage in
their duties until some hours after the boat quit the pier; but the
third, down on the ship’s papers as Miguel Saveda, had to be carried in
by a crimp and slung into a bunk where he lay locked in a trance. To
heighten the discomforts of the forecastle, there was soon added to the