Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
stench of sweated flesh, old clothes, tobacco smoke, rum and bilge, a
new odour, attributed to the presence of a dead rat. Some days before,
the forecastle had been smoked out to extirpate the vermin over-running
her: a smoking that seemed to have been fatal to a rodent among the
hollow spaces in the side planks. “At midnight, the larboard watch, to
which I belonged, turned out; and instantly as every man waked, he
exclaimed at the now intolerable smell, supposed to be heightened by
the shaking up of the bilge-water, from the ship’s rolling.
“‘Blast that rat!’ cried the Greenlander.
“‘He’s blasted already,’ said Jackson, who in his drawers had crossed
over to the bunk of Miguel. ‘It’s a water-rat, shipmates, that’s dead;
and here he is’--and with that he dragged forth the sailor’s arm,
exclaiming ‘Dead as a timber-head!’
“Upon this the men rushed toward the bunk, Max with the light, which he
held to the man’s face. ‘No, he’s not dead,’ he cried, as the yellow
flame wavered for a moment at the seaman’s motionless mouth. But hardly
had the words escaped when, to the silent horror of all, two threads
of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, darted out between his lips;
and in a moment the cadaverous face was crawled over by a swarm of
worm-like flames.
“The light dropped from the hand of Max, and went out; while covered
all over with spires and sparkles of flame, that faintly crackled
in the silence, the uncovered parts of the body burned before us,
precisely like a phosphorescent shark in a midnight sea. The eyes were
open and fixed; the mouth was curled like a scroll, while the whole
face, now wound in curls of soft blue flame, wore an aspect of grim
defiance, and eternal death. Prometheus blasted by fire on the rock.
“One arm, its red shirt-sleeve rolled up, exposed the man’s name,
tattooed in vermilion, near the hollow of the middle joint; and as if
there was something peculiar in the painted flesh, every vibrating
letter burned so white that you might read the flaming name in the
flickering ground of blue.
“‘Where’s that damned Miguel?’ was now shouted down among us by the
mate.
“‘He’s gone to the harbour where they never weigh anchor,’ coughed
Jackson. ‘Come down, sir, and look.’
“Thinking that Jackson intended to beard him, the mate sprang down in
a rage; but recoiled at the burning body as if he had been shot by a
bullet. ‘Take hold of it,’ said Jackson at last, to the Greenlander;
‘it must go overboard. Don’t stand shaking there, like a dog; take
hold of it, I say!--But stop!’ and smothering it all in the blankets,
he pulled it partly out of the bunk.
“A few minutes more, and it fell with a bubble among the phosphorescent
sparkles of the sea, leaving a coruscating wake as it sank.”
After this, Melville ceased reading in the forecastle. And indeed no
other sailor but Jackson would stay in the forecastle alone, and none
would laugh or sing there: none but Jackson. But he, while the rest
would be sitting silently smoking on their chests, or on their bunks,
would look towards the nailed-up bunk of Miguel and cough, and laugh,
and invoke the dead man with scoffs and jeers.
Of Melville’s shipmates, surely this Jackson was the most remarkable: a
fit rival to Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus. Max and the Greenlander
were merely typical old tars. Mr. Thompson, the grave negro cook, with
his leaning towards metaphysics and his disquisitions on original sin,
together with his old crony, Lavendar the steward, with his amorous
backslidings, his cologne water, and his brimstone pantaloons, though
mildly diverting, were usual enough. Blunt, too, with his collection of
hair-oils, and his dream-book, and his flowing bumpers of horse-salts,
though picturesque, was pale in comparison with Jackson. Larry, the
old whaler, with his sentimental distaste for civilised society, was a
forerunner of Mr. H. L. Mencken; and as such, deserves a more prominent
mention. “And what’s the use of bein’ _snivelized_?” he asks Melville;
“snivelized chaps only learn the way to take on ’bout life, and snivel.
Blast Ameriky, I say. I tell ye, ye wouldn’t have been to sea here,
leadin’ this dog’s life, if you hadn’t been snivelized. Snivelization
has been the ruin on ye; and it’s sp’iled me complete: I might have
been a great man in Madagasky; it’s too darned bad! Blast Ameriky, I
say.”
But flat, stale and unprofitable seem the whole ship’s company in
comparison with the demoniacal Jackson. Sainte-Beuve, in reviewing an
early work of Cooper’s, speaks enthusiastically of Cooper’s “faculté
créatrice qui enfante et met au monde des caractères nouveaux, et
en vertu de laquelle Rabelais a produit ‘Panurge,’ Le Sage ‘Gil
Blas,’ et Richardson ‘Clarissa.’” In _The Confidence Man_ Melville
spends a chapter discussing “originality” in literature. The phrase
“quite an original” he maintains, in contempt of Sainte-Beuve, is “a
phrase, we fancy, oftener used by the young, or the unlearned, or the
untravelled, than by the old, or the well-read, or the man who has
made the grand tour.” This faculty of creating “originals”--which is,
after all, as both Melville and Flaubert clearly saw, but a quality of
observation--Melville had to an unusual degree. In this incongruous
group of striking “originals” Jackson deserves, as Melville says, a
“lofty gallows.”
“Though Tiberius come in the succession of the Cæsars, and though
unmatchable Tacitus has embalmed his carrion,” writes Melville in
the luxurious cadence of Sir Thomas Browne which some of his critics
have stigmatised as both the sign and cause of his later “madness,”
“yet do I account this Yankee Jackson full as dignified a personage
as he, and as well meriting his lofty gallows in history, even though
he was a nameless vagabond without an epitaph, and none but I narrate
what he was. For there is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple
or rags: and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals. In
historically canonising on earth the condemned below, and lifting
up and lauding the illustrious damned, we do but make ensamples of
wickedness; and call upon ambition to do some great iniquity to be sure
of fame.”
When Melville came to know Jackson, nothing was left of him but the
foul lees and dregs of a man; a walking skeleton encased in a skin as
yellow as gamboge, branded with the marks of a fearful end near at
hand: “like that of King Antiochus of Syria, who died a worse death,
history says, than if he had been stung out of the world by wasps and
hornets.” In appearance he suggests Villon at the time when the gallows
spared him the death-penalty of his vices. He looked like a man with
his hair shaved off and just recovering from the yellow fever. His hair
had fallen out; his nose was broken in the middle; he squinted in one
eye. But to Melville that squinting eye “was the most deep, subtle,
infernal-looking eye that I ever saw lodged in a human head. I believe
that by good rights it must have belonged to a wolf, or starved tiger;
at any rate I would defy any oculist to turn out a glass eye half so
cold and snaky and deadly.” He was a foul-mouthed bully, and “being
the best seaman on board, and very overbearing every way, all the men
were afraid of him, and durst not contradict him or cross his path in
anything.” And what made this more remarkable was, that he was the
weakest man, bodily, of the whole crew. “But he had such an over-awing
way with him; such a deal of brass and impudence, such an unflinching
face, and withal was such a hideous mortal, that Satan himself would
have run from him.” The whole crew stood in mortal fear of him, and
cringed and fawned before him like so many spaniels. They would rub his
back after he was undressed and lying in his bunk, and run up on deck
to the cook-house to warm some cold coffee for him, and fill his pipe,
and give him chews of tobacco, and mend his jackets and trousers, and
watch and tend and nurse him every way. “And all the time he would sit
scowling on them, and found fault with what they did: and I noticed
that those who did the most for him were the ones he most abused.”
These he flouted and jeered and laughed to scorn, on occasion breaking
out in such a rage that “his lips glued together at the corners with a
fine white foam.”
His age it was impossible to tell: for he had no beard, and no wrinkles
except for small crow’s-feet about the eyes. He might have been thirty,
or perhaps fifty years. “But according to his own account, he had been
at sea ever since he was eight years old, when he first went to sea as
a cabin-boy in an Indiaman, and ran away at Calcutta.” And according to
his own account, too, he had passed through every kind of dissipation
and abandonment in the worst parts of the world. He had served in
Portuguese slavers on the coast of Africa, and with diabolical relish
would tell of the middle passage where the slaves were stowed, heel
and point, like logs, and the suffocated and dead were unmanacled and
weeded out from the living each morning before washing down the decks.
Though he was apt to be dumb at times, and would sit with “his eyes
fixed, and his teeth set, like a man in the moody madness,” yet when
he did speak his whole talk was full of piracies, plagues, poisonings,
seasoned with filth and blasphemy. “Though he never attended churches
and knew nothing of Christianity; no more than a Malay pirate; and
though he could not read a word, yet he was spontaneously an atheist
and an infidel; and during the long night watches, would enter into
arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed; nothing to be
loved, and nothing worth living for; but everything to be hated in the
wide world. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow with some
inscrutable curse; and going about corrupting and searing every heart
that beat near him.”
The last scene in his eventful history took place off Cape Cod, when,
in a stiff favourable breeze, the captain was impatient to make his
port before a shift of wind. Four sullen weeks previous to this had
Jackson spent in the forecastle without touching a rope. Every day
since leaving New York Jackson had seemed to be growing worse and
worse, both in body and mind. “And all the time, though his face
grew thinner and thinner, his eyes seemed to kindle more and more,
as if he were going to die out at last, and leave them burning like
tapers before his corpse.” When, after these four weeks of idleness,
Jackson, to the surprise of the crew, came up on deck, his aspect was
damp and death-like; the blue hollows of his eyes were like vaults
full of snakes; and issuing so unexpectedly from his dark tomb in the
forecastle, he looked like a man raised from the dead.
“Before the sailors had made fast the reef-tackle, Jackson was
tottering up the rigging; thus getting the start of them, and securing
his place at the extreme weather-end of the topsail yard--which in
reefing is accounted the place of honour. For it was one of the
characteristics of this man that though when on duty he would shy away
from mere dull work in a calm, yet in tempest time he always claimed
the van and would yield to none.
“Soon we were all strung along the main-topsail yard; the ship rearing
and plunging under us like a runaway steed; each man griping his
reef-point, and sideways leaning, dragging the sail over towards
Jackson, whose business it was to confine the reef corner to the yard.
“His hat and shoes were off; and he rode the yard-arm end, leaning
backward to the gale, and pulling at the earing-rope like a bridle. At
all times, this is a moment of frantic exertion with sailors, whose
spirits seem then to partake of the commotion of the elements as they
hang in the gale between heaven and earth; and then it is, too, that
they are the most profane.