Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
“‘Haul out to windward!’ coughed Jackson, with a blasphemous cry, and
he threw himself back with a violent strain upon the bridle in his
hand. But the wild words were hardly out of his mouth when his hands
dropped to his side, and the bellying sail was spattered with a torrent
of blood from his lungs.
“As the man next him stretched out his arm to save, Jackson fell
headlong from the yard, and with a long seethe, plunged like a diver
into the sea.
“It was when the ship had rolled to windward, which, with the long
projection of the yard-arm over the side, made him strike far out upon
the water. His fall was seen by the whole upward-gazing crowd on deck,
some of whom were spotted with the blood that trickled from the sail,
while they raised a spontaneous cry, so shrill and wild that a blind
man might have known something deadly had happened.
“Clutching our reef-joints, we hung over the stick, and gazed down
to the one white bubbling spot which had closed over the head of our
shipmate; but the next minute it was brewed into the common yeast of
the waves, and Jackson never arose. We waited a few minutes, expecting
an order to descend, haul back the fore-yard, and man the boats; but
instead of that, the next sound that greeted us was, ‘Bear a hand and
reef away, men!’ from the mate.”
CHAPTER V
DISCOVERIES ON TWO CONTINENTS
“If you read of St. Peter’s, they say, and then go and visit it, ten
to one, you account it a dwarf compared to your high-raised ideal.
And, doubtless, Jonah himself must have been much disappointed when
he looked up to the domed midriff surmounting the whale’s belly, and
surveyed the ribbed pillars around him. A pretty large belly, to be
sure, thought he, but not so big as it might have been.”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Redburn_.
The merchantman on which Melville shipped was not a Liverpool liner,
or packet-ship, plying in connection with a sisterhood of packets.
She was a _regular trader_ to Liverpool; sailing upon no fixed days,
and acting very much as she pleased, being bound by no obligation of
any kind, though in all her voyages ever having New York or Liverpool
for her destination. Melville’s craft was not a greyhound, not a very
fast sailer. The swifter of the packet ships then made the passage
in fifteen or sixteen days; the _Highlander_, travelling at a more
matronly pace, was out on the Atlantic a leisurely month.
“It was very early in the month of June that we sailed,” says Melville;
“and I had greatly rejoiced that it was that time of year; for it
would be warm and pleasant upon the ocean I thought; and my voyage
would be like a summer excursion to the seashore for the benefit of
the salt water, and a change of scene and society.” But the fact was
not identical with Melville’s fancy, and before many days at sea, he
found it a galling mockery to remember that his sisters had promised
to tell all enquiring friends that he had gone “_abroad_”: “just as if
I was visiting Europe on a tour with my tutor.” Though his thirty days
at sea considerably disabused him--for the time--of the unmitigated
delights of ocean travel in the forecastle; still always in the vague
and retreating distance did he hold to the promise of some stupendous
discovery still in store. Finally, one morning when he came on deck, he
was thrilled to discover that he was, in sober fact, within sight of
a foreign land: a shore-line that in imagination he transformed into
the seacoast of Bohemia. “A foreign country actually visible!” But as
he gazed ashore, disillusion ran hot upon the heels of his romantic
expectations.
“Was that Ireland? Why, there was nothing remarkable about that;
nothing startling. If _that’s_ the way a foreign country looks, I might
as well have stayed at home. Now what, exactly, I had fancied the shore
would look like, I can not say; but I had a vague idea that it would be
something strange and wonderful.”
The next land they sighted was Wales. “It was high noon, and a long
line of purple mountains lay like a bank of clouds against the east.
But, after all, the general effect of these mountains was mortifyingly
like the general effect of the Kaatskill Mountains on the Hudson River.”
It was not until midnight of the third day that they arrived at the
mouth of the Mersey. Before the following daybreak they took the first
flood.
“Presently, in the misty twilight, we passed immense buoys, and caught
sight of distant objects on shore, vague and shadowy shapes, like
Ossian’s ghosts.” And then it was that Melville found leisure to lean
over the side, “trying to summon up some image of Liverpool, to see how
the reality would answer to my concept.”
As the day advanced, the river contracted, and in the clear morning
Melville got his first sharp impression of a foreign port.
“I beheld lofty ranges of dingy ware-houses, which seemed very
deficient in the elements of the marvellous; and bore a most unexpected
resemblance to the ware-houses along South Street in New York.
There was nothing strange, nothing extraordinary about them. There
they stood; a row of calm and collected ware-houses; very good and
substantial edifices, doubtless, and admirably adapted to the ends had
in view by the builders: but yet, these edifices, I must confess, were
a sad and bitter disappointment to me.”
Melville was six weeks in Liverpool. Of this part of his adventure, he
says in _Redburn_: “I do not mean to present a diary of my stay there.
I shall here simply record the general tenor of the life led by our
crew during that interval; and will proceed to note down, at random,
my own wanderings about town, and impressions of things as they are
recalled to me now after the lapse of so many (twelve) years.”
Not the least important detail of these six weeks is the fact that
Melville and his ship-mates were very well fed at the sign of the
Baltimore Clipper. “The roast beef of Old England abounded; and so
did the immortal plum-puddings and the unspeakably capital gooseberry
pies.” Owing to the strict but necessary regulations of the Liverpool
docks, no fire of any kind was allowed on board the vessels within
them. And hence, though the sailors of the _Highlander_ slept in the
forecastle, they were fed ashore at the expense of the ship’s owners.
This, in a large crew remaining at Liverpool more than six weeks, as
the _Highlander_ did, formed no inconsiderable item in the expenses of
the voyage. The Baltimore Clipper was one of the boarding houses near
the docks which flourished on the appetite of sailors. At the Baltimore
Clipper was fed not only the crew of the _Highlander_, but, each in
a separate apartment, a variety of other crews as well. Since each
crew was known collectively by the name of its ship, the shouts of the
servant girls running about at dinner time mustering their guests must
have been alarming to an uninitiated visitor.
“Where are the _Empresses of China_?--Here’s their beef been smoking
this half-hour”--“Fly, Betty, my dear, here come the _Panthers_”--“Run,
Molly, my love; get the salt-cellars for the _Splendids_”--“You, Peggy,
where’s the _Siddons’_ pickle-pot?”--“I say, Judy, are you never coming
with that pudding for the _Sultans_?”
It was to the Baltimore Clipper that Jackson immediately led the
ship’s crew when they first sprang ashore: up this street and down
that till at last he brought them to their destination in a narrow
lane filled with boarding-houses, spirit-vaults and sailors. While
Melville’s shipmates were engaged in tippling and talking with
numerous old acquaintances of theirs in the neighbourhood who thronged
about the door, he sat alone in the dining-room appropriated to the
_Highlanders_ “meditating upon the fact that I was now seated upon an
English bench, under an English roof, in an English tavern, forming an
integral part of the British empire.”
Melville examined the place attentively. “It was a long narrow little
room, with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out upon
a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall, the top of which
was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles stuck into mortar. A
dull lamp swung overhead, placed in a wooden ship suspended from the
ceiling. The walls were covered with a paper, representing an endless
succession of vessels of all nations continually circumnavigating the
apartment. From the street came a confused uproar of ballad-singers,
bawling women, babies, and drunken sailors.”
It was during this disenchanting examination that the realisation began
to creep chillingly over Melville that his prospect of seeing the
world as a sailor was, after all, but very doubtful. It seems never
to have struck him before that sailors but hover about the edges of
terra-firma; that “they land only upon wharves and pier-heads, and
their reminiscences of travel are only a dim recollection of a chain of
tap-rooms surrounding the globe.”
Melville’s six weeks in Liverpool offered him, however, opportunity
to make slightly more extended observations. During these weeks he
was free to go where he pleased between four o’clock in the afternoon
and the following dawn. Sundays he had entirely at his own disposal.
But withal, it was an excessively limited and distorted version of
England that was open for his examination. Except for his shipmates,
his very distant cousin, the Earl of Leven and Melville and Queen
Victoria and such like notables, he knew by name no living soul in
the British Isles. And neither his companions in the forecastle,
nor the remote and elaborately titled strangers of Melville House,
offered encouragement of an easy and glowing intimacy. With but three
dollars as his net capital--money advanced him in Liverpool by the
ship--and without a thread of presentable clothing on his back, he
could not hope promiscuously to ingratiate himself either by his purse
or the adornments of his person. Thus lacking in the fundamentals of
friendship, his native charms stood him in little stead. So alone he
walked the streets of Liverpool and gratuitously saw the sights.
While on the high seas, Melville had improved his fallow hours by
poring over an old guide-book of Liverpool that had descended to him
from his father. This old family relic was to Melville cherished with
a passionate and reverent affection. Around it clustered most of the
fond associations that are the cords of man. It had been handled by
Allan amid the very scenes it described; it bore some “half-effaced
miscellaneous memoranda in pencil, characteristic of a methodical
mind, and therefore indubitably my father’s”: jottings of “a strange,
subdued, old, midsummer interest” to Melville. And on the fly-leaves
were crabbed inscriptions, and “crayon sketches of wild animals and
falling air-castles.” These decorations were the handiwork of Melville
and his brothers and sisters and cousins. Of his own contributions,
Melville says: “as poets do with their juvenile sonnets, I might write
under this horse, ‘_Drawn at the age of three years_,’ and under
this autograph, ‘_Executed at the age of eight_.’” This guide-book
was to Melville a sacred volume, and he expresses a wish that he
might immortalise it. Addressing this unpretentious looking little
green-bound, spotted and tarnished guide-book, he exclaims: “Dear book!
I will sell my Shakespeare, and even sacrifice my old quarto Hogarth,
before I will part from you. Yes, I will go to the hammer myself, ere
I send you to be knocked down in the auctioneer’s scrambles. I will,
my beloved; till you drop leaf from leaf, and letter from letter, you
shall have a snug shelf somewhere, though I have no bench for myself.”
To the earlier manuscript additions to this guide-book, Melville added,
while on the Atlantic, drawings of ships and anchors, and snatches of