Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
That Dana’s book should have fired Melville to an impetuous and
romantic jaunt to the South Seas, though an ill-favoured statement, is
Stedman’s very own. When a boy concludes the Christmas holidays by a
mid-winter plunge into the filthy and shabby business of whaling; when
a young man inaugurates the year not among the familiar associations
of the gods of his hearth, but among semi-barbarous strangers of the
forecastle of a whaler: to make such a shifting of whereabouts a sign
of jolly romantic exuberance, is engagingly naïve in its perversity.
Just what specific circumstances were the occasion of Melville’s escape
into whaling will probably never be known: what burst of demoniac
impulse, either of anger, or envy, or spite; what gnawing discontent;
what passionate disappointment; what crucifixion of affection; what
blind impetuosity; what sinister design. But in the light of his
writings and the known facts of his life it seems likely that his
desperate transit was made in the mid-winter of his discontent. That
the reading of Dana’s book should have filled his head with a mere
adolescent longing for brine-drenched locomotion and sent him gallantly
off to sea is a surmise more remarkable for simplicity than insight.
Melville never wearies of iterating his “itch for things remote.” Like
Thoreau, he had a “naturally roving disposition,” and of the two men it
is difficult to determine which achieved a wider peregrination. It was
Thoreau’s proud boast: “I have travelled extensively in Concord.” He
believed that Concord, with its sylvan environment, was a microcosm “by
the study of which the whole world could be comprehended,” and so, this
wildest of civilised men seldom strayed beyond its familiar precincts.
His was a heroic provincialism, that cost him little loss either in
worldliness or in wisdom. Though his head went swimming in the Milky
Way, his feet were well-rooted in New England sod. “One world at a
time” was the programme he set himself for digesting the universe: and
he looked into the eyes of this world with cold stoical serenity.
Melville made no such capitulation with reality. Between the obdurate
world of facts and his ardent and unclarified desires there was always,
to the end of his life, a blatant incompatibility. Alongside the hard
and cramping world of reality, and in more or less sharp opposition
to it, he set up a fictitious world, a world of heart’s desire; and
unlike Thoreau, he hugged his dream in jealous defiance of reality.
It is, of course, an ineradicable longing of man to repudiate the
inexorable restrictions of reality, and return to the happy delusion
of omnipotence of early childhood, an escape into some land of heart’s
desire. Goethe compared the illusions that man nourishes in his breast
to the population of statues in ancient Rome which were almost as
numerous as the population of living men. Most men keep the boundaries
between these two populations distinct: a separation facilitated by the
usual dwindling of the ghostly population. Flaubert once observed that
every tenth-rate provincial notary had in him the debris of a poet.
As Wordsworth complains, as we grow away from childhood, the vision
fades into the light of common day. Thoreau clung to his visions; but
they were, after all, cold-blooded and well-behaved visions. And by
restricting himself to “one world at a time,” by mastering his dream,
he mastered reality. Alcott declared that Thoreau thought he dwelt in
the centre of the universe, and seriously contemplated annexing the
rest of the planet to Concord. The delicacy of the compliment to the
rest of the planet has never been adequately appreciated. Melville’s
more violent and restive impulses never permitted him to feel any
such flattering attachment to his whereabouts, whether it was Albany,
Liverpool, Lima, Tahiti or Constantinople. Like Rousseau, who confessed
himself “burning with desire without any definite object,” Melville
always felt himself an exile from the seacoast of Bohemia. But his
nostalgia, his indefinite longing for the unknown, was not, in any
literal sense, “homesickness” at all. As Aldous Huxley has observed:
“Those find, who most delight to roam
’Mid castles of remotest Spain
That there’s, thank Heaven, no place like home
So they put out upon their travels again.”
That Melville came to no very pleasant haven of refuge in the
forecastle of the _Acushnet_ is borne out by his drastic preference
to be eaten by cannibals rather than abide among the sureties of the
ship and her company. That he “left the ship, being oppressed with hard
fare and hard usage, in the summer of 1842 with a companion, Richard T.
Greene (Toby) at the bay of Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands” is the
statement in the journal of his wife vividly elaborated in _Typee_.
Of Melville’s history aboard the _Acushnet_ there is no straightforward
account. _Redburn_, _Typee_, _Omoo_ and _White-Jacket_ are transparent
chapters in autobiography. From his experiences on board the _Acushnet_
Melville draws generously in _Moby-Dick_: but these experiences do
not for one moment pretend to be the whole of the literal truth. Only
an insanity as lurid as Captain Ahab’s would mistake _Moby-Dick_ for
a similarly reliable report of personal experiences. _Moby-Dick_ is,
indeed, an autobiography of adventure; but adventure upon the highest
plane of spiritual daring. Incidentally, it also offers the fullest,
and truest, and most readable history of an actual whaling cruise
ever written. But it is not a “scientific” history. The “scientific”
historian, proudly unreadable, thanks God that he has no style to tempt
him out of the strict weariness of counting-house inventories; and in
despair of presenting the truth, he boasts a make-shift veracity. The
truest historians are, of course, the poets--and their histories are
“feigned.” Melville, writing in the capacity of poet, was licensed in
the best interests of truth to expurgate reality. And though Captain
Ahab’s hunt of the abhorred Moby-Dick belongs as essentially to the
realm of poetry as does the quest of the Holy Grail, it is, withal, in
its lower reaches, so broadly based on a foundation of solid reality
that it is possible, by considering _Moby-Dick_ in double conjunction
with the few facts explicitly known of Melville during the period
of his whaling cruise, and the wealth of facts known of whaling in
general, to block in, with a considerable degree of certainty, the
contours of his experiences aboard the _Acushnet_.
By all odds, the chief chapter in the history of whaling is the story
of its rise and practical extinction in the Southern New England
States. In this limited geographical area, trade in “oil and bone” was
pursued with an alacrity, an enterprise and a prosperity unparalleled
in the world’s history. When, in 1841, Melville boarded the _Acushnet_,
American whaling, after a development through nearly two centuries,
was within a decade of its highest development, within two decades of
its precipitous decay. The doom of whale-oil lamps and sperm candles
was ultimately decided in 1859 with the opening of the first oil well
in Pennsylvania, and sealed by the Civil War. Melville knew American
whaling at the prime of its golden age, and taking it at its crest, he
raised it in fiction to a dignity and significance incomparably higher
than it ever reached in literal fact.
At the beginning of _Moby-Dick_, Melville culls from the most
incongruous volumes an anthology of comments upon Leviathan, beginning
with the Mosaic comment “And God created great whales,” and ending,
after eclectic quotations from Pliny, Lucian, Rabelais, Sir Thomas
Browne, Spenser, Hobbes, Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Paley,
Blackstone, Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, Darwin, and dozens of others
(including an excerpt “From ‘Something’ Unpublished”) ends on the old
whale song:
“Oh, the rare old whale, mid storm and gale
In his ocean home will be
A giant in might, where might is right,
And King of the boundless sea.”
Rather than conventionally distribute his quotations throughout the
book as chapter headings, Melville offers them all in a block at the
beginning of the volume, somewhat after the manner of Franklin’s grace
said over the pork barrel. And extraordinarily effective is this
device of Melville’s in stirring the reader’s interest to a sense of
the wonder and mystery of this largest of all created live things, of
the wild and distant seas wherein he rolls his island bulk; of the
undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale with all the attending
marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds. Even before the
reader comes to the superb opening paragraph of _Moby-Dick_, the great
flood-gates of the wonder-world are swung open, and into his inmost
soul, as into Melville’s, “two by two there float endless processions
of the whale, and midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like
a snow hill in the air.”
The literature of whaling slopes down from _Moby-Dick_, both before and
after, into a wilderness of several hundred volumes.
There is but one attempt at a comprehensive history of whaling: Walter
S. Tower’s _A History of the American Whale Fishery_ (Philadelphia,
1907). This slender volume first makes a rapid survey of the sources
and proceeds from these to a cautious selection of the outstanding
documented facts which by “economic interpretation” it presents as
a consecutive story. Devoid of literary pretension, it is admirable
in accuracy, compactness and clarity. The most comprehensive popular
treatment of American whaling is to be found in Hyatt Verrill’s _The
Real Story of the Whaler_ (1916): a more exuberant but less workmanly
book than Tower’s. Representative shorter surveys are to be found both
in Winthrop L. Martin’s very able _The American Merchant Marine_ (1902)
and Willis J. Abbot’s _American Merchant Ships and Sailors_ (1902).
Although the literature of whaling extends by repeated dilutions from
“economic interpretations” to infant books, the classical sources for
this extended literature tally less than a score. The great work on
the _Fisheries and Fishing Industries of the United States_, prepared
under the direction of G. Brown Goode in 1884, contains two articles
on whaling of the first magnitude of importance: _Whalemen, Vessels,
Apparatus and Methods of the Whale Fishery_ and a _History of the
Present Condition of the Whale Fishery_. The facts presented in these
last two encyclopædic treatments are drawn principally from Alexander
Starbuck’s _History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest
Inception to the Year 1874_, published in 1876, and C. M. Scammon’s
_Marine Mammals of the North Western Coast of North America, with an
Account of the American Whale Fishery_, published in 1874. Lorenzo
Sabine’s _Report on the Principal Fisheries of the American Seas_,
published in 1870, while prior to the monumental works of Starbuck and
Scammon in date of publication, enjoys no other priority. The most
complete and detailed treatment of the origin and early development
of whaling is to be found in William Scoresby’s _An Account of the
Arctic Regions_, dated 1820. Scoresby--“the justly renowned,” according
to Melville; “the excellent voyager”--was an English naval officer,
and in his discussion of the whale fishery he deals solely with the
European and principally with the British industry. But Scoresby’s book
is principally a classic as regards the earlier history of whaling.
Scoresby seems to have convinced all later historians in this field of
the folly of further research. Melville knew Scoresby’s book--“I honour
him for a veteran,” Melville confesses--and drew from its erudition in
_Moby-Dick_. Obed Macy’s _History of Nantucket_, published in 1836, is