Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
As for Melville, he tries to convince us he kept very sorry watch,
as in the serene weather of the tropics, he perched “a hundred feet
above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were
gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were,
swim the huge monsters of the deep, even as ships once sailed between
the boots of the famous Colossus of old Rhodes.” There, through his
watches, he used to swing, he says, “lost in the infinite series of the
sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently
rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into
languor.” “I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in
the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I
might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a
lazy leg over the topsail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery
pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.” According
to Melville’s own representation, the _Acushnet_ was not a pint of oil
richer for all his watching in the thought-engendering altitude of
the crow’s-nest. He admonishes all ship-owners of Nantucket to eschew
the bad business of shipping “romantic, melancholy, absent-minded
young men, disgusted with the cankering cares of earth”: young men
seeking sentiment--as did he--in tar and blubber. “Childe Harold not
infrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless
disappointed whaleship,” he warns prosaic ship-owners, “young men
hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition,” and indifferent to the
selling qualities of “oil and bone.” It is well both for Melville and
Captain Pease, the testy old skipper of the ship _Acushnet_, that he
could not see into the head of Melville as he hung silently perched in
his dizzy lookout. “Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of
vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that
deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every
strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every
dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to
him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul
by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit
ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space;
like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of
every shore the round globe over.”
When, from the mast-head, eyes less abstracted than Melville’s
sighted a whale, the daring and excitement of the ensuing pursuit in
the whale-boats left Melville less occasion, during such energetic
intervals, to luxuriate in high mysteries. And it seems likely that
Melville was of more value to the ship’s owners when in a whale-boat
than riding the mast-head.
Through long years of whaling these boats had been developed until
practical perfection had been reached. Never has boat been built
which for speed, staunchness, seaworthiness and hardiness excels the
whaleboat of the Massachusetts whalemen. These mere cockleshells, sharp
at both ends and clean-sided as a mackerel, were about twenty-seven
feet long by six feet beam, with a depth of twenty-two inches amidships
and thirty-seven inches at the bow and stern. These tiny clinker-built
craft can ride the heaviest sea, withstand the highest wind, resist
the heaviest gale. Incredible voyages have been made in these whaling
boats, not the least remarkable being the three months’ voyage of two
boats that survived the wreck of the _Essex_ in 1819, or the even
more remarkable six months’ voyage of the whaling boat separated from
the _Janet_ in 1849. In _Mardi_ Melville describes a prolonged voyage
in a whale-boat. In this account Melville takes one down to the very
plane of the sea. He is speaking from experience when he says: “Unless
the waves, in their gambols, toss you and your chip upon one of their
lordly crests, your sphere of vision is little larger than it would be
at the bottom of a well. At best, your most extended view in any one
direction, at least, is in a high slow-rolling sea; when you descend
into the dark misty spaces, between long and uniform swells. Then,
for the moment, it is like looking up and down in a twilight glade,
interminable; where two dawns, one on each hand, seem struggling
through the semi-transparent tops of the fluid mountains.”
Of his first lowering in pursuit of a whale, he says in _Moby-Dick_:
“It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of
the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they
rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless
bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip
for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that seemed
almost threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the
watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the
top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other
side:--all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and
the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, and wondrous sight of the ivory
_Pequod_ bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a
wild hen after her screaming brood;--all this was thrilling. Not the
raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat
of his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first
unknown phantom in the other world,--neither of these can feel stranger
and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds
himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm
whale.”
After this first lowering, Melville returned to the ship to indulge
in the popular nautical diversion of making his will. This ceremony
concluded, he says he looked round him “tranquilly and contentedly,
like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of
a snug family vault. Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the
sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and
destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.”
In _Moby-Dick_, whales are sighted, chased, and captured; nor does
Melville fail to give detailed accounts of these activities or of the
ensuing “cutting in” and the “trying” of the oil. One of the most
vivid scenes in _Moby-Dick_ is the description of the “try-works” in
operation.
“By midnight,” says Melville, “the works were in full operation.
We were clean from the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was
freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was
licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from
the sooty flues, and illuminated every rope in the rigging, as with
the famed Greek fire.... The hatch, removed from the top of the works,
now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were
the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooners, always the whaleship’s
stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber
into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the
snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the
feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the
ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness
to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the
further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served
for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed,
looking into the red heat of the fire, their tawny features, now all
begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting
barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these strangely revealed in the
capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other
their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth;
their uncivilised laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames
from the furnace: to and fro, in their front, the harpooners wildly
gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; the wind howled
on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, yet steadfastly
shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and
the night; and scornfully champed, and viciously spat round her on all
sides.” During this scene Melville stood at the helm, “and for long
silent hours guarded the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for
that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness,
the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the
fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire these
at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield
to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a
midnight helm.”
In a chapter on dreams, in _Mardi_, one of the wildest chapters
Melville ever wrote, and the one in which he profoundly searched into
the heart of his mystery, he compares his dreams to a vast herd of
buffaloes, “browsing on to the horizon, and browsing on round the
world; and among them, I dash with my lance, to spear one, ere they all
flee.” In this world of dreams, “passing and repassing, like Oriental
empires in history,” Melville discerned, “far in the background, hazy
and blue, their steeps let down from the sky, Andes on Andes, rooted on
Alps; and all round me, long rolling oceans, roll Amazons and Orinocos;
waver, mounted Parthians; and to and fro, toss the wide woodlands:
all the world an elk, and the forest its antlers. Beneath me, at the
equator, the earth pulses and beats like a warrior’s heart, till I know
not whether it be not myself. And my soul sinks down to the depths,
and soars to the skies; and comet-like reels on through such boundless
expanses, that methinks all the worlds are my kin, and I invoke them to
stay in their course. Yet, like a mighty three decker, towing argosies
by scores, I tremble, gasp, and strain in my flight, and fain would
cast off the cables that hamper.”
On that night that Melville drowsed at the helm of the _Acushnet_ while
she was “freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a
corpse, and plunging into that blackness of blackness” his soul sank
deep into itself, and he seems to have awakened to recognise in the
ship that he drowsily steered, the material counterpart of the darkest
mysteries of his own soul. It was then that he awoke to be “horribly
conscious” that “whatever swift rushing thing I stood on was not so
much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.” And
in reflecting upon that insight Melville plunges into the lowest abyss
of disenchantment. “The truest of men was the Man of Sorrows,” he says,
“and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine
hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.... He who ... calls Cowper,
Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout
a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore
jolly; not that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break the
green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.”
The greatest of all dreamers conquer their dreams; others, who are
great, but not of the greatest, are mastered by them, and Melville
was one of these. There is a passage in the works of Edgar Allan Poe
that Melville may well have pondered when he awoke at the helm of the
_Acushnet_ after looking too long into the glare of the fire: “There
are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad
humanity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man
is no Carathes to explore with impunity its every cavern. All the grim