Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
easy promises. “Whaling, gentlemen, is tolerably hard at first,”
Browne makes him say, “but it’s the finest business in the world
for enterprising young men. Vigilance and activity will insure you
rapid promotion. I haven’t the least doubt but you’ll come home boat
steerers. I sent off six college students a few days ago, and a poor
fellow who had been flogged away from home by a vicious wife. A whaler,
gentlemen, is a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a
school for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy! There’s nothing
like it. You can see the world; you can see something of life.”
The first half of one of the truest and most popular of whaling
chanteys, a lyric which must have been sung with heartfelt conviction
by thousands of whalemen, runs:
’Twas advertised in Boston,
New York and Buffalo,
Five hundred brave Americans
A-whaling for to go.
They send you to New Bedford,
The famous whaling port;
They send you to a shark’s store
And board and fit you out.
They send you to a boarding-house
For a time to dwell.
The thieves there, they are thicker
Than the other side of Hell.
They tell you of the whaling ships
A-going in and out.
They swear you’ll make your fortune
Before you’re five months out.
The second half of this ballad celebrates the hardships of life aboard
ship: the poor food and the brutality of the officers. With this
side of whaling we know that Melville was familiar. But of the usual
preliminaries of whaling recounted by Browne and summarised in the
chantey, Melville says not a word, either in _Moby-Dick_ or elsewhere.
Nor does tradition or history supplement this autobiographical
silence. On this point, we know nothing. Surely it would be intensely
interesting to know how far egotism conspired with art in guiding
Melville in the writing of the masterful beginning of _Moby-Dick_.
No matter by what process Melville found his way to the _Acushnet_,
the whaling fleet was, indeed, at the time of his addition to it, “a
place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the
dissipated, an asylum for the needy.” J. Ross Browne was warned before
his sailing that New Bedford “was the sink-hole of iniquity; that the
fitters were all blood-suckers, the owners cheats, and the captains
tyrants.”
Though the arraignment was incautiously comprehensive, Browne
confesses to have looked back upon it as a sound warning. The boasted
advantages of whaling were not selfishly withheld from any man, no
matter what the race, or the complexion of his hide or his morals.
The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, English, Scotch,
Irish, in fact, men of almost every country of Europe, and this with
no jealous discrimination against Asia, Africa, or the Islands of the
Pacific, were drawn upon by the whale fleet during the days of its
greatest prosperity. “And had I not been, from my birth, as it were, a
cosmopolite,” Melville remarks parenthetically in _Redburn_. It would
have been difficult for him to find a more promising field for the
exercise of this inherited characteristic, than was whaling in 1841:
and this, indeed, without the nuisance of leaving New Bedford. “In
thoroughfares nigh the docks,” he says, “any considerable seaport will
frequently offer to view the queerest nondescripts from foreign ports.
Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will
sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not unknown to
Lascars and Malays; and in Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees
have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water street
and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but
in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners;
savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.
It makes a stranger stare.” It will be remembered that Ishmael spends
his first night in New Bedford in bed with one of these very cannibals;
and on the following morning, in a spirit of amiable and transcendent
charity, goes down on his knees with his tattooed bed-fellow before a
portable wooden deity: an experience fantastic and highly diverting,
nor at all outside the bounds of possibility. It is a fact to chasten
the optimism of apostles of the promiscuous brotherhood of man, that as
the whaling crews grew in cosmopolitanism, they made no corresponding
advances towards the Millennium. Had Nantucket and New Bedford but
grown to the height of their whaling activities in the fourth century,
they might have sent enterprising agents to the African desert to
tempt ambitious cenobites with offers of undreamed-of luxuries of
mortification. These holy men might have worked miracles in whaling,
and transformed the watery wilderness of the Pacific into a floating
City of God. But in the nineteenth century of grace, the kennel-like
forecastle of the whaler was the refuge not of the athletic saint, but
of the offscourings of all races, the discards of humanity, and of
this fact there is no lack of evidence. Nor did Melville’s ship-mates,
on the whole, seem to have varied this monotony. There survives this
record in his own hand:
“_What became of the ship’s company on the whale-ship ‘Acushnet,’
according to Hubbard who came back home in her (more than a four
years’ voyage) and visited me in Pittsfield in 1850._
“_Captain Pease_--returned & lives in asylum at the Vineyard.
“_Raymond_, 1st Mate--had a fight with the Captain & went ashore at
Payta.
“_Hall_, 2nd Mate--came home & went to California.
“_3rd Mate_, Portuguese, went ashore at Payta.
“_Boatswain_, either ran away or killed at Ropo one of the Marquesas.
“_Smith_, went ashore at Santa, coast of Peru, afterwards committed
suicide at Mobile.
“_Barney_, boatswain, came home.
“_Carpenter_, went ashore at Mowee half dead with disreputable
disease.
“_The Czar._
“_Tom Johnson_, black, went ashore at Mowee, half dead (ditto) & died
at the hospital.
“_Reed_, mulatto--came home.
“_Blacksmith_, ran away at San Francisco.
“_Blackus_, little black, ditto.
“_Bill Green_, after several attempts to run away, came home in the
end.
“_The Irishman_, ran away, coast of Colombia.
“_Wright_, went ashore half dead at the Marquesas.
“_Jack Adams_ and _Jo Portuguese_ came home.
“_The Old Cook_, came home.
“_Haynes_, ran away aboard of a Sidney ship.
“_Little Jack_, came home.
“_Grant_, young fellow, went ashore half dead, spitting blood, at
Oahu.
“_Murray_, went ashore, shunning fight at Rio Janeiro.
“_The Cooper_, came home.”
Of the twenty-seven men who went out with the ship, only the Captain,
the Second Mate, a Boatswain, the Cook, the Cooper and six of the
mongrel crew (one of which made several futile attempts to escape)
came back home with her. The First Mate had a fight with the Captain
and left the ship; the Carpenter and four of the crew went ashore to
die, two at least with venereal diseases, another went ashore spitting
blood, another to commit suicide.
With this company Melville was intimately imprisoned on board the
_Acushnet_ for fifteen months. Of the everyday life of Melville in
this community we know little enough. In _Moby-Dick_ Melville has left
voluminous accounts of the typical occupations of whaling but beyond
this nothing certainly to be identified as derived from life on the
_Acushnet_. The ship’s company on board the _Pequod_, in so far as is
known, belong as purely to romance as characters of fiction can. It
doubtless abbreviates the responsibilities of the custodians of public
morals, that the staple of conversation on board the _Acushnet_, the
scenes enacted in the forecastle and elsewhere in the ship, shall
probably never be known. In _Typee_ Melville says of the crew of
the _Acushnet_, however: “With a very few exceptions, our crew was
composed of a parcel of dastardly and mean-spirited wretches, divided
among themselves, and only united in enduring without resistance the
unmitigated tyranny of the captain.”
Of the “very few exceptions” that Melville spares the tribute of
contemptuous damnation, one alone does he single out for portraiture.
“He was a young fellow about my own age,” says Melville in _Typee_, of
a seventeen-year-old shipmate, “for whom I had all along entertained
a great regard; and Toby, such was the name by which he went among
us, for his real name he would never tell us, was every way worthy
of it. He was active, ready, and obliging, of dauntless courage, and
singularly open and fearless in the expression of his feelings. I
had on more than one occasion got him out of scrapes into which this
had led him; and I know not whether it was from this cause, or a
certain congeniality of sentiment between us, that he had always shown
a partiality for my society. We had battled out many a long watch
together, beguiling the weary hours with chat, song, and story, mingled
with a good many imprecations upon the hard destiny it seemed our
common fortune to encounter.”
Toby, like Melville, had evidently not been reared from the cradle to
the life of the forecastle; a fact that, despite his anxious effort,
Toby could not entirely conceal. “He was one of that class of rovers
you sometimes meet at sea,” says Melville, “who never reveal their
origin, never allude to home, and go rambling over the world as if
pursued by some mysterious fate they cannot possibly elude.”
By the spell of the senses, too, Melville was attracted to Toby. “For
while the greater part of the crew were as coarse in person as in
mind,” says Melville, “Toby was endowed with a remarkably prepossessing
exterior. Arrayed in his blue frock and duck trousers, he was as smart
a looking sailor as ever stepped upon a deck; he was singularly small
and slightly made, with great flexibility of limb. His naturally dark
complexion had been deepened by exposure to the tropical sun, and a
mass of jetty locks clustered about his temples, and threw a darker
shade into his large black eyes.”
There is preserved among Melville’s papers a lock of hair, unusually
fine and soft in texture, but not so much “jetty” as of a rich
red-black chestnut colour, and marked “a lock of Toby’s hair,” and
dated 1846 the year of the publication of _Typee_. When Melville and
Toby parted in the Marquesas, each came to think that the other had
most likely been eaten by the cannibals. Upon the publication of
_Typee_, Toby was startled into delight to learn of Melville’s survival
and to rub his eyes at the flattering portrayal of himself. In a letter
of his to Melville, dated June 16, 1856, he says: “I am still proud of
the immortality with which you have invested me.” The extent of the
first extremity of his pride is not recorded. But in his first flush
of immortality he seems to have sent Melville a lock of his hair, an
amiable vanity, perhaps, at Melville’s celebration of his personal
charms.
There survives with the lock of hair a daguerreotype of Toby, also of
1846. There are also two other photographs: the three strewn over a
period of thirty years. These three photographs make especially vivid
the regret at the lack of any early picture of Melville. Melville’s
likeness is preserved only in bearded middle-age: and such portraiture
gives no more idea of his youthful appearance than does Toby’s
washed-out maturity suggest his Byronic earlier manner. There is
every indication that Melville was a young man of a very conspicuous
personal charm. From his books one forms a vivid image of him in the