Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
freshness and agility and full-bloodedness of his youth. To bring this
face to face with the photographs of his middle age is a challenge to
the loyalty of the imagination. All known pictures of Melville postdate
his creative period. They are pictures of Melville the disenchanted
philosopher. As pictures of Melville the adventurer and artist, they
survive as misleading posthumous images.
Of Toby’s character, Melville says: “He was a strange wayward being,
moody, fitful, and melancholy--at times almost morose. He had a quick
and fiery temper too, which, when thoroughly roused, transported him
into a state bordering on delirium. No one ever saw Toby laugh. I mean
in the hearty abandonment of broad-mouthed mirth. He did sometimes
smile, it is true; and there was a good deal of dry, sarcastic humour
about him, which told the more from the imperturbable gravity of his
tone and manner.”
After escaping from the _Acushnet_ with Melville into the valley of
Typee, Toby in course of time found himself back to civilisation, where
the history of his life that he kept so secret aboard the _Acushnet_
came more fully to be known.
“TOBY”
RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE
Toby, or Richard Tobias Greene, was, according to notices in Chicago
papers at the time of his death on August 24, 1892, born in Dublin,
Ireland, in 1825. He was as a child brought to America by his father,
who settled in Rochester, New York, where Toby “took public school
and academic courses.” Before he was seventeen he shipped aboard the
_Acushnet_, there to fall in with Melville and to accompany him into
the uncorrupted heart of cannibalism. Toby returned to civilisation
to study law with John C. Spencer, “the noted attorney whose son was
executed for mutiny at Canandaigua, New York,” and was, in time,
admitted to the bar. He relinquished jurisprudence for journalism,
and was for some indefinite period editor of the _Buffalo Courier_.
He restlessly varied his activities by assisting in constructing the
first telegraph line west of New York State, and opened the first
telegraph office in Ohio, at Sandusky. For some years he published the
_Sandusky Mirror_. In 1857 he moved to Chicago and took a place on
the _Times_. With the Civil War he enlisted in the 6th Infantry of
Missouri and for three years was “trusted clerk at General Grant’s
headquarters.” He was discharged June, 1864, to enlist again October
19, 1864, in the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. With the end of the war
he returned to Chicago, ruined in health. Yet he continued to exert
himself as a public-minded citizen, and at his funeral were “many
fellow Masons, comrades from the G.A.R. and others who came to pay
their respects to the late traveller, editor and soldier.”
After the publication of _Typee_ there were delighted exchanges of
recognition and gratitude between him and Melville. And though these
two men grew further and further apart with years, there continued
between them an irregular correspondence and a pathetic loyalty to
youthful associations: felicitations that grew to be as conscientious
and hollow as the ghastly amiabilities of a college reunion. Toby’s
son, born in 1854, he named Herman Melville Greene (a compliment to
Melville adopted by some of his later shipmates in the navy); and
Melville presented his namesake with a spoon--the gift he always made
to namesakes. Toby’s nephew was named Richard Melville Hair, and
another spoon was shipped west. In 1856 Toby wrote Melville he had
read Melville’s most recent book, _Piazza Tales_. Toby’s critical
efforts exhausted themselves in the comment: “_The Encantadas_ called
up reminiscences of the _Acushnet_, and days gone by.” In 1858, when
Melville was lecturing about the country, Toby addressed a dutiful
letter to his “Dear Old Shipmate,” asking that Melville visit him
while in Cleveland. If the visit was ever made, it has not transpired.
In 1860 Toby wrote to Melville: “Hope you enjoy good health and can
yet stow away five shares of duff! I would be delighted to see you
and ‘freshen the nip’ while you would be spinning a yarn as long as
the main-top bowline.” In acknowledgment Melville during the year
following sent Toby the gift of a spoon. In reply Toby observes: “My
mind often reverts to the many pleasant moonlight watches we passed
together on the deck of the _Acushnet_ as we whiled away the hours
with yarn and song till eight bells.” Even to the third generation
Toby’s descendants were “proud of the immortality” with which Melville
had invested Toby. Miss Agnes Repplier has written on _The Perils of
Immortality_. There are perils, too, in immortalisation.
But in the days of Toby’s unredeemed immortality on board the
_Acushnet_ before he joined the Masons and the Grand Army of the
Republic, Toby was to Melville a singularly grateful variation to the
filth and hideousness and brutality of the human refuse with which he
cruised the high seas in search of oil and bone.
Melville was fifteen months on board the _Acushnet_; and for the last
six months of this period he was out of sight of land; cruising “some
twenty degrees to the westward of the Gallipagos”--“cruising after the
sperm-whale under the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the
billows of the wide-rolling Pacific--the sky above, the sea around, and
nothing else.”
The ship itself was, at the expiration of this period, deplorable in
appearance. The paint on her sides, burnt up by the scorching sun,
was puffed up and cracked. She trailed weeds after her; about her
stern-piece an unsightly bunch of barnacles had formed; and every
time she rose on a sea, she showed her copper torn away, or hanging
in jagged strips. The only green thing in sight aboard her was the
green paint on the inside of the bulwarks, and that, to Melville, was
of “a vile and sickly hue.” The nearest suggestion of the grateful
fragrance of the loamy earth, was the bark which clung to the wood used
for fuel--bark gnawed off and devoured by the Captain’s pig--and the
mouldy corn and the brackish water in the little trough before which
the solitary tenant of the chicken-coop stood “moping all day long on
that everlasting one leg of his.”
The usage on board in Melville’s ship, as in that of J. Ross Browne
and many another, had been tyrannical in the extreme. In _Typee_
he says: “We had left both law and equity on the other side of the
Cape.” And Captain Pease, arbitrary and violent, promptly replied to
all complaints and remonstrances with the butt-end of a hand-spike,
“so convincingly administered as effectually to silence the aggrieved
party.”
“The sick had been inhumanly neglected; the provisions had been doled
out in scanty allowance.” The provisions on board the _Acushnet_
had consisted chiefly of “delicate morsels of beef and pork, cut
on scientific principles from every part of the animal and of all
conceivable shapes and sizes, carefully packed in salt and stored away
in barrels; affording a never-ending variety in their different degrees
of toughness, and in the peculiarities of their saline properties.
Choice old water, too, two pints of which were allowed every day to
every soul on board; together with ample store of sea-bread, previously
reduced to a state of petrification, with a view to preserve it either
from decay or consumption in the ordinary mode, were likewise provided
for the nourishment and gastronomic enjoyment of the crew.” Captain
Davis, in his _Nimrod of the Sea_, suggests that petrification is not
the worst state of ship’s-biscuits; he recounts how with mellower fare
“epicures on board hesitate to bite the ship-bread in the dark, and the
custom is to tap each piece as you break it off, to dislodge the large
worms that breed there.”
The itinerary of this fifteen months’ cruise is not known. In
_Moby-Dick_ Melville says: “I stuffed a shirt or two into my
carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the
Pacific.” In _Omoo_, Melville speaks of “an old man-of-war’s-man whose
acquaintance I had made at Rio de Janeiro, at which place the ship
touched in which I sailed from home.” In _White-Jacket_ and _Omoo_ he
speaks of whaling off the coast of Japan. And in _Moby-Dick_, in a
passage that reads like an excerpt from the Book of Revelations, he
indicates a more frigid whereabouts: “I remember the first albatross
I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the
Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the
overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a
regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman
bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings,
as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings
shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s
ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange
eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its
wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the
miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at
that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that
darted through me then. But at last I awoke; when the white fowl flew
to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!”
But what waters the _Acushnet_ sailed, and what shores she touched
before she dropped anchor in the Marquesas, little positively is known.
The last eighteen or twenty days, however, during which time the light
trade winds silently swept the _Acushnet_ towards the Marquesas, were
to Melville, when viewed in retrospect, “delightful, lazy, languid.”
Land was ahead! And with the refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass
in prospect, Melville and the whole ship’s company resigned themselves
to a disinclination to do anything, “and spreading an awning over the
forecastle, slept, ate, and lounged under it the livelong day.” The
promise of the ship’s at last breaking through the inexorable circle
of the changeless horizon into the fragrance of firm and loamy earth,
gave Melville an eye for the sea-scape he had formerly abhorred. “The
sky presented a clear expanse of the most delicate blue, except along
the skirts of the horizon, where you might see a thin drapery of pale
clouds which never varied their form or colour. The long, measured,
dirge-like swell of the Pacific came rolling along, with its surface
broken by little tiny waves, sparkling in the sunshine. Every now and
then a shoal of flying fish, scared from the water under the bows,
would leap into the air, and fall the next moment like a shower of
silver into the sea.”
In later years, memory treacherously transformed this watery
environment upon which Melville and Toby had vented their youthful and
impotent imprecations. From his farm in the Berkshire Hills, he looked
back regretfully upon his rovings over the Pacific, and by a pathetic
fallacy, convinced himself that in them “the long supplication of my
youth was answered.” The spell of the Pacific descended upon him not
while he was cruising the Pacific, however, but while he was busy upon
his farm in Pittsfield, “building and patching and tinkering away in
all directions,” as he described his activities to Hawthorne.
Strangely jumbled anticipations haunted Melville, he says, as drowsing
on the silent deck of the _Acushnet_ he was being borne towards land:
towards the Marquesas, one of the least known islands in the Pacific.
“The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does
the very name spirit up!” exclaims Melville in excited prospect.
“Naked houris--cannibal banquets--groves of cocoa-nut--coral