Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
reefs--tattooed chiefs--and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted
with bread-fruit-trees--carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue
waters--savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols--_heathenish rites
and human sacrifices_.”
After fifteen months aboard the _Acushnet_, Melville was ripe to
discover alluring Edenic beauties in tropical heathendom. And in the
end, so intolerable was the prospect of dragging out added relentless
days under the guardianship of Captain Pease, that as a last extremity,
Melville preferred to risk the fate of Captain Cook, and find a
strolling cenotaph in the bellies of a tribe of practising cannibals.
CHAPTER IX
THE PACIFIC
“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose
gentle awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath;
like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried
Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures,
wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four
continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb, and flow
unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned
dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls,
lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds;
the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Moby-Dick_.
First sighted by Balboa in the year 1513, and for more than two
centuries regarded by the Spaniards as their own possession, these
midmost waters of the world lay locked behind one difficult and
dangerous portal. During these centuries the Indian Ocean and the
Atlantic--but arms of the Pacific--were gloomy with mysteries. The
Spanish sailors used to chant a litany when they saw St. Elmo’s Fire
glittering on the mast-head, and exorcised the demon of the waterspout
by elevating their swords in the form of crosses. Mermaids still lived
in the tranquil blue waters. The darkness of the storm was thronged
with gigantic shadowy figures. The pages of Purchas and Hackluyt
offer no lack of supernatural visitations. Thus superstition joined
with substantial danger to guard the entrance to the Pacific. Balboa
himself was beheaded. Everybody who had to do with Magellan’s first
passage into the Pacific came to a bad end. The captain was murdered
in a brawl by the natives of the Philippines; the sailor De Lepe, who
first sighted the straits from the mast-head, was taken prisoner by the
Algerians, embraced the faith of the False Prophet, and so lost his
everlasting soul; Ruy Falero died raving mad. There was a fatality upon
the whole ship’s company.
Two years before Magellan’s memorable voyage, the western boundary of
the Pacific had been approached by the Portuguese, Francisco Serrano
having discovered the Molucca Islands immediately after the conquest
of Malacca by the celebrated Albuquerque. To stimulate exertion, and
to preclude contention in the rivalry of dominion between Portugal and
Spain, Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander the Sixth, drew a line down the
map through the western limits of the Portuguese province of Brazil,
and allotted to Portugal all heathen lands she should discover on
the eastern half of this line; to Spain, all heathen lands to the
west. So shadowy was the knowledge of geography at the time that this
apportionment of His Holiness left it doubtful to which hemisphere the
Moluccas belonged; and the precious spices peculiar to those islands
rendered the decision important. To ascertain this was the purpose of
Magellan’s voyage across the Pacific. In this waste of waters Magellan
made two discoveries: a range of small islands--including Guam among
its number--which he named Ladrones, on account of the thievish
disposition of the natives; and, at the cost of his life, one of the
islands which has since been called the Philippines.
The voyage of Magellan proved that by the allotment of Alexander the
Sixth, the Pacific belonged to Spain. And though for eight generations
the Spaniards were hereditary lords of the Pacific, they soon grew
greedy and jealous and lazy in their splendid and undisturbed monopoly.
Once or twice, it is true, the English devils took the great galleon:
but only once or twice in all these years. Lesser spoils occasionally
fell into the hands of pirates; for did not Dampier take off Juan
Fernandez a vessel laden with “a quantity of marmalade, a stately and
handsome mule, and an immense wooden image of the Virgin Mary”? Towns,
too, were occasionally sacked. But the Spaniards feared little danger,
and ran few risks. They grew richer and lazier, and troubled themselves
little in exploring the great expanse of the Pacific. They coasted the
Americas as far north as California, which they half-suspected to be
an island. The Galapagos, Juan Fernandez, and Masafuera they knew; a
part of China, a part of Japan, the Philippines, Celebes, Timor, and
the Ladrones. Voyages across the Pacific between Manilla and Acapulco
were not infrequent: but these voyages were sterile in discovery. The
traditional route, once through the Straits of Magellan, was to touch
at Juan Fernandez, coast South America, stand in at Panama, turn out to
sea again, appear off Acapulco, and then sail in the parallel of 13° N.
to the Ladrones. The Abbé Raynal states that the strictest orders were
given by the Spanish Government prohibiting captains on any account
to deviate from the track laid down on their charts during the voyage
between these places.
In the darkness of this uncharted ocean there was believed to stretch
a great southern continent of fabulous wealth and beauty: the Terra
Australis Incognita that survived pertinaciously in the popular
imagination until the time of Captain Cook. Members of the Royal
Society had proved, beyond doubt, that the right balance of the earth
required a southern continent; geographers pointed out how Quiros, Juan
Fernandez and Tasman had touched at various points of this continent.
Politicians and poets agreed that treasures of all kinds would be found
there,--though they varied in their appropriation of these Utopian
resources. The controversy over the existence of this continent was
vehemently revived in 1770 by the appearance of Alexander Dalrymple’s
_An Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the
South Pacific Ocean_. Dalrymple was an ardent advocate of the reality
of the Terra Australis Incognita, and to encourage an experimental
confirmation of his faith, he dedicated his handsome quarto: “To the
man who, emulous of Magellan and the heroes of former times, undeterred
by difficulties and unseduced by pleasure, shall persist through every
obstacle, and not by chance but by virtue and good conduct succeed in
establishing an intercourse with a Southern Continent.” Dr. Kippis,
Captain Cook’s biographer, writing in 1788, says he remembers how
Cook’s “imagination was captivated in the early part of his life with
the hypothesis of a southern continent. He has often dwelt upon it with
rapture.” The year following Dalrymple’s dedication, Captain Cook, back
from his first voyage in the Pacific, was commissioned by the Earl of
Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, to go out and settle once and
for all the mystery of the Southern Continent. So long as this mystery
remained unsettled, the Pacific stretched a great limbo pregnant with
the wildest fancies. Between the times of Magellan and Captain Cook
there was no certainty as to what revelations it held to disgorge.
It was in 1575 that Drake climbed the hill and the tree upon its summit
from which could be seen both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
“Almighty God,” this devout pirate exclaimed, “of thy holiness give me
life and leave to sail in an English ship upon that sea!” God heard
his prayer, and blessed him with rich pirate spoils in the Pacific,
and honoured him at home by a “stately visit” from the Queen. Yet he
died at sea, and in a leaden coffin his body was dropped into the
ocean slime. Cavendish continued the British tradition of lucrative
piracy, and in 1586 captured the great plate galleon. This stimulated
competition in high-sea robbery, until in 1594, the capture of Sir
Richard Hawkins daunted even English courage.
In 1595, Alvaro Mendana de Neyra, departing from the beaten track
across the Pacific on his way to occupy the Solomon Islands which he
had discovered twenty-eight years earlier, chanced upon a new group
of islands which he named Las Marquesas de Mendoca, in honour of his
patron Mendoca, Marquis of Cenete, and viceroy of Peru. He had mass
said on shore, refitted his vessels, planted a few crosses in devout
memorial, to die before he accomplished the object of his voyage, and
to leave the Marquesas unmolested by visitors until visited by Captain
Cook in 1774. It was in the Marquesas, of course, that Melville lived
with the cannibals.
The seventeenth century saw the Dutch upon the Pacific. During the
greater part of the century, England was busy with troublesome affairs
at home; the Spanish were too indolent to bestir themselves. Unmolested
by competition, the great Dutch navigators, Joris Spilbergen, La
Maire, Schouten, and, most famous of all, Tasman, drifted among the
islands of the extreme southwest. It was not until 1664 that the
French sailed upon the Pacific. To the end of the century belong the
buccaneers--Morgan, Sawkin, Edward Cooke, Woodes, Rogers, Cowley,
Clipperton, Shelvocke and Dampier. William Dampier, the greatest of
these voyagers, crossed the Pacific, missing all islands but New
Zealand. He added but little to the stock of knowledge that had been
already collected from the narratives of Tasman, or Schouten. W.
Clark Russell, in his life of Dampier, suggests it as probable “that
his failure, coupled with the despondent tone that characterises his
narrative, went far to retard further explorations of the South Seas.
It was no longer disputed that a vast body of land stood in those
waters. All that Dampier said in its favour was theoretical; all that
he had to report as an eye-witness, all that he could speak to as
facts, was extremely discouraging.” The myth of the entrancing beauties
and voluptuous charms of the South Seas owes nothing to Dampier except,
perhaps, a delayed inception. Of the inhabitants of the South Seas he
reports that they had the most unpleasant looks and the worst features
of any people he ever saw; and, says he: “I have seen a great variety
of Savages.” He speaks of them as “blinking Creatures,” with “black
skins and Hair frizzled, tall, thin, etc.”
Russell considered the depressing influence of Dampier’s recorded
adventures manifested in the direction given to later navigators.
Byron in 1764, Wallis, Mouat, and Cartaret in 1766, were despatched on
voyages round the world to search the South Seas for new lands; but
only one of them, Cartaret, deviated from Dampier’s track, confining
his explorations in this way to a glance at New Guinea and New Britain,
to the discovery of New Ireland, lying adjacent to the island Dampier
sailed around, and to giving names to the Solomon and other groups.
Both Byron and Wallis, it is true, did enter the archipelago of the
Society Islands, Wallis discovering island after island, until he
reached Tahiti. Wallis’s account of Otaheite--on the authority of
the London Missionary Society “to be pronounced so as to rhyme with
the adjective _mighty_”--and its people, occupies a great part of
his narrative. Though his reception was not without a show of arms
and bloodshed, the native women exerted themselves tirelessly to do
unselfish penance for the hostile behaviour of the native males. Oammo,
the ruling chief, retired from the scene, leaving the felicitation
of the strangers in the hands of his consort, Oberea, “whose whole