Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
thrilling and terrible five days, hardship runs hard on the heels of
hardship, and each obstacle as it presents itself, seems, if possible,
more unsurmountable than the last. There is no way out of this, one
says for the tenth time: but the sagacity and fearless confidence
of Toby--to whom let glory be given--and the manful endurance of
Melville through parching fever and agonising lameness, disappoint the
lugubrious reader. On the third day after their escape, their ardour
is cooled to a resolve to forego futile ramblings for a space. They
crawled under a clump of thick bushes, and pulling up the long grass
that grew around, covered themselves completely with it to endure
another downpour. While the exhausted Toby slept through the violent
rain, Melville tossed about in a raging fever, without the heart to
wake Toby when the rain ceased. Chancing to push aside a branch,
Melville was as transfixed with surprised delight as if he had opened a
sudden vista into Paradise. He “looked straight down into the bosom of
a valley, which swept away in long wavy undulations to the blue waters
in the distance. Midway towards the sea, and peering here and there
amidst the foliage, might be seen the palmetto-thatched houses of its
inhabitants glistening in the sun that had bleached them to a dazzling
whiteness. The vale was more than three leagues in length, and about a
mile across its greatest width. Everywhere below me, from the base of
the precipice upon whose very verge I had been unconsciously reposing,
the surface of the vale presented a mass of foliage, spread with such
rich profusion that it was impossible to determine of what description
of trees it consisted. But perhaps there was nothing about the scenery
I beheld more impressive than those silent cascades, whose slender
threads of water, after leaping down the steep cliffs, were lost amidst
the rich foliage of the valley. Over all the landscape there reigned
the most hushed repose, which I almost feared to break, lest, like the
enchanted gardens of the fairy tale, a single syllable might dissolve
the spell.” Toby was awakened and called into consultation. With his
usual impetuosity, Toby wanted promptly to descend into the valley
before them; but Melville restrained him, dwelling upon the perilous
possibility of its inhabitants being Typees. Toby was with difficulty
reined to circumspection, and off Melville and his companion started
on a wild goose chase for a valley on the other side of the ridge.
So fruitless and disheartening did this attempt prove, that Melville
was reduced to the wan solace that it was, after all, better to die
of starvation in Nukuheva than to be fed on salt beef, stale water
and flinty bread in the forecastle of the _Acushnet_. Yet Toby was
dauntless. Despite the defeats of the preceding day, Toby awoke on the
following morning as blithe and joyous as a young bird. Melville’s
fever and his swollen leg, however, had left him not so exultant.
“What’s to be done now?” Melville inquired, after their morning repast
of a crumb of sweat-mixed biscuit and tobacco,--and rather doleful was
his inquiry, he confesses.
“Descend into that same valley we descried yesterday,” rejoined Toby,
with a rapidity and loudness of utterance that led Melville to suspect
almost that Toby had been slyly devouring the broadside of an ox in
some of the adjoining thickets. “Come on, come on; shove ahead. There’s
a lively lad,” shouted Toby as he led the way down a ravine that jagged
steeply along boulders and tangled roots down into the valley; “never
mind the rocks; kick them out of the way, as I do; and to-morrow, old
fellow, take my word for it, we shall be in clover. Come on;” and so
saying he dashed along the ravine like a madman.
Thus was piloted down into the heart of barbarism the man who was to
emerge as the first Missionary Polynesia ever sent to Christendom. And
on the chances of Toby’s contagious impetuosity hung the annexation
of a new realm to the kingdom of the imagination and the discovery
of a new manner in the history of letters. For on that day, when
Melville and Toby struggled down that ravine like Belzoni worming
himself through the subterranean passages of the Egyptian catacombs,
the Polynesians were without a competent apologist, and the literary
possibilities of the South Seas were unsuspected.
Literature was, of course, already elaborated with fantastic patterns
drawn from barbarism, and the Indians of Aphra Behn and Voltaire had
given place to the redmen of Cooper. Earlier than this, however, the
great discoverers, in their wealth of records, had given many an
account of their contacts with savage peoples. But one searches in
vain among these records for any very vivid sense that the savage and
the Christian belong to the same order of nature. At best, one gathers
the impression that in savagery God’s image had been multiplied in an
excess of contemptible counterfeits. Melville reports that as late
as his day “wanton acts of cruelty are not unusual on the part of
sea captains landing at islands comparatively unknown. Indeed, it is
almost incredible, the light in which many sailors regard these naked
heathens. They hardly consider them human. But it is a curious fact,
that the more ignorant and degraded men are, the more contemptuously
they look upon those whom they deem their inferiors.” John G. Paton
records in his _Autobiography_ how, in 1860, three traders gleefully
told him that to humble the natives of Tanna, and to diminish their
numbers, they had let out on shore at different ports, four men ill
with the measles--an exceedingly virulent disease among savage peoples.
“Our watchwords are,” these jolly traders said, “‘sweep the creatures
into the sea, and let white men occupy the soil.’” This sentiment
belongs more to a fixed human type, than to a period, of course: and
that type has frequently taken to sailing strange seas. In treachery,
cruelty, and profligacy, the exploits of European discoverers contain
some of the rosiest pages in the history of villainy.
These sickening pages of civilised barbarism soon won to the savage
ardent apologists, however, who applied an old technique of libel by
imputing to the unbreeched heathen a touching array of the superior
virtues. Montaigne was among the first to come forward in this
capacity. “We may call them barbarous in regard to reasons rules,”
he said, “but not in respect to us that exceed them in all kinde of
barbarisme. Their warres are noble and generous, and have as much
excuse and beautie, as this humane infirmitie may admit: they ayme
at nought so much, and have no other foundation amongst them, but
the meere jelousie of vertue.” Once in full current of idealisation
Montaigne goes on to write as if he soberly believed that savage
peoples were descended from a stock that Eve had conceived by an angel
before the fall. In his dithyramb on the nobilities of savagery,
Montaigne was unhampered by any first-hand dealings with savages, and
he was far too wise ever to betray the remotest inclination to improve
his state by migrating into the bosom of their uncorrupted nobility.
The myth of the “noble savage” was a taking conceit, however, and
when Rousseau taught the world the art of reverie, he taught it also
an easy vagabondage into the virgin forest and into the pure heart of
the “natural man.” In describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing
rooms, Taine says that “The fops dreamed between two madrigals of
the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” Rousseau’s
savage, “attached to no place, having no prescribed task, obeying no
one, having no other law than his own will,” was, of course, a wilful
backward glance to the vanished paradise of childhood, not a finding of
ethnology. Yet ethnology may prate as it will, the “noble savage” is a
myth especially diverting to the over-sophisticated, and like dreams
of the virgin forest, thrives irrepressibly among the upholsterings
of civilisation. The soft and ardent dreamer, no less than the sleek
and parched imagination of Main Street, find compensation for the
defeats of civilisation in dreams of a primitive Arcadia. While the
kettle is boiling they relax into slippers and make the grand tour.
Chateaubriand--whose life, according to Lemaître, was a “magnificent
series of attitudes”--showed incredible hardihood of attitudinising
in crossing the Atlantic in actual quest of the primitive. In the
forest west of Albany he did pretend to find some satisfaction in
wild landscape. He showed his “intoxication” at the beauties of wild
nature by taking pains to do “various wilful things that made my guide
furious.” But Chateaubriand was less fortunate in his contact with
savagery than he was with nature. His first savages he found under a
shed taking dancing lessons from a little Frenchman, who, “bepowdered
and befrizzled” was scraping on a pocket fiddle to the prancings of
“ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” Chateaubriand
concludes with a reflection: “Was it not a crushing circumstance for
a disciple of Rousseau?” And it is an indubitable fact that if the
present-day disciples of the South Sea myth would show Chateaubriand’s
hardihood and migrate to Polynesia, they would find themselves in
circumstances no less “crushing.”
Melville was the first competent literary artist to write with
authority about the South Seas. In his day, a voyage to those distant
parts was a jaunt not lightly to be undertaken. In the Pacific
there were islands to be discovered, islands to be annexed, and
whales to be lanced. As for the incidental savage life encountered
in such enterprise, that, in Montaigne’s phrase, was there to be
bastardised, by applying it to the pleasures of our corrupted taste.
These attractions of whaling and patriotism--with incidental rites
to Priapus--had tempted more than one man away from the comfort of
his muffins, and more than one returned to give an inventory of
the fruits of the temptation. The knowledge that these men had of
Polynesia was ridiculously slight: the regular procedure was to
shoot a few cannibals, to make several marriages after the manner of
Loti. The result is a monotonous series of reports of the glorious
accomplishments of Christians: varied on occasions with lengthy and
learned dissertations on heathendom. But they are invariably writers
with insular imagination, telling us much of the writer, but never
violating the heart of Polynesia.
The Missionaries, discreetly scandalised at the exploitation of unholy
flesh, went valiantly forth to fight the battle of righteousness
in the midst of the enemy. The missionaries came to be qualified
by long first-hand contact to write intimately of the heathen: but
their records are redolent with sanctity, not sympathy. The South Sea
vagabonds were the best hope of letters: but they all seem to have died
without dictating their memoirs. William Mariner, it is true, thanks
to a mutiny at the Tongo Islands in 1805, was “several years resident
in those islands:” and upon Mariner’s return, Dr. John Martin spent
infinite patience in recording every detail of savage life he could
draw from Mariner. Dr. Martin’s book is still a classic in its way:
detailed, sober, and naked of literary pretensions. This book is the
nearest approach to _Typee_ that came out of the South Seas before
Melville’s time. So numerous have been the imitators of Melville, so
popular has been the manner that he originated, that it is difficult
at the present day to appreciate the novelty of _Typee_ at the time of
its appearance. When we read Mr. Frederick O’Brien we do not always
remember that Mr. O’Brien is playing “sedulous ape”--there is here
intended no discourtesy to Mr. O’Brien--to Melville, but that in
_Typee_ and _Omoo_ Melville was playing “sedulous ape” to nobody. Only