Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
neither to adopt their ways, nor to change them. He made them pop-guns,
he astonished them by exhibiting the miracle of sewing. He tried to
teach them to box. “As not one of the natives had soul enough in him
to stand up like a man, and allow me to hammer away at him, for my own
personal satisfaction and that of the king, I was necessitated to
fight with an imaginary enemy, whom I invariably made to knock under to
my superior prowess.”
Among the bachelors of the Ti, the men’s club of the valley, he
chatted, he smoked, he drowsed: he witnessed the Feast of the
Calabashes when, for the livelong day “the drums sounded, the priests
chanted, and the multitude roared and feasted”--a scene reminiscent of
a University whole-heartedly given over to “campus activity.” A mock
battle was staged for his diversion. He entered the funeral fastnesses
where the effigies of former heroes eternally paddled canoes adorned by
the skulls of their enemies. He mused by pools, splashing with laughing
bronze nymphs. Yet withal, Melville was a captive in the valley. His
lameness, too, returned. His hosts began to make friendly but insistent
suggestions that he be tattooed--a suggestion superlatively repugnant
to him. He heard, moreover, the clamour of a cannibal feast, and lifted
the cover of a tub under which lay a fresh human skeleton. Under these
circumstances he taught old Marheyo two English words: _Home_ and
_Mother_. But he did not complete the trinity. _Forsan et haec olim
meminisse juvabit._ It was time for him to depart.
One profoundly silent noon, as Melville lay lame and miserable under
Kory-Kory’s roof, Mow-Mow, the one-eyed chief, appeared at the door,
and leaning forward towards Melville, whispered: _Toby pemi ena_--“Toby
has arrived.” That evening Mow-Mow’s dead body floated on the Pacific,
a boat-hook having been mortally hurled at his throat. And it was
Melville who hurled the boat-hook.
An Australian whaler, touching at the harbour of Nukuheva, had been
informed of Melville’s detention in Typee. Desirous of adding to his
crew, the Captain had sailed round thither, and “hove to” off the
mouth of the bay. Chary of the man-eating propensities of the Typees,
the Captain sent in a boat-load of taboo natives from the other
harbour, with an interpreter at their head, to procure Melville’s
release. Accompanied by a throng of armed natives, Melville was
carried down to the shore--being too lame to walk the distance. A
gun and an extravagant bounty of powder and calico were offered for
Melville’s release: but this bounty was clamorously and indignantly
rejected. Karakoee, the head of the ransoming party, was menaced by
furious gestures, and forced out into the sea, up to his waist in
the surf. Blows were struck, wounds were given, and blood flowed. In
the excitement of the fray, Melville was left to the guardianship of
Marheyo, Kory-Kory, and Fayaway. Throwing to these three the articles
that had been brought for his ransom, Melville bounded into the boat
which was in immediate readiness to pull off towards the ship. It
was not until the boat was about fifty yards from the shore that the
savages recovered from their astonishment at Melville’s alacrity in
escape. Then Mow-Mow and six or seven warriors rushed into the sea and
hurled their javelins at the retreating boat--and some of the weapons
passed as close as was desirable. The wind was freshening every minute,
and was right in the teeth of the retreating party. Karakoee, who was
steering the boat, gave many a look towards a jutting point of the bay
they had to pass. When they came within a hundred yards of the point,
the savages on the shore dashed into the water, swimming out towards
the boat: and by the time Melville’s party reached the headland, the
savages were spread right across the boat’s course. The rowers got
out their knives and held them ready between their teeth. Melville
seized the boat-hook. Mow-Mow, with his tomahawk between his teeth, was
nearest to the boat, ready the next instant to seize one of the oars.
“Even at the moment I felt horror at the act I was to commit; but it
was no time for pity or compunction, and with a true aim, and exerting
all my strength, I dashed the boat-hook at him. I struck him below the
throat, and forced him downward.” Mow-Mow’s body arose in the wake of
the boat, but not to attack again. Another savage seized the gunwale,
but the knives of the rowers so mauled his wrists, that before many
moments the boat was past all the Typees, and in safety. In the closing
tableau, Melville fell fainting into the arms of Karakoee.
Though later, when Melville was a sailor in the United States Navy,
he touched at the Marquesas, he never again set foot within the
valley of Typee. Melville had known the Typees in their uncorrupted
glory--strong, wicked, laughter-loving and clean. Mr. O’Brien visited
Typee not many years ago, to find it pathetically fallen from its high
estate. “I found myself,” he says, “in a loneliness indescribable and
terrible. No sound but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the
sombre silence.... Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a
feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a
weight, upon leaf and flower. The thin, sharp buzzing of the _nonos_
was incessant.” Mr. O’Brien discovered in the heart of the valley fewer
than a dozen people who sat within the houses by cocoanut-husk fires,
the acrid smoke of which daunted the _nonos_. “They have clung to their
lonely _paepaes_ despite their poverty of numbers and the ferocity of
the _nonos_. They had clearings with cocoanuts and breadfruits, but
they cared no longer to cultivate them, preferring rather to sit sadly
in the curling fumes and dream of the past. One old man read aloud the
_Gospel of St. John_ in Marquesan, and the others listlessly listened,
seeming to drink in little comfort from the verses, which he recited in
the chanting monotone of their _uta_.... Nine miles in length is Typee,
from a glorious cataract that leaps over the dark buttress wall where
the mountain bounds the valley, to the blazing beach. And in all this
extent of marvellously rich land, there are now this wretched dozen
natives, too old or listless to gather their own food.”
Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!
CHAPTER XI
MUTINY AND MISSIONARIES--TAHITI
“Ah, truant humour. But to me
That vine-wreathed urn of Ver, in sea
Of halcyons, where no tides do flow
Or ebb, but waves bide peacefully
At brim, by beach where palm trees grow
That sheltered Omai’s olive race--
Tahiti should have been the place
For Christ in advent.”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Clarel_.
It was in the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that Melville made
good his escape from the valley of Typee. The Australian whaler--called
by Melville the _Julia_--which had broken his four months’ captivity,
lay with her main-topsail aback, about a league from the land. “She
turned out to be a small, slatternly looking craft, her hull and
spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and bleached nearly white, and
everything denoting an ill state of affairs aboard. Leaning carelessly
over the bulwarks were the sailors, wild, haggard-looking fellows in
Scotch caps and faded blue frocks; some of them with cheeks of mottled
bronze, to which sickness soon changes the rich berry-brown of a
seaman’s complexion in the tropics.” So extraordinary was Melville’s
appearance--“a robe of the native cloth was thrown over my shoulders,
my hair and beard were uncut, and I betrayed other evidences of my
recent adventure”--that as the boat came alongside, a low cry ran fore
and aft the deck. Immediately on gaining the deck, Melville was beset
on all sides by questions.
Indeed, never afterwards, it appears, could Melville escape a like
curiosity. Henceforth he was to be “the man who lived among the
cannibals.” Nor does he always seem to have been so uncommunicative as
he grew in later years. In the Preface to _Omoo_, after recording the
fact that he kept no journal during his wanderings in the South Seas,
he says: “The frequency, however, with which these incidents have been
verbally related, has tended to stamp them upon the memory.” There
is novelty in his logic: all twice-told tales are not always just-so
stories. He says, too, in the Preface to _Typee_: “The incidents
recorded in the following pages have often served, when ‘spun as a
yarn,’ not only to relieve the weariness of many a night-watch at sea,
but to excite the warmest sympathies of the author’s shipmates.”
Upon being taken aboard the _Julia_, Melville was almost immediately
seen by the captain, a young, pale, slender, sickly looking creature,
who signed Melville up for one cruise, engaging to discharge him at the
next port.
Life on board the _Julia_ was, if anything, worse than life on board
the _Acushnet_. In the first place, Melville was ill. Not until three
months after his escape from Typee did he regain his normal strength.
And, as always, Melville looked back with regret upon leaving the life
he had so wanted to escape from while he was in the midst of it. “As
the land faded from my sight,” he says, “I was all alive to the change
in my condition. But how far short of our expectations is oftentimes
the fulfilment of the most ardent hopes. Safe aboard of a ship--so
long my earnest prayer--with home and friends once more in prospect,
I nevertheless felt weighed down with a melancholy that could not be
shaken off.” Melville felt he was leaving cannibalism forever--and the
departure shot a pang into his heart.
The ship’s company were a sorry lot: reduced by desertion from
thirty-two to twenty souls, and more than half of the remaining were
more or less unwell from a long sojourn in a dissipated port. Some
were wholly unfit for duty; one or two were dangerously ill. The rest
managed to stand their watch, though they could do little. The crew
was, for the most part, a typical whaling crew: “villains of all
nations and dyes; picked up in the lawless Spanish Main, and among the
savages of the islands.” The provisions, too, on board the _Julia_ were
notoriously bad, even for a whaler. Melville’s regret at leaving Typee
was not mere wanton sentimentality.
The captain was despised by all aboard. He was commonly called “The
Cabin Boy,” “Paper Jack,” “Miss Guy” and other descriptive titles.
Though sheepish looking, he was a man of still, timid cunning that did
not endear him to Melville.
The mate, John Jermin, was of the efficient race of short thick-set
men: bullet headed, with a fierce little squint out of one eye, and a
nose with a rakish tilt to one side. His was the art of knocking a man
down with irresistible good humour, so the very men he flogged loved
him like a brother. He had but one failing: he abhorred weak infusions,
and cleaved manfully to strong drink. He was never completely sober:
and when he was nearly drunk he was uncommonly obstreperous.
Jermin was master of every man aboard except the ship’s carpenter,--a
man so excessively ugly he went by the name of “Beauty.” As
ill-favoured as Beauty was in person, he was no less ugly in temper:
his face had soured his heart. Melville witnessed an encounter between
Jermin and Beauty: an encounter that showed up clearly the state of
affairs on board. While Beauty was thrashing Jermin in the forecastle,
the captain called down the scuttle: “Why, why, what’s all this about?
Mr. Jermin, Mr. Jermin--carpenter, carpenter: what are you doing down
there? Come on deck; come on deck.” In reply to this, Doctor Long Ghost
cried out in a squeak, “Ah! Miss Guy, is that you? Now, my dear, go
right home, or you’ll get hurt.” The captain dipped his head down the
scuttle to make answer, to receive, full in the face, the contents of a