Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
my best love along with you,” Melville wrote; “and God bless you,
wherever you go.” And this sentiment Melville cherished throughout his
life. Almost the last thing Melville ever wrote was the dedication
of his last novel, _Billy Budd_--existing only in manuscript, and
completed three months before his death to “Jack Chase, Englishman,
wherever that great heart may now be, Here on earth or harboured in
Paradise, Captain in the war-ship in the year 1843, In the U. S.
Frigate _United States_.”
In _White-Jacket_, Melville glows with the same superlative admiration
for Jack Chase that Ouida, or the Duchess, exhibit in portraying
their most irresistible cavaliers; an enthusiasm similar to that of
Nietzsche’s for his Übermensch. So contagious is Melville’s love
for his ship-mate that strange infections seem to have been caught
therefrom. Though it is certainly not true that “all the world loves a
lover,” Melville’s affection for Jack Chase won him at least one rather
startling proof that Shakespeare’s dictum is not absolutely false. The
proof came in the following form:
“No 2, Guthuee Port, Arbrooth 13 May 1857
“_Herman Melville Esquire_
“Author of the white Jacket Mardi and others, Honour’d Sir Let it
not displease you to be addressed by a stranger to your person not
so to your merits, I have read the white jacket with much pleasure
and delight ‘I found it rich in wisdom and brilliant with beauty,
ships and the sea and those who plow it with their belongings on
shore--those subjects are idintified with Herman Melvil’s name for
he has most unquestioneably made them his own,, No writer not even
Marryat himself has observed them more closely or pictured them more
impressively, a delightful book it is. I long exceedingly to read
Mardi, but how or where to obtain it is the task? I have just now
received an invitation to cross the Atlantic from a Mr and Mrs Weed
Malta between Bolston springs and saratoga Countie, ,, as also from
Mr Alexer Muler my own Cousin, Rose bank Louistown
“I have for this many a day been wishing to see you ‘to hear you
speak to breath the same air in which you dwell’ Are you the picture
of him you so powerfully represent as the Master piece of all Gods
works Jack Chase?--
“write me dear sir and say where Omidi ’sto be gote, I do much admire
the American Authors Washington Irver Mrs Stowe Allan Edgar Po the
Late James Abbott and last though not least your good self--Did you
ever read the history of Jeffery Rudel he was a young Noble man of
Provence and reconed one of the handsomest and polite persons of his
age. he lived in the time of Richard the first sir named cour de Lion
who invited Jeffery to his court and it was there he first heard
of the beauty wit, learning and virtue of the Countess of Tripoly
by which he became so enamoured that he resolved upon seeing her
purchased a vesel and in opesition to the King and the luxury of a
Court set sail for Tripoly the obgect of his affections realised his
most sanguine expectations.
“were you to cross the atlantic you should receive a cordeial
reception from Mr George Gordon my-beloved & only brother & I’d
bid you welcome to old s’’t Thomas a Becket famed for kindness to
strangers.--
“permite me Dear Sir to subskribe myself your friend although unseen
and at a Distance
“ELIZA GORDON
“Heaven first sent letters,
For some wretches aid,
Some banished Lover
Or some Captive maid
“POPE.”
Besides the “Master piece of all Gods works Jack Chase” and his
comrades of the main-top, Melville was fortunate in finding a few
other ship-mates to admire. There was Lemsford, “a gentlemanly young
member of the after-guard,” a poet, to whose effusions Melville was
happy to listen. “At the most unseasonable hours you would behold
him, seated apart, in some corner among the guns--a shot-box before
him, pen in hand, and eyes ‘in a fine frenzy rolling.’ Some deemed
him a conjurer; others a lunatic. The knowing ones said that he must
be a crazy Methodist.” Another of Melville’s friends was Nord. Before
Melville knew him, he “saw in his eye that the man had been a reader
of good books; I would have staked my life on it, that he had seized
the right meaning of Montaigne.” With Nord, Melville “scoured all the
prairies of reading; dived into the bosoms of authors, and tore out
their hearts.” Melville’s friend Williams “was a thorough-going Yankee
from Maine, who had been both a pedlar and a pedagogue in his day. He
was honest, acute, witty, full of mirth and good humour--a laughing
philosopher.” Beyond these, Melville was chary of his friendship,
despite the personal intimacies imposed by the crowded conditions on
shipboard. For living on board a man-of-war is like living in a market,
where you dress on the doorsteps and sleep in the cellar.
Yet even on board the _United States_ Melville did find it possible to
get some solitude. “I am of a meditative humour,” he says, “and at sea
used often to mount aloft at night, and, seating myself on one of the
upper yards, tuck my jacket about me and give loose to reflection. In
some ships in which I have done this, the sailors used to fancy that
I must be studying astronomy--which, indeed, to some extent, was the
case. For to study the stars upon the wide, boundless ocean, is divine
as it was to the Chaldean Magi, who observed their revolutions from the
plain.”
Melville was not only fortunate in his friends on the top, and
above, but also in the mess to which he belonged: “a glorious set of
fellows--Mess No. 1!--numbering, among the rest, my noble Captain Jack
Chase. Out of a pardonable self-conceit they called themselves the
_Forty-two-pounder Club_; meaning that they were, one and all, fellows
of large intellectual and corporeal calibre.”
In _White-Jacket_, Melville’s purpose was to present the variegated
life aboard a man-of-war; to give a vivid sense of the complexity of
the typical daily existence aboard a floating armed city inhabited by
five hundred male human beings. And no one else has ever done this so
successfully as has Melville. “I let nothing slip, however small,” he
says; “and feel myself actuated by the same motive which has prompted
many worthy old chroniclers to set down the merest trifles concerning
things that are destined to pass entirely from the earth, and which,
if not preserved in the nick of time, must infallibly perish from the
memories of man. Who knows that this humble narrative may not hereafter
prove the history of an obsolete barbarism?” For _White-Jacket_ is,
certainly, written with no intent to glorify war. It is a book that
a militaristic country would do well to suppress. “Courage,” Melville
teaches therein, “is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.” Of a
celebrated and dauntless fighter he says: “a hero in this world;--but
what would they have called him in the next?” “As the whole matter of
war is a thing that smites common sense and Christianity in the face,”
he contends, “so everything connected with it is utterly foolish,
unchristian, barbarous, brutal, and savouring of the Feejee Islands,
cannibalism, saltpetre, and the devil.”
But Melville’s anti-militaristic convictions in no sense perverted his
astonishingly vital presentation of life on board the _United States_.
Though in contemplation he despised war, and was open-eyed to the
abuses and iniquity on all sides of him on board the frigate; in actual
fact he seems to have been unusually happy as a sailor in the navy,
among his comrades of the top. The predominant mood of the book is the
rollicking good-humour of high animal spirits.
There were black moments in his pleasant routine, however: the terrible
nipping cold, and blasting gales, and hurricanes of sleet and hail
in which he furled the main-sail in rounding Cape Horn; the flogging
he witnessed; his watches at the cot of his mess-mate Shenley in the
subterranean sick-bay, and Shenley’s death and burial at sea; the
barbarous amputation he witnessed, and the death of the sick man at
the hands of the ship’s surgeon--a scene that Flaubert might well have
been proud to have written. And there were ugly experiences during the
cruise that were among the most lurid in his life.
Throughout the cruise, it seems, for upward of a year he had been an
efficient sailor, alert in duties, circumspect in his pleasures, liked
and respected by his comrades. The ship homeward bound, and he within
a few weeks of being a freeman, he heard the boatswain’s mate bawling
his name at all the hatchways and along the furtherest recesses of the
ship: the Captain wanted him at the mast. Melville’s heart jumped to
his throat at the summons, as he hurriedly asked Fluke, the boatswain’s
mate at the fore-hatchway, what was wanted of him.
“Captain wants you at the mast,” Fluke replied. “Going to flog ye, I
guess.”
“For what?”
“My eyes! you’ve been chalking your face, hain’t ye?”
Swallowing down his heart, he saw, as he passed through the gangway
to the dread tribunal of the frigate, the quartermaster rigging
the gratings; the boatswain with his green bag of scourges; the
master-at-arms ready to help off some one’s shirt. On the charge of a
Lieutenant, Melville was accused by the Captain of failure in his duty
at his station in the starboard main-lift: a post to which Melville had
never known he was assigned. His solemn disclaimer was thrown in his
teeth, and for a thing utterly unforeseen, and for a crime of which he
was utterly innocent, he was about to be flogged.
“There are times when wild thoughts enter a man’s breast, when he seems
almost irresponsible for his act and his deed,” writes the grandson of
General Peter Gansevoort. “The Captain stood on the weather-side of the
deck. Sideways, on an unobstructed line with him, was the opening of
the lee-gangway, where the side-ladders are suspended in port. Nothing
but a slight bit of sinnate-stuff served to rail in this opening,
which was cut right to the level of the Captain’s feet, showing the
far sea beyond. I stood a little to windward of him, and, though he
was a large, powerful man, it was certain that a sudden rush against
him, along the slanting deck, would infallibly pitch him headforemost
into the ocean, though he who so rushed must needs go over with him.
My blood seemed clotting in my veins; I felt icy cold at the tips of
my fingers, and a dimness was before my eyes. But through that dimness
the boatswain’s mate, scourge in hand, loomed like a giant, and Captain
Claret, and the blue sea seen through the opening at the gangway,
showed with an awful vividness. I cannot analyse my heart, though it
then stood still within me. But the thing that swayed me to my purpose
was not altogether the thought that Captain Claret was about to degrade
me, and that I had taken an oath with my soul that he should not. No, I
felt my man’s manhood so bottomless within me, that no word, no blow,
no scourge of Captain Claret could cut me deep enough for that. I
but swung to an instinct within me--the instinct diffused through all
animated nature, the same that prompts even a worm to turn under the
heel. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of
dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us
without a purpose.”
Captain Claret ordered Melville to the grating. The ghost of Peter
Gansevoort, awakening in Melville, measured the distance between
Captain Claret and the sea.
“Captain Claret,” said a voice advancing from the crowd. Melville
turned to see who this might be that audaciously interrupted at a
juncture like this. It was a corporal of marines, who speaking in a
mild, firm, but extremely deferential manner, said: “I know that man,