Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
and I know that he would not be found absent from his station if he
knew where it was.” This almost unprecedented speech inspired Jack
Chase also to intercede in Melville’s behalf. But for these timely
intercessions, it is very likely that Melville would have ended that
day as a suicide and a murderer. There is no lack of evidence, both in
his writings and in the personal recollections of him that survive,
that the headlong violence of his passion, when deeply stirred, balked
at no extremity. And that day as the scourge hung over him for an
offence he had not committed, he seems to have been as murderously
roused as at any other known moment in his life. Though hating war, he
boasted “the inalienable right to kill”: and the ghost of Mow-Mow, at
the day of final reckoning, can attest that this boast was not lightly
given. Like the whaling Quakers that he so much admired, he was “a
pacifist with a vengeance.”
This scene happened during the run of the _United States_ from Rio
to the Line. At Rio, Melville had gone ashore with Jack Chase and
a few other discreet and gentlemanly top-men. But of the dashing
adventures--if any--that they had on land, Melville is silent: “my
man-of-war alone must supply me with the staple of my matter,” he
says; “I have taken an oath to keep afloat to the last letter of my
narrative.”
In so far as fine weather and the ship’s sailing were concerned, the
whole run from Rio to the Line was one delightful yachting. Especially
pleasant to Melville during this run were his quarter watches in
the main-top. Removed from the immediate presence of the officers,
he and his companions could there enjoy themselves more than in any
other part of the ship. By day, many of them were industrious making
hats or mending clothes. But by night they became more romantically
inclined. Seen from this lofty perch, of moonlight nights, the frigate
must have been a glorious sight. “She was going large before the
wind, her stun’-sails set on both sides, so that the canvases on the
main-mast and fore-mast presented the appearance of two majestic,
tapering pyramids, more than a hundred feet broad at the base, and
terminating in the clouds with the light cope-stone of the royals. That
immense area of snow-white canvas sliding along the sea was indeed
a magnificent spectacle. The three shrouded masts looked like the
apparition of three gigantic Turkish Emirs striding over the ocean.”
From there, too, the band, playing on the poop, would tempt them to
dance; Jack Chase would well up into song during silent intervals:
songs varied by sundry yarns and twisters of the top-men.
One pleasant midnight, after the _United States_ had crossed the
Line and was running on bravely somewhere off the coast of Virginia,
the breeze gradually died, and an order was given to set the
main-top-gallant-stun’-sail. The halyards not being rove, Jack Chase
assigned to Melville that eminently difficult task. That this was a
business demanding unusual sharp-sightedness, skill, and celerity is
evident when it is remembered that the end of a line, some two hundred
feet long, was to be carried aloft in one’s teeth and dragged far out
on the giddiest of yards, and after being wormed and twisted about
through all sorts of intricacies, was to be dropped, clear of all
obstructions, in a straight plumb-line right down to the deck.
“Having reeved the line through all the inferior blocks,” Melville
says, “I went out to the end of the weather-top-gallant-yard-arm, and
was in the act of leaning over and passing it through the suspended
jewel-block there, when the ship gave a plunge in the sudden swells
of the calm sea, and pitching me still further over the yard, threw
the heavy skirts of my jacket right over my head, completely muffling
me. Somehow I thought it was the sail that had flapped, and under that
impulse threw up my hands to drag it from my head, relying upon the
sail itself to support me meanwhile. Just then the ship gave another
jerk, and head foremost I pitched over the yard. I knew where I was,
from the rush of air by my ears, but all else was a nightmare. A bloody
film was before my eyes, through which, ghost-like, passed and repassed
my father, mother, and sisters. An unutterable nausea oppressed me; I
was conscious of groping; there seemed no breath in my body. It was
over one hundred feet that I fell--down, down, with lungs collapsed as
in death. Ten thousand pounds of shot seemed tied to my head, as the
irresistible law of gravitation dragged me, head foremost and straight
as a die, towards the infallible centre of the terrequeous globe. All
I had seen, and read, and heard, and all that I had thought and felt
in my life--seemed intensified in one fixed idea in my soul. But dense
as this idea was, it was made up of atoms. Having fallen from the
projecting yard-arm end, I was conscious of a collected satisfaction in
feeling, that I should not be dashed on the deck, but would sink into
the speechless profound of the sea.
“With the bloody, blind film before my eyes, there was a still stranger
hum in my head, as if a hornet were there; and I thought to myself,
Great God! this is Death! Yet these thoughts were unmixed with alarm.
Like frost-work that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all
my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm.
“So protracted did my fall seem, that I can even now recall the feeling
of wondering how much longer it would be, ere all was over and I
struck. Time seemed to stand still, and all the worlds seemed poised on
their poles, as I fell, soul-becalmed, through the eddying whirl and
swirl of the Maelstrom air.
“At first, as I have said, I must have been precipitated head foremost;
but I was conscious, at length, of a swift, flinging motion of my
limbs, which involuntarily threw themselves out, so that at last I must
have fallen in a heap. This is more likely, from the circumstance that
when I struck the sea, I felt as if some one had smote me slantingly
across the shoulder and along part of my right side.
“As I gushed into the sea, a thunder-boom sounded in my ear; my soul
seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me
with the billows. The blow from the sea must have turned me, so that
I sank almost feet foremost through a soft, seething, foamy lull.
Some current seemed hurrying me away; in a trance I yielded, and sank
deeper and deeper into the glide. Purple and pathless was the deep
calm now around me, flecked by summer lightnings in an azure afar. The
horrible nausea was gone; the bloody, blind film turned a pale green; I
wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying. But of a sudden some
fashionless form brushed my side--some inert, coiled fish of the sea;
the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong
shunning of death shocked me through.
“For one instant an agonising revulsion came over me as I found myself
utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expended; and
there I hung, vibrating in the mid-deep. What wild sounds then rang
in my ear! One was a soft moaning, as of low waves on the beach; the
other wild and heartlessly jubilant, as of the sea in the height of a
tempest. Oh soul! thou then heardest life and death: as he who stands
upon the Corinthian shore hears both the Ionian and the Ægean waves.
The life-and-death poise soon passed; and then I found myself slowly
ascending, and caught a dim glimmering of light. Quicker and quicker I
mounted; till at last I bounded up like a buoy, and my whole head was
bathed in the blessed air.”
With his knife, Melville ripped off his jacket, struck out boldly
towards the elevated pole of one of the life-buoys which had been cut
away, and was soon after picked up by one of the cutters from the
frigate.
“Ten minutes after, I was safe on board, and, springing aloft, was
ordered to reeve anew the stun’-sail-halyards, which, slipping through
the blocks when I had let go the end, had unrove and fallen to the
deck.” Amphitrite had, indeed, interceded with Neptune, and the
sea-gods strove to answer Melville’s prayer. But Melville always, even
in the lowest abyss of despair, clung passionately to life. And the
night he was hurled from the mast he was hurled from among friends, and
into waters that washed the neighbouring shores of his birth.
Melville’s long wanderings were nearly at an end. With the home port
believed to be broad on their bow, under the stars and a meagre moon in
her last quarter, the main-top-men gathered aloft in the top, and round
the mast they circled, “hand in hand, all spliced together. We had
reefed the last top-sail; trained the last gun; blown the last match;
bowed to the last blast; been tranced in the last calm. We had mustered
our last round the capstan; been rolled to grog the last time; for the
last time swung in our hammocks; for the last time turned out at the
sea-gull call of the watch. We had seen our last man scourged at the
gangway; our last man gasp out the ghost in the stifling sick-bay; our
last man tossed to the sharks.”
And there Melville has left this brother band--with the anchor still
hanging from the bow--with the land still out of sight. “I love an
indefinite infinite background,” he says,--“a vast, heaving, rolling,
mysterious rear!”
CHAPTER XIII
INTO THE RACING TIDE
“As the vine flourishes, and the grape empurples close up to the very
walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein; so do the sweetest
joys of life grow in the very jaws of its peril.”--HERMAN MELVILLE:
_Pierre_.
“Until I was twenty-five,” Melville once wrote to Hawthorne, “I had no
development at all.” When the cable and anchor of the _United States_
were all clear, and when he bounded ashore on his native soil, Melville
was in his twenty-fifth year. “From my twenty-fifth year,” he wrote
Hawthorne, “I date my life.”
His three years of wandering, crowded as they were with alienating
experiences, had, of course, worked deep changes in him: changes more
radical than in the dizzy whirl of strangely peopled adventures it was
possible for him to gauge. In memory, the fitful fever of the past,
deceitfully seems to strive not. But we delude ourselves when we fancy
that it sleeps well. During his far driftings, Melville had clung
reverently to thoughts of home, his imagination treacherously caressing
those very scenes whose intimate contact had filled him with revulsion.
“Do men ever hate the thing they love?” he asks in _White-Jacket_,
perplexed at the paradox of this perpetual recoil. He was eternally
looking both before and after, but never with the smug and genial
after-dinner optimism of Rabbi Ben Ezra. The insufficient present was
always poisoned, to him, by bitter margins of pining and regret. In
headlong escape from his household gods he had been landed among South
Sea islands that in retrospect he viewed as “authentic Edens.” Yet even
in Paradise did he feel himself an exile, teaching old Marheyo to say
“Home” and “Mother,” converting into sacred words the countersigns of
a former Hell. He tells in _White-Jacket_, how, with the smell of tar
in his nostrils, out of sight of land, with a stout ship under his
feet, and snuffing the ocean air, in the silence and solitude of the
deep, during the long night watches used to come thronging about his
heart “holy home associations.” And he closes _White-Jacket_ with the
reflection that “Life’s a voyage that’s homeward-bound!” But he sailed
with sealed orders.
Of Melville’s impressions upon his return he has left no record. During
his three years of whaling and captivity among cannibals, and mutiny,
and South Sea driftings, and adventures in the Navy, life at home had
gone along in its regular necessary way; and the scenes of his youth,