Herman Melville
Now the little daily current of anxiety was over: there were a few new
ropes to learn; but a strong, eager fellow, always ready to bear a
hand, always prompt to spring to his post, is pretty sure of getting
a good word from his immediate superiors, even though it is not an
audible one; and with the big ship’s company, the work itself was
not so onerous but that there was time for long chats and lengthier
meditations, particularly if one belonged to the maintop. Melville knew
the value of height and seclusion to stimulate the inward eye: climbing
a high tower, he wrote in The Encantadas, is the best way to see the
country around one; and at sea, he would climb the mast: that was his
watch-tower and his cloister.
The Navy of Melville’s day was not unlike the Navy of today: these
saurian institutions do not add to the quantity of brains in their
brain-pan, nor do they change the quality of their tissue: it was
bound up by red tape, precedent, a stupefying routine, and a set
of regulations designed to establish and maintain the authority of
those marginal officers who may have neither seamanship nor the gift
of command. In addition to the abuses that still exist in the Navy,
some of which are inevitable by the mere act of regimentation and by
an existence that is purposeless except in terms of slaughter and
bellicose action, there was in Melville’s time the further iniquity
of flogging. Melville’s words against this institution are in bold
contrast to Dana’s. Dana was one of those cautious friends of a cause
whose timid counsel is far harder to dispose of than the practices of
its enemies: he minced and compromised, and, dealing only with merchant
sailors, still recommended merely that flogging be mitigated. To
Melville flogging was a degradation of humanity; if discipline could
not be maintained without it, discipline was degrading; if the navy
of a free community could not be maintained without it, navies were
degrading: let us get rid of all these things together.
Life on the man-of-war was difficult and capricious still. Through the
mere punctilio of an officer in charge, Melville was unable to give his
white jacket a coat of paint; and he suffered from terrible exposure
in the journey round the Horn; but after the comparative solitude of
his savage Polynesian existence, with just a stray soul for company,
the ship had something of the stir and variety of a metropolis: it
contained people like Nord, a man of mystery and romance, who, Melville
suspected sympathetically, had been bolted in the mill of adversity:
and there was Lemsford, the poet, who conceived platitudes in Dionysiac
ecstasy, and above all, there was Jack Chase, the captain of the
maintop, a simple, hearty, beautiful soul, who gave young Melville all
a father could have given him; and to whom Melville clung, at sea,
and later, in memory--a starved orphan, finding in Jovian Chase all
that his father’s death, and his father’s marble image, denied him.
The hours spent with Chase on the maintop were happy hours indeed;
and no less so were those that Melville spent with books, Walpole’s
Letters and the Jew of Malta and Volpone, as well as earlier books
of travel and adventure, such as Morgan’s History of Algiers, and
Knox’s Captivity in Ceylon. Coming as they did, after a long period
of abstention and thirst, these books had a profound influence upon
Melville: and they give his literary pedigree. Through his experience
of life, he broke away by necessity from the weak romantics of his
youth, and, seeking the nearest parallels to his own adventures and
meditations and visions, he found them in the Elizabethan dramatists
and the seventeenth-century travellers and literary philosophers.
Melville’s genius followed two separate lines of growth, which joined
in Moby-Dick: one of them was that of Marlowe and Webster, with their
untrammelled emotions, their stertorous vitality, and their keen
transposition of dream into reality and of reality into dream--the
other was that of Knox’s Captivity, direct, honest, well ballasted. Had
not these books been in the ship’s library, Melville might have taken
much longer to find himself. Jack Chase himself added to Melville’s
literary education: he could recite the Lusiad by heart, and Camoëns
made a vivid impression on Melville. In two of his last poems he
assumed Camoëns’ personality.
“Mind you, White-Jacket,” Jack Chase would say, “there are many
great men in the world besides commodores and captains. I’ve that
there, White-Jacket”--touching his forehead--“which under happier
skies--perhaps in yon solitary star there, peeping down from those
clouds--might have made a Homer of me. But Fate is Fate, White-Jacket;
and we Homers who happen to be captains of the tops must write our Odes
in our hearts and publish them in our heads.” Did Melville smile at
Chase’s conceit, or was he already meditating his own odes and epics?
When he wrote Typee, he explained that the incidents of it had been
imprinted in his memory by being told over and over again; and one can
imagine a hundred places where Melville might have found less incentive
to literary activity than he found in the library and the maintop of
the U. S. frigate United States.
There were three main events in the voyage. Two of these experiences
involved deep personal humiliation. One was the time he was called to
the mast and condemned to the scourge for being absent from his post
at general quarters, a post to which he had never to his knowledge
been assigned: in a panic of righteous anger, he measured the distance
between himself and the captain, and had the blind impulse to rush
him overboard, and end his own life, too, rather than undergo the
degradation of this punishment. By a miracle, he was saved from this
fate through the courageous intercession of a corporal of the marines,
who spoke up in his behalf and got the order remitted. The other
humiliation was the massacre of the beards, when, by the capricious
order of “Captain Claret,” the autocrat of the United States, even the
oldest veteran, just completing his last voyage, was ordered to shave
his beard; and when he would not submit to it, was flogged and put in
irons. No one can feel the inner resentment occasioned by such an order
who has not been subject to a similar indignity; on such occasions, the
spirit boils in helpless rebellion. In civilian life, only the poor and
the outcast know this experience; but in every large and regimented
organization, military or commercial, such affronts to human dignity
and autonomy are commonplace; they characterize the system, rather than
the men who conduct it. Had Captain Claret not, on the whole, been a
lenient officer, Melville would have had a hundred other occasions for
this feeling. In gauging Melville’s conduct at a later period, one must
not forget these humiliations; their effect was cumulative.
But the crowning adventure of the voyage happened when the United
States was off the capes of Virginia in a calm sea: the ship gave a
sudden lurch and he was thrown from the yard-arm into the water. Let
him tell the story for himself:
“With a 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 frostwork that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all
my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm....
As I gushed into the sea, a thunderboom 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 down
with a glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm 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 agonizing 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.... 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.” Melville was rescued; but not before he had rid himself of his
white jacket forever; the ominous whiteness that he found later in
Moby-Dick was accentuated, perhaps, by his memory of that “accursed
jacket” which had delivered him up to the elements, rather than
protected him, and in the moment of extremity, had nearly proved his
shroud.
To have faced life and death, not as abstractions, but as concrete
events, when a sinew less of resolution would have meant his
extinction, in a stove boat off the coast of Japan, at the hands of
the pursuant Typees, or enveloped in the white jacket at sea: to have
thrown himself among strange men, and to have kept his own shape,
always set apart a little by culture and breeding, but never rebuffed
for a feebleness or an unmanliness or inability to bear a hand: to
feel the wild throb of a ship in a gale, sea-wracked but magnificent,
creaking, whining, wind-whistling, slapping into a trough of wave or
climbing dizzily on to a crest, and to feel a wilder, louder, more
victorious throb within: to have been attracted by the languors and
sensuous jollities of a savage life, but still more attracted by all
that civilisation had left with him, in hints and promises, Homer
and Dante and Shakespeare and Cervantes: to have left home a boy,
innocent and unspoiled, and to have returned a man, toughened, bronzed,
firm-fibred, and full of mixed knowledge, yet still essentially
innocent and unspoiled--all this had happened to Melville. He had left
America to seek adventures. Now he had found adventures; and he left
that behind, left the South Seas and the whaleman’s joys and hardships,
and the man-of-war’s settled routine, to pursue adventure farther, but
on a higher plane.
There comes a time--it is the beginning of manhood or womanhood--when
one realizes that adventure is as humdrum as routine unless one
assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows
within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is
empty, just as empty in the forecastle of a whaler as in the chamber
of a counting-house; it is not what one does, but in a manifold
sense, what one _realizes_, that keeps existence from being vain and
trivial. Mankind moves about in worlds not realized: Wordsworth’s
phrase expresses a profound reality, and Melville himself suggests
a similar idea in Mardi, when the philosopher points out that ages
hence people may realize more keenly what has happened today than our
own contemporaries do. It is the artist, the knower, the sayer, who
realizes human experience, who takes the raw lump of ore we find in
nature, smelts it, refines it, assays it, and stamps it into coins
that can pass from hand to hand and make every man who touches them
the richer. “No man can live for another” is a true doctrine as far
as experience goes; but it is the opposite of true in the life of
realization; for into this fuller and more durable apprehension of
experience goes our whole social heritage, all the forms and symbols
that have aided human expression in the past, the cumulative effect of
many cultures and many different modes of life. Those who absorb and