Herman Melville
disappointment, every trial, has its revelation. The crew of the
Acushnet was an ill-fated one: ten years later Melville found out from
one of them, Hubbard, what had become of them: the record is one of
desertion, suicide, murder, or a miserable death from syphilis; and the
ship itself foundered in the very year he wrote Moby-Dick: but this
catalogue of misfortunes does not exhaust the matter.
Melville undoubtedly chafed at the monotonous routine and the salt
horse and hard-tack, varied though it might occasionally be by bananas
and breadfruit: in the meanwhile, however, he had jumped into boats and
gone in pursuit of the whale: he had helped to dismember its carcass:
he had chopped up blubber and watched the fire in the try-works:
he had observed his shipmates whittling and carving in wood and in
whalebone all sorts of curious tools, ornaments, and fetiches, work
that was often done with a more sure aesthetic touch than any of the
contemporary arts could show in America; for these whaling implements,
particularly the jagging-wheels, are worthy to have a place alongside
the handsome coverlets and the hooked rugs of the forties in a museum
of American folk-arts. Weaving mats, with the slow methodical motion of
the weaver, his thoughts would solidify into new patterns; or aloft,
on lookout duty, in the bland air of the tropics, he would gaze into
his own mind, still, gently heaving, fathomless, like the waters around
him, and be lulled into a feeling of oneness with the circumambient
world, not with the ship’s crew or the captain, but that remoter world
of infinite space and unthinkable time which somehow, in these moments
of solitude, seemed so much nearer to him.
These thoughts have no images and are not framed in words; Melville
must wait long before, in any way, he can find word or fable to express
them; but though he himself, as observer, was no more conscious of his
growth than a child is conscious of the passage of stars in the sky
during the daytime, these were growing-days for him. The routine of
the ship was in itself a varied education: every sailor was a bit of a
musician and a weaver and an artist and a ropemaker and a blacksmith
and an athlete: thought, when it existed at all, had the benefit of
those manual exercises and bodily rhythms which, quite literally,
increase a man’s grasp and range--a true gymnosophy.
“If by any possibility,” Melville said in Moby-Dick, “there be any as
yet undiscovered thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute
in that small but high hushed world which I might not unreasonably be
ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a
man might rather have done than have left undone; if, at my death, my
executors or more properly my creditors find any precious MSS. in my
desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory
to whaling; for a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
Melville was not wide of the mark: these broad-bottomed ships, slow,
even sailers, cut off for six months at a time from the distractions of
any port, were in truth the best of universities for a young man, still
not out of adolescence, to retire into: they were a sort of profane
cloister. The regular routine, the monastic discipline, yes, even the
restricted diet, were all favourable to a vivid and purposive inner
life--all the more so because a lick of bad weather or a sudden chase
after the whale confronted Melville peremptorily with the demands of
reality, and broke the routine sufficiently to avoid the torpor and
complacent lassitude that dogs all restricted lives.
2
As the Acushnet approached the Marquesas in order to renew water and
to procure fresh food, Melville made plans to escape her. Conditions
were intolerable, and he had learned that there was no definite
terminus to the voyage: he had already endured a year and a half, and
he might have to hover somewhere between the tropics and the poles, if
the oil barrels did not fill up quickly enough, for three, four, even
five years. At twenty-two, he did not dare to squander so much of his
life: he had ties at home, and did not wish to be buried in a floating
coffin. Perhaps this tedious prospect determined Melville as much as
the inhuman treatment; perhaps the sight of Nukuheva itself, its bold
headlands, with the surf beating against the cliffs, its deep inlets
with thickly wooded valleys, separated by the bare spurs of formidable
mountains, made him ache for solid ground. There is a form of
homesickness one must call land-sickness, and perhaps Melville had it.
Did the naked maidens who swam aboard when the ship came to port make
the scene seem doubly attractive to Melville and to his companion,
Toby? Was he pleasantly shocked and intoxicated by those brown bodies,
and stirred, as well as repelled, by the open debauchery of the nights
they spent aboard ship? Melville does not tell us. The cruelty and the
hardship and the tedium and the green jungle and the abrupt mountains
and the brown maidens doubtless all played a part in the adventure
and gave heat to it: at all events, Toby and Melville made speedy
use of their shore-leave, and set out to escape for a while into the
interior, till they could make away again on another ship. Their plans
miscarried. After dire hardship, sleeping in dank ravines, leaping from
tree-trunk to tree-top down gorges, they found themselves in the valley
of a dreaded tribe, the Typees, whose very name meant eater of men.
Melville stayed among the Typees for four months, with a leg that
had become lamed and infected in making the escape. The people he
was thrown among were suspected of ferocity and cannibalism; that
is to say, like a good many savage tribes, they fought a species of
extravagant and ritualistic battle with their enemies, the Happars, and
retired from the fray usually fit enough in flesh and limb to fight
another time. As for the cannibalism, at the very end of his stay,
Melville had reason to think that one of their feasts was culminating
in the extreme delicacy of Long Pig: but up to that time he had had an
exemplary vegetarian diet of breadfruit and cocoanut and various fine
elaborations of these staples; and but for the anxiety of losing Toby,
who disappeared completely, after going in search of medical aid for
Melville’s leg, and the further anxiety of not knowing whether he was
being treated as a distinguished visitor, entitled to the services of
a young man-servant, Kory-Kory, and royal attentions from Mehevi, the
chief, or whether he was being fattened for the sacrifice, like the
god-apparent among the Aztecs--but for these things all was serene.
If life were merely a matter of getting a living in the physical
sense, as Western Civilization had come largely to believe, then the
Typees were in a higher state of civilization than New York or Paris
or London had achieved. The Typees were a sort of perpetually endowed
leisure class; their food fell from the trees; their water flowed
at their feet; their garments, of pounded bark, tappa, were a sport
to make, and with less attention than they would have to give to a
fitting from a Bond Street tailor or dressmaker, they were made; their
days were torpid and free from care, like those of a _rentier_ with
gilt-edge government bonds; and though they had ceremonial observances
and religious feasts and wars, the symbol never stood between them and
their physical life: they did not whine about their sins and cry to
God: even in their sexual life, there was rivalry without jealousy,
and marriage without physical fidelity: almost the only desire they
were accustomed to repress was the typical Western desire for a little
repression!
The first whaleman Melville had ever met, on his trip to Liverpool,
had raised a doubt about the value of civilized society. “And what’s
the use of being snivelized,” he used to say. “Snivelized chaps only
learns the way to take on ’bout life and snivel. You don’t see any
Methodist chaps feelin’ dreadful about their souls; you don’t see any
damned beggars and pesky constables in Madagasky.... Blast Ameriky, I
say.” Melville could appreciate this among the Typees. “There were,” he
says, “none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity
of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no
foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no
debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers,
perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description; no assaults
and battery attorneys to foment discord, backing their clients into
a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; no poor relations
everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber and diminishing the
elbow-room at the family table; no destitute widows with their children
starving on the cold charities of the world; no debtors’ prisons;
no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or, to sum up all in one
word--No Money! That ‘root of all evil’ was not to be found in the
valley. In this secluded abode of happiness there were no cross old
women, no cruel step-dames, no withered spinsters, no lovesick maidens,
no sour bachelors, no inattentive husbands, no melancholy young men, no
blubbering youngsters and no squalling brats. All was mirth, fun, and
high good humour. Blue devils, hypochondria, and doleful dumps went and
hid themselves among the nooks and crannies of the rocks.”
By this process of exclusion, Melville tells us much about his
experience and the effect it had on him. “Civilization,” he discovered,
“does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she had not even her
full share of them.... If truth and justice and the better principles
of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how
are we to account for the social condition of the Typees?” Small
wonder that Melville’s contemporaries in the money-warrens of the West
thought that he was inventing these people out of whole cloth! But
it was not by the mere absence of ugly and harassing things that the
Valley of the Typees was flecked with sunlight and warm, rose-violet
shadows; there were positive pleasures as well; above all things, there
was beauty, the constant beauty of splendid forms, undisguised by
clothes, beauty so simple and statuesque that, in later years, it gave
Melville an immediate clue to Greek sculpture. There were many happy
afternoons; afternoons that he spent in bathing with a parcel of brown
river nymphs; afternoons when, once he had got the taboo lifted, he
paddled idly in a canoe with Fayaway, a lovely girl in his household,
who was his constant companion; there were evenings spent watching the
dancers in the hula-hula grounds, swaying, arching, gliding, swimming,
whirling in an ecstasy of sensuous enjoyment that threatened to rob
this “quiet, sober-minded, modest young man” of all his studious
inhibitions; and there were days of contrast, spent with masculine
gravity in the company of Mehevi and his attendant warriors, feasting
heavily, with no cloying reminder of the other sex. Life itself became
the most beautiful of rituals: its duties were games, its necessities
were pastimes. Rivalry, enmity, jealousy, hardship, violence were all
transposed to the realm of art, where, instead of defeating life, they
added to its enjoyment.
True: these people were simple to the point of childishness: they could
become excited, young and greybeards alike, over a popgun that Melville
devised; but did not the Western World have its popguns, too: did
not the crowds on Broadway turn out for a fire or a soldiers’ parade
with the same naïve delight? It was true, too, that these islanders
had taboos, whose meaning Melville could never quite understand: they
seemed as capricious as the flight of a bat, and like that flight, were