Herman Melville
determined doubtless by some imperceptible fact or belief that belonged
to the insect order of rationality: but the taboos did not strike many
of the essential elements of life. A man might be taboo against the
assaults of his enemies and so might venture among them freely as a
messenger, like the good fellow who abetted Melville’s final rescue,
or the canoe might be taboo against women using it--a comical male
reservation--but food and clothing were not made taboo to the destitute
by the laws of property, nor were men and women condemned to an acrid
chastity by sexual taboos which had also arisen very largely out of
laws and customs connected with the succession of property. There was
no theft where every one could help himself, and no vice where virtue
made such simple and rational demands.
Melville had a healthy capacity to adapt himself to a situation;
and he was not ill at ease, little though this life resembled the
world of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association,
which the missionaries were introducing with the help of biblical
pocket-handkerchiefs, pious exhortations, cheap Manchester rags, ugly
bedizenments, and the sense of bitter sin that naturally accompanies
the horrors of venereal disease. Had it not been for the infection in
his leg, the uncertainty as to his eventual fate, and the plain desire
of some of his native friends to make a thorough Typee of him, by a
spirited application of tattooing, there is no telling how long he
might have stayed, or how thoroughly he might have been lulled into
forgetfulness of his Western connections.
In Mardi Melville pictured Hautia, the symbol of sensual oblivion, as
the constant beckoner of the hero; and Hautia must have pressed him
hard in Typee. Nevertheless, Yillah, who represented the spiritual
quest, had already stirred him up before he started on his voyage,
and in the end, Yillah must have reminded him of activities that
found no answering chord among his happy, kindly Typee captors. When
that ghastly devil with his tattooing implements made advances to
him, Melville felt his quintessential foreignness. People wore queer
clothes in Albany, perhaps, but thank heaven, they did not permanently
discolour the flesh. Fayaway was lovely to look at, lovely to court,
and perhaps lovelier to possess: but no man in full command of his
faculties ever looked forward to a lifetime of such possession as
sufficient reason for not committing suicide. Kory-Kory, his ugly
man-servant, was as faithful as Sancho Panza; King Mehevi was as
gracious as Francis I; one might even say a good word about tattooing
and man-eating: they were matters of taste, perhaps; but inevitably,
Melville felt a little out of it; and neither love-making nor bachelor
companionship could quite make up for his spiritual isolation.
The moment for escape at last came. Melville, sadly in need of medical
aid, hobbled down to the shore: a boatload of tabooed Kanakas had come
with presents of calico and a musket to ransom the captive. The Typees
were unwilling to part with Melville, and the boat was about to pull
off without him, when, in the midst of the clamour, he broke away
and threw himself into the arms of his rescuers, escaping only after
he himself had killed a ferocious old chief, hot in pursuit, who in
a happier and more apathetic day had been kind to him. Fayaway and
Hautia’s bliss lay behind him; Fayaway clutching a piece of calico
Melville had thrown her for consolation: Yillah lay in an unfathomable
distance beyond, and what stood between was a tortured filthy life in
a broken-down whaler, whose planks were rotting and whose hold swarmed
with cockroaches and rats. Many a time during the next two years,
Melville must have regretted leaving Fayaway’s arms! Yes: and she must
have regretted Melville, for a little later an American traveller,
Henry Augustus Wise, discovered a brown maid from the valley of Typee,
named Fayaway, working as maid-of-all-work to the French commissary
of the garrison at Nukuheva--a proper snivelized anti-climax to the
unsullied tropical summer of Melville’s residence and courtship among
the Typees.
3
A harsh captain is a bad fellow to sail under, but a weak captain
is worse. When Melville came to on the Julia, a drab little barque,
with a jaunty way of catching the wind, he found himself under the
orders of an uncertain cockney landsman from Melbourne, with a crew
of discontented scalawags, and a roving commission to hunt whales or
seals or pick up a living somehow on the South Seas. Paper Jack, as
the men called this landlubber of a captain, signed him on for one
cruise, with the stipulation that he be discharged at the next port;
and when Melville looked around him, he discovered that between the
slack disorder of the Little Jule and the tyranny of the Acushnet he
had little to choose.
The physician on board, Dr. Long Ghost, had parted company with the
captain and had made his bunk in the forecastle. The mate, a hale,
bullet-headed fellow with a kind heart and a heavy fist, John Jermin
by name, was always half-seas-over; the captain was one of those
watchful, ineffectual, capriciously determined men who achieved the
dignity of isolation and got the semblance of obedience by never
delivering an order through his own mouth. Without any success in
whaling, the ship remained at sea, lest by lying in harbour and
replenishing its provisions it might incidentally lose the whole crew
by desertion.
Melville was contemptuous of the captain, he admired the bluff,
bustling Jermin, and he fell in with the doctor, who was an educated
man, as naturally as one globule of mercury will coalesce with another
as soon as they touch. The doctor was a capital fellow to finish off
Melville’s education and to while away the sleepy hours of the night:
“he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy,
and associated with gentlemen. As for his learning, he quoted Virgil,
and talked of Hobbes of Malmesbury, besides repeating poetry by the
Canto, especially Hudibras. He was, moreover, a man who had seen the
world. In the easiest possible way he could refer to an amour he had
in Palermo, his lion-hunting before breakfast among the Caffres, and
the quality of the coffee he had drunk in Muscat.” Such a man did not
merely bring authentic reports of books and conversations; he was
himself a picaresque library, and he who ran with him had much to read.
This was the sort of acquaintance Melville could never have picked up
in Albany, nor in New York: one first must become an outcast before he
can have the privilege of such company.
The captain became seriously ill; and he purposed to send his men to
sea under command of Jermin while he recuperated on shore. Heartily
sick of the voyage, the crew rebelled at the notion, and when the ship
lay off the harbour of Papeetee, they sent a round robin to the English
consul, stating their grievances and petitioning to be put ashore.
Wilson, the consul, would not hear of it: to cow them into submission,
he delivered them over to the French frigate, La Reine Blanche, that
lay in the harbour; and for five days and nights Melville had a chance
to live on a French man-of-war and to observe the contrast between
French customs and character, and the American and English ways he was
used to; but the imprisonment was only a demonstration; and the ship
returned so that Wilson might again utter his ultimatum to the crew.
The upshot of it was that the crew was put inside the British jail, the
Calabooza Beretanee, under the surveillance of a huge, brown Polynesian
dignitary; and after a few weeks of their semi-confinement, the Julia
went off without them; and they finally found themselves at liberty
among the miscellaneous riff-raff that haunted the shores of these
tropical islands.
During the next couple of months, Melville lived the life of a rover,
in the company of Dr. Long Ghost, visiting among the natives, working
for a brief period on a Polynesian farm, for a tall robust Yankee
born in the backwoods of Maine, and finally trying, unsuccessfully,
to advance their fortunes in the court of Queen Pomaree. It was a
rambling, roving, thoroughly outlandish mode of life which must
have had the episodic and incredible quality of a dream: there was
a complete absence of pressure and direction; Melville drifted from
one islet in Imeeo to another as a leaf driven by chance breezes will
drift on the surface of a still pond. Thrown among the superficially
converted Christians of Tahiti, Melville observed no advance over
the untainted pagans of Typee; quite the contrary. “So far as mere
temporal felicity was concerned, the Tahitians are far worse off now
than formerly. Years ago brought to a stand, where all that is corrupt
in barbarism and civilization unite, to the exclusion of the virtues
of either state ... they must here remain stationary until utterly
extinct.”
Away from the purlieus of the Christian “mickonaree” Melville enjoyed
the lazy, savage life. The air was relaxing; but for a young American,
bred in Albany and Pittsfield, the danger was that he might bless his
braces, and damn his relaxes too opprobriously; so, on the whole,
one must count these months of rambling and laziness and observation
as good ones for Melville. Some of the dreamy, unexpected quality of
them went, no doubt, into the fantasy of Mardi when he came to write
it: Omoo, which records the actuality, and Mardi, which utters the
dream, are the morning and night of the same day. Through it all,
Melville kept his shape; he was still a quizzical, modest, slightly
sentimental, sober-minded young man: when he beholds the beautiful wife
of a sugar-planter, mounted gallantly on a white pony, his emotions
are touched by distant adoration and curiosity, just as they might
have been in Lansingburgh; and one suspects that he plagued more than
one incipient brown sweetheart with a far too respectful and brotherly
reserve. Five years later, Melville still remembered how the sugar
planter’s wife had captivated him: when he thinks back to this trivial
incident he sets it apart in a chapter; and he remembers, too, the
brown feminine mockery at his attempts to be sentimental. There is no
likelihood that this young man will succumb to Queen Hautia: he is
always on guard. If he needs any advice at this period it is that of
Koheleth: Be not righteous over-much: why shouldst thou destroy thyself?
4
Whether Melville judged better of his third whaling captain, the
Vineyarder, whom he finally fell in with, he does not tell: whether he
tired of whaling off the coast of Japan one does not know either. One
has a glimpse of him working as a clerk for four months in Honolulu,
the capital of the Sandwich Islands, among the fine dwelling-houses,
the hotels, the barber-shops, the offices, of the whites; and there
one’s knowledge ends. By the summer of 1843 he had shipped aboard the
frigate, United States, upon its homeward voyage. The free, vagrant,
uncertain life of the rover was over: he was in the Navy now. Melville
had not done more than pick up a bare living, certainly, for when
he was in Callao, about to equip himself for the terrible exposure
of rounding the Horn, he could get no pea-jacket from the purser,
and apparently could not afford to purchase one on shore: so he
manufactured a white jacket for himself out of a white duck frock,
folded and padded, cold comfort enough in dry weather, and colder
comfort in wet, when the jacket was so absorbent his shipmates would
cruelly stand up against him, to get rid of their own moisture.
Melville was as sick of adventure as Ulysses himself. When he heard
the words, “Up anchor! Man the capstan: we’re homeward bound,” from
the gruff boatswain, the words ran through his veins like golden wine.