Sailor, Writer, Metaphysician
Mary K. Bercaw Edwards
A “whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard” (Melville
112), Herman Melville exclaims in Moby-Dick (1851). Melville
spent four years at sea, serving aboard a merchant vessel, three
whaleships, and a naval frigate. His time at sea was unusual, for
nineteenth-century sailors mostly served on vessels within the same
occupation. The variety of Melville’s work aboard ship resulted in a
rich diversity of works, from Typee (1846) to The Confidence-Man
(1857) and Billy Budd (posthumously published in 1924). Melville
was a sailor first, then a writer, and ultimately a metaphysician.1
His time at sea and immersion in oral and written sources were the
materials from which Moby-Dick, his greatest work, grew. Melville
writes:
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though
it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of
this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an
inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my
thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with
their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep (Melville 456).
For Melville, the Leviathan here is not only the large sea monster
of the Bible (commonly supposed to be a whale), nor simply the
white whale itself, but also the task he has set himself of writing
Moby-Dick. Faced with such an enormous undertaking, his normal
handwriting (his chirography) must be replaced with poster-sized
capital letters; his pen must be made with the feather of a condor, one
of the largest flying birds, rather than that of a goose; and he needs
a volcano as large as Vesuvius to hold his ink. The gigantic scale
of the task before him makes him feel faint. Yet the inspiration for
what has been called the greatest American novel—his years at sea
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25
and his contemplation of the world in light of those experiences—
sustained him in his work.
Melville’s Time at Sea
Melville left on his first voyage aboard the merchant vessel St.
Lawrence in 1839 at the age of 19. He sailed from New York to
Liverpool and back. The passage to England took twenty-seven
days and the passage home forty-nine. Leaving New York, Melville
experienced, for the first time, what it meant to be out of sight of
land. As he asks in Moby-Dick: “Why upon your first voyage as a
passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first
told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?” (Melville
5). “What most amazed me,” the narrator tells us in Redburn (1849),
Melville’s fictional account of his first voyage, “was the sight of
the great ocean itself, for we were out of sight of land. . . . Never
did I realize till now what the ocean was: how grand and majestic,
how solitary, and boundless, and beautiful and blue” (Melville, R
64). The alliteration of the last passage emphasizes Redburn’s poetic
vision of the ocean, a view perhaps more poetic than Melville’s may
have been at the time.
People who go to sea for the first time often get seasick. Melville
gives a wonderful account of such seasickness in the journal he
wrote ten years later en route to England. Sunday, October 14, 1849:
“A gale of wind, & every one sick. Saloons deserted, & all sorts of
nausea noise heard from the state-rooms. Taylor, McCurdy, & Adler
[three fellow passengers] all in their berths—& I alone am left to tell
the tale of their misery” (Melville, Journals 6). The last line echoes
Job 1:15 and 1:19—“and I only am escaped alone to tell thee”—and
prefigures the ending of Moby-Dick, where Melville quotes it at the
beginning of the Epilogue (Melville 573). Melville’s brief journal
entry begins concretely—with the feel of the gale, the appalling
sounds (and implied smell) of nausea, the sight of the deserted
stateroom—and moves via humor to the metaphysical. Melville
evokes the raunchy humor commonly found among sailors in the
presence of seasick passengers—“all sorts of nausea noise”—before
turning to the poignant human comedy of being the only one not
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Critical Insights
seasick. He ends with the metaphysical pondering of human misery,
both for the sufferers and for those who must tell their tale.
Melville’s fourth book, Redburn: His First Voyage, is loosely
based on his time aboard the St. Lawrence. Subtitled Being the Sailorboy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in
the Merchant Service, the book describes what it is like for a member
of the upper-middle-class to be suddenly thrust into the position of a
greenhand, a sailor of the lowest rank, with no power, no authority,
who receives little respect from the officers. When Melville was ten,
his father had gone bankrupt, forcing the family to move from New
York City to upstate New York. Then, when Melville was twelve,
his father died, leaving Melville’s mother and her eight children
in poverty. That poverty ultimately led to Melville’s signing as a
“green hand” rather than an officer.
After his discharge from the St. Lawrence, Melville traveled to
Illinois by water in 1840. His three-day journey by canal boat from
Albany to Buffalo may have inspired the description of the Erie
Canal found in chapter fifty-four of Moby-Dick, “The Town-Ho’s
Story.” He crossed Lake Erie by steamboat and then, from Detroit,
booked passage on a Lake Huron and Lake Michigan steamboat to
Chicago. From there, Melville crossed the prairie to Galena, Illinois,
where his uncle, Thomas Melvill Jr., had a farm. Melville’s tenth
book, The Confidence-Man (1857), is set on board the Fidéle, a
Mississippi River steamboat; his knowledge of steamboats came
from this journey to Galena. Illinois also features in Moby-Dick, in
Melville’s lyrical chapter “Nantucket,” in which Ishmael tells us:
There is more sand there [on Nantucket] than you would use in
twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome
wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don’t
grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to
send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask;2 that pieces
of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in
Rome . . . that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a
day’s walk a prairie . . . that they are so shut up, belted about, every
way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean,
that to the very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found
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27
adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only
show that Nantucket is no Illinois (Melville 63).
With his family still in financial trouble, Melville left New
Bedford, Massachusetts, on January 3, 1841, for the most influential
voyage of his life. He joined the crew of the whaleship Acushnet
on its maiden voyage, sailing from Fairhaven, Massachusetts. The
Acushnet was a newly-launched ship, a far cry from the grim, trophystudded Pequod, a “cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the
chased [engraved] bones of her enemies” (Melville 70), with its
belaying pins made of sperm-whale teeth and its tiller made from the
lower jaw of a sperm whale. Ishmael chooses the Pequod over two
other whaleships seeking crew, the Devil-Dam and the Tit-bit. He
chooses neither the devil’s mother nor the witch’s breast, but instead
a vessel named after “a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians,
now extinct as the ancient Medes” (Melville 69). The Pequot tribe is
far from extinct, but Melville’s belief in the tribe’s extinction came
from reports of the horrific 1637 Pequot Massacre.
The Acushnet left the icy January waters off New Bedford and
sailed south, around Cape Horn, and up into the Pacific. Interestingly,
in Moby-Dick, the Pequod sails eastward and rounds the Cape of
Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, a passage never made by
Melville. He rounded Cape Horn three times, but never the Cape of
Good Hope.
In November 1841, the Acushnet spent six days at anchor off
Chatham Island in the Galápagos Islands, the location of Melville’s
ten sketches entitled “The Encantadas” (1854). The islands were
called enchanted because the baffling currents were “so strong and
irregular as to change a vessel’s course against the helm [opposite
to the direction steered], though sailing at the rate of four or five
miles the hour” (PT 128). The Acushnet returned to the waters of
the Galápagos for the month of January 1842, but the six days at
Chatham Island in 1841 were the longest continuous period during
which Melville may have had the possibility of going ashore.
Surprisingly, Chatham Island is referred to only twice—and then in
passing—in “The Encantadas.”
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Critical Insights
Seventeen months after leaving New Bedford, the Acushnet
arrived at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands. Melville begins the
first chapter of his first book Typee (1846): “Six months at sea! Yes,
reader, as I live, six months out of the sight of land” (Melville, T
3). Dark, rain-shrouded, with gritty black beaches and murky water
made turgid by the rush of mud-laden waterfalls into the ocean,
the Marquesan coast bears little resemblance to the sapphire-blue
water and white sand beaches of most South Pacific islands. Such
geographic elements may be one reason the Marquesas earned a
savage reputation as the home of bloodthirsty cannibals. “There—
there’s Typee,” the sailor Ned tells the narrator in Typee, “Oh, the
bloody cannibals, what a meal they’d make of us” (Melville, T 25).
Despite the islanders’ terrifying and brutal reputation, Melville
jumped ship at Nuku Hiva on July 9, 1842. His action was nothing
unusual: the whaling industry in the mid-nineteenth century was
rife with desertion. Sailors deserted for many reasons, including
insufficient or inedible food, poor living and working conditions,
discouragement over the number of whales caught, and boredom.
Desertion was often considered a rite of passage. One captain in
1859 commented in frustration, “if a ship were bound for heaven
and should stop at Hell for wood and water[,] some of the crew
would run away” (Logbook of the Florida: entry for January 29,
1859, Busch 104).
Five men deserted on that July 9: Melville, his companion
Richard Tobias Greene, and three others. The Acushnet sailed two
days later, intending to lay off the island for a day or two and send
in a boat to recover the deserters. Pease’s stratagem worked: on July
13, the Acushnet touched again at the island and recovered three
of the runaways. Melville and Greene successfully eluded capture.
What happened in the month between Melville’s desertion on July
9 and his joining the crew of an Australian whaler named Lucy Ann
on August 9 is unknown. Whether he and Greene did, in fact, make
their way into the Taipi Valley or whether they perhaps lived with
the Tai’oa people of Haka’ui Bay, who had a history of harboring
runaway seamen, is lost from the historic record. What is known
is that after leaving the island, Melville spent more than two more
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years at sea, entertaining his shipmates with yarns based on his
Marquesan adventures. He tells us in the Preface to Typee: “the
incidents recorded in the following pages have often served, when
‘spun as a yarn,’ not only to relieve the weariness of many a nightwatch at sea, but to excite the warmest sympathies of the author’s
shipmates” (Melville, T xiii). By the time he began writing his first
book four years after leaving Nuku Hiva, he had crafted a wellstructured tale, driven by the fear of cannibalism.
Unease, disquiet, and fear join together as the book draws to
a close. Typee ends with a melodramatic scene of violence when
Tommo brutally drives the hideous, scarred, one-eyed Mow-Mow
underwater by striking him with a boat-hook just below his throat
as others of the boat’s crew use their knives to maul the wrists of an
islander who clings to the boat’s side (Melville, T 252).
There is no hint in the surviving records that Melville’s
departure from Nuku Hiva was anywhere near as dramatic as the
end of Typee. He signed aboard the Lucy Ann on August 9, 1842,
and joined a crew torn by dissent. The Lucy Ann was inadequately
officered, with a sickly captain; a first mate, James German, who was
prone to drink; an illiterate South Pacific islander serving as acting
third mate; one illiterate harpooner; and a newly-shipped harpooner,
who soon turned against the captain. A whaleship carrying four
whaleboats, as the Lucy Ann did, would normally carry four mates
and four harpooneers. When Captain Henry Ventom became very ill,
German headed for Tahiti, where the captain was put ashore. In an
effort to prevent desertion during the captain’s illness, the Lucy Ann
left port and sailed back and forth off the harbor of Papeete, Tahiti.
Eventually, eleven men, including Melville, refused duty and were
incarcerated in a Tahitian “calaboose” (jail). Within a few weeks,
Melville escaped to the neighboring island of Eimeo (now called
Moorea), from whence he joined his third whaler, the Charles and
Henry of Nantucket. Melville’s adventures—mutiny, incarceration,
escape—are the basis of his second book Omoo (1847). Nearly
one hundred years after its publication, the consular records of
the mutiny aboard the Lucy Ann were discovered by an Australian
librarian, Ida Leeson, and published in the Philological Quarterly in
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Critical Insights
1940; it is fascinating to compare these “Revolt Documents” against
Melville’s description in the first half of Omoo.
Captain John B. Coleman, Jr., master of Melville’s third whaler,
treated his sailors well, making sure they had dinner before lowering
for a whale and giving them liberty in port. Melville’s paean to
Nantucket in Moby-Dick, a place he had never visited, is often
thought to have come from his respect for Coleman. Nonetheless,
Melville was only signed on for the length of the passage, not the
length of the voyage, and so was discharged from the Charles and
Henry in Lahaina, Maui. He made his way to Honolulu, where he
joined a crew of 470 men aboard the naval frigate United States, the
first of six frigates authorized for construction by the Naval Act of
1794 and built for the Barbary Wars off the north coast of Africa; the
USS Constitution is another.
The United States was captained by James Armstrong, but
sailed under the pennant of Commodore Thomas ap Catesby
Jones. During his fourteen months aboard, Melville witnessed 163
floggings, which so horrified him that his fifth book, White-Jacket
or The World in a Man-of-War (1850), is suffused with his absolute
hatred of flogging.
Melville’s long period at sea ended on October 3, 1844, when
the United States arrived in Boston. He traveled on the ocean several
more times, but never again as a seaman. In 1860, he sailed around
Cape Horn aboard the clipper ship Meteor, which was captained
by his younger brother Thomas. He felt so homesick and depressed
upon reaching San Francisco that rather than sailing home on the
Meteor, he took a steamer from San Francisco to Panama, crossed the
isthmus, and then returned to New York on the steamer North Star.
The Oral World of Sailors and Moby-Dick
Melville spent four years at sea, immersed in an almost completely
oral world. Statistics vary, but in the mid-nineteenth century,
roughly one-quarter of American sailors were illiterate and onequarter barely literate. Even those who could read had little access
to newspapers, letters, or books, especially aboard whaleships, on
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which the average voyage lasted between two and five years. Sailors
created a world rich in oral culture.
How different was the language spoken by sailors? When
men first signed on board ship, the technical language could seem
nightmarish, grotesque. Melville says that it is like “going into a
barbarous country, where they speak a strange dialect” (Melville,
R 65). Jack Cremer, who apprenticed to an officer aboard a British
man-of-war in the early eighteenth century, writes of his arrival
aboard ship:
I was not taken note of for a day or two, nor could I think what world
I was in, weather [whether] among Spirits or Devills. All seemed
strange; different languidge and strange expreshions of tonge, that
I always thought myself a sleep or in a dream, and never properly
awake (Ramblin’ Jack 43, Rediker 162).
In Redburn, Melville expatiates on seafaring language:
People who have never gone to sea for the first time as sailors, can
not imagine how puzzling and confounding it is. It must be like going
into a barbarous country, where they speak a strange dialect, and
dress in strange clothes, and live in strange houses. For sailors have
their own names, even for things that are familiar ashore; and if you
call a thing by its shore name, you are laughed at for an ignoramus
and a land-lubber (Melville, R 65).
Like all new sailors, Melville had to learn the technical language
of the ship for his own safety as well as that of his shipmates. If
sailors were aloft furling a topsail, for example, it was imperative
that they not throw off the windward brace when told to release
the topsail sheet, or the yard could swing wildly and the men be
plunged to their death. Men who fell from aloft were often lost. In
Moby-Dick, as the Pequod inexorably draws closer and closer to her
predestinated end, a sailor falls from the fore masthead:
But the bodings of the crew [that one of them would drown] were
destined to receive a most plausible confirmation in the fate of one
of their number that morning. At sun-rise this man went from his
hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and whether it was that he was
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Critical Insights
not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in
a transition state), whether it was thus with the man, there is now no
telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at his perch, when
a cry was heard—a cry and a rushing—and looking up, they saw a
falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of
white bubbles in the blue of the sea (Melville 524).
The crew throws the life-buoy into the water, “but no hand rose to
seize it” (Melville 524).
Sea language, or sailor talk, encompasses far more than simply
such technical language. Another element richly mined by Melville
in his maritime works is occupational lore. In White-Jacket, Jack
Chase drives Tubbs, a whaleman newly recruited into the Navy—
“a long, lank Vineyarder, eternally talking of line-tubs, Nantucket,
sperm oil, stove boats, and Japan” (Melville, WJ 15) —from the
main-top:
“Why, you limb of Nantucket! you train-oil man! you sea-tallow
strainer! you bobber after carrion! . . . Bah! You are full of the forepeak and the forecastle; you are only familiar with Burtons and Billytackles; your ambition never mounted above pig-killing! which, in
my poor opinion, is the proper phrase for whaling! Topmates! has
not this Tubbs here been but a misuser of good oak planks, and a vile
desecrator of the thrice holy sea? . . . Begone! you graceless, godless
knave!” (Melville, WJ 16)
Poor Tubbs scrambles from the main-top, made a misft by his very
language. He can only talk of tubs filled with the whale-line lashed
to the harpoons used to catch whales; of the sperm-oil and train-oil
(whale oil) rendered from whales; of lifting lines, such as burtons
and billy-tackles; and of Nantucket, the eighteenth-century center of
American whaling.
Whaling was usually seen as a lesser enterprise because it
demanded far less skill to be a sailor on a tubby whaleship that
cruised aimlessly in search of whales rather than a vessel, such as a
merchantman, trying to cross the ocean as swiftly as possible, or a
naval warship, which needed to maneuver in tight quarters during
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