“‘Where’s that damned Miguel?’ was now shouted down among us by the mate.
“‘He’s gone to the harbour where they never weigh anchor,’ coughed Jackson. ‘Come down, sir, and look.’
“Thinking that Jackson intended to beard him, the mate sprang down in a rage; but recoiled at the burning body as if he had been shot by a bullet. ‘Take hold of it,’ said Jackson at last, to the Greenlander; ‘it must go overboard. Don’t stand shaking there, like a dog; take hold of it, I say!—But stop!’ and smothering it all in the blankets, he pulled it partly out of the bunk.
“A few minutes more, and it fell with a bubble among the phosphorescent sparkles of the sea, leaving a coruscating wake as it sank.”
After this, Melville ceased reading in the forecastle. And indeed no other sailor but Jackson would stay in the forecastle alone, and none would laugh or sing there: none but Jackson. But he, while the rest would be sitting silently smoking on their chests, or on their bunks, would look towards the nailed-up bunk of Miguel and cough, and laugh, and invoke the dead man with scoffs and jeers.
Of Melville’s shipmates, surely this Jackson was the most remarkable: a fit rival to Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus. Max and the Greenlander were merely typical old tars. Mr. Thompson, the grave negro cook, with his leaning towards metaphysics and his disquisitions on original sin, together with his old crony, Lavendar the steward, with his amorous backslidings, his cologne water, and his brimstone pantaloons, though mildly diverting, were usual enough. Blunt, too, with his collection of hair-oils, and his dream-book, and his flowing bumpers of horse-salts, though picturesque, was pale in comparison with Jackson. Larry, the old whaler, with his sentimental distaste for civilised society, was a forerunner of Mr. H. L. Mencken; and as such, deserves a more prominent mention. “And what’s the use of bein’ snivelized?” he asks Melville; “snivelized chaps only learn the way to take on ’bout life, and snivel. Blast Ameriky, I say. I tell ye, ye wouldn’t have been to sea here, leadin’ this dog’s life, if you hadn’t been snivelized. Snivelization has been the ruin on ye; and it’s sp’iled me complete: I might have been a great man in Madagasky; it’s too darned bad! Blast Ameriky, I say.”
But flat, stale and unprofitable seem the whole ship’s company in comparison with the demoniacal Jackson. Sainte-Beuve, in reviewing an early work of Cooper’s, speaks enthusiastically of Cooper’s “faculté créatrice qui enfante et met au monde des caractères nouveaux, et en vertu de laquelle Rabelais a produit ‘Panurge,’ Le Sage ‘Gil Blas,’ et Richardson ‘Clarissa.’” In The Confidence Man Melville spends a chapter discussing “originality” in literature. The phrase “quite an original” he maintains, in contempt of Sainte-Beuve, is “a phrase, we fancy, oftener used by the young, or the unlearned, or the untravelled, than by the old, or the well-read, or the man who has made the grand tour.” This faculty of creating “originals”—which is, after all, as both Melville and Flaubert clearly saw, but a quality of observation—Melville had to an unusual degree. In this incongruous group of striking “originals” Jackson deserves, as Melville says, a “lofty gallows.”
“Though Tiberius come in the succession of the Cæsars, and though unmatchable Tacitus has embalmed his carrion,” writes Melville in the luxurious cadence of Sir Thomas Browne which some of his critics have stigmatised as both the sign and cause of his later “madness,” “yet do I account this Yankee Jackson full as dignified a personage as he, and as well meriting his lofty gallows in history, even though he was a nameless vagabond without an epitaph, and none but I narrate what he was. For there is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags: and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals. In historically canonising on earth the condemned below, and lifting up and lauding the illustrious damned, we do but make ensamples of wickedness; and call upon ambition to do some great iniquity to be sure of fame.”
When Melville came to know Jackson, nothing was left of him but the foul lees and dregs of a man; a walking skeleton encased in a skin as yellow as gamboge, branded with the marks of a fearful end near at hand: “like that of King Antiochus of Syria, who died a worse death, history says, than if he had been stung out of the world by wasps and hornets.” In appearance he suggests Villon at the time when the gallows spared him the death-penalty of his vices. He looked like a man with his hair shaved off and just recovering from the yellow fever. His hair had fallen out; his nose was broken in the middle; he squinted in one eye. But to Melville that squinting eye “was the most deep, subtle, infernal-looking eye that I ever saw lodged in a human head. I believe that by good rights it must have belonged to a wolf, or starved tiger; at any rate I would defy any oculist to turn out a glass eye half so cold and snaky and deadly.” He was a foul-mouthed bully, and “being the best seaman on board, and very overbearing every way, all the men were afraid of him, and durst not contradict him or cross his path in anything.” And what made this more remarkable was, that he was the weakest man, bodily, of the whole crew. “But he had such an over-awing way with him; such a deal of brass and impudence, such an unflinching face, and withal was such a hideous mortal, that Satan himself would have run from him.” The whole crew stood in mortal fear of him, and cringed and fawned before him like so many spaniels. They would rub his back after he was undressed and lying in his bunk, and run up on deck to the cook-house to warm some cold coffee for him, and fill his pipe, and give him chews of tobacco, and mend his jackets and trousers, and watch and tend and nurse him every way. “And all the time he would sit scowling on them, and found fault with what they did: and I noticed that those who did the most for him were the ones he most abused.” These he flouted and jeered and laughed to scorn, on occasion breaking out in such a rage that “his lips glued together at the corners with a fine white foam.”
His age it was impossible to tell: for he had no beard, and no wrinkles except for small crow’s-feet about the eyes. He might have been thirty, or perhaps fifty years. “But according to his own account, he had been at sea ever since he was eight years old, when he first went to sea as a cabin-boy in an Indiaman, and ran away at Calcutta.” And according to his own account, too, he had passed through every kind of dissipation and abandonment in the worst parts of the world. He had served in Portuguese slavers on the coast of Africa, and with diabolical relish would tell of the middle passage where the slaves were stowed, heel and point, like logs, and the suffocated and dead were unmanacled and weeded out from the living each morning before washing down the decks. Though he was apt to be dumb at times, and would sit with “his eyes fixed, and his teeth set, like a man in the moody madness,” yet when he did speak his whole talk was full of piracies, plagues, poisonings, seasoned with filth and blasphemy. “Though he never attended churches and knew nothing of Christianity; no more than a Malay pirate; and though he could not read a word, yet he was spontaneously an atheist and an infidel; and during the long night watches, would enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed; nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for; but everything to be hated in the wide world. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat near him.”