In 1846
In 1865
Toby, or Richard Tobias Greene, was, according to notices in Chicago papers at the time of his death on August 24, 1892, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1825. He was as a child brought to America by his father, who settled in Rochester, New York, where Toby “took public school and academic courses.” Before he was seventeen he shipped aboard the Acushnet, there to fall in with Melville and to accompany him into the uncorrupted heart of cannibalism. Toby returned to civilisation to study law with John C. Spencer, “the noted attorney whose son was executed for mutiny at Canandaigua, New York,” and was, in time, admitted to the bar. He relinquished jurisprudence for journalism, and was for some indefinite period editor of the Buffalo Courier. He restlessly varied his activities by assisting in constructing the first telegraph line west of New York State, and opened the first telegraph office in Ohio, at Sandusky. For some years he published the Sandusky Mirror. In 1857 he moved to Chicago and took a place on the Times. With the Civil War he enlisted in the 6th Infantry of Missouri and for three years was “trusted clerk at General Grant’s headquarters.” He was discharged June, 1864, to enlist again October 19, 1864, in the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. With the end of the war he returned to Chicago, ruined in health. Yet he continued to exert himself as a public-minded citizen, and at his funeral were “many fellow Masons, comrades from the G.A.R. and others who came to pay their respects to the late traveller, editor and soldier.”
After the publication of Typee there were delighted exchanges of recognition and gratitude between him and Melville. And though these two men grew further and further apart with years, there continued between them an irregular correspondence and a pathetic loyalty to youthful associations: felicitations that grew to be as conscientious and hollow as the ghastly amiabilities of a college reunion. Toby’s son, born in 1854, he named Herman Melville Greene (a compliment to Melville adopted by some of his later shipmates in the navy); and Melville presented his namesake with a spoon—the gift he always made to namesakes. Toby’s nephew was named Richard Melville Hair, and another spoon was shipped west. In 1856 Toby wrote Melville he had read Melville’s most recent book, Piazza Tales. Toby’s critical efforts exhausted themselves in the comment: “The Encantadas called up reminiscences of the Acushnet, and days gone by.” In 1858, when Melville was lecturing about the country, Toby addressed a dutiful letter to his “Dear Old Shipmate,” asking that Melville visit him while in Cleveland. If the visit was ever made, it has not transpired. In 1860 Toby wrote to Melville: “Hope you enjoy good health and can yet stow away five shares of duff! I would be delighted to see you and ‘freshen the nip’ while you would be spinning a yarn as long as the main-top bowline.” In acknowledgment Melville during the year following sent Toby the gift of a spoon. In reply Toby observes: “My mind often reverts to the many pleasant moonlight watches we passed together on the deck of the Acushnet as we whiled away the hours with yarn and song till eight bells.” Even to the third generation Toby’s descendants were “proud of the immortality” with which Melville had invested Toby. Miss Agnes Repplier has written on The Perils of Immortality. There are perils, too, in immortalisation.
But in the days of Toby’s unredeemed immortality on board the Acushnet before he joined the Masons and the Grand Army of the Republic, Toby was to Melville a singularly grateful variation to the filth and hideousness and brutality of the human refuse with which he cruised the high seas in search of oil and bone.
Melville was fifteen months on board the Acushnet; and for the last six months of this period he was out of sight of land; cruising “some twenty degrees to the westward of the Gallipagos”—“cruising after the sperm-whale under the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific—the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else.”
The ship itself was, at the expiration of this period, deplorable in appearance. The paint on her sides, burnt up by the scorching sun, was puffed up and cracked. She trailed weeds after her; about her stern-piece an unsightly bunch of barnacles had formed; and every time she rose on a sea, she showed her copper torn away, or hanging in jagged strips. The only green thing in sight aboard her was the green paint on the inside of the bulwarks, and that, to Melville, was of “a vile and sickly hue.” The nearest suggestion of the grateful fragrance of the loamy earth, was the bark which clung to the wood used for fuel—bark gnawed off and devoured by the Captain’s pig—and the mouldy corn and the brackish water in the little trough before which the solitary tenant of the chicken-coop stood “moping all day long on that everlasting one leg of his.”
The usage on board in Melville’s ship, as in that of J. Ross Browne and many another, had been tyrannical in the extreme. In Typee he says: “We had left both law and equity on the other side of the Cape.” And Captain Pease, arbitrary and violent, promptly replied to all complaints and remonstrances with the butt-end of a hand-spike, “so convincingly administered as effectually to silence the aggrieved party.”
“The sick had been inhumanly neglected; the provisions had been doled out in scanty allowance.” The provisions on board the Acushnet had consisted chiefly of “delicate morsels of beef and pork, cut on scientific principles from every part of the animal and of all conceivable shapes and sizes, carefully packed in salt and stored away in barrels; affording a never-ending variety in their different degrees of toughness, and in the peculiarities of their saline properties. Choice old water, too, two pints of which were allowed every day to every soul on board; together with ample store of sea-bread, previously reduced to a state of petrification, with a view to preserve it either from decay or consumption in the ordinary mode, were likewise provided for the nourishment and gastronomic enjoyment of the crew.” Captain Davis, in his Nimrod of the Sea, suggests that petrification is not the worst state of ship’s-biscuits; he recounts how with mellower fare “epicures on board hesitate to bite the ship-bread in the dark, and the custom is to tap each piece as you break it off, to dislodge the large worms that breed there.”