The itinerary of this fifteen months’ cruise is not known. In Moby-Dick Melville says: “I stuffed a shirt or two into my carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific.” In Omoo, Melville speaks of “an old man-of-war’s-man whose acquaintance I had made at Rio de Janeiro, at which place the ship touched in which I sailed from home.” In White-Jacket and Omoo he speaks of whaling off the coast of Japan. And in Moby-Dick, in a passage that reads like an excerpt from the Book of Revelations, he indicates a more frigid whereabouts: “I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!”
But what waters the Acushnet sailed, and what shores she touched before she dropped anchor in the Marquesas, little positively is known.
The last eighteen or twenty days, however, during which time the light trade winds silently swept the Acushnet towards the Marquesas, were to Melville, when viewed in retrospect, “delightful, lazy, languid.” Land was ahead! And with the refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass in prospect, Melville and the whole ship’s company resigned themselves to a disinclination to do anything, “and spreading an awning over the forecastle, slept, ate, and lounged under it the livelong day.” The promise of the ship’s at last breaking through the inexorable circle of the changeless horizon into the fragrance of firm and loamy earth, gave Melville an eye for the sea-scape he had formerly abhorred. “The sky presented a clear expanse of the most delicate blue, except along the skirts of the horizon, where you might see a thin drapery of pale clouds which never varied their form or colour. The long, measured, dirge-like swell of the Pacific came rolling along, with its surface broken by little tiny waves, sparkling in the sunshine. Every now and then a shoal of flying fish, scared from the water under the bows, would leap into the air, and fall the next moment like a shower of silver into the sea.”
In later years, memory treacherously transformed this watery environment upon which Melville and Toby had vented their youthful and impotent imprecations. From his farm in the Berkshire Hills, he looked back regretfully upon his rovings over the Pacific, and by a pathetic fallacy, convinced himself that in them “the long supplication of my youth was answered.” The spell of the Pacific descended upon him not while he was cruising the Pacific, however, but while he was busy upon his farm in Pittsfield, “building and patching and tinkering away in all directions,” as he described his activities to Hawthorne.
Strangely jumbled anticipations haunted Melville, he says, as drowsing on the silent deck of the Acushnet he was being borne towards land: towards the Marquesas, one of the least known islands in the Pacific.
“The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up!” exclaims Melville in excited prospect. “Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoa-nut—coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols—heathenish rites and human sacrifices.”
After fifteen months aboard the Acushnet, Melville was ripe to discover alluring Edenic beauties in tropical heathendom. And in the end, so intolerable was the prospect of dragging out added relentless days under the guardianship of Captain Pease, that as a last extremity, Melville preferred to risk the fate of Captain Cook, and find a strolling cenotaph in the bellies of a tribe of practising cannibals.
CHAPTER IX
THE PACIFIC
“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gentle awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb, and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.”