Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

—Herman Melville: Moby-Dick.

First sighted by Balboa in the year 1513, and for more than two centuries regarded by the Spaniards as their own possession, these midmost waters of the world lay locked behind one difficult and dangerous portal. During these centuries the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic—but arms of the Pacific—were gloomy with mysteries. The Spanish sailors used to chant a litany when they saw St. Elmo’s Fire glittering on the mast-head, and exorcised the demon of the waterspout by elevating their swords in the form of crosses. Mermaids still lived in the tranquil blue waters. The darkness of the storm was thronged with gigantic shadowy figures. The pages of Purchas and Hackluyt offer no lack of supernatural visitations. Thus superstition joined with substantial danger to guard the entrance to the Pacific. Balboa himself was beheaded. Everybody who had to do with Magellan’s first passage into the Pacific came to a bad end. The captain was murdered in a brawl by the natives of the Philippines; the sailor De Lepe, who first sighted the straits from the mast-head, was taken prisoner by the Algerians, embraced the faith of the False Prophet, and so lost his everlasting soul; Ruy Falero died raving mad. There was a fatality upon the whole ship’s company.

Two years before Magellan’s memorable voyage, the western boundary of the Pacific had been approached by the Portuguese, Francisco Serrano having discovered the Molucca Islands immediately after the conquest of Malacca by the celebrated Albuquerque. To stimulate exertion, and to preclude contention in the rivalry of dominion between Portugal and Spain, Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander the Sixth, drew a line down the map through the western limits of the Portuguese province of Brazil, and allotted to Portugal all heathen lands she should discover on the eastern half of this line; to Spain, all heathen lands to the west. So shadowy was the knowledge of geography at the time that this apportionment of His Holiness left it doubtful to which hemisphere the Moluccas belonged; and the precious spices peculiar to those islands rendered the decision important. To ascertain this was the purpose of Magellan’s voyage across the Pacific. In this waste of waters Magellan made two discoveries: a range of small islands—including Guam among its number—which he named Ladrones, on account of the thievish disposition of the natives; and, at the cost of his life, one of the islands which has since been called the Philippines.

The voyage of Magellan proved that by the allotment of Alexander the Sixth, the Pacific belonged to Spain. And though for eight generations the Spaniards were hereditary lords of the Pacific, they soon grew greedy and jealous and lazy in their splendid and undisturbed monopoly. Once or twice, it is true, the English devils took the great galleon: but only once or twice in all these years. Lesser spoils occasionally fell into the hands of pirates; for did not Dampier take off Juan Fernandez a vessel laden with “a quantity of marmalade, a stately and handsome mule, and an immense wooden image of the Virgin Mary”? Towns, too, were occasionally sacked. But the Spaniards feared little danger, and ran few risks. They grew richer and lazier, and troubled themselves little in exploring the great expanse of the Pacific. They coasted the Americas as far north as California, which they half-suspected to be an island. The Galapagos, Juan Fernandez, and Masafuera they knew; a part of China, a part of Japan, the Philippines, Celebes, Timor, and the Ladrones. Voyages across the Pacific between Manilla and Acapulco were not infrequent: but these voyages were sterile in discovery. The traditional route, once through the Straits of Magellan, was to touch at Juan Fernandez, coast South America, stand in at Panama, turn out to sea again, appear off Acapulco, and then sail in the parallel of 13° N. to the Ladrones. The Abbé Raynal states that the strictest orders were given by the Spanish Government prohibiting captains on any account to deviate from the track laid down on their charts during the voyage between these places.

In the darkness of this uncharted ocean there was believed to stretch a great southern continent of fabulous wealth and beauty: the Terra Australis Incognita that survived pertinaciously in the popular imagination until the time of Captain Cook. Members of the Royal Society had proved, beyond doubt, that the right balance of the earth required a southern continent; geographers pointed out how Quiros, Juan Fernandez and Tasman had touched at various points of this continent. Politicians and poets agreed that treasures of all kinds would be found there,—though they varied in their appropriation of these Utopian resources. The controversy over the existence of this continent was vehemently revived in 1770 by the appearance of Alexander Dalrymple’s An Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean. Dalrymple was an ardent advocate of the reality of the Terra Australis Incognita, and to encourage an experimental confirmation of his faith, he dedicated his handsome quarto: “To the man who, emulous of Magellan and the heroes of former times, undeterred by difficulties and unseduced by pleasure, shall persist through every obstacle, and not by chance but by virtue and good conduct succeed in establishing an intercourse with a Southern Continent.” Dr. Kippis, Captain Cook’s biographer, writing in 1788, says he remembers how Cook’s “imagination was captivated in the early part of his life with the hypothesis of a southern continent. He has often dwelt upon it with rapture.” The year following Dalrymple’s dedication, Captain Cook, back from his first voyage in the Pacific, was commissioned by the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, to go out and settle once and for all the mystery of the Southern Continent. So long as this mystery remained unsettled, the Pacific stretched a great limbo pregnant with the wildest fancies. Between the times of Magellan and Captain Cook there was no certainty as to what revelations it held to disgorge.

It was in 1575 that Drake climbed the hill and the tree upon its summit from which could be seen both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. “Almighty God,” this devout pirate exclaimed, “of thy holiness give me life and leave to sail in an English ship upon that sea!” God heard his prayer, and blessed him with rich pirate spoils in the Pacific, and honoured him at home by a “stately visit” from the Queen. Yet he died at sea, and in a leaden coffin his body was dropped into the ocean slime. Cavendish continued the British tradition of lucrative piracy, and in 1586 captured the great plate galleon. This stimulated competition in high-sea robbery, until in 1594, the capture of Sir Richard Hawkins daunted even English courage.

In 1595, Alvaro Mendana de Neyra, departing from the beaten track across the Pacific on his way to occupy the Solomon Islands which he had discovered twenty-eight years earlier, chanced upon a new group of islands which he named Las Marquesas de Mendoca, in honour of his patron Mendoca, Marquis of Cenete, and viceroy of Peru. He had mass said on shore, refitted his vessels, planted a few crosses in devout memorial, to die before he accomplished the object of his voyage, and to leave the Marquesas unmolested by visitors until visited by Captain Cook in 1774. It was in the Marquesas, of course, that Melville lived with the cannibals.

The seventeenth century saw the Dutch upon the Pacific. During the greater part of the century, England was busy with troublesome affairs at home; the Spanish were too indolent to bestir themselves. Unmolested by competition, the great Dutch navigators, Joris Spilbergen, La Maire, Schouten, and, most famous of all, Tasman, drifted among the islands of the extreme southwest. It was not until 1664 that the French sailed upon the Pacific. To the end of the century belong the buccaneers—Morgan, Sawkin, Edward Cooke, Woodes, Rogers, Cowley, Clipperton, Shelvocke and Dampier. William Dampier, the greatest of these voyagers, crossed the Pacific, missing all islands but New Zealand. He added but little to the stock of knowledge that had been already collected from the narratives of Tasman, or Schouten. W. Clark Russell, in his life of Dampier, suggests it as probable “that his failure, coupled with the despondent tone that characterises his narrative, went far to retard further explorations of the South Seas. It was no longer disputed that a vast body of land stood in those waters. All that Dampier said in its favour was theoretical; all that he had to report as an eye-witness, all that he could speak to as facts, was extremely discouraging.” The myth of the entrancing beauties and voluptuous charms of the South Seas owes nothing to Dampier except, perhaps, a delayed inception. Of the inhabitants of the South Seas he reports that they had the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any people he ever saw; and, says he: “I have seen a great variety of Savages.” He speaks of them as “blinking Creatures,” with “black skins and Hair frizzled, tall, thin, etc.”

Russell considered the depressing influence of Dampier’s recorded adventures manifested in the direction given to later navigators. Byron in 1764, Wallis, Mouat, and Cartaret in 1766, were despatched on voyages round the world to search the South Seas for new lands; but only one of them, Cartaret, deviated from Dampier’s track, confining his explorations in this way to a glance at New Guinea and New Britain, to the discovery of New Ireland, lying adjacent to the island Dampier sailed around, and to giving names to the Solomon and other groups. Both Byron and Wallis, it is true, did enter the archipelago of the Society Islands, Wallis discovering island after island, until he reached Tahiti. Wallis’s account of Otaheite—on the authority of the London Missionary Society “to be pronounced so as to rhyme with the adjective mighty”—and its people, occupies a great part of his narrative. Though his reception was not without a show of arms and bloodshed, the native women exerted themselves tirelessly to do unselfish penance for the hostile behaviour of the native males. Oammo, the ruling chief, retired from the scene, leaving the felicitation of the strangers in the hands of his consort, Oberea, “whose whole character,” according to the observations of the London Missionary Society, “for sensuality exceeded even the usual standard of Otaheite.” In the establishment of friendship that ensued, Wallis sent Lieutenant Furneaux ashore to erect a British pennant, and in defiance of the Pope, to take formal possession of the island in the name of King George the Third. Hopelessly unimpressed by the whole transaction, the natives took down the flag during the night, and for a long time afterwards the ruling chieftains wore it about their persons as a badge of royalty. Oberea’s hospitality was requited by a parting gift of some turkeys, a gander, a goose, and a cat. Oberea’s live stock figures repeatedly in the later annals of Tahiti.

Early in April, 1768, Tahiti was again visited by Europeans. Louis de Bougainville was in Tahiti only eight days. But, if Bougainville’s account be not the bravado of patriotism, during that period his ship’s company seem to have outdone their English predecessors in sensuality and open indecency. Several murders were committed more privately. And the natives, with an eye for the detection of such matters, exposed among the ship’s crew a woman who had sailed from France disguised in man’s apparel. Bougainville attached to himself a native youth, Outooroo, brother of a chieftain; Outooroo accompanied Bougainville to France. Within a few weeks after sailing from Tahiti, Bougainville discovered that Outooroo, as well as others aboard, were infected with venereal disease. Wallis very specifically asserts that his ship’s company were untouched by disreputable symptoms six months before, and still longer after their visit at Tahiti. In any event, before the first year had elapsed after the discovery of Tahiti, its inhabitants were exhibiting unmistakable signs of their contact with civilisation. In 1799, the London Missionary Society gave warning to the world: “The present existence, and the general prevalence of the evil, is but too obvious; and it concurs with other dreadful effects of sensuality, to threaten the entire population of this beautiful island, if it is not seasonably averted by the happy influence of the gospel.” The steady extinction of the Polynesian races would seem to indicate that this happy influence has, to date, not been efficacious. When Pope Alexander the Sixth gave to the indolent Spanish the heathen for inheritance, His Holiness was being used by a mysterious Providence as the guardian of heathendom. It was not until he had been for over two centuries and a half in his tomb, that the heretical and more enterprising English came to dispel the Egyptian darkness that hung protectingly over most of the islands of the Pacific, and to expose a competent barbarism to the devastating aggressions of civilisation.