After running all night with a light breeze straight for the island, the Acushnet was in easy distance of the shore by morning. But as the Acushnet had approached the island from the side opposite to Tyohee—christened by Captain Porter, Melville remembered, Massachusetts Bay,—they were obliged to sail some distance along the shore. Melville was surprised not to find “enamelled and softly swelling plains, shaded over by delicious groves, and watered by purling brooks.” Instead he found himself cruising along a bold rock-bound coast, dashed high against by the beating surf, and broken here and there into deep inlets that offered sudden glimpses of blooming valleys, deep glens, waterfalls and waving groves. As the ship sailed by the projecting and rocky headlands with their short inland vistas of new and startling beauty, one of the sailors exclaimed to Melville, pointing with his hand in the direction of the treacherous valley: “There—there’s Typee. Oh, the bloody cannibals, what a meal they’d make of us if we were to take it into our heads to land! but they say they don’t like sailors’ flesh, it’s too salt. I say, matey, how should you like to be shoved ashore there, eh?” Melville shuddered at the question, he says, little thinking that within the space of a few weeks he would actually be a captive in that self-same valley.
Towards noon they swung abreast of their harbour. No description can do justice to its beauty, Melville tells us. But its beauty was to him not an immediate discovery. All that he saw was the tri-coloured flag of France trailing over the stern of six vessels, whose black hulls and bristling broadsides floated incongruously in that tranquil bay.
The first emissary from the shore to welcome the Acushnet was a visitor in that interesting state of intoxication when a man is amiable and helpless: a south-sea vagabond, once a lieutenant in the English navy, recently appointed pilot to the harbour by the invincible French. He was aided by some benevolent person out of his whale-boat into the Acushnet, and though utterly unable to stand erect or navigate his own body, he magnanimously proffered to steer the ship to a good anchorage: a feat Captain Pease did for himself, despite the amazing volubility of the visitor in contrary commands.
This renegade from Christendom and humanity was of a type not infrequently met with in accounts of the South Seas. At Hannamanoo, Melville came across another such—a white man in the South Sea girdle, and tattooed on the face, living among a tribe of savages and apparently settled for life, so perfectly satisfied seemed he with his circumstances. This man was an Englishman,—Lem Hardy he called himself,—who had deserted from a trading brig touching at Hannamanoo for wood and water some ten years previous. Aboard the Acushnet he told his history. “Thrown upon the world a foundling, his paternal origin was as much a mystery to him as the genealogy of Odin; and scorned by everybody, he fled the parish workhouse when a boy, and launched upon the sea. He had followed it for several years, a dog before the mast, and now he had thrown it up forever.” He had gone ashore as a sovereign power, armed with a musket and a bag of ammunition, and soon became, what he was when Melville found him, military leader of the tribe, war-god of the entire island, living under the sacred protection of an express edict of the taboo, his person inviolable forever. In Iles Marquises, ou Nouka-Hiva, Histoire, Géographie, Mœurs et Considérations Générales (Paris, 1843) by Vincendon-Dumoulin and Desgraz is to be found (pages 356-359) a history of two more of these vagabonds: one Joseph Cabri, a Frenchman, and one E. Roberts, an Englishman. Cabri returned to Europe, for a time, to find the novelty of his tattooing both an embarrassment and a source of livelihood. He was examined by grave learned societies, was presented before several crowned heads, and submitted his person to intimate examination to any one who would pay his fee. In 1818 he died in obscurity and poverty in Valenciennes, his birth place. His historians regret that his precious person was not preserved in alcohol to delight the inquiring mind of later generations. The Pacific, it would appear, was early a place of refuge for men with an insurmountable homesickness for the mud. Melville soon came to believe that the gifts of civilisation to the South Seas were without exception very doubtful blessings; he came to be a special pleader for the barbaric virtues; when these virtues were practised by legitimate barbarians; but the spectacle of such men as Hardy fell beyond the pale of his unusually broad sympathies. Though he was despairingly alert to the vices of Christendom, never was he betrayed into a corrupt hankering to recapitulate into savagery. Though he excused the cannibalism of the Marquesans as an amiable weakness, he gazed upon Hardy “with a feeling akin to horror.” Hardy’s tattooing was to Melville the outward and visible sign of the lowest degradation to which a mortal, nurtured in a civilisation that had for thousands of years a pathetically imperfect struggle striven to some significance above the beast, could possibly descend. “What an impress!” Melville exclaimed in superlative loathing. “Far worse than Cain’s—his was perhaps a wrinkle, or a freckle, which some of our modern cosmetics might have effaced.” But Hardy’s tattooing was to Melville a mark indelible of the blackest of all betrayals.
More worthy emissaries than the pilot to the port of Tyohee were to welcome Melville to the Marquesas. The entrance of the Acushnet brought from the shore a flotilla of native canoes. “Such strange outcries and passionate gesticulations I never certainly heard or saw before,” Melville says. “You would have thought the islanders were on the point of flying at one another’s throats, whereas they were only amiably engaged in disentangling their boats.” Melville was surprised at the strange absence of a single woman in the invading party, not then knowing that canoes were “taboo” to women, and that consequently, “whenever a Marquesan lady voyages by water, she puts in requisition the paddles of her own fair body.”
As the Acushnet approached within a mile and a half of the foot of the bay, Melville noticed a singular commotion in the water ahead of the vessel: the women, swimming out from shore, eager to embrace the advantages of civilisation. “As they drew nearer,” Melville says, “and as I watched the rising and sinking of their forms, and beheld the uplifted right arm bearing above the water the girdle of tappa, and their long dark hair trailing beside them as they swam, I almost fancied they could be nothing else but so many mermaids. Under slow headway we sailed right into the midst of these swimming nymphs, and they boarded us at every quarter; many seizing hold of the chain-plates and springing into the chains; others, at the peril of being run over by the vessel in her course, catching at the bob-stays, and wreathing their slender forms about the ropes, hung suspended in the air. All of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they clung dripping with the brine and glowing with the bath, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half enveloping their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity, laughing gaily at one another, and chattering away with infinite glee. Nor were they idle the while, for each performed the simple offices of the toilet for the other. Their luxuriant locks, wound up and twisted into the smallest possible compass, were freed from the briny element; the whole person carefully dried, and from a small little round shell that passed from hand to hand, anointed with a fragrant oil: their adornments were completed by passing a few loose folds of white tappa, in a modest cincture, around the waist. Thus arrayed, they no longer hesitated, but flung themselves lightly over the bulwarks, and were quickly frolicking about the decks. Many of them went forward, perching upon the headrails or running out upon the bowsprit, while others seated themselves upon the taffrail, or reclined at full length upon the boats.”
The ship was fairly captured, and it yielded itself willing prisoner. In the evening, after anchor had been struck, the deck was hung with lanterns, and the women, decked in flowers, danced with “an abandoned voluptuousness” that was a prelude “to every species of riot and debauchery.” According to Melville’s account, on board the Acushnet “the grossest licentiousness and the most shameful inebriety prevailed, with occasional and but short-lived interruptions, through the whole period of her stay.”
Nor were the French at the Marquesas neglectful of their duties to the islanders. Admiral Du Petit-Thouars had stationed about one hundred soldiers ashore, according to Melville’s account. Every other day the troops marched out in full regalia, and for hours went through all sorts of military evolutions to impress a congregation of naked cannibals with the superior sophistications of Christendom. “A regiment of the Old Guard, reviewed on a summer’s day in the Champs Elysées,” Melville vouches, “could not have made a more critically correct appearance.” The French had also with them, to enrich their harvest of savage plaudits, a puarkee nuee, or “big hog”—in more cultivated language, a horse. One of the officers was commissioned to prance up and down the beach at full speed on this animal, with results that redounded to the glory of France. This horse “was unanimously pronounced by the islanders to be the most extraordinary specimen of zoology that had ever come under their observation.”
It would be an ungracious presumption to contend that the French, while at the Marquesas, exhibited to the natives only the sterner side of civilisation. The behaviour of the French at Tahiti leaves room for the hope that they were no less gallant at the Marquesas. An officer of the Reine Blanche, writing at sea on October 10, 1842, of the exploits of his countrymen at Tahiti, says, in part: “In the evening, more than a hundred women came on board. At dinner time, the officers and midshipmen invited them gallantly to their tables; and the repasts, which were very gay, were prolonged sufficiently late at night, so that fear might keep on board those of the women who were afraid to sail home by the doubtful light of the stars.” The last three lines of this letter were suppressed by the Journal de Debats, it is true, but given in the National and other journals. Three days later the letter was officially pronounced “inexact” by the Moniteur, which courageously asserted that “it is utterly false that a frigate has been the theatre of corruption, in any country whatever; and French mothers may continue to congratulate themselves that their sons serve in the navy of their country.”
While the Frenchmen at the Marquesas—no less than the Americans, one hopes with pardonable patriotic jealousy—were giving their mothers at home cause for congratulation, Melville came to the determination to leave the ship; “to use the concise, point-blank phrase of the sailors, I had made up my mind to ‘run away.’” And that his reasons for resolving to take this step were numerous and weighty, he says, may be inferred from the fact that he chose rather to risk his fortune among cannibals than to endure another voyage on board the Acushnet. In Typee he gives a general account of the captain’s bad treatment of the crew, and his non-fulfilment of agreements. Life aboard the Acushnet has already been sufficiently expatiated upon.