Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

—Herman Melville: Clarel.

It was in the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that Melville made good his escape from the valley of Typee. The Australian whaler—called by Melville the Julia—which had broken his four months’ captivity, lay with her main-topsail aback, about a league from the land. “She turned out to be a small, slatternly looking craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of affairs aboard. Leaning carelessly over the bulwarks were the sailors, wild, haggard-looking fellows in Scotch caps and faded blue frocks; some of them with cheeks of mottled bronze, to which sickness soon changes the rich berry-brown of a seaman’s complexion in the tropics.” So extraordinary was Melville’s appearance—“a robe of the native cloth was thrown over my shoulders, my hair and beard were uncut, and I betrayed other evidences of my recent adventure”—that as the boat came alongside, a low cry ran fore and aft the deck. Immediately on gaining the deck, Melville was beset on all sides by questions.

Indeed, never afterwards, it appears, could Melville escape a like curiosity. Henceforth he was to be “the man who lived among the cannibals.” Nor does he always seem to have been so uncommunicative as he grew in later years. In the Preface to Omoo, after recording the fact that he kept no journal during his wanderings in the South Seas, he says: “The frequency, however, with which these incidents have been verbally related, has tended to stamp them upon the memory.” There is novelty in his logic: all twice-told tales are not always just-so stories. He says, too, in the Preface to Typee: “The incidents recorded in the following pages have often served, when ‘spun as a yarn,’ not only to relieve the weariness of many a night-watch at sea, but to excite the warmest sympathies of the author’s shipmates.”

Upon being taken aboard the Julia, Melville was almost immediately seen by the captain, a young, pale, slender, sickly looking creature, who signed Melville up for one cruise, engaging to discharge him at the next port.

Life on board the Julia was, if anything, worse than life on board the Acushnet. In the first place, Melville was ill. Not until three months after his escape from Typee did he regain his normal strength. And, as always, Melville looked back with regret upon leaving the life he had so wanted to escape from while he was in the midst of it. “As the land faded from my sight,” he says, “I was all alive to the change in my condition. But how far short of our expectations is oftentimes the fulfilment of the most ardent hopes. Safe aboard of a ship—so long my earnest prayer—with home and friends once more in prospect, I nevertheless felt weighed down with a melancholy that could not be shaken off.” Melville felt he was leaving cannibalism forever—and the departure shot a pang into his heart.

The ship’s company were a sorry lot: reduced by desertion from thirty-two to twenty souls, and more than half of the remaining were more or less unwell from a long sojourn in a dissipated port. Some were wholly unfit for duty; one or two were dangerously ill. The rest managed to stand their watch, though they could do little. The crew was, for the most part, a typical whaling crew: “villains of all nations and dyes; picked up in the lawless Spanish Main, and among the savages of the islands.” The provisions, too, on board the Julia were notoriously bad, even for a whaler. Melville’s regret at leaving Typee was not mere wanton sentimentality.

The captain was despised by all aboard. He was commonly called “The Cabin Boy,” “Paper Jack,” “Miss Guy” and other descriptive titles. Though sheepish looking, he was a man of still, timid cunning that did not endear him to Melville.

The mate, John Jermin, was of the efficient race of short thick-set men: bullet headed, with a fierce little squint out of one eye, and a nose with a rakish tilt to one side. His was the art of knocking a man down with irresistible good humour, so the very men he flogged loved him like a brother. He had but one failing: he abhorred weak infusions, and cleaved manfully to strong drink. He was never completely sober: and when he was nearly drunk he was uncommonly obstreperous.

Jermin was master of every man aboard except the ship’s carpenter,—a man so excessively ugly he went by the name of “Beauty.” As ill-favoured as Beauty was in person, he was no less ugly in temper: his face had soured his heart. Melville witnessed an encounter between Jermin and Beauty: an encounter that showed up clearly the state of affairs on board. While Beauty was thrashing Jermin in the forecastle, the captain called down the scuttle: “Why, why, what’s all this about? Mr. Jermin, Mr. Jermin—carpenter, carpenter: what are you doing down there? Come on deck; come on deck.” In reply to this, Doctor Long Ghost cried out in a squeak, “Ah! Miss Guy, is that you? Now, my dear, go right home, or you’ll get hurt.” The captain dipped his head down the scuttle to make answer, to receive, full in the face, the contents of a tin of soaked biscuit and tea-leaves. Things were not well aboard the Julia.