Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

But it was Doctor Long Ghost—he who so mocked the captain—who figures most largely in Melville’s history: a man remarkable both in appearance and in personality. He was over six feet—a tower of bones, with a bloodless complexion, fair hair and a pale unscrupulous grey eye that twinkled occasionally with the very devil of mischief. At the beginning of the cruise of the Julia, as ship’s doctor, he had lived in the cabin with the captain. But once on a time they had got into a dispute about politics, and the doctor, getting into a rage, had driven his argument home with his fist, and left the captain on the floor, literally silenced. The captain replied by shutting him up in his state-room for ten days on a diet of bread and water. Upon his release he went forward with his chests among the sailors where he was welcomed as a good fellow and an injured man.

The early history of Doctor Long Ghost he kept to himself; but it was Melville’s conviction that he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy, and associated with gentlemen. “He quoted Virgil, and talked of Hobbes of Malmsbury, besides repeating poetry by the canto, especially Hudibras.” In the most casual manner, too, he could refer to an amour he had in Palermo, his lion hunting before breakfast among the Kaffirs, and the quality of coffee he had drunk in Muscat.

Melville was in no condition, physically, to engage in the ship’s duties, so he and Doctor Long Ghost fraternised in the forecastle, where they were treated by the crew as distinguished guests. There they talked, played chess—with an outfit of their own manufacture—and there Melville read the books of the Long Doctor, over and over again, not omitting a long treatise on the scarlet fever.

At its best, the forecastle is never an ideal abode: but the forecastle of the Julia—its bunks half wrecked, its filthy sailors’ pantry, and its plague of rats and cockroaches—must have made the Highlander seem as paradise in retrospect. The forecastle of the Julia, Melville says, “looked like the hollow of an old tree going to decay. In every direction the wood was damp and discoloured, and here and there soft and porous. Moreover, it was hacked and hewed without mercy, the cook frequently helping himself to splinters for kindling wood.” The viciousness of the crew of the Julia, did not, of course, perceptibly enhance the charms of the forecastle. Nor was Melville’s estate made more enviable when the man in the bunk next to his went wildly delirious. One night Melville was awakened from a vague dream of horrors by something clammy resting on him: his neighbour, with a stark stiff arm reached out into Melville’s bunk, had during the night died. The crew rejoiced at his death.

For weeks the Julia tacked about among the islands of the South Seas. The captain was ill, and Jermin steered the Julia, to Tahiti, to arrive off the island the moment that Admiral Du Petit-Thouars was firing, from the Reine Blanche, a salute in honour of the treaty he had just forced Pomare to sign.

But to the astonishment of the crew, Jermin kept the ship at sea, fearing the desertion of all his men if he struck anchor. His purpose was to set the sick captain ashore, and to resume the voyage of the Julia at once, to return to Tahiti after a certain period agreed upon, to take the captain off. The crew were in no mood to view this manœuvre with indifference. Melville and Long Ghost cautioned them against the folly of immediate mutiny, and on the fly-leaf of an old musty copy of A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies, a round-robin was indited, giving a statement of the crew’s grievances, and concluding with the earnest hope that the consul would at once come off and see how matters stood. Pritchard, the missionary consul, was at that time in England; his place was temporarily filled by one Wilson, son of the well-known missionary of that name, and no honour to his ancestor. It did not promise well for the crew that Wilson was an old friend of Captain Guy’s.

The round-robin was the prelude to iniquitous bullying and stupidity on the part of Wilson, Jermin, and Captain Guy. To the crew, it seemed that justice was poisoned at the fountain head. They gazed on the bitter waters, did a stout menagerie prance, and raged into mutiny. Then it was, after one of the men had all but succeeded in maliciously running the Julia straight upon a reef, that the good ship was piloted into the harbour of Papeetee, and the crew—including Melville and the Long Doctor, who were misjudged because of the company they kept—were for five days and nights held in chains on board the Reine Blanche. At the end of that time they were tried, one by one, before a tribunal composed of Wilson and two elderly European residents. Melville was examined last. One of the elderly gentlemen condescended to take a paternal interest in Melville. “Come here, my young friend,” he said; “I’m extremely sorry to see you associated with these bad men; do you know what it will end in?” Melville was in no mood for smug and salvationly solicitations. He had already declared that his resolution with respect to the ship was unalterable: he stuck to this resolution. Wilson thereupon pronounced the whole crew clean gone in perversity, and steeped in abomination beyond the reach of clemency. He then summoned a fat old native, Captain Bob—and a hearty old Bob he proved—giving him directions to marshal the crew to a place of safe keeping.

Along the Broom Road they were led: and to Melville, escaped from the forecastle of the Julia and the confined decks of the frigate, the air breathed spices. “The tropical day was fast drawing to a close,” he says; “and from where we were, the sun looked like a vast red fire burning in the woodlands—its rays falling aslant through the endless ranks of trees, and every leaf fringed with flame.”

About a mile from the village they came to the Calabooza Beretanee—the English jail.

The jail was extremely romantic in appearance: a large oval native house, with a dazzling white thatch, situated near a mountain stream that, flowing from a verdant slope, spread itself upon a beach of small sparkling shells, and then trickled into the sea. But the jail was ill adapted for domestic comforts, the only piece of furniture being two stout pieces of timber, about twenty feet in length, gouged to serve as stocks. John La Farge, in his Reminiscences of the South Seas, says: “We try to find, by the little river that ends our walk, on this side of the old French fort, the calaboose where Melville was shut up. There is no one to help us in our search; no one remembers anything. Buildings occupy the spaces of woodland that Melville saw about him. Nothing remains but the same charm of light and air which he, like all others, has tried to describe and to bring back home in words. But the beach is still as beautiful as if composed by Claude Lorraine.”