Besides the “Master piece of all Gods works Jack Chase” and his comrades of the main-top, Melville was fortunate in finding a few other ship-mates to admire. There was Lemsford, “a gentlemanly young member of the after-guard,” a poet, to whose effusions Melville was happy to listen. “At the most unseasonable hours you would behold him, seated apart, in some corner among the guns—a shot-box before him, pen in hand, and eyes ‘in a fine frenzy rolling.’ Some deemed him a conjurer; others a lunatic. The knowing ones said that he must be a crazy Methodist.” Another of Melville’s friends was Nord. Before Melville knew him, he “saw in his eye that the man had been a reader of good books; I would have staked my life on it, that he had seized the right meaning of Montaigne.” With Nord, Melville “scoured all the prairies of reading; dived into the bosoms of authors, and tore out their hearts.” Melville’s friend Williams “was a thorough-going Yankee from Maine, who had been both a pedlar and a pedagogue in his day. He was honest, acute, witty, full of mirth and good humour—a laughing philosopher.” Beyond these, Melville was chary of his friendship, despite the personal intimacies imposed by the crowded conditions on shipboard. For living on board a man-of-war is like living in a market, where you dress on the doorsteps and sleep in the cellar.
Yet even on board the United States Melville did find it possible to get some solitude. “I am of a meditative humour,” he says, “and at sea used often to mount aloft at night, and, seating myself on one of the upper yards, tuck my jacket about me and give loose to reflection. In some ships in which I have done this, the sailors used to fancy that I must be studying astronomy—which, indeed, to some extent, was the case. For to study the stars upon the wide, boundless ocean, is divine as it was to the Chaldean Magi, who observed their revolutions from the plain.”
Melville was not only fortunate in his friends on the top, and above, but also in the mess to which he belonged: “a glorious set of fellows—Mess No. 1!—numbering, among the rest, my noble Captain Jack Chase. Out of a pardonable self-conceit they called themselves the Forty-two-pounder Club; meaning that they were, one and all, fellows of large intellectual and corporeal calibre.”
In White-Jacket, Melville’s purpose was to present the variegated life aboard a man-of-war; to give a vivid sense of the complexity of the typical daily existence aboard a floating armed city inhabited by five hundred male human beings. And no one else has ever done this so successfully as has Melville. “I let nothing slip, however small,” he says; “and feel myself actuated by the same motive which has prompted many worthy old chroniclers to set down the merest trifles concerning things that are destined to pass entirely from the earth, and which, if not preserved in the nick of time, must infallibly perish from the memories of man. Who knows that this humble narrative may not hereafter prove the history of an obsolete barbarism?” For White-Jacket is, certainly, written with no intent to glorify war. It is a book that a militaristic country would do well to suppress. “Courage,” Melville teaches therein, “is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.” Of a celebrated and dauntless fighter he says: “a hero in this world;—but what would they have called him in the next?” “As the whole matter of war is a thing that smites common sense and Christianity in the face,” he contends, “so everything connected with it is utterly foolish, unchristian, barbarous, brutal, and savouring of the Feejee Islands, cannibalism, saltpetre, and the devil.”
But Melville’s anti-militaristic convictions in no sense perverted his astonishingly vital presentation of life on board the United States. Though in contemplation he despised war, and was open-eyed to the abuses and iniquity on all sides of him on board the frigate; in actual fact he seems to have been unusually happy as a sailor in the navy, among his comrades of the top. The predominant mood of the book is the rollicking good-humour of high animal spirits.
There were black moments in his pleasant routine, however: the terrible nipping cold, and blasting gales, and hurricanes of sleet and hail in which he furled the main-sail in rounding Cape Horn; the flogging he witnessed; his watches at the cot of his mess-mate Shenley in the subterranean sick-bay, and Shenley’s death and burial at sea; the barbarous amputation he witnessed, and the death of the sick man at the hands of the ship’s surgeon—a scene that Flaubert might well have been proud to have written. And there were ugly experiences during the cruise that were among the most lurid in his life.
Throughout the cruise, it seems, for upward of a year he had been an efficient sailor, alert in duties, circumspect in his pleasures, liked and respected by his comrades. The ship homeward bound, and he within a few weeks of being a freeman, he heard the boatswain’s mate bawling his name at all the hatchways and along the furtherest recesses of the ship: the Captain wanted him at the mast. Melville’s heart jumped to his throat at the summons, as he hurriedly asked Fluke, the boatswain’s mate at the fore-hatchway, what was wanted of him.
“Captain wants you at the mast,” Fluke replied. “Going to flog ye, I guess.”
“For what?”