When it came time to leave paradise, Melville deserted ship, ‘living in the garden of Eden before the Fall’. Three weeks later, obviously tiring of paradise, he joined another whaleship, before spending time on Tahiti, Eimeo, Maui and Oahu. Later he would pad out his version of castaway life with suitably modified extracts from Porter’s Journal, a book he only encountered after returning to the United States, and Chaplain Stewart’s altogether more restrained text. In 1842 Melville, sailing between Eimeo and Maui on board the whaler Charles and Henry, read an expurgated edition of Robinson Crusoe, and it is unlikely he ever went back to the original text. This version provided the basic guide for a white man writing about life among ‘savages’; it is likely he was familiar with similar editions from childhood, along with an equally sanitised edition of Gulliver’s Travels. Much was lost in such editions: violence, death and the exotic. These losses mattered because Melville would become ‘the Modern Crusoe’.5 This was entirely appropriate, for while he became a castaway by choice, in the mould of Alexander Selkirk, Melville was quick to see that the purpose of voyaging was to arrive at strange and exotic places, and take the opportunity to immerse himself in their exoticism. He would be a mariner by necessity, a poet by sensibility and an author by trade.
On 17 August 1843 Melville, tiring of life in a Hawaiian bowling alley, signed on as an ordinary seaman on the frigate USS United States. Here he perfected his superlative skills as a story-teller, a raconteur with a rich stock of exotic and alarming tales. He used and improved Dana’s Two Year’s Before the Mast, a text that would serve him throughout his career, along with a good selection of modern English history, travel and fiction. Among them he encountered the four-volume voyage narrative of HM ships Adventure and Beagle, now best known for the volume written by Charles Darwin, which contained a rich diet of coastal surveying, runs ashore and weirdness, human, animal and vegetable, along with a visit to Juan Fernández. Such shipboard literary adventures provided a running theme throughout Melville’s fictionalised narrative White Jacket. On the United States Melville read not only more than he had recently done, but more deeply than he had ever done before.6
On 19 November the United States reached the Juan Fernández group, sailing past Más Afuera, and then Más a Tierra. While Melville may or may not have seen one of the Juan Fernández islands from the deck of the Acushnet in 1841, he did see them from the deck of the United States, the voyage that he reworked in White Jacket. The ship did not stop in Cumberland Bay, denying Melville the opportunity to add new layers of detail to his personal robinsonade. Another sailor on the United States left a journal in which he waxed lyrical about El Yunque, the 3,000-foot-high mountain, ‘an abrupt wall of dark coloured bare rock’, and ‘caught a view of verdant glades surrounded by luxuriant woodland’ and the grassy lower slopes.
The story of Alexander Selkirk was well known to most; the journal keeper paraphrased William Cowper’s ‘Monarch of all I survey’ as they passed ‘the famed island of Juan Fernández’, and left his own response:
we approached it rapidly and run close in, and I have seldom seen a more remarkable and picturesque view than it presented when seen from a short distance. The mountain of the Anvil, so called from its resemblance to a Blacksmith’s Anvil, it appears conspicuously placed in the range of precipitous mountains and is alone an object of interest.7
‘Profoundly moved by the sight of the island, the emblem of man’s isolation from other human beings and his triumphant survival’, Melville needed little more to imagine this new world. He already knew both Crusoe and Gulliver, defining texts of mysterious island life. Fourteen years later he mused on the event, while observing a Greek island: ‘Was here again afflicted with the great curse of modern travel – scepticism. Could no more realise that St. John had ever had revelations here, than when off Juan Fernandez, could believe in Robinson Crusoe according to De Foe.’ While Hershel Parker observed that Melville was mistaken as to the reality of the story, he may have missed something deeper. It is unlikely Melville was ignorant of the fictional nature of Crusoe, or the real Selkirk. Like so many American voyagers he preferred to compound the stories, and it was this compound that he was unable to place in the landscape. His expurgated Crusoe portrayed a solitary man, living like Selkirk, rather than Defoe’s energetic colonial master, liberator of the oppressed and beacon of religious tolerance.8
Passing on the great ship anchored at Valparaiso, where news arrived that David Porter had died, in Istanbul of all places. On 27 November the colours were half-masted in respect for the man who imagined an American South Pacific, which reminded Melville that he had yet to read Porter’s Journal, the founding text of the genre. The voyage ended in October 1844 at Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston. Melville had been in the Pacific for more than three years, visited many islands and the odd mainland city, seen whaling up close, heard many marvellous tales, and developed a fair few of his own. He had enough material for a sea book or two, and in Dana both a model to emulate, and an ideal audience.9 Typee, his first book, was published in London by John Murray, printer and publisher to the Admiralty.
Melville’s Pacific books Typee and Omoo proved popular, but audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were obsessed with literal truth. They wanted Melville to be a simple chronicler of fact, a man lacking in imagination and invention, entirely unaffected by the wider cultural legacies that were the birthright of all Anglophone seafarers. As John Murray (son of Byron’s publisher) noted: ‘I wish some means could be taken to convince the English public that your Books are not fictitious imitations of Robinson Crusoe.’ Tis the feeling of being tricked which impedes their circulation here …’10 Murray needed ‘proof’ of truth to promote the book to a sceptical audience. While the dramatic reappearance of his companion on the Marquesas did no harm, Melville took a very different view. His next book, Mardi, was strikingly different. If his audience doubted the truth of his travelogue he might as well turn to fiction.
By contrast, American reviewers saw Melville as ‘the de Foe of the Ocean’, although the Southern Literary Messenger managed to mangle the analogy, declaring his work ‘the most life-like and natural fiction since Robinson’s Crusoe’s account of life on the island of Juan Fernández’. British reviews developed a different line. In February 1850 The Athenaeum judged:
Mr Melville stands as far apart from any past or present marine painter in pen and ink as Turner does from the magnificent artist villipended by Mr Ruskin for Turner’s sake – Vandevelde. He was the only writer who could convey the poetry of the Ship – her voyages and her crew – in a manner that matched Turner’s, with something of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner about them, an art higher than the actor’s or the scene painters.11
Melville had transcended a genre dominated by the literal truth of things recorded. Hitherto contemporary sea stories had varied little, and while the eye-witness travelogues of Charles Darwin and Captain Basil Hall occupied different spaces to the fiction of Fenimore Cooper and Frederick Marryat, Melville’s original approach, ‘a creation of genius’, moulded narrative into poetry, where ships and men were enchanted by the ocean.12
One astute English reviewer sensed a shift in the literary balance of power. Melville had given American literature a truly unique voice, one that surpassed the best British models, and older American tales by Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper, owning a vast, mysterious space that defied categorisation, possession or control. For all his admiration of the Royal Navy, and his cultural links with Britain, Melville was an American author, celebrating the democratic spirit of his nation, the politics of Andrew Jackson and the expansive force propelling his countrymen across the ocean to Hawaii. He read and admired British authors from Shakespeare onwards, but found an essential camaraderie with contemporary Americans. He dedicated Moby Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne because Hawthorne had been a critical sounding board for his ideas, and represented a key facet of his ambition, to be an American author writing about American subjects.13
While Melville’s adventures in the Pacific were hardly the stuff of heroic literature, his books transformed them into epic fables. Writing Moby Dick was another, perhaps more heroic journey, ‘the most daring and prolonged aesthetic adventure that had ever been conducted in the hemisphere in the English language’. Melville took the natural world, and the strange tales that surrounded it, as the source material. He then crafted versions that, in seeking the truth, achieved a heightened reality. As a whaler, Melville experienced the world he would explore in print, and heard many tall tales along the way. He soon learned how to tell a tale, his ability to hold an audience was fashioned on the long quiet watches that punctuate Pacific voyages, but unlike the majority of seafaring raconteurs he collected and developed other stories, stories with the narrative power to chill the soul, stories of mutiny and massacre, of cannibalism and disaster, none more compelling that the narratives of the whaleship Essex and the mutiny on the Globe. These were only too true. Melville’s genius lay not in the invention of the story, which was invariably based on his own experiences, or borrowed from another book, but the elemental melding of fact, fiction, and poetry into a new way of seeing.14 His quality was Shakespearean. Moby Dick gave shape and meaning to the American Pacific. Across vast extremes of space, humanity and inhumanity were wrapped up in the slaughter of advanced mammals, a horrific trade that achieved a degree of dignity through the pre-industrial nature of the pursuit – the risks run by the whalemen, and the puny scale of their whaleboat – when set against the might and majesty of a full grown sperm whale. His argument was subversive, the superior intelligence of the mighty whale defeated the obsessive intent of a maniacal, murderous mariner, and the humans paid dearly for his folly.
Melville poured his creative being into Moby Dick, it was the summation of his art, but it met with a decidedly lukewarm response. Many reviewers ignored it altogether; a few praised the lively energetic style; others criticised the lack of formal structure, the wild mixture of philosophy, biology, seafaring and unconventional religious opinions. It did not sell, ignored and abused for the rest of the century.
From the start of his career Melville had been supported by London publishers, initially John Murray and then Richard Bentley, the leading houses for naval history. They had an audience for sea stories, and recognised the merit of the new author, but the economic returns on their investment proved less rich than they hoped. This mattered because in the 1840s American literature was not a paying career, only Irving and Cooper made a living from writing, and neither was doing very well. Other authors relied on day jobs, rich wives or family support.15 After Moby Dick Melville accepted that model: he took a post in the New York Customs, writing for pleasure rather than from economic necessity.
In 1854 he compiled a series of sketches of the Galápagos Islands for Putnam’s Monthly Magazine under their Spanish name ‘The Encantadas’, or enchanted islands. Putnam’s was seeking a new American voice, and Melville duly obliged: blending his own distinctly limited experience of the islands with a rich haul of readings to mould an American literature of the sea, an imaginative reworking of reality. While their location in a vast empty ocean made the Galápagos obvious landfalls and refreshment stops, the sheer strangeness of the tortoise and iguana, the combination of the weird and the prosaic, made them ideal settings. As Melville observed: ‘for slight is the difference between good fiction and a well told fact, especially when either lies in the atmosphere of the great western ocean’. He used the ‘distance of the Pacific from the seat of America’s leading literary periodicals’ to invest the islands with ‘fantastic qualities’.16
In 1858 Melville gave a public lecture on the ‘South Seas’, a term he greatly preferred to the ‘Pacific, evoking the ancient, oak panelled rooms of the moribund South Sea Company, the ‘South Sea Bubble’, William Dampier and Harris’s voyages, the lexicon of early English South Pacific voyaging. He recognised that the acquisition of California in the late 1840s, and the almost immediate discovery of gold in 1848 ‘first opened the Pacific as a thoroughfare for American ships’, that the underlying vision, dominated by land and gold, linked American voyagers to their Spanish forebears: he made them, rather than the English, the true descendants of Juan Fernández. It was equally predictable that the Americans shifted their attention to a shorter route for the movement of men and gold. The Panama Railway, linking Aspinwall (modern Colón) and Panama across the Isthmus in 1855, ended the age of heroic voyaging. The press of progress had no sooner opened an American Pacific than it was closed down by superior communications, leaving the Polynesian islands as ‘the last provocative to those jaded tourists to whom even Europe has become hackneyed, and who look upon the Parthenon and the Pyramids with a yawn’. Deeply enamoured of the native peoples, Melville condemned missionary interference and punitive vengeance by ‘civilised sorts’.17
Melville’s pre-contact, pre-industrial Pacific was in terminal decline: continental attractions, new sources of oil and a dramatic change in methods of travel emptied the ocean of observers, whether armed with harpoons or pens. In Melville’s Pacific Juan Fernández had been a useful rendezvous; providing inbound shipping with fresh water and provisions, while those outbound could pick up news from home. Within a decade the whaling trade had shifted north, the overland rail link tapped the passenger traffic, while the idyllic island of castaway mariners subsided into the quiescent sloth of an isolated backwater. In less than a decade America would forget the South Pacific altogether, finding a new identity in the bitter legacy of internal conflict, a state ripped apart by a bitter bloody Civil War had no need of Pacific Oceans, external frontiers or sailor heroes.
After 1855 the Pacific slowly ebbed out of the American world view, the overland rail link replaced the passage round Cape Horn, while American deep water merchant shipping was largely foreign manned. When the Americans finally returned to the ocean they were heading for China, not the South Seas. The old whaling days were done, and although Latin American Republics were occasionally reminded that a heavy-handed Uncle Sam was in charge, to their abiding annoyance, the ocean has lost its allure. Soon Melville’s Nantucket whalers, who had owned the Pacific ‘as emperors own their empires’, were gone.18 The last Nantucket whaleship sailed for the Pacific in 1869, the year that a deranged, food-hoarding Owen Chase, narrator of the ultimate cannibal boat trip died. That last ship did not return. The explosive growth of mineral oil extraction collapsed an iconic industry, leaving the American Pacific silent and still.
When Melville died in 1891 the South Seas he had inherited from David Porter and Richard Henry Dana, and his own unique vision of life and death on a limitless sea, was done. America had lost contact with the sea; it became a continent, and the Wild West replaced the shimmering ocean. As Haskell Springer observed, the western frontier became ‘a hoary cliché’, while the ocean, the permanent enduring and very real American frontier ‘hardly registers today in our cultural consciousness as setting, theme, metaphor, symbol, or powerful shaper of literary history’.19 After six frenetic decades the Americans departed, leaving the stage to the descendants of Drake, Dampier, Defoe and Anson. The British remembered Melville and his ocean; the sea was still at the heart of their culture, and their ships ruled the Pacific. American commercial shipping collapsed as iron and steam replaced wood and canvas, unable to compete with the economic opportunities opened up by trans-continental expansion, industry and railroads.
NOTES
1 H. Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume I: 1819–1851, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1996, pp. 689, 724–6; Blum, The View from the Masthead, pp. 109, 115–16, 128–9.
2 C.S. Stewart, A Visit to the South Seas, in the US Ship Vincennes, During the Years 1829 and 1830, Fisher, Son, & Jackson, London, 1832; Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, p. 75; Blum, The View from the Masthead, p. 10.
3 Chase, The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, p. 100; Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, pp. 194–8.
4 Parker, Herman Me
lville, vol. I, pp. 220–12 quotes from the novel Typee.
5 Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, p. 233. 265, 385–6.
6 Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, p. 267.
7 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 180–1.
8 Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, pp. 273–7.
9 Melville thought sending the manuscript of Moby Dick to Dana ‘the best publication’; see Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, p. 715.
10 Murray to Melville, 5 December 1847, in L. Hoth (ed.), Correspondence of Herman Melville, Chicago, 1960, p. 591.
11 Reviews cited in Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, pp. 709–14.
12 Review cited in Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, p. 715.
13 Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, pp. 832, 835.
14 Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, pp. 843, 694. Melville gathered whale and whaling books; few texts were so useful as Colnett’s A Voyage to the South Atlantic, which he may have encountered in Porter’s Journal.
15 Parker, Herman Melville, vol. I, pp. 476–7.
16 Blum, The View from the Masthead, pp. 131–57. H. Melville, ‘Islands of the Pacific’, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (August 1856), p. 156, quoted in Blum, The View from the Masthead, p. 157. Text in Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories, pp. 129–94.
17 H. Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume II: 1851–1891, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2002, pp. 374–8.
18 Loveman, No Higher Law, pp. 143–9. M.R. Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power, 1882–1893, US Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1995 examines a later clash between old and new views of the Pacific.
19 Blum, The View from the Masthead, p. 194; H. Springer (ed.), America and the Sea: A Literary History, Georgia University Press, Athens, GA, 1995, p. ix.
Crusoe's Island Page 23
