Young Melville felt the world closing in on him. He had no answer to the major problem of civilization, namely, how to get a living without losing all the other things that make life joyful and significant. Herman’s contemporaries, with all their factories and mines and new-fangled machinery and speeding ships, were perhaps as far from solving this problem as any civilization has yet been: the only people who were contented with the current solution were those whose narrow aims and limited personalities were completely fulfilled by the business routine itself. Herman was not of that cast, so he must invent an alternative. If he cannot go to college, he must at least have that other advantage of an education: the Grand Tour. He will be his own tutor, guide, philosopher, and friend. Why should he not ship for a trip to Europe? He would not merely earn his keep; but at the end of his voyage he might have a little to spare. Europe itself was at least a goal, or the promise of a goal; not a dead-end, like the bank.
Herman had not spent his early years in Manhattan for nothing. He doubtless knew, up in the fresh waters of Albany, the nostalgia of desiring just a whiff of salt-laden wind: when he looked at the little glass ship in the square case that stood on the claw-footed Dutch table in one corner of the sitting-room, that admirable ship, with masts, yards, ropes, all of glass, and little glass sailors on the rigging, and a glass figurehead, and a glass captain smoking a glass cigar and looking at the world with a glassy eye, all his desires somehow crystallized into a sudden overwhelming passion to be on the sea, and to wake up some early moonlit morning in a distant port, with dawn breaking over strange roofs. His father’s books reinforced his dreams; and he was still bound by his father’s heroic image and wanted to follow it, ancient guidebook in hand, through the streets of Liverpool. That would somehow establish a connection with those better and happier times before bankruptcy, death, penurious circumstances, had cut like flint through the soles of paper boots. In England, he might recapture his magnificent ambitions; or, if not that, he would at least return to Lansingburgh with a badge of cosmopolitan distinction: his sisters, Fanny, Helen, Kate, Augusta, would be proud of him; and people might say when he passed: Do you know that Herman Melville has been to Europe? Yes, and he’s only seventeen!
It sounded daring and adventurous; but there was a brackish taste in the going. At the outset of the journey, on the boat to New York, he did not have enough fare for the trip and had to brazen his poverty out: his sole wealth was a fowling-piece his brother had given him, to sell in New York for spending-money; with the gun and a dollar and his brother’s cast-off shooting-jacket, he set out to face the world. He felt himself driven out into the desert, an infant Ishmael, without a maternal Hagar to accompany him and give him comfort. Riches and poverty stared at him at his very first venture alone beyond the family nest: the jovial party in the saloon, gay, flushed over wine, crackers, cheese, cigars--and himself on deck, collar up, outcast, facing the rain! “Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life,” exclaimed Melville in Redburn, “a boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen; and the fruit, which with others is only blasted after ripeness, with him is nipped in the first blossom and bud. And never again can such blights be made good; they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise might not erase it.”
Melville’s downheartedness was deepened by contrast with the natural expectations which he had formed in the balmier period of his childhood, and which people somehow kept up, for form, to go with the family name. His sisters told all inquiring friends that Herman had gone abroad, as if just for his health and education with no expense spared; and when he applied for a place on ship, under the tutelage of a young family friend, his friend’s high talk about Melville’s name and connections enabled the sly captain to withhold an advance in pay--because the family would attend to that! The pretensions were shabby ones; they brought Herman nothing but an insufficient supply of clothes and an empty stomach in the day that elapsed between his saying good-bye to his friend and leaving port. That was the irony of having a proud name and a poor purse, of following in his father’s footsteps and sleeping in the forecastle instead of a stateroom.
Thirty days on the water will take the wind out of these pretensions. Herman will forget that he is a Melville and a Gansevoort and a pupil of the Albany Academy and a relative of a regent and a general, and a reader of books, and a member of the Juvenile Total Abstinence Association and the Anti-smoking Society; he will lose many of the little refinements of birth and breeding; but the loss will not leave him destitute. In exchange, he will learn the ropes, and find out what men are like in the rough.
5
Every boat is a little world, every ship a Noah’s ark; but the vessel on which Melville worked his way contained more than its share, perhaps, of the battered and unvarnished furniture of human society, from Captain Riga himself, sleek, bland, affable, cunning, a lap-dog in port and a mastiff at sea, to Jackson, the depraved wreck of a man who, not through any physical strength, but through a sort of Satanic energy, ruled the forecastle.
The contrast between the sisterly society of Lansingburgh, clean and very chaste, and the ugly, dirty, promiscuously vile company of the forecastle was as acute as the difference between the feather-beds of his home and the hard, bug-ridden planks on which he was forced to sleep. A greenhorn in men, a greenhorn in work, Herman met face to face the uncouth cruelty of men whose own hides had been blackened by hardship and mean living, and who flayed every new comer until he was equally able to stand the misery and depression.
With the exception of Jackson, these men were not innately unkind: they had simply been brutalized. The Greenlander brought Herman Jamaica rum the first time he was seasick, helping him to recover and incidentally making him break his pledge of total abstinence; and though they resented his nice language and his earnest moralizings, which marked him off as a member of that inimical social class out of which captains are hewn, they gradually learned to tolerate him when they found that he was ready to work with a will and tumble out of his bunk at call. But, at best, it was hard for Melville to get the hang of the ship’s ways: climbing aloft was terrifying at first; and slushing down the masts and spars with old grease was disgusting. He would have liked to chat with Captain Riga in a friendly way and discuss his prospects in the world and what one might find at Liverpool: surely, a gentleman would appreciate the plight of a gentleman’s son, and perhaps he would even cozen Herman with something tasty to eat, as an offset to the hogwash and hard-tack of the forecastle: Herman was a little surprised when he dolled himself up for a sociable call to find the mate stamping with astonished outrage when he discovered Herman’s purpose in time to turn him back. What a disillusion to find that there is an impassable gulf between skipper and crew, a gulf that even gentlemen’s sons cannot cross on any pretext!
There were few books on board: a dream-book and a copy of the Wealth of Nations which his brother’s friend had solicitously given Herman, for his self-improvement, on the eve of departure; but the sailors, who had been to Gibraltar and Canton and Valparaiso and Bombay, just as Herman might have ventured to Coenties Slip or Hoboken, were a complete library of Voyages and Travels around the World. The names they uttered in such a casual way were magical; but the world they moved in was grim and formidable; a hand with delirium tremens jumped overboard and drowned before the boat was much beyond the Hook: shipwreck, mouldy bread, hard weather, mutiny, did not sound so romantic if one had been in the thick of it; and as for the sailors’ fonder recollections, these stories were as tasteless as duff: did the bar-girl in Hamburg have blue eyes or black: what a nice time Max the Greenlander had had with the young ladies in Stockholm: who kept the Foul Anchor Tavern at Portsmouth at such and such a time? They had seen so much and taken in so little, travelling with their bodies, not with their minds: they knew chiefly the sameness of sailor’s stews and purchased caresses, and to them one city was like another and one girl was like another: the best port was that which promised the longest and fullest oblivion.
The ship itself was the strangest port of all. Pails were buckets: pegs were plugs: floors were decks: “Yes, sir” was “Ay, ay, sir”: in addition to all these new habits and ways, one must grasp new handles for old ones. The ropes needed a dictionary in themselves: every knot and reef had a name. The accent of this world was gruff: Herman had never dreamed that a malign, cur-faced rascal like Jackson, who swore he would swipe him off the rigging if Herman got in his way, could exist in real life; nor could he have imagined the uncouthness of men to whom life at its best was simply hard work, hard words, hard fare, fornication, drunkenness and sleep. Herman was shocked: but the sea gave him what the sailors did not: there were good moments when the sails were hoisted to the breeze and the ship responded: every mast and timber seemed to have a pulse in it, and as the ship picked up speed, he felt a wild exulting in his own heart. “Then,” says Melville, “I was first conscious of a wonderful thing in me, that responded to all the wild commotion of the outer world and went reeling on and on with the planets in their orbits, and was lost in one delirious throb at the center of the All. A wild bubbling and bursting at my heart, as if a hidden spring gushed out there.... But how soon these raptures abated, when after a brief idle interval, we were again set to work, and I had a vile commission to clean out the chicken coops, and make up the beds of the pigs in the long boats. Miserable dog’s life is this of the sea: commanded like a slave and set to work like an ass: vulgar and brutal men lording it over me, as if I were an African in Alabama.”