Typee. Herman Melville
his uncle’s farm, long known as the ‘Van Schaack place.’ This uncle was Thomas Melville, president of the Berkshire Agricultural Society, and a successful gentleman farmer.
Herman’s roving disposition, and a desire to support himself independently of family assistance, soon led him to ship as cabin boy in a New York vessel bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, visited London, and returned in the same ship. ‘Redburn: His First Voyage,’ published in 1849, is partly founded on the experiences of this trip, which was undertaken with the full consent of his relatives, and which seems to have satisfied his nautical ambition for a time. As told in the book, Melville met with more than the usual hardships of a sailor-boy’s first venture. It does not seem difficult in ‘Redburn’ to separate the author’s actual experiences from those invented by him, this being the case in some of his other writings.
A good part of the succeeding three years, from 1837 to 1840, was occupied with school-teaching. While so engaged at Greenbush, now East Albany, N.Y., he received the munificent salary of ‘six dollars a quarter and board.’ He taught for one term at Pittsfield, Mass., ‘boarding around’ with the families of his pupils, in true American fashion, and easily suppressing, on one memorable occasion, the efforts of his larger scholars to inaugurate a rebellion by physical force.
I fancy that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana’s ‘Two Years Before the Mast’ which revived the spirit of adventure in Melville’s breast. That book was published in 1840, and was at once talked of everywhere. Melville must have read it at the time, mindful of his own experience as a sailor. At any rate, he once more signed a ship’s articles, and on January 1, 1841, sailed from New Bedford harbour in the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific Ocean and the sperm fishery. He has left very little direct information as to the events of this eighteen months’ cruise, although his whaling romance, ‘Moby Dick; or, the Whale,’ probably gives many pictures of life on board the Acushnet. In the present volume he confines himself to a general account of the captain’s bad treatment of the crew, and of his non-fulfilment of agreements. Under these considerations, Melville decided to abandon the vessel on reaching the Marquesas Islands; and the narrative of ‘Typee’ begins at this point. However, he always recognised the immense influence the voyage had had upon his career, and in regard to its results has said in ‘Moby Dick,’—
‘If I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that on the whole a man might rather have done than to have left undone... then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.’
The record, then, of Melville’s escape from the Dolly, otherwise the Acushnet, the sojourn of his companion Toby and himself in the Typee Valley on the island of Nukuheva, Toby’s mysterious disappearance, and Melville’s own escape, is fully given in the succeeding pages; and rash indeed would he be who would enter into a descriptive contest with these inimitable pictures of aboriginal life in the ‘Happy Valley.’ So great an interest has always centred in the character of Toby, whose actual existence has been questioned, that I am glad to be able to declare him an authentic personage, by name Richard T. Greene. He was enabled to discover himself again to Mr. Melville through the publication of the present volume, and their acquaintance was renewed, lasting for quite a long period. I have seen his portrait,—a rare old daguerrotype,—and some of his letters to our author. One of his children was named for the latter, but Mr. Melville lost trace of him in recent years.
With the author’s rescue from what Dr. T. M. Coan has styled his ‘anxious paradise,’ ‘Typee’ ends, and its sequel, ‘Omoo,’ begins. Here, again, it seems wisest to leave the remaining adventures in the South Seas to the reader’s own discovery, simply stating that, after a sojourn at the Society Islands, Melville shipped for Honolulu. There he remained for four months, employed as a clerk. He joined the crew of the American frigate United States, which reached Boston, stopping on the way at one of the Peruvian ports, in October of 1844. Once more was a narrative of his experiences to be preserved in ‘White Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War.’ Thus, of Melville’s four most important books, three, ‘Typee,’ ‘Omoo,’ and ‘White-Jacket,’ are directly auto biographical, and ‘Moby Dick’ is partially so; while the less important ‘Redburn’ is between the two classes in this respect. Melville’s other prose works, as will be shown, were, with some exceptions, unsuccessful efforts at creative romance.
Whether our author entered on his whaling adventures in the South Seas with a determination to make them available for literary purposes, may never be certainly known. There was no such elaborate announcement or advance preparation as in some later cases. I am inclined to believe that the literary prospect was an after-thought, and that this insured a freshness and enthusiasm of style not otherwise to be attained. Returning to his mother’s home at Lansingburg, Melville soon began the writing of ‘Typee,’ which was completed by the autumn of 1845. Shortly after this his older brother, Gansevoort Melville, sailed for England as secretary of legation to Ambassador McLane, and the manuscript was intrusted to Gansevoort for submission to John Murray. Its immediate acceptance and publication followed in 1846. ‘Typee’ was dedicated to Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, an old friendship between the author’s family and that of Justice Shaw having been renewed about this time. Mr. Melville became engaged to Miss Elizabeth Shaw, the only daughter of the Chief Justice, and their marriage followed on August 4, 1847, in Boston.
The wanderings of our nautical Othello were thus brought to a conclusion. Mr. and Mrs. Melville resided in New York City until 1850, when they purchased a farmhouse at Pittsfield, their farm adjoining that formerly owned by Mr. Melville’s uncle, which had been inherited by the latter’s son. The new place was named ‘Arrow Head,’ from the numerous Indian antiquities found in the neighbourhood. The house was so situated as to command an uninterrupted view of Greylock Mountain and the adjacent hills. Here Melville remained for thirteen years, occupied with his writing, and managing his farm. An article in Putnam’s Monthly entitled ‘I and My Chimney,’ another called ‘October Mountain,’ and the introduction to the ‘Piazza Tales,’ present faithful pictures of Arrow Head and its surroundings. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, given in ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife,’ his daily life is set forth. The letter is dated June 1, 1851.
‘Since you have been here I have been building some shanties of houses (connected with the old one), and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays. I have been ploughing and sowing and raising and printing and praying, and now begin to come out upon a less bristling time, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farmhouse here. Not entirely yet, though, am I without something to be urgent with. The ‘Whale’ is only half through the press; for, wearied with the long delays of the printers, and disgusted with the heat and dust of the Babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to the country to feel the grass, and end the book reclining on it, if I may.’
Mr. Hawthorne, who was then living in the red cottage at Lenox, had a week at Arrow Head with his daughter Una the previous spring. It is recorded that the friends ‘spent most of the time in the barn, bathing in the early spring sunshine, which streamed through the open doors, and talking philosophy.’ According to Mr. J. E. A. Smith’s volume on the Berkshire Hills, these gentlemen, both reserved in nature, though near neighbours and often in the same company, were inclined to be shy of each other, partly, perhaps, through the knowledge that Melville had written a very appreciative review of ‘Mosses from an Old Manse’ for the New York Literary World, edited by their mutual friends, the Duyckincks. ‘But one day,’ writes Mr. Smith, ‘it chanced that when they were out on a picnic excursion, the two were compelled by a thundershower to take shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks of Monument Mountain. Two hours of this enforced intercourse settled the matter. They learned so much of each other’s character,... that the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable.’ A passage in Hawthorne’s ‘Wonder Book’ is noteworthy as describing the number of literary neighbours in Berkshire:—
‘For my part, I wish I had Pegasus here at this moment,’ said the student. ‘I would mount him forthwith, and gallop about the country within a circumference of a few miles, making literary calls on my brother authors. Dr. Dewey