Setting Sail with Herman Melville: Typee and Its Influence on Moby-Dick
Herman Melville set sail for the Pacific aboard an American whaling ship at the age of twenty-one. He returned to the United States four years later, having gained enough experience to launch his career as a writer. During his time away, he acted in a breathtaking cast of roles—American whaler, explorer, Polynesian captive, Tahitian prisoner, and naval seaman. Once home, Melville wrote six sea novels in six years.
The following essay sketches Melville's early life and traces the key themes that run throughout his first novel, Typee. These themes would be repeated and magnified in each of Melville's subsequent five "sea tales," culminating in the American masterpiece Moby-Dick. Melville wrote his first sea novel at age twenty-six and finished Moby-Dick at thirty-two. During these six years, Melville's power as a writer grew so exponentially that Moby-Dick surpassed the comprehension of its critics, who found the novel a "chowder" of a tale too dense to swallow.
It would take an economic crisis and a world war to mature the American mind enough to understand Moby-Dick. The economic crisis occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, as the nation experienced a dizzying fall from the financial splendor of the Gilded Age. Even more sobering, the nation's core belief in Manifest Destiny had been exploded by the psychological shrapnel of modern warfare. By 1920, three decades after Melville's death, Moby-Dick would finally be recognized as a portrait depicting the heart and soul of America, simultaneously monstrous and magnificent.
Jumping Ship
Herman Melville read a harrowing tale about the shipwreck of The Essex and its tragic aftermath while sailing in the Pacific aboard the whaling ship Acushnet. Reading about the events, Melville learned that four whalers had been stranded at sea for eighty days aboard a twenty-eight-foot whaleboat when one of the sailors, Isaac Cole, died in agony. His three shipmates watched helplessly. When Cole's body lay still, they drew a sailcloth over his cadaver. Within hours, the survivors decided to carve up their shipmate's body and consume his flesh. As a result, each of them survived.
The sailors' whaling ship, The Essex, had sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean some 2000 nautical miles from the Western coast of Chile. Its hull had been twice rammed by an eighty-five-foot sperm whale. After the second strike cracked the wooden hull wide open, the whalers descended into the sea with the small, nimble boats used to outmaneuver the snapping jaws and thrashing tails of their prey.
In a twist of irony, TheEssex crew had chosen to sail away from the closest known bodies of land. At 1200 miles distance, the Marquesas Islands could have been reached in a matter of weeks, but the whalers sailed against the wind in the opposite direction, fearing that the Indigenous islanders would kill and eat them. Instead, they cannibalized themselves.
The tale of The Essex and its crew struck a powerful chord of fear and awe in young Melville, emotions that eventually drove him to write Moby-Dick. The tale also fueled Melville's youthful curiosity, prompting him to desert the Acushnet. Unhappy with his ship's captain and irresistibly drawn toward the unknown, Melville jumped ship while anchored off Nuku Hiva island in the Marquesas. He fled into the forest, injured his leg, and was eventually captured by a Polynesian tribe in Typee Valley.
Rather than being cannibalized, as the Essex crew feared they would be, the injured American was hand-fed, bathed, rubbed with oils, entertained, and sexually gratified by tribal women. Steeped in a sensual paradise, Melville (and his fictionalized self) began to draw comparisons between the suffocating rules of Victorian America and the uninhibited sexuality that surrounded him in Polynesia. While living among Polynesians, Melville also questioned his nation's drive to conquer and eradicate Indigenous cultures. In sum, the vast distance from home enabled Melville to comprehend his nation's many vices—greed for material wealth built on the enslavement of laborers, insatiable hunger for land and dominion over all its creatures, and a penchant to rationalize violence and other evils inherent in man, all in the name of Manifest Destiny.
"Going Native"
Before Melville sailed home, he would commit mutiny and spend a brief stint in a Tahitian jail. After being liberated and exploring the island, Melville eventually landed in Honolulu. By the time he arrived, Honolulu had begun its cultural descent into colonial decay, serving as a hub for missionaries intent on "civilizing" the islanders and the prostitutes who served the whims of lustful sailors. After three months exploring Honolulu, Melville signed aboard the naval ship United States, where he served as a seaman. He disembarked in Boston fourteen months later.
Back in America, Melville fashioned his adventures into fireside stories, which he shared with friends and family. Spurred by the positive reception, he wrote his first semi-autobiographical novel, Typee. A blend of on-the-ground observation, imagination, and research, Typee recounts the tale of Tommo. Whereas Melville spent four weeks on shore, Typee's protagonist, Tommo, passes four months. Held gently captive by a tribe of Polynesians, Tommo narrates a story that blurs Melville's real adventures with the realm of fiction. Unlike Melville's mature works, Typee skims lightly across the surface of deep psychic and cultural reservoirs. The romanticized version of events, after all, was aimed at a Victorian audience. Nonetheless, Tommo's reflections express the profound mental shifts Melville underwent during his four-year voyage.
Unmoored from America and set adrift aboard a whaling ship, the young island-hopping Melville began to question the foundations of American democracy and the rise of capitalism, both of which relied on the labor of enslaved Africans and the lands stolen from Native Americans. The criticism he leveled in Typee hit the mark so forcefully that the novel would be censored in Melville's home country. Whereas the unexpurgated version of the novel was published in England, a sanitized and politically neutered edition was issued in the United States.
Harpooning American Hypocrisy
Born into a well-heeled household, the maternal side of which took part in the Boston Tea Party, Melville grew up surrounded by luxury. By the time he turned twelve, however, the family's fortune had been swallowed by bankruptcy. His father died soon after, precipitating a dramatic change in the young boy's life. By the time he was twenty-one, Melville had clerked at a bank, worked at a cap and fur store, studied engineering, and taught school. All the while, he failed to earn his keep.
With few prospects on land, Melville signed up as a novice whaler, setting sail from New Bedford. Aboard the Acushnet, he worked alongside a motley crew of twenty-five whalers, few of whom had enjoyed the luxuries that surrounded Melville prior to his father's death. Hailing from all walks of life, the whalers whom Melville lived and worked with taught him the beauty and meaning of solidarity and brotherhood.
At sea, many of the social strictures of land dissolved, while others hardened. The sailors bonded, swapped stories, shared terrifying and life-changing adventures, and learned to entertain and laugh with one another. Many were illiterate. Some suffered from alcoholism, syphilis, or tuberculosis. Of the original crew, only eight sailed home aboard the Acushnet. Five died at sea, and the remainder, like Melville, jumped ship. Desertion, common among whalers, had become rampant by the mid-nineteenth century.
As the industry rose to its peak, it began to embody the dark side of American capitalism. The divide between common laborers and officers grew so wide that sailors often returned home with few wages in hand. The least fortunate died at sea. Others earned a paltry sum in return for years of life-threatening, physically demanding, and often injurious work. In addition, as an increasing number of whales were slaughtered, voyages became longer and ships set sail ever more poorly stocked with food and water. Officers, too, became crueler. Some captains unleashed a torrent of physical and psychological abuse on their men, doing so only after their cargo holds were brimming with rendered whale oil. After all, whalers were not paid until the ship had arrived back at the port from which it set sail. By driving whalers to desert after the crew had landed its quota, captains pocketed more money for themselves.
By the 1840s when Melville set sail as a whaler, the skilled craft of hunting, harpooning, dissecting, and rendering whales into oil had fueled America's economic muscle, forging a country strong enough to throw off the shackles of the British crown. Whale oil lit the streets of the cities and towns that expanded rapidly along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. It lubricated the machines that powered the Industrial Revolution, ultimately enabling the United States to become a global powerhouse, with the financial wealth to sail ever further West in quest of whales to slay and lands to conquer.
The young nation was not only eager to gobble up natural resources, but also aimed to "civilize" the "wild savages" in North America and Polynesia. Deeming Indigenous peoples as crude vessels needing to be shaped into proper citizens or eradicated altogether, the American mission to explore and conquer had become a core facet of the nation's nineteenth-century identity. Having "gone native" during his four years sailing the Pacific and witnessed first-hand the quality of life among Polynesians in the Typee Valley of Nuku Hiva, Melville intuitively questioned Western imperialism. He began to recoil from the hypocrisy of American democracy, founded as it was on enslavement, dispossession, and cultural genocide.
In Typee and the following sea novels—Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, and White-Jacket—Melville began the work needed to forge Moby-Dick. Each of his early novels probed the duality at the heart of America. The nation simultaneously embodied an adventurous, hardworking, imaginative, and community-oriented character and awarded individualism, greed, corruption, violence, egotism, and xenophobia.
Plumbing the Depths
Published in 1951, Moby-Dick contains a collage of experimental forms and styles that pioneered the modernist novel. It would be another seventy years before modernism would emerge as a distinctive literary movement led by such figures as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Like Melville before them, these writers ruptured the boundaries of traditional literature to better capture the modern psyche and the chaotic cultural transformations triggered by colonialism and its violent aftermath—modern warfare. Not coincidentally, the modernist heyday of the 1920s would witness a revival of Melville's writing, which was initially resigned to the dustbin of history. Melville's reputation as a writer had been prematurely tanked at the mid-point of his career, when readers balked at the dizzying digressions and perilous psychological depths plumbed in Moby-Dick. Melville, after all, preceded Sigmund Freud. Before the terms "conscious," "unconscious," and "ego" had even been coined, Melville had pioneered two grand tours of the American psyche—the first in Moby-Dick and the second in his subsequent novel, Pierre.
Stunned by the negative reviews of Moby-Dick, Melville turned further inward in Pierre, which revolves around an incestuous, homoerotic plot. Readers were repulsed. So too were critics. Spurned by the public and publishers alike, Melville turned to poetry. Desperate for money, he spent nineteen years working as a customs officer in New York, where he walked the streets unknown. Today Melville is lauded as a literary genius, and Moby-Dick is widely hailed as the greatest novel of nineteenth-century American literature.
Written for the educational app Gaiali