^^^^^^^^^^
HERMAN MELVILLE: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES
On a January morning in 1841, a twenty-one-year-old man stood
on the docks of the New Bedford, Massachusetts, harbor. Poverty
had forced him to abandon his schooling to help support his
family, but he had not found happiness as a farmer,
schoolteacher, or bank clerk. Two years before, he had shipped
out as a sailor on a merchant ship, and that job hadn't pleased
him any better than the others. Still, something about the sea
must have called him back, for here he was about to board
another ship, the whaler Acushnet, bound from New Bedford round
Cape Horn to the South Pacific.
It was a voyage that would change the young man's life, and
change American literature as well. The man standing on the New
Bedford docks was Herman Melville, and his four years at sea
provided him with the raw material for a career's worth of
books, one of them a masterpiece: Moby-Dick.
Melville was an unlikely candidate to become a sailor. He
was born on August 1, 1819, into a well-off, religious New York
family whose sons by rights should have found careers in
business or in law offices rather than aboard ships. But
Melville's comfortable childhood ended all too soon. When he
was ten his father's import business failed, and that failure
drove his father to madness and, two years later, to death. The
Melvilles sank into genteel poverty, dependent on money doled
out by richer relatives and on the earnings of Herman and his
brothers. These were the pressures that helped drive Melville,
like Moby-Dick's narrator, Ishmael, to sea.
The history of Melville's time at sea reads very much like an
adventure story. In fact, it reads very much like Melville's
own early books, and for good reason, since they are largely
autobiographical. His first year on the Acushnet seemed happy
enough, but by July of 1842 he had grown sick of his captain's
bad temper. With a companion he jumped ship at Nuku Hiva in the
Marquesas Islands, hoping to find refuge with a tribe known to
be friendly to sailors. The pair got lost; they wound up not
with the friendly tribe but with the Typees, reputed to be
cannibals. While the Typees treated their American guests well
enough, their reputation made Melville's stay a nervous one, and
after four weeks he escaped with the help of the crew of an
Australian whaling ship, the Lucy Ann. The Lucy Ann was little
improvement over the Acushnet, however--her captain was
incompetent, her first mate alcoholic--and when she reached
Tahiti, Melville and other crew members plotted a revolt. Found
out, they were thrown in jail. Eventually Melville escaped,
made his way to Honolulu, and there enlisted in the United
