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 broth-
ers. 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 States Navy, serving on the frigate United States, which brought him back to Boston in October, 1844.
Melville was now twenty-five and seemed no closer to finding a career than four years before. Except for letters published in a local newspaper, he had shown few signs of a gift for writing. As he recounted his adventures for his family, however, they urged him to write the tales down. In this way, it is said, he discovered his calling. Later he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, “From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.” Melville’s account of his time in the Marquesas, the novel Typee, was published in the spring of 1846. Advertisements promised readers “personal adventure, cannibal banquets... carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters, savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols, heathenish rites and human sacrifices.” And the book was a great popular success. Today, Melville probably would have won a place on best-seller lists and an article in People magazine as “the man who lived with the cannibals.” Melville continued to draw on his sea adventures in the novels Omoo (1847), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850). Another novel, Mardi, published in 1849, was an unsuccessful attempt to add fantasy and philosophy to sea stories.
Melville had become a popular writer, but he wasn’t fully satisfied with his popularity. On the one hand, with a wife and children to support, he needed the money that success brought him. But on the other, writing simple adventure stories was, he said, no more creative than sawing wood. He had greater ambitions.
At the same time, while most popular writers of the day tended to be optimistic about America and about mankind, Melville was- perhaps because of his richesto-rags childhood- in many ways a deeply pessimistic and insecure figure, doubtful about his nation, doubtful about man, doubtful about the universe.
Moby-Dick is the result of both Melville’s ambitions and his doubts. When he began the book, he intended to call it The Whale and promised his publishers that
it would be another popular sea adventure. But midway through his writing something changed. Melville had moved to the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts and met Nathaniel Hawthorne, already famous as the author of The Scarlet Letter. In Hawthorne, Melville seemed to find a kindred spirit, a man who had fulfilled himself writing the kind of dark, complex books that Melville wanted to write. Perhaps the older author’s example gave Melville the courage to achieve his ambitions. Whatever the reason, soon after he met Hawthorne, Melville began furiously to rewrite The Whale. The finished product reached his publisher a full year after it had been promised; it bore a new title, Moby-Dick, and it was a far greater book than anything Melville had written before.
You can see the influence of many other works of literature in Moby-Dickthe Bible, the plays of Shakespeare, Homer’s Odyssey. But perhaps the book’s real power comes from the doubts and fears of Melville’s own life. Though not as literally autobiographical as Typee or Omoo, in many ways Moby-Dick more truly reflects its author. While other popular American writers saluted the nation’s free-enterprise system, Melville had seen how cut-throat competition could destroy men like his father. And so in the memorable sermon of Fleece, the cook, men are compared to savage sharks. While other writers promoted the ideal of the self-reliant, strong-willed American hero, Melville saw how easily those qualities might make a man a dictator. And so he shows us, in Captain Ahab, how strong will and self-reliance become madness. And while other writers imagined a benign God smiling down upon mankind, Melville saw the universe as at best indifferent, at worst cruel- as indifferent and cruel as the great whale, Moby-Dick.
Moby-Dick is a book crowded with doubts and short on reassurance, the fitting product of a man who, in Hawthorne’s words, could neither believe in anything “nor be comfortable in his disbelief.” Moby-Dick is the greatest work of Melville’s career and one of the finest- perhaps “the” finest- works of American literature. Tradition has it that this masterpiece was unjustly attacked by critics and readers of its day. In fact, many reviews were favorable, and sales were respectable, though nowhere near the level of Typee. But Moby-Dick did not sell well enough for Melville to support his wife and children, and he came under increasing financial pressure. Though his wife’s family was wealthy, Melville hated taking money from richer relatives, as his widowed mother had been forced to do. “Dollars damn me,” he told Hawthorne angrily. “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,- it will not pay. Yet altogether write the other way, I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.” The rest of Melville’s career seemed to prove the truth of his complaint. His next novel, Pierre (1852)- his only novel set on land, not water- was a failure.
Some critics openly doubted his sanity in writing it. None of the books that followed- Israel Potter (1855), The Piazza Tales (1856) and The Confidence-Man (1857)- though valued highly today, achieved anything like the success of his first efforts. Worn out by writing ten books in eleven years, disappointed in his hopes of finding financial security through his work, Melville seemed to be near a nerv-
ous breakdown. He tried, as other authors of the day did, to make a living as a public speaker but failed. Finally, in 1866, he did what his family had long been urging him to do- he took his first steady job, a secure government post as the Deputy Inspector of Customs of the Port of New York.
Melville held the post until retirement, sinking into near total obscurity. He continued to write, though at a slow pace. Most of his time was spent composing poetry. And then, in the last years of his life, Melville wrote the novel Billy Budd, a gripping tale of good and evil aboard ship, that today is ranked second only to Moby-Dick among his works. But it was not published until 1924, more than 30 years after his death. When Melville died, on September 28, 1891, the obituary in the New York Post probably spoke for most when it said, “even his own generation has long thought him dead, so quiet have been the later years of his life.” Only in the 1920s, with the publication of the first biography of Melville and the discovery of the manuscript of Billy Budd, was Melville’s greatness appreciated. Today he is regarded not only as a skilled spinner of sea tales but as a brilliant, tormented seeker of truth- and nowhere more brilliant, or tormented, than in Moby-Dick. About this book, the Nobel Prize-winning American author William Faulkner said, “Moby-Dick is the book which I put down with the unqualified thought, ‘I wish I had written that.’” And the distinguished English author D. H. Lawrence wrote, “It is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.”