In August 1844, a ne’er-do-well 25-year-old named Herman Melville disembarked from the USS United States in Boston harbor. The second son of a once-respectable New York City family—broke and mad, his businessman father had died 12 years earlier—he had neither measured up to his pious mother’s expectations nor found steady employment. He’d made his first getaway in 1839, signing on as cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing between New York and Liverpool. The next year, after a brief stab at teaching, Melville was on the road again—west on the Erie Canal, then over the Great Lakes to Chicago, downriver to southern Illinois, and then back east on the Ohio River—all in a failed quest to find gainful work as a surveyor. After another short stay in New York, he went up to New Bedford, talking his way into a job on the whaling ship Acushnet. His brother said that he’d “never seen him so completely happy” as on the day the ship sailed.
Reality quickly set in. Captains of whaling ships ruled their polyglot crews with a severity intolerable to a young man who admired his fellow Americans for their “genuine republican swagger.” The captains brooked no such swagger in their crews, upholding the doctrine that all men are created equal—equally subordinate to their captain. For nearly four years, Melville experienced the democratic despotism of life at sea under captains on three whaling ships, jumping the first one in the Marquesan Islands, where the local tribe treated him to four weeks of plentiful food and playful girls, perhaps intending to fatten him up for their own cannibalistic feast. Escaping to an Australian ship, he participated in a mutiny, and got on another whaler, which brought him to Honolulu, where he submitted to the slightly more benevolent despotism of the U.S. Navy on the vessel that would carry him back to America.
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