The merchantman on which Melville shipped was not a Liverpool liner, or packet-ship, plying in connection with a sisterhood of packets. She was a regular trader to Liverpool; sailing upon no fixed days, and acting very much as she pleased, being bound by no obligation of any kind, though in all her voyages ever having New York or Liverpool for her destination. Melville’s craft was not a greyhound, not a very fast sailer. The swifter of the packet ships then made the passage in fifteen or sixteen days; the Highlander, travelling at a more matronly pace, was out on the Atlantic a leisurely month.

“It was very early in the month of June that we sailed,” says Melville; “and I had greatly rejoiced that it was that time of year; for it would be warm and pleasant upon the ocean I thought; and my voyage would be like a summer excursion to the seashore for the benefit of the salt water, and a change of scene and society.” But the fact was not identical with Melville’s fancy, and before many days at sea, he found it a galling mockery to remember that his sisters had promised to tell all enquiring friends that he had gone “abroad”: “just as if I was visiting Europe on a tour with my tutor.” Though his thirty days at sea considerably disabused him—for the time—of the unmitigated delights of ocean travel in the forecastle; still always in the vague and retreating distance did he hold to the promise of some stupendous discovery still in store. Finally, one morning when he came on deck, he was thrilled to discover that he was, in sober fact, within sight of a foreign land: a shore-line that in imagination he transformed into the seacoast of Bohemia. “A foreign country actually visible!” But as he gazed ashore, disillusion ran hot upon the heels of his romantic expectations.

“Was that Ireland? Why, there was nothing remarkable about that; nothing startling. If that’s the way a foreign country looks, I might as well have stayed at home. Now what, exactly, I had fancied the shore would look like, I can not say; but I had a vague idea that it would be something strange and wonderful.”

The next land they sighted was Wales. “It was high noon, and a long line of purple mountains lay like a bank of clouds against the east. But, after all, the general effect of these mountains was mortifyingly like the general effect of the Kaatskill Mountains on the Hudson River.”

It was not until midnight of the third day that they arrived at the mouth of the Mersey. Before the following daybreak they took the first flood.

“Presently, in the misty twilight, we passed immense buoys, and caught sight of distant objects on shore, vague and shadowy shapes, like Ossian’s ghosts.” And then it was that Melville found leisure to lean over the side, “trying to summon up some image of Liverpool, to see how the reality would answer to my concept.”

As the day advanced, the river contracted, and in the clear morning Melville got his first sharp impression of a foreign port.

“I beheld lofty ranges of dingy ware-houses, which seemed very deficient in the elements of the marvellous; and bore a most unexpected resemblance to the ware-houses along South Street in New York. There was nothing strange, nothing extraordinary about them. There they stood; a row of calm and collected ware-houses; very good and substantial edifices, doubtless, and admirably adapted to the ends had in view by the builders: but yet, these edifices, I must confess, were a sad and bitter disappointment to me.”

Melville was six weeks in Liverpool. Of this part of his adventure, he says in Redburn: “I do not mean to present a diary of my stay there. I shall here simply record the general tenor of the life led by our crew during that interval; and will proceed to note down, at random, my own wanderings about town, and impressions of things as they are recalled to me now after the lapse of so many (twelve) years.”

Not the least important detail of these six weeks is the fact that Melville and his ship-mates were very well fed at the sign of the Baltimore Clipper. “The roast beef of Old England abounded; and so did the immortal plum-puddings and the unspeakably capital gooseberry pies.” Owing to the strict but necessary regulations of the Liverpool docks, no fire of any kind was allowed on board the vessels within them. And hence, though the sailors of the Highlander slept in the forecastle, they were fed ashore at the expense of the ship’s owners. This, in a large crew remaining at Liverpool more than six weeks, as the Highlander did, formed no inconsiderable item in the expenses of the voyage. The Baltimore Clipper was one of the boarding houses near the docks which flourished on the appetite of sailors. At the Baltimore Clipper was fed not only the crew of the Highlander, but, each in a separate apartment, a variety of other crews as well. Since each crew was known collectively by the name of its ship, the shouts of the servant girls running about at dinner time mustering their guests must have been alarming to an uninitiated visitor.

“Where are the Empresses of China?—Here’s their beef been smoking this half-hour”—“Fly, Betty, my dear, here come the Panthers”—“Run, Molly, my love; get the salt-cellars for the Splendids”—“You, Peggy, where’s the Siddons’ pickle-pot?”—“I say, Judy, are you never coming with that pudding for the Sultans?”

It was to the Baltimore Clipper that Jackson immediately led the ship’s crew when they first sprang ashore: up this street and down that till at last he brought them to their destination in a narrow lane filled with boarding-houses, spirit-vaults and sailors. While Melville’s shipmates were engaged in tippling and talking with numerous old acquaintances of theirs in the neighbourhood who thronged about the door, he sat alone in the dining-room appropriated to the Highlanders “meditating upon the fact that I was now seated upon an English bench, under an English roof, in an English tavern, forming an integral part of the British empire.”

Melville examined the place attentively. “It was a long narrow little room, with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out upon a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall, the top of which was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles stuck into mortar. A dull lamp swung overhead, placed in a wooden ship suspended from the ceiling. The walls were covered with a paper, representing an endless succession of vessels of all nations continually circumnavigating the apartment. From the street came a confused uproar of ballad-singers, bawling women, babies, and drunken sailors.”

It was during this disenchanting examination that the realisation began to creep chillingly over Melville that his prospect of seeing the world as a sailor was, after all, but very doubtful. It seems never to have struck him before that sailors but hover about the edges of terra-firma; that “they land only upon wharves and pier-heads, and their reminiscences of travel are only a dim recollection of a chain of tap-rooms surrounding the globe.”

Melville’s six weeks in Liverpool offered him, however, opportunity to make slightly more extended observations. During these weeks he was free to go where he pleased between four o’clock in the afternoon and the following dawn. Sundays he had entirely at his own disposal. But withal, it was an excessively limited and distorted version of England that was open for his examination. Except for his shipmates, his very distant cousin, the Earl of Leven and Melville and Queen Victoria and such like notables, he knew by name no living soul in the British Isles. And neither his companions in the forecastle, nor the remote and elaborately titled strangers of Melville House, offered encouragement of an easy and glowing intimacy. With but three dollars as his net capital—money advanced him in Liverpool by the ship—and without a thread of presentable clothing on his back, he could not hope promiscuously to ingratiate himself either by his purse or the adornments of his person. Thus lacking in the fundamentals of friendship, his native charms stood him in little stead. So alone he walked the streets of Liverpool and gratuitously saw the sights.

While on the high seas, Melville had improved his fallow hours by poring over an old guide-book of Liverpool that had descended to him from his father. This old family relic was to Melville cherished with a passionate and reverent affection. Around it clustered most of the fond associations that are the cords of man. It had been handled by Allan amid the very scenes it described; it bore some “half-effaced miscellaneous memoranda in pencil, characteristic of a methodical mind, and therefore indubitably my father’s”: jottings of “a strange, subdued, old, midsummer interest” to Melville. And on the fly-leaves were crabbed inscriptions, and “crayon sketches of wild animals and falling air-castles.” These decorations were the handiwork of Melville and his brothers and sisters and cousins. Of his own contributions, Melville says: “as poets do with their juvenile sonnets, I might write under this horse, ‘Drawn at the age of three years,’ and under this autograph, ‘Executed at the age of eight.’” This guide-book was to Melville a sacred volume, and he expresses a wish that he might immortalise it. Addressing this unpretentious looking little green-bound, spotted and tarnished guide-book, he exclaims: “Dear book! I will sell my Shakespeare, and even sacrifice my old quarto Hogarth, before I will part from you. Yes, I will go to the hammer myself, ere I send you to be knocked down in the auctioneer’s scrambles. I will, my beloved; till you drop leaf from leaf, and letter from letter, you shall have a snug shelf somewhere, though I have no bench for myself.”

To the earlier manuscript additions to this guide-book, Melville added, while on the Atlantic, drawings of ships and anchors, and snatches of Dibdin’s sea-poetry. And as he lay in his bunk, with the aid of this antiquated volume he used to take “pleasant afternoon rambles through the town, down St. James street and up Great George’s, stopping at various places of interest and attraction” so familiar seemed the features of the map. But in this vagabondage of reverie he was but preparing for himself a poignant disillusionment. Lying in the dim, reeking forecastle, with his head full of deceitful day-dreams, he was being tossed by the creaking ship towards a bitter awakening. The Liverpool of the guide-book purported to be the Liverpool of 1808. The Liverpool of which Melville dreamed was, of course, without date and local habitation. When Melville found himself face to face with the solid reality of the Liverpool of 1837, he was offered an object-lesson in mutability. As the brute facts smote in the face of his cherished sentimentalisings, he sat his concrete self down on a particular shop step in a certain street in Liverpool, reflected on guide-books and luxuriated in disenchantment. “Guide-books,” he then came to see, “are the least reliable books in all literature: and nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace.” In the end he sealed his moralising by the pious reflection that “there is one Holy Guide-Book that will never lead you astray if you but follow it aright.” There can be no doubt that the ghost of Allan, retracing its mundane haunts at that moment trailed its shadowy substance through the offspring of its discarded flesh.

If this same paternal ghost, recognising its kinship with this obstruction of blood and bone, tracked in futile affection at Melville’s heels through Liverpool, only a posthumous survival of its terrestrial Calvinism could have spared it an agonised six weeks; only the sardonic optimism of a faith in predestination could have saved Allan’s shade from consternation and fear at the chances of Melville’s flesh. Or it may be that Allan was sent as a disembodied spectator to haunt Melville’s wake, by way of penance for his pre-ghostly theological errors. In any event, Melville, on occasion, took Allan through the most hideous parts of Liverpool. Of evenings they strolled through the narrow streets where the sailors’ boarding-houses were. “Hand-organs, fiddlers, and cymbals, plied by strolling musicians, mixed with the songs of seamen, the babble of women and children, and groaning and whining of beggars. From the various boarding-houses proceeded the noise of revelry and dancing: and from the open casements leaned young girls and old women chattering and laughing with the crowds in the middle of the street.” In the vicinity were “notorious Corinthian haunts which in depravity are not to be matched by anything this side of the pit that is bottomless.” Along Rotten-row, Gibraltar-place and Boodle-alley Melville surveyed the “sooty and begrimed bricks” of haunts of abomination which to Melville’s boyish eyes (seen through the protecting lens of Allan’s ghost) had a “reeking, Sodom-like and murderous look.” Melville excuses himself in the name of propriety from particularising the vices of the residents of this quarter; “but kidnappers and resurrectionists,” he declares, “are almost saints and angels to them.”

Melville satirically pictures himself as pathetically innocent to the iniquities of the flesh and the Devil when he left home to view the world. He was, he says, a member both of a Juvenile Total Abstinence Association and of an Anti-Smoking Society organised by the Principal of his Sunday School. With dire compunctions of conscience—which had been considerably weakened by sea-sickness—Melville had his first swig of spirits—administered medicinally to him by a paternal old tar,—before they were many hours out upon the Atlantic. But neither on the high seas nor in England does he seem to have been prematurely tempted by the bottle. And this, for the adequate reason that united to his innocence of years, his very limited finances spared him the solicitations of toping companions as well as the luxury of precocious solitary tippling. Though at the beginning of the voyage he refused the friendly offer of a cigar, he less austerely eschewed tobacco by the time he again struck land. Melville did not, throughout his life, hold so strictly to the puritanical prohibitions of his boyhood.

The youthful member of the Anti-Smoking Society came in later years to be a heroic consumer of tobacco, and the happiest hours of his life were haloed with brooding blue haze. “Nothing so beguiling,” he wrote in 1849, “as the fumes of tobacco, whether inhaled through hookah, narghil, chibouque, Dutch porcelain, pure Principe, or Regalia.” On another occasion he expressed a desire to “sit cross-legged and smoke out eternity.” And the youthful pillar of the Juvenile Total Abstinence Association, growing in wisdom as he took on years, lived to do regal penance for his unholy childhood pledge. His avowed refusal to believe in a Temperance Heaven would seem to imply a conviction that it is only the damned who never drink. In his amazing novel Mardi—which won him acclaim in France as “un Rabelais Americain”—wine flows in ruddy and golden rivers. And the most brilliantly fantastic philosophising, the keenest wit of the demi-gods that lounge through this wild novel, are concomitant upon the heroic draining of beaded bumpers. In Mardi, Melville celebrates the civilising influences of wine with the same devout and urbane affection to be found in Horace and Meredith. On occasion, however, he seems to share Baudelaire’s conviction that “one should be drunk always”—and drunk on wine in the manner of the best period. He quotes with approval the epitaph of Cyrus the Great: “I could drink a great deal of wine, and it did me a great deal of good.” In Clarel he asks: “At Cana, who renewed the wine?” In the riotous chapter wherein “Taji sits down to Dinner with five-and-twenty Kings, and a royal Time they have,” there is an exuberant tilting of calabashes that would have won the esteem even of Socrates and Pantagruel. One wonders if Rabelais, in his youth, did not belong to some Juvenile Total Abstinence Society, or if Socrates, who both lived and died over a cup, had not as a boy committed an equally heinous sacrilege to Dionysus.

On board the Highlander Melville was too young yet to have come to a sense of the iniquity of the deadly virtues. He was not thereby, however, tempted to the optimism of despair that preaches that because God is isolated in His Heaven, all is right with the world. Even at seventeen Melville had keenly felt that much in the world needs mending. And at seventeen—more than at any other period—he felt moved to exert himself to set the world aright. Ashipboard, the field of his operations being very limited, he cast a missionary eye upon the rum-soaked profanity and lechery of his ship-mates. “I called to mind a sermon I had once heard in a church in behalf of sailors,” says Melville, “when the preacher called them strayed lambs from the fold, and compared them to poor lost children, babes in the wood, or orphans without fathers or mothers.” Overflowing with the milk of human kindness at the sad condition of these amiable outcasts, Melville, during his first watch, made bold to ask one of them if he was in the habit of going to church. The sailor answered that “he had been in a church once, some ten or twelve years before, in London, and on a week-day had helped to move the Floating Chapel round the Battery from North River.” This first and last effort of Melville’s to evangelise a shipmate ended in winning Melville hearty ridicule. “If I had not felt so terribly angry,” he says, “I should certainly have felt very much like a fool. But my being so angry prevented me from feeling foolish, which is very lucky for people in a passion.” Though Melville made no further effort to save the souls of his shipmates, his own seems not to have been jeopardised by any hankering after the instruments of damnation.

As has been said, he was without friends, both ashipboard and later ashore; a complete absence of companionship that on occasion inspired him with a parched desire for some friend to whom to say “how sweet is solitude.” He craved in his isolation, he says, “to give his whole soul to another; in its loneliness it was yearning to throw itself into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend.” In Redburn, Melville spends a generous number of pages in celebrating his encounter with a good-for-nothing but courtly youth whom he calls Harry Bolton. “He was one of those small, but perfectly formed beings with curling hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been born in cocoons. His complexion was a mantling brunette, feminine as a girl’s; his feet were small; his hands were white; and his eyes were large, black and womanly: and, poetry aside, his voice was as the sound of a harp.” How much of Harry Bolton is fact, how much fiction, is impossible to tell. The most significant thing about him is Melville’s evident affection for him, no matter who made him. In Redburn, this engaging dandy kidnaps Melville, and takes him for a mysterious night up to London: a night spent, to Melville’s consternation, in a gambling palace of the sort that exists only in the febrile and envious imagination of vitriolic puritans. In his description of this escapade, Melville owes more, perhaps, to his early spiritual guides than to any first-hand observation. This flight to London in Redburn, its abrupt reversal, and the escape to America of Harry Bolton, may, of course, all be founded on sober fact. But there is a lack of verisimilitude in the recounting that prompts to the suspicion that in this part of the narrative, Melville is making brave and unconvincing concessions to romance. Not, of course, that Melville in his youth was incapable of the wild impetuosity of suddenly leaving his ship and running up to London with an engagingly romantic stranger: he did more impulsive and far more surprising things than that before he died. But his account of this adventure in Redburn reads hollow and false. Harry Bolton must be discounted as myth until he is more cogently substantiated as history.

In Liverpool Melville seems to have spent his leisure in company with his thoughts, wandering along the docks and about the city. Each Sunday morning he went regularly to church; Sunday afternoons he spent walking in the neighbouring country. His most vivid impressions of Liverpool were of the terrible poverty he saw, and it is doubtful if there is a more ruthless piece of realism in the language than his account in Redburn of the slow death through starvation of the mother and children that Melville found lying in a cellar, and whose lives he tried in vain to save. The green cold bodies in the morgue, the ragpickers, the variety of criminals that haunt the shadows of the docks: these too came in for characterisation.

The noblest sight that Melville found in England, it would seem, was the truck-horses he saw round the docks. “So grave, dignified, gentlemanly and courteous did these fine truck horses look—so full of calm intelligence and sagacity, that often I endeavoured to get into conversation with them as they stood in contemplative attitudes while their loads were preparing.” And Melville admired the truckmen also. “Their spending so much of their valuable lives in the high-bred company of their horses seems to have mended their manners and improved their taste; but it has also given to them a sort of refined and unconscious aversion to human society.” Though Melville grew to a most uncomplimentary rating of the human biped, he always cherished a very deep reverence for some of his four-footed brothers. “There are unknown worlds of knowledge in brutes,” he wrote; “and whenever you mark a horse, or a dog, with a peculiarly mild, calm, deep-seated eye, be sure he is an Aristotle or a Kant, tranquilly speculating upon the mysteries in man.”

The trip back across the Atlantic, after six weeks in Liverpool, though longer than the out-bound passage, was for Melville less of an ordeal. He was no longer a bewildered stranger in the forecastle or in the riggings, so he turned his eye to other parts of the ship. It was the steerage of the Highlander packed with its four or five hundred emigrants, that gave him most bitter occasion to reflect on the criminal nature of the universe. Because of insufficient provisions in food for an unexpectedly prolonged voyage, the dirty weather, and the absence of the most indispensable conveniences, these emigrants suffered almost incredible hardships. Before they had been at sea a week, to hold one’s head down the fore hatchway, Melville says, was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool. The noisome confinement in this close unventilated and crowded den, and the deprivation of sufficient food, helped by personal uncleanliness, brought on a malignant fever among the emigrants. The result was the death of some dozens of them, a panic throughout the ship, and a novel indulgence in spasmodic devotions. “Horrible as the sights of the steerage were, the cabin, perhaps, presented a scene equally despairing. Trunks were opened for Bibles; and at last, even prayer-meetings were held over the very tables across which the loud jest had been so often heard.”

But with the coming of fair winds and fine weather the pestilence subsided, and the ship steered merrily towards New York. The steerage was cleaned thoroughly with sand and water. The place was then fumigated, and dried with pieces of coal from the gallery: so that when the Highlander streamed into New York harbour no stranger would have imagined, from her appearance, that the Highlander had made other than a tidy and prosperous voyage. “Thus, some sea-captains take good heed that benevolent citizens shall not get a glimpse of the true condition of the steerage while at sea.”

As they came into the Narrows, “no more did we think of the gale and the plague; nor turn our eyes upward to the stains of blood still visible on the topsail, whence Jackson had fallen. Oh, he who has never been afar, let him once go from home, to know what home is. Hurra! Hurra! and ten thousand times hurra! down goes our anchor, fathoms down into the free and independent Yankee mud, one handful of which was now worth a broad manor in England.”

Melville spent the greater part of the night “walking the deck and gazing at the thousand lights of the city.” At sunrise, the Highlander warped into a berth at the foot of Wall street, and the old ship was knotted, stem and stern, to the pier. This knotting of the ship was the unknotting of the bonds of the sailors; for, the ship once fast to the wharf, Melville and his shipmates were free. So with a rush and a shout they bounded ashore—all but Melville. He went down into the forecastle and sat on a chest. The ship he had loathed, while he was imprisoned in it, grew lovely in his eyes when he was free to bid it forever farewell. In the tarry old den he sat, the only inhabitant of the deserted ship but for the mate and the rats. He sat there and let his eyes linger over every familiar old plank. “For the scene of suffering is a scene of joy when the suffering is past,” he says, inverting the reflection of Dante; “and the silent reminiscence of hardship departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.” According to this philosophy, the more accumulated and overwhelming the hardships we survive, the richer and sweeter will be the ensuing hours of thoughtful recollection. For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth. And pleasure’s crown of pleasure is remembering sorrier things. So indoctrinated, Melville should have viewed the concluding scene with the captain of the Highlander, on the day the sailors drew their wages, with eternal thanksgiving.

“Seated in a sumptuous arm-chair, behind a lustrous inlaid desk, sat Captain Riga, arrayed in his City Hotel suit, looking magisterial as the Lord High Admiral of England. Hat in hand, the sailors stood deferentially in a semi-circle before him, while the captain held the ship-papers in his hand, and one by one called their names; and in mellow bank notes—beautiful sight!—paid them their wages.... The sailors, after counting their cash very carefully, and seeing all was right, and not a bank-note was dog-eared, in which case they would have demanded another, salaamed and withdrew, leaving me face to face with the Paymaster-general of the Forces.”

Melville stood awhile, looking as polite as possible, he says, and expecting every moment to hear his name called. But no such name did he hear. “The captain, throwing aside his accounts, lighted a very fragrant cigar, took up the morning paper—I think it was the Herald—threw his leg over one arm of the chair, and plunged into the latest intelligence from all parts of the world.”

Melville hemmed, and scraped his foot to increase the disturbance. The Paymaster-general looked up. Melville demanded his wages. The captain laughed, and taking a long inspiration of smoke, removed his cigar, and sat sideways looking at Melville, letting the vapour slowly wriggle and spiralise out of his mouth.

“Captain Riga,” said Melville, “do you not remember that about four months ago, my friend Mr. Jones and myself had an interview with you in this very cabin; when it was agreed that I was to go out in your ship, and receive three dollars per month for my services? Well, Captain Riga, I have gone out with you, and returned; and now, sir, I’ll thank you for my pay.”

“Ah, yes, I remember,” said the captain. “Mr. Jones! Ha! Ha! I remember Mr. Jones: a very gentlemanly gentleman; and stop—you, too, are the son of a wealthy French importer; and—let me think—was not your great-uncle a barber?”

“No!” thundered Melville, his Gansevoort temper up.

Captain Riga suavely turned over his accounts. “Hum, hum!—yes, here it is: Wellingborough Redburn, at three dollars a month. Say four months, that’s twelve dollars: less three dollars advanced in Liverpool—that makes it nine dollars; less three hammers and two scrapers lost overboard—that brings it to four dollars and a quarter. I owe you four dollars and a quarter, I believe, young gentleman?”

“So it seems,” said Melville with staring eyes.

“And now let me see what you owe me, and then we’ll be able to square the yards, Monsieur Redburn.”

“Owe him!” Melville confesses to thinking; “what do I owe him but a grudge.” But Melville concealed his resentment. Presently Captain Riga said: “By running away from the ship in Liverpool, you forfeited your wages, which amount to twelve dollars; and there has been advanced to you, in money, hammers and scrapers, seven dollars and seventy-five cents; you are therefore indebted to me for precisely that sum. I’ll thank you for the money.” He extended his open palm across the desk.

The precise nature of Melville’s eloquence at this juncture of his career has not been recorded. Penniless, he left the ship, to trail after his shipmates as they withdrew along the wharf to stop at a sailors’ retreat, poetically denominated “The Flashes.” Here they all came to anchor before the bar.

“Well, maties,” said one of them, at last—“I s’pose we shan’t see each other again:—come, let’s splice the mainbrace all round, and drink to the last voyage.”

And so they did. Then they shook hands all round, three times three, and disappeared in couples through the several doorways.

Melville stood on the corner in front of “The Flashes” till the last of his shipmates was out of sight. Then he walked down to the Battery, and within a stone’s throw of the place of his birth, sat on one of the benches, under the summer shade of the trees. It was a quiet, beautiful scene, he says; full of promenading ladies and gentlemen; and through the fresh and bright foliage he looked out over the bay, varied with glancing ships. “It would be a pretty fine world,” he thought, “if I only had a little money to enjoy it.” He leaves it ambiguous whether or not he imbibed his optimism at “The Flashes.” Equally veiled does he leave the mystery by which he came by the money to pay his passage on the steamboat up to Albany: a trip he took that afternoon. “I pass over the reception I met with at home; how I plunged into embraces, long and loving,” he says:—“I pass over this.”

For the home we return to, is never the home that we leave, and the more desperate the leave-taking, the more bathetic the return.