It was the same Edmund Burke who movingly mourned the departure of the epic virtues of chivalry, who in swift generalities celebrated the heroic enterprise of the hunters of leviathan. But Burke viewed both whaling and knight-errantry from a safe remove of time or place, and the crude everyday realities of each he smothered beneath billows of gorgeous generalisation. Burke offers a notable instance wherein romance and rhetoric conspired to glorify two human activities that are glorious only in expurgation. Piracy is picturesque in its extinction, and to the snugly domesticated imagination there is both virtue and charm in cut-throats and highwaymen. Even the perennial newspaper accounts of massacre and rape doubtless serve to keep sweet the blood of many a benevolent pew-holder. The incorrigible tendency of the imagination to extract sweet from the bitter, honey from the carcass of the lion, makes an intimate consideration of the filthy soil from which some of its choicest illusions spring, downright repugnant to wholesomemindedness. Intimately considered, both whaling and knight-errantry were shabby forms of the butchering business. Their virtues were but the nobler vices of barbarism: vices that take on a semblance of nobility only when measured against the deadly virtues of emasculated righteousness. In flight from the deadly virtues, Melville was precipitated into the reeking barbarism of the forecastle of a whaling ship. Whaling he applied as a counter-irritant to New England decorum, and he seems to have smarted much during the application. He was blessed with a high degree of the resilience of youthful animal vigour, it is true; and there is solace for all suffering, the godly tell us—omitting the ungodly solaces of madness and suicide. It will be seen that whaling prompted Melville to extreme measures. The full hideousness of his life on board the Acushnet has not yet transpired.

The chief whaling communities—those of Nantucket and Buzzard’s Bay—were originally settled by Quakers. The inhabitants of these districts in general retained in an uncommon measure throughout the golden age of whaling, the peculiarities of the Quaker. Never perhaps in the history of the world has there been mated two aspects of life more humorously incompatible than whale-hunting and Quakerism. This mating produced, however, a race of the most sanguinary of all sailors; a race of fighting Quakers: in Melville’s phrase, “Quakers with a vengeance.” Though refusing from conscientious scruples to bear arms against land invaders, yet these same Quakers inimitably invaded the Atlantic and the Pacific; and though sworn foes to human bloodshed, yet did they, in their straight-bodied coats, spill tons and tons of leviathan gore. And so, as Melville goes on to point out, “there are instances among them of men who, named with Scripture names, and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.”

The two old Quaker captains of Moby-Dick, Bildad and Peleg, are typical of the race that made Nantucket and New Bedford the greatest whaling ports in all history. Peleg significantly divides all good men into two inclusive categories: “pious good men, like Bildad,” and “swearing good men—something like me.” The “swearing good men,” Melville would seem to imply, in sacrificing piety to humanity, while standing lower in the eyes of God, stood higher in the hearts of their crew. Though Bildad never swore at his men, so Melville remarks, “he somehow got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them.”

Typical of the cast of mind of the whaling Quaker is Captain Bildad’s farewell to ship’s company on board the ship in which he was chief owner: “God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooners; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent, within the year. Don’t forget your prayers, either. Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s day, men; but don’t miss a fair chance either; that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye!”

The old log-books most frequently begin: “A journal of an intended voyage from Nantucket by God’s permission.” And typical is the closing sentence of the entry in George Gardener’s journal for Saturday, January 21, 1757: “So no more at Present all being in health by the Blessing of God but no whale yet.”

At first, the New England vessels were manned almost entirely by American-born seamen, including a certain proportion of Indians and coast-bred negroes. But as the fishery grew, and the number of vessels increased, the supply of hands became inadequate. Macy says that as early as about 1750 the Nantucket fishery had attained such proportions that it was necessary to secure men from Cape Cod and Long Island to man the vessels. Goode says: “Captain Isaiah West, now eighty years of age (in 1880), tells me that he remembers when he picked his crew within a radius of sixty miles of New Bedford; oftentimes he was acquainted, either personally or through report, with the social standing or business qualifications of every man on his vessel; and also that he remembers the first foreigner—an Irishman—that shipped with him, the circumstance being commented on at that time as a remarkable one.” Time was, however, when it was easy to gather at New Bedford or New London a prime crew of tall and stalwart lads from the fishing coast and from the farms of the interior of New England. Maine furnished a great many whalemen, and for a long time the romance of whaling held out a powerful fascination for adventurous farmer boys of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Upper New York. During Melville’s time the farms of New England still supplied a contingent of whalers. In writing of New Bedford he says: “There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.” Of course, these farm-boys were of the verdant innocence Melville paints them when they signed the ship’s papers, not knowing a harpoon from a handspike. It is a curious paradox in the history of whaling,—a paradox best elaborated by Verrill,—that the ship’s crew were almost never sailors. The captain, of course, the officers and the harpooners were usually skilled and efficient hands. But so filthy was the work aboard the whaler, and so perilous; so brutal the treatment of the crew, and so hazardous the actual earnings, that competent deep-water sailors stuck to the navy or the merchant marine. When Melville shipped from Honolulu as an “ordinary seaman in the United States Navy,” he soon found occasion “to offer up thanksgiving that in no evil hour had I divulged the fact of having served in a whaler; for having previously marked the prevailing prejudice of men-of-war’s-men to that much maligned class of mariners, I had wisely held my peace concerning stove boats on the coast of Japan.” And in Redburn he says “that merchant seamen generally affect a certain superiority to ‘blubber-boilers,’ as they contemptuously style those who hunt the leviathan.”

When the farmer lads came down to the sea no more in adequate numbers, the whaleships were forced to fill their crews far from home, and to take what material they could get. Shipping offices, with headquarters at the whaling ports, employed agents scattered here and there in the principal cities, especially in the Middle West and the interior of New England. These agents received ten dollars for each man they secured for the ship’s crew. Besides this, each agent was paid for the incidental expenses of transportation, board, and outfit of every man shipped. By means of lurid advertisements and circulars, these agents with emancipated conscience, made glowing promises to the desperate and the ignorant. Each prospective whaleman was promised a “lay” of the ship’s catch. For in the whaling business, no set wages were paid. All hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called “lays.” The size of the lay was proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s company. The captain usually received a lay of from one-twelfth to one-eighteenth; green hands about the one-hundred-and-fiftieth. What lay Melville received is not known. Bildad is inclined to think that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay was not too much for Ishmael; but Bildad was a “pious good man.” Peleg, the “swearing good man,” after a volcanic eruption with Bildad, puts Ishmael down for the three hundredth lay. Though this may exemplify the relation that, in Melville’s mind, existed between profanity and kindness, it tells us, unfortunately, nothing of the prospective earnings of Melville’s whaling. Of one thing, however, we can be fairly certain: Melville did not drive a shrewd and highly profitable bargain. The details of his life bear out his boast: “I am one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I put up at the grim sign of the Thunder Cloud.”

Each prospective whaler, besides being assured a stated fraction of the ship’s earnings, was by the agents promised an advance of seventy-five dollars, an outfit of clothes, as well as board and lodging until aboard ship. From this imaginary seventy-five dollars were deducted all the expenses which the agent defrayed, as well as the ten dollars head payment. By a shameless perversion of exaggerated charges, a really competent outfitter managed to ship his embryo whalemen without a cent of the promised advance. The agent who shipped J. Ross Browne and his unfortunate friend, was a suave gentleman of easy promises. “Whaling, gentlemen, is tolerably hard at first,” Browne makes him say, “but it’s the finest business in the world for enterprising young men. Vigilance and activity will insure you rapid promotion. I haven’t the least doubt but you’ll come home boat steerers. I sent off six college students a few days ago, and a poor fellow who had been flogged away from home by a vicious wife. A whaler, gentlemen, is a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy! There’s nothing like it. You can see the world; you can see something of life.”

The first half of one of the truest and most popular of whaling chanteys, a lyric which must have been sung with heartfelt conviction by thousands of whalemen, runs:

The second half of this ballad celebrates the hardships of life aboard ship: the poor food and the brutality of the officers. With this side of whaling we know that Melville was familiar. But of the usual preliminaries of whaling recounted by Browne and summarised in the chantey, Melville says not a word, either in Moby-Dick or elsewhere. Nor does tradition or history supplement this autobiographical silence. On this point, we know nothing. Surely it would be intensely interesting to know how far egotism conspired with art in guiding Melville in the writing of the masterful beginning of Moby-Dick.

No matter by what process Melville found his way to the Acushnet, the whaling fleet was, indeed, at the time of his addition to it, “a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy.” J. Ross Browne was warned before his sailing that New Bedford “was the sink-hole of iniquity; that the fitters were all blood-suckers, the owners cheats, and the captains tyrants.”

Though the arraignment was incautiously comprehensive, Browne confesses to have looked back upon it as a sound warning. The boasted advantages of whaling were not selfishly withheld from any man, no matter what the race, or the complexion of his hide or his morals. The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, English, Scotch, Irish, in fact, men of almost every country of Europe, and this with no jealous discrimination against Asia, Africa, or the Islands of the Pacific, were drawn upon by the whale fleet during the days of its greatest prosperity. “And had I not been, from my birth, as it were, a cosmopolite,” Melville remarks parenthetically in Redburn. It would have been difficult for him to find a more promising field for the exercise of this inherited characteristic, than was whaling in 1841: and this, indeed, without the nuisance of leaving New Bedford. “In thoroughfares nigh the docks,” he says, “any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest nondescripts from foreign ports. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and in Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.” It will be remembered that Ishmael spends his first night in New Bedford in bed with one of these very cannibals; and on the following morning, in a spirit of amiable and transcendent charity, goes down on his knees with his tattooed bed-fellow before a portable wooden deity: an experience fantastic and highly diverting, nor at all outside the bounds of possibility. It is a fact to chasten the optimism of apostles of the promiscuous brotherhood of man, that as the whaling crews grew in cosmopolitanism, they made no corresponding advances towards the Millennium. Had Nantucket and New Bedford but grown to the height of their whaling activities in the fourth century, they might have sent enterprising agents to the African desert to tempt ambitious cenobites with offers of undreamed-of luxuries of mortification. These holy men might have worked miracles in whaling, and transformed the watery wilderness of the Pacific into a floating City of God. But in the nineteenth century of grace, the kennel-like forecastle of the whaler was the refuge not of the athletic saint, but of the offscourings of all races, the discards of humanity, and of this fact there is no lack of evidence. Nor did Melville’s ship-mates, on the whole, seem to have varied this monotony. There survives this record in his own hand:

Of the twenty-seven men who went out with the ship, only the Captain, the Second Mate, a Boatswain, the Cook, the Cooper and six of the mongrel crew (one of which made several futile attempts to escape) came back home with her. The First Mate had a fight with the Captain and left the ship; the Carpenter and four of the crew went ashore to die, two at least with venereal diseases, another went ashore spitting blood, another to commit suicide.

Toby, like Melville, had evidently not been reared from the cradle to the life of the forecastle; a fact that, despite his anxious effort, Toby could not entirely conceal. “He was one of that class of rovers you sometimes meet at sea,” says Melville, “who never reveal their origin, never allude to home, and go rambling over the world as if pursued by some mysterious fate they cannot possibly elude.”

By the spell of the senses, too, Melville was attracted to Toby. “For while the greater part of the crew were as coarse in person as in mind,” says Melville, “Toby was endowed with a remarkably prepossessing exterior. Arrayed in his blue frock and duck trousers, he was as smart a looking sailor as ever stepped upon a deck; he was singularly small and slightly made, with great flexibility of limb. His naturally dark complexion had been deepened by exposure to the tropical sun, and a mass of jetty locks clustered about his temples, and threw a darker shade into his large black eyes.”

There is preserved among Melville’s papers a lock of hair, unusually fine and soft in texture, but not so much “jetty” as of a rich red-black chestnut colour, and marked “a lock of Toby’s hair,” and dated 1846 the year of the publication of Typee. When Melville and Toby parted in the Marquesas, each came to think that the other had most likely been eaten by the cannibals. Upon the publication of Typee, Toby was startled into delight to learn of Melville’s survival and to rub his eyes at the flattering portrayal of himself. In a letter of his to Melville, dated June 16, 1856, he says: “I am still proud of the immortality with which you have invested me.” The extent of the first extremity of his pride is not recorded. But in his first flush of immortality he seems to have sent Melville a lock of his hair, an amiable vanity, perhaps, at Melville’s celebration of his personal charms.

There survives with the lock of hair a daguerreotype of Toby, also of 1846. There are also two other photographs: the three strewn over a period of thirty years. These three photographs make especially vivid the regret at the lack of any early picture of Melville. Melville’s likeness is preserved only in bearded middle-age: and such portraiture gives no more idea of his youthful appearance than does Toby’s washed-out maturity suggest his Byronic earlier manner. There is every indication that Melville was a young man of a very conspicuous personal charm. From his books one forms a vivid image of him in the freshness and agility and full-bloodedness of his youth. To bring this face to face with the photographs of his middle age is a challenge to the loyalty of the imagination. All known pictures of Melville postdate his creative period. They are pictures of Melville the disenchanted philosopher. As pictures of Melville the adventurer and artist, they survive as misleading posthumous images.

Of Toby’s character, Melville says: “He was a strange wayward being, moody, fitful, and melancholy—at times almost morose. He had a quick and fiery temper too, which, when thoroughly roused, transported him into a state bordering on delirium. No one ever saw Toby laugh. I mean in the hearty abandonment of broad-mouthed mirth. He did sometimes smile, it is true; and there was a good deal of dry, sarcastic humour about him, which told the more from the imperturbable gravity of his tone and manner.”

After escaping from the Acushnet with Melville into the valley of Typee, Toby in course of time found himself back to civilisation, where the history of his life that he kept so secret aboard the Acushnet came more fully to be known.

“TOBY”
RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE

Toby, or Richard Tobias Greene, was, according to notices in Chicago papers at the time of his death on August 24, 1892, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1825. He was as a child brought to America by his father, who settled in Rochester, New York, where Toby “took public school and academic courses.” Before he was seventeen he shipped aboard the Acushnet, there to fall in with Melville and to accompany him into the uncorrupted heart of cannibalism. Toby returned to civilisation to study law with John C. Spencer, “the noted attorney whose son was executed for mutiny at Canandaigua, New York,” and was, in time, admitted to the bar. He relinquished jurisprudence for journalism, and was for some indefinite period editor of the Buffalo Courier. He restlessly varied his activities by assisting in constructing the first telegraph line west of New York State, and opened the first telegraph office in Ohio, at Sandusky. For some years he published the Sandusky Mirror. In 1857 he moved to Chicago and took a place on the Times. With the Civil War he enlisted in the 6th Infantry of Missouri and for three years was “trusted clerk at General Grant’s headquarters.” He was discharged June, 1864, to enlist again October 19, 1864, in the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. With the end of the war he returned to Chicago, ruined in health. Yet he continued to exert himself as a public-minded citizen, and at his funeral were “many fellow Masons, comrades from the G.A.R. and others who came to pay their respects to the late traveller, editor and soldier.”

After the publication of Typee there were delighted exchanges of recognition and gratitude between him and Melville. And though these two men grew further and further apart with years, there continued between them an irregular correspondence and a pathetic loyalty to youthful associations: felicitations that grew to be as conscientious and hollow as the ghastly amiabilities of a college reunion. Toby’s son, born in 1854, he named Herman Melville Greene (a compliment to Melville adopted by some of his later shipmates in the navy); and Melville presented his namesake with a spoon—the gift he always made to namesakes. Toby’s nephew was named Richard Melville Hair, and another spoon was shipped west. In 1856 Toby wrote Melville he had read Melville’s most recent book, Piazza Tales. Toby’s critical efforts exhausted themselves in the comment: “The Encantadas called up reminiscences of the Acushnet, and days gone by.” In 1858, when Melville was lecturing about the country, Toby addressed a dutiful letter to his “Dear Old Shipmate,” asking that Melville visit him while in Cleveland. If the visit was ever made, it has not transpired. In 1860 Toby wrote to Melville: “Hope you enjoy good health and can yet stow away five shares of duff! I would be delighted to see you and ‘freshen the nip’ while you would be spinning a yarn as long as the main-top bowline.” In acknowledgment Melville during the year following sent Toby the gift of a spoon. In reply Toby observes: “My mind often reverts to the many pleasant moonlight watches we passed together on the deck of the Acushnet as we whiled away the hours with yarn and song till eight bells.” Even to the third generation Toby’s descendants were “proud of the immortality” with which Melville had invested Toby. Miss Agnes Repplier has written on The Perils of Immortality. There are perils, too, in immortalisation.

But in the days of Toby’s unredeemed immortality on board the Acushnet before he joined the Masons and the Grand Army of the Republic, Toby was to Melville a singularly grateful variation to the filth and hideousness and brutality of the human refuse with which he cruised the high seas in search of oil and bone.

Melville was fifteen months on board the Acushnet; and for the last six months of this period he was out of sight of land; cruising “some twenty degrees to the westward of the Gallipagos”—“cruising after the sperm-whale under the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific—the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else.”

The ship itself was, at the expiration of this period, deplorable in appearance. The paint on her sides, burnt up by the scorching sun, was puffed up and cracked. She trailed weeds after her; about her stern-piece an unsightly bunch of barnacles had formed; and every time she rose on a sea, she showed her copper torn away, or hanging in jagged strips. The only green thing in sight aboard her was the green paint on the inside of the bulwarks, and that, to Melville, was of “a vile and sickly hue.” The nearest suggestion of the grateful fragrance of the loamy earth, was the bark which clung to the wood used for fuel—bark gnawed off and devoured by the Captain’s pig—and the mouldy corn and the brackish water in the little trough before which the solitary tenant of the chicken-coop stood “moping all day long on that everlasting one leg of his.”

The usage on board in Melville’s ship, as in that of J. Ross Browne and many another, had been tyrannical in the extreme. In Typee he says: “We had left both law and equity on the other side of the Cape.” And Captain Pease, arbitrary and violent, promptly replied to all complaints and remonstrances with the butt-end of a hand-spike, “so convincingly administered as effectually to silence the aggrieved party.”

“The sick had been inhumanly neglected; the provisions had been doled out in scanty allowance.” The provisions on board the Acushnet had consisted chiefly of “delicate morsels of beef and pork, cut on scientific principles from every part of the animal and of all conceivable shapes and sizes, carefully packed in salt and stored away in barrels; affording a never-ending variety in their different degrees of toughness, and in the peculiarities of their saline properties. Choice old water, too, two pints of which were allowed every day to every soul on board; together with ample store of sea-bread, previously reduced to a state of petrification, with a view to preserve it either from decay or consumption in the ordinary mode, were likewise provided for the nourishment and gastronomic enjoyment of the crew.” Captain Davis, in his Nimrod of the Sea, suggests that petrification is not the worst state of ship’s-biscuits; he recounts how with mellower fare “epicures on board hesitate to bite the ship-bread in the dark, and the custom is to tap each piece as you break it off, to dislodge the large worms that breed there.”

The itinerary of this fifteen months’ cruise is not known. In Moby-Dick Melville says: “I stuffed a shirt or two into my carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific.” In Omoo, Melville speaks of “an old man-of-war’s-man whose acquaintance I had made at Rio de Janeiro, at which place the ship touched in which I sailed from home.” In White-Jacket and Omoo he speaks of whaling off the coast of Japan. And in Moby-Dick, in a passage that reads like an excerpt from the Book of Revelations, he indicates a more frigid whereabouts: “I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!”

But what waters the Acushnet sailed, and what shores she touched before she dropped anchor in the Marquesas, little positively is known.

The last eighteen or twenty days, however, during which time the light trade winds silently swept the Acushnet towards the Marquesas, were to Melville, when viewed in retrospect, “delightful, lazy, languid.” Land was ahead! And with the refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass in prospect, Melville and the whole ship’s company resigned themselves to a disinclination to do anything, “and spreading an awning over the forecastle, slept, ate, and lounged under it the livelong day.” The promise of the ship’s at last breaking through the inexorable circle of the changeless horizon into the fragrance of firm and loamy earth, gave Melville an eye for the sea-scape he had formerly abhorred. “The sky presented a clear expanse of the most delicate blue, except along the skirts of the horizon, where you might see a thin drapery of pale clouds which never varied their form or colour. The long, measured, dirge-like swell of the Pacific came rolling along, with its surface broken by little tiny waves, sparkling in the sunshine. Every now and then a shoal of flying fish, scared from the water under the bows, would leap into the air, and fall the next moment like a shower of silver into the sea.”

In later years, memory treacherously transformed this watery environment upon which Melville and Toby had vented their youthful and impotent imprecations. From his farm in the Berkshire Hills, he looked back regretfully upon his rovings over the Pacific, and by a pathetic fallacy, convinced himself that in them “the long supplication of my youth was answered.” The spell of the Pacific descended upon him not while he was cruising the Pacific, however, but while he was busy upon his farm in Pittsfield, “building and patching and tinkering away in all directions,” as he described his activities to Hawthorne.

Strangely jumbled anticipations haunted Melville, he says, as drowsing on the silent deck of the Acushnet he was being borne towards land: towards the Marquesas, one of the least known islands in the Pacific.

“The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up!” exclaims Melville in excited prospect. “Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoa-nut—coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols—heathenish rites and human sacrifices.”

After fifteen months aboard the Acushnet, Melville was ripe to discover alluring Edenic beauties in tropical heathendom. And in the end, so intolerable was the prospect of dragging out added relentless days under the guardianship of Captain Pease, that as a last extremity, Melville preferred to risk the fate of Captain Cook, and find a strolling cenotaph in the bellies of a tribe of practising cannibals.