It was sunset when the Acushnet came within sight of the loom of the mountains of the Marquesas. Innumerable sea-fowls, screaming and whirling in spiral tracts had, for some days previous, been following the vessel as harbingers from land. As the ship drew nearer to green earth, several of man-of-war’s-hawks, with their blood-red bills and raven plumage, had circled round the ship in diminishing circles until Melville was able distinctly to mark the strange flashing of their eyes; and then, as if satisfied by their observations, they would sail up into the air as if to carry sinister warning on ahead. Then,—driftwood on the oily swells; and finally had come the glad announcement from aloft—given with that peculiar prolongation of sound that a sailor loves—“Land ho!”

After running all night with a light breeze straight for the island, the Acushnet was in easy distance of the shore by morning. But as the Acushnet had approached the island from the side opposite to Tyohee—christened by Captain Porter, Melville remembered, Massachusetts Bay,—they were obliged to sail some distance along the shore. Melville was surprised not to find “enamelled and softly swelling plains, shaded over by delicious groves, and watered by purling brooks.” Instead he found himself cruising along a bold rock-bound coast, dashed high against by the beating surf, and broken here and there into deep inlets that offered sudden glimpses of blooming valleys, deep glens, waterfalls and waving groves. As the ship sailed by the projecting and rocky headlands with their short inland vistas of new and startling beauty, one of the sailors exclaimed to Melville, pointing with his hand in the direction of the treacherous valley: “There—there’s Typee. Oh, the bloody cannibals, what a meal they’d make of us if we were to take it into our heads to land! but they say they don’t like sailors’ flesh, it’s too salt. I say, matey, how should you like to be shoved ashore there, eh?” Melville shuddered at the question, he says, little thinking that within the space of a few weeks he would actually be a captive in that self-same valley.

Towards noon they swung abreast of their harbour. No description can do justice to its beauty, Melville tells us. But its beauty was to him not an immediate discovery. All that he saw was the tri-coloured flag of France trailing over the stern of six vessels, whose black hulls and bristling broadsides floated incongruously in that tranquil bay.

The first emissary from the shore to welcome the Acushnet was a visitor in that interesting state of intoxication when a man is amiable and helpless: a south-sea vagabond, once a lieutenant in the English navy, recently appointed pilot to the harbour by the invincible French. He was aided by some benevolent person out of his whale-boat into the Acushnet, and though utterly unable to stand erect or navigate his own body, he magnanimously proffered to steer the ship to a good anchorage: a feat Captain Pease did for himself, despite the amazing volubility of the visitor in contrary commands.

This renegade from Christendom and humanity was of a type not infrequently met with in accounts of the South Seas. At Hannamanoo, Melville came across another such—a white man in the South Sea girdle, and tattooed on the face, living among a tribe of savages and apparently settled for life, so perfectly satisfied seemed he with his circumstances. This man was an Englishman,—Lem Hardy he called himself,—who had deserted from a trading brig touching at Hannamanoo for wood and water some ten years previous. Aboard the Acushnet he told his history. “Thrown upon the world a foundling, his paternal origin was as much a mystery to him as the genealogy of Odin; and scorned by everybody, he fled the parish workhouse when a boy, and launched upon the sea. He had followed it for several years, a dog before the mast, and now he had thrown it up forever.” He had gone ashore as a sovereign power, armed with a musket and a bag of ammunition, and soon became, what he was when Melville found him, military leader of the tribe, war-god of the entire island, living under the sacred protection of an express edict of the taboo, his person inviolable forever. In Iles Marquises, ou Nouka-Hiva, Histoire, GÉographie, Moeurs et ConsidÉrations GÉnÉrales (Paris, 1843) by Vincendon-Dumoulin and Desgraz is to be found (pages 356-359) a history of two more of these vagabonds: one Joseph Cabri, a Frenchman, and one E. Roberts, an Englishman. Cabri returned to Europe, for a time, to find the novelty of his tattooing both an embarrassment and a source of livelihood. He was examined by grave learned societies, was presented before several crowned heads, and submitted his person to intimate examination to any one who would pay his fee. In 1818 he died in obscurity and poverty in Valenciennes, his birth place. His historians regret that his precious person was not preserved in alcohol to delight the inquiring mind of later generations. The Pacific, it would appear, was early a place of refuge for men with an insurmountable homesickness for the mud. Melville soon came to believe that the gifts of civilisation to the South Seas were without exception very doubtful blessings; he came to be a special pleader for the barbaric virtues; when these virtues were practised by legitimate barbarians; but the spectacle of such men as Hardy fell beyond the pale of his unusually broad sympathies. Though he was despairingly alert to the vices of Christendom, never was he betrayed into a corrupt hankering to recapitulate into savagery. Though he excused the cannibalism of the Marquesans as an amiable weakness, he gazed upon Hardy “with a feeling akin to horror.” Hardy’s tattooing was to Melville the outward and visible sign of the lowest degradation to which a mortal, nurtured in a civilisation that had for thousands of years a pathetically imperfect struggle striven to some significance above the beast, could possibly descend. “What an impress!” Melville exclaimed in superlative loathing. “Far worse than Cain’s—his was perhaps a wrinkle, or a freckle, which some of our modern cosmetics might have effaced.” But Hardy’s tattooing was to Melville a mark indelible of the blackest of all betrayals.

More worthy emissaries than the pilot to the port of Tyohee were to welcome Melville to the Marquesas. The entrance of the Acushnet brought from the shore a flotilla of native canoes. “Such strange outcries and passionate gesticulations I never certainly heard or saw before,” Melville says. “You would have thought the islanders were on the point of flying at one another’s throats, whereas they were only amiably engaged in disentangling their boats.” Melville was surprised at the strange absence of a single woman in the invading party, not then knowing that canoes were “taboo” to women, and that consequently, “whenever a Marquesan lady voyages by water, she puts in requisition the paddles of her own fair body.”

As the Acushnet approached within a mile and a half of the foot of the bay, Melville noticed a singular commotion in the water ahead of the vessel: the women, swimming out from shore, eager to embrace the advantages of civilisation. “As they drew nearer,” Melville says, “and as I watched the rising and sinking of their forms, and beheld the uplifted right arm bearing above the water the girdle of tappa, and their long dark hair trailing beside them as they swam, I almost fancied they could be nothing else but so many mermaids. Under slow headway we sailed right into the midst of these swimming nymphs, and they boarded us at every quarter; many seizing hold of the chain-plates and springing into the chains; others, at the peril of being run over by the vessel in her course, catching at the bob-stays, and wreathing their slender forms about the ropes, hung suspended in the air. All of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they clung dripping with the brine and glowing with the bath, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half enveloping their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity, laughing gaily at one another, and chattering away with infinite glee. Nor were they idle the while, for each performed the simple offices of the toilet for the other. Their luxuriant locks, wound up and twisted into the smallest possible compass, were freed from the briny element; the whole person carefully dried, and from a small little round shell that passed from hand to hand, anointed with a fragrant oil: their adornments were completed by passing a few loose folds of white tappa, in a modest cincture, around the waist. Thus arrayed, they no longer hesitated, but flung themselves lightly over the bulwarks, and were quickly frolicking about the decks. Many of them went forward, perching upon the headrails or running out upon the bowsprit, while others seated themselves upon the taffrail, or reclined at full length upon the boats.”

The ship was fairly captured, and it yielded itself willing prisoner. In the evening, after anchor had been struck, the deck was hung with lanterns, and the women, decked in flowers, danced with “an abandoned voluptuousness” that was a prelude “to every species of riot and debauchery.” According to Melville’s account, on board the Acushnet “the grossest licentiousness and the most shameful inebriety prevailed, with occasional and but short-lived interruptions, through the whole period of her stay.”

Nor were the French at the Marquesas neglectful of their duties to the islanders. Admiral Du Petit-Thouars had stationed about one hundred soldiers ashore, according to Melville’s account. Every other day the troops marched out in full regalia, and for hours went through all sorts of military evolutions to impress a congregation of naked cannibals with the superior sophistications of Christendom. “A regiment of the Old Guard, reviewed on a summer’s day in the Champs ElysÉes,” Melville vouches, “could not have made a more critically correct appearance.” The French had also with them, to enrich their harvest of savage plaudits, a puarkee nuee, or “big hog”—in more cultivated language, a horse. One of the officers was commissioned to prance up and down the beach at full speed on this animal, with results that redounded to the glory of France. This horse “was unanimously pronounced by the islanders to be the most extraordinary specimen of zoology that had ever come under their observation.”

It would be an ungracious presumption to contend that the French, while at the Marquesas, exhibited to the natives only the sterner side of civilisation. The behaviour of the French at Tahiti leaves room for the hope that they were no less gallant at the Marquesas. An officer of the Reine Blanche, writing at sea on October 10, 1842, of the exploits of his countrymen at Tahiti, says, in part: “In the evening, more than a hundred women came on board. At dinner time, the officers and midshipmen invited them gallantly to their tables; and the repasts, which were very gay, were prolonged sufficiently late at night, so that fear might keep on board those of the women who were afraid to sail home by the doubtful light of the stars.” The last three lines of this letter were suppressed by the Journal de Debats, it is true, but given in the National and other journals. Three days later the letter was officially pronounced “inexact” by the Moniteur, which courageously asserted that “it is utterly false that a frigate has been the theatre of corruption, in any country whatever; and French mothers may continue to congratulate themselves that their sons serve in the navy of their country.”

While the Frenchmen at the Marquesas—no less than the Americans, one hopes with pardonable patriotic jealousy—were giving their mothers at home cause for congratulation, Melville came to the determination to leave the ship; “to use the concise, point-blank phrase of the sailors, I had made up my mind to ‘run away.’” And that his reasons for resolving to take this step were numerous and weighty, he says, may be inferred from the fact that he chose rather to risk his fortune among cannibals than to endure another voyage on board the Acushnet. In Typee he gives a general account of the captain’s bad treatment of the crew, and his non-fulfilment of agreements. Life aboard the Acushnet has already been sufficiently expatiated upon.

Melville knew that immediately adjacent to Nukuheva, and only separated from it by the mountains seen from the harbour, lay the lovely valley of Happar, whose inmates cherished the most friendly relations with the inhabitants of Nukuheva. On the other side of Happar, and closely adjoining it, lay the magnificent valley of the dreaded Typee, the unappeasable enemies of both these tribes. These Typees enjoyed a prodigious notoriety all over the islands. The natives of Nukuheva, Melville says, used to try to frighten the crew of the Acushnet “by pointing to one of their own number and calling him a Typee, manifesting no little surprise when we did not take to our heels at so terrible an announcement.” But having ascertained the fact that the tribes of the Marquesas dwell isolated in the depths of the valleys, and avoided wandering about the more elevated portions of the islands, Melville concluded that unperceived he might effect a passage to the mountains, where he might easily and safely remain, supporting himself on such fruits as came in his way, until the sailing of the ship. The idea pleased him greatly. He imagined himself seated beneath a cocoanut tree on the brow of the mountain, with a cluster of plantains within easy reach, criticising the ship’s nautical evolutions as she worked her way out of the harbour, and contrasting the verdant scenery about him with the recollections of narrow greasy decks and the vile gloom of the forecastle.

Melville at first prided himself that he was the only person on board the Acushnet sufficiently reckless to attempt an idyllic sojourn on an island of irreclaimable cannibals. But Toby’s perennially hanging over the side of the ship, gazing wistfully at the shore in moody isolation, coupled with Melville’s knowledge of Toby’s hearty detestation of the ship, of his dauntless courage, and his other engaging traits as companion in high adventure, led Melville to share with Toby his schemes. A few words won Toby’s most impetuous co-operation. Plans were rapidly made and ratified by an affectionate wedding of palms, when, to elude suspicion, each repaired to his hammock to spend a last night aboard the Acushnet.

On the morrow, with as much tobacco, ship’s biscuit and calico as they could stow in the front of their frocks, Melville and Toby made off for the interior of Nukuheva,—but not before Melville “lingered behind in the forecastle a moment to take a parting glance at its familiar features.” Their five days of marvellous adventures that landed them finally in the valley of Typee has abidingly tried the credulity of Melville’s readers—though never for an instant their patience. After reading these adventures, Stevenson expressed his slangy approval by hailing Melville as “a howling cheese.” It has been questioned in passing whether or not the number of days that two strong male humans, going through incredible exertion, can support themselves upon a hunk of bread soaked in sweat and ingrained with shreds of tobacco, must not be fewer than Melville makes out. And did they, in sober verity, critics have asked, lower themselves down the cliff by swinging from creeper to creeper with horrid gaps between them—was it as steep as Melville says, and the creepers as far apart? And did they, on another occasion, as Melville asserts, break a second gigantic fall by pitching on the topmost branches of a very high palm tree? During these thrilling and terrible five days, hardship runs hard on the heels of hardship, and each obstacle as it presents itself, seems, if possible, more unsurmountable than the last. There is no way out of this, one says for the tenth time: but the sagacity and fearless confidence of Toby—to whom let glory be given—and the manful endurance of Melville through parching fever and agonising lameness, disappoint the lugubrious reader. On the third day after their escape, their ardour is cooled to a resolve to forego futile ramblings for a space. They crawled under a clump of thick bushes, and pulling up the long grass that grew around, covered themselves completely with it to endure another downpour. While the exhausted Toby slept through the violent rain, Melville tossed about in a raging fever, without the heart to wake Toby when the rain ceased. Chancing to push aside a branch, Melville was as transfixed with surprised delight as if he had opened a sudden vista into Paradise. He “looked straight down into the bosom of a valley, which swept away in long wavy undulations to the blue waters in the distance. Midway towards the sea, and peering here and there amidst the foliage, might be seen the palmetto-thatched houses of its inhabitants glistening in the sun that had bleached them to a dazzling whiteness. The vale was more than three leagues in length, and about a mile across its greatest width. Everywhere below me, from the base of the precipice upon whose very verge I had been unconsciously reposing, the surface of the vale presented a mass of foliage, spread with such rich profusion that it was impossible to determine of what description of trees it consisted. But perhaps there was nothing about the scenery I beheld more impressive than those silent cascades, whose slender threads of water, after leaping down the steep cliffs, were lost amidst the rich foliage of the valley. Over all the landscape there reigned the most hushed repose, which I almost feared to break, lest, like the enchanted gardens of the fairy tale, a single syllable might dissolve the spell.” Toby was awakened and called into consultation. With his usual impetuosity, Toby wanted promptly to descend into the valley before them; but Melville restrained him, dwelling upon the perilous possibility of its inhabitants being Typees. Toby was with difficulty reined to circumspection, and off Melville and his companion started on a wild goose chase for a valley on the other side of the ridge. So fruitless and disheartening did this attempt prove, that Melville was reduced to the wan solace that it was, after all, better to die of starvation in Nukuheva than to be fed on salt beef, stale water and flinty bread in the forecastle of the Acushnet. Yet Toby was dauntless. Despite the defeats of the preceding day, Toby awoke on the following morning as blithe and joyous as a young bird. Melville’s fever and his swollen leg, however, had left him not so exultant.

“What’s to be done now?” Melville inquired, after their morning repast of a crumb of sweat-mixed biscuit and tobacco,—and rather doleful was his inquiry, he confesses.

“Descend into that same valley we descried yesterday,” rejoined Toby, with a rapidity and loudness of utterance that led Melville to suspect almost that Toby had been slyly devouring the broadside of an ox in some of the adjoining thickets. “Come on, come on; shove ahead. There’s a lively lad,” shouted Toby as he led the way down a ravine that jagged steeply along boulders and tangled roots down into the valley; “never mind the rocks; kick them out of the way, as I do; and to-morrow, old fellow, take my word for it, we shall be in clover. Come on;” and so saying he dashed along the ravine like a madman.

Thus was piloted down into the heart of barbarism the man who was to emerge as the first Missionary Polynesia ever sent to Christendom. And on the chances of Toby’s contagious impetuosity hung the annexation of a new realm to the kingdom of the imagination and the discovery of a new manner in the history of letters. For on that day, when Melville and Toby struggled down that ravine like Belzoni worming himself through the subterranean passages of the Egyptian catacombs, the Polynesians were without a competent apologist, and the literary possibilities of the South Seas were unsuspected.

Literature was, of course, already elaborated with fantastic patterns drawn from barbarism, and the Indians of Aphra Behn and Voltaire had given place to the redmen of Cooper. Earlier than this, however, the great discoverers, in their wealth of records, had given many an account of their contacts with savage peoples. But one searches in vain among these records for any very vivid sense that the savage and the Christian belong to the same order of nature. At best, one gathers the impression that in savagery God’s image had been multiplied in an excess of contemptible counterfeits. Melville reports that as late as his day “wanton acts of cruelty are not unusual on the part of sea captains landing at islands comparatively unknown. Indeed, it is almost incredible, the light in which many sailors regard these naked heathens. They hardly consider them human. But it is a curious fact, that the more ignorant and degraded men are, the more contemptuously they look upon those whom they deem their inferiors.” John G. Paton records in his Autobiography how, in 1860, three traders gleefully told him that to humble the natives of Tanna, and to diminish their numbers, they had let out on shore at different ports, four men ill with the measles—an exceedingly virulent disease among savage peoples. “Our watchwords are,” these jolly traders said, “‘sweep the creatures into the sea, and let white men occupy the soil.’” This sentiment belongs more to a fixed human type, than to a period, of course: and that type has frequently taken to sailing strange seas. In treachery, cruelty, and profligacy, the exploits of European discoverers contain some of the rosiest pages in the history of villainy.

These sickening pages of civilised barbarism soon won to the savage ardent apologists, however, who applied an old technique of libel by imputing to the unbreeched heathen a touching array of the superior virtues. Montaigne was among the first to come forward in this capacity. “We may call them barbarous in regard to reasons rules,” he said, “but not in respect to us that exceed them in all kinde of barbarisme. Their warres are noble and generous, and have as much excuse and beautie, as this humane infirmitie may admit: they ayme at nought so much, and have no other foundation amongst them, but the meere jelousie of vertue.” Once in full current of idealisation Montaigne goes on to write as if he soberly believed that savage peoples were descended from a stock that Eve had conceived by an angel before the fall. In his dithyramb on the nobilities of savagery, Montaigne was unhampered by any first-hand dealings with savages, and he was far too wise ever to betray the remotest inclination to improve his state by migrating into the bosom of their uncorrupted nobility.

The myth of the “noble savage” was a taking conceit, however, and when Rousseau taught the world the art of reverie, he taught it also an easy vagabondage into the virgin forest and into the pure heart of the “natural man.” In describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing rooms, Taine says that “The fops dreamed between two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” Rousseau’s savage, “attached to no place, having no prescribed task, obeying no one, having no other law than his own will,” was, of course, a wilful backward glance to the vanished paradise of childhood, not a finding of ethnology. Yet ethnology may prate as it will, the “noble savage” is a myth especially diverting to the over-sophisticated, and like dreams of the virgin forest, thrives irrepressibly among the upholsterings of civilisation. The soft and ardent dreamer, no less than the sleek and parched imagination of Main Street, find compensation for the defeats of civilisation in dreams of a primitive Arcadia. While the kettle is boiling they relax into slippers and make the grand tour. Chateaubriand—whose life, according to LemaÎtre, was a “magnificent series of attitudes”—showed incredible hardihood of attitudinising in crossing the Atlantic in actual quest of the primitive. In the forest west of Albany he did pretend to find some satisfaction in wild landscape. He showed his “intoxication” at the beauties of wild nature by taking pains to do “various wilful things that made my guide furious.” But Chateaubriand was less fortunate in his contact with savagery than he was with nature. His first savages he found under a shed taking dancing lessons from a little Frenchman, who, “bepowdered and befrizzled” was scraping on a pocket fiddle to the prancings of “ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” Chateaubriand concludes with a reflection: “Was it not a crushing circumstance for a disciple of Rousseau?” And it is an indubitable fact that if the present-day disciples of the South Sea myth would show Chateaubriand’s hardihood and migrate to Polynesia, they would find themselves in circumstances no less “crushing.”

Melville was the first competent literary artist to write with authority about the South Seas. In his day, a voyage to those distant parts was a jaunt not lightly to be undertaken. In the Pacific there were islands to be discovered, islands to be annexed, and whales to be lanced. As for the incidental savage life encountered in such enterprise, that, in Montaigne’s phrase, was there to be bastardised, by applying it to the pleasures of our corrupted taste. These attractions of whaling and patriotism—with incidental rites to Priapus—had tempted more than one man away from the comfort of his muffins, and more than one returned to give an inventory of the fruits of the temptation. The knowledge that these men had of Polynesia was ridiculously slight: the regular procedure was to shoot a few cannibals, to make several marriages after the manner of Loti. The result is a monotonous series of reports of the glorious accomplishments of Christians: varied on occasions with lengthy and learned dissertations on heathendom. But they are invariably writers with insular imagination, telling us much of the writer, but never violating the heart of Polynesia.

The Missionaries, discreetly scandalised at the exploitation of unholy flesh, went valiantly forth to fight the battle of righteousness in the midst of the enemy. The missionaries came to be qualified by long first-hand contact to write intimately of the heathen: but their records are redolent with sanctity, not sympathy. The South Sea vagabonds were the best hope of letters: but they all seem to have died without dictating their memoirs. William Mariner, it is true, thanks to a mutiny at the Tongo Islands in 1805, was “several years resident in those islands:” and upon Mariner’s return, Dr. John Martin spent infinite patience in recording every detail of savage life he could draw from Mariner. Dr. Martin’s book is still a classic in its way: detailed, sober, and naked of literary pretensions. This book is the nearest approach to Typee that came out of the South Seas before Melville’s time. So numerous have been the imitators of Melville, so popular has been the manner that he originated, that it is difficult at the present day to appreciate the novelty of Typee at the time of its appearance. When we read Mr. Frederick O’Brien we do not always remember that Mr. O’Brien is playing “sedulous ape”—there is here intended no discourtesy to Mr. O’Brien—to Melville, but that in Typee and Omoo Melville was playing “sedulous ape” to nobody. Only when Typee is seen against the background of A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean performed in the years 1796, 1797, 1798 in the Ship Duff (1799) and Mariner’s Tonga (1816) (fittingly dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, and companion of Captain Cook in the South Seas) can Melville’s originality begin to transpire.

This originality lies partly, of course, in the novelty of Melville’s experience, partly in the temperament through which this experience was refracted. Melville himself believed his only originality was his loyalty to fact. He bows himself out of the Preface “trusting that his anxious desire to speak the ungarnished truth will gain him the confidence of his readers.”

When Melville’s brother Gansevoort offered Typee for publication in England, it was accepted not as fiction but as ethnology, and was published as Melville’s Marquesas only after Melville had vouched for its entire veracity.

Though Melville published Typee upright in the conviction that he had in its composition been loyal both to veracity and truth, his critics were not prone to take him at his word. And he was to learn, too, that veracity and truth are not interchangeable terms. Men do, in fact, believe pretty much what they find it most advantageous to believe. We live by prejudices, not by syllogisms. In Typee, Melville undertook to show from first-hand observation the obvious fact that there are two sides both to civilisation and to savagery. He was among the earliest of literary travellers to see in barbarians anything but queer folk. He intuitively understood them, caught their point of view, respected and often admired it. He measured the life of the Marquesans against that of civilisation, and wrote: “The term ‘savage’ is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilisation, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as missionaries, might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.” Civilisation is so inured to anathema,—so reassured by it,—indeed, that Melville could write a vague and sentimental attack upon its obvious imperfections with the cool assurance that each of his readers, applying the charges to some neighbour, would approve in self-righteousness. But one ventures the “ungarnished truth” about any of the vested interests of civilisation at the peril of his peace in this world and the next. It was when Melville focussed his charge and wrote “a few passages which may be thought to bear rather hard upon a reverend order of men” with incidental reflections upon “that glorious cause which has not always been served by the proceedings of some of its advocates,” that all the musketry of the soldiers of the Prince of Peace was aimed at his head. Melville himself was a man whose tolerance provoked those who sat in jealous monopoly upon warring sureties to accuse him of license. He specifies his delight in finding in the valley of Typee that “an unbounded liberty of conscience seemed to prevail. Those who were pleased to do so were allowed to repose implicit faith in an ill-favoured god with a large bottle-nose and fat shapeless arms crossed upon his breast; whilst others worshipped an image which, having no likeness either in heaven or on earth, could hardly be called an idol. As the islanders always maintained a discrete reserve with regard to my own peculiar views on religion, I thought it would be excessively ill-bred in me to pry into theirs.” This boast of delicacy did not pass unnoticed by “a reverend order of men.” The vitriolic rejoinder of the London Missionary Society would seem to indicate that there may be two versions of “the ungarnished truth.” It should be stated, however, that the English editions of Typee contain strictures against the Missionaries that were omitted in the American editions. But even Melville’s unsanctified critics showed an anxiety to repudiate him. Both Typee and Omoo were scouted as impertinent inventions, defying belief in their “cool sneering wit and perfect want of heart.” Melville’s name was suspiciously examined as being a nom de plume used to cover a cowardly and supercilious libel. A gentleman signing himself G. W. P. and writing in the American Review (1847, Vol. IV, pp. 36-46) was scandalised by Melville’s habit of presenting “voluptuous pictures, and with cool deliberate art breaking off always at the right point, so as without offending decency, he may excite unchaste desire.” After discovering in Melville’s writing a boastful lechery, this gentleman undertakes to discountenance Melville on three scores: (1) only the impotent make amorous boasts; (2) Melville had none of Sir Epicure Mammon’s wished-for elixir; (3) the beauty of Polynesian women is all myth.

Unshaken in the conviction of his loyalty to fact, Melville discovered that the essence of originality lies in reporting “the ungarnished truth.”

On the subject of “originality” in literature, Melville says in Pierre: “In the inferior instances of an immediate literary success, in very young writers, it would be almost invariably observable, that for that instant success they were chiefly indebted to some rich and peculiar experience in life, embodied in a book, which because, for that cause, containing original matter, the author himself, forsooth, is to be considered original; in this way, many very original books being the product of very unoriginal minds.” It is none the less true, however, that though Melville and Toby both lived among the cannibals, it was Melville, not Toby, who wrote Typee.

For four months Melville was held in friendly captivity by the Typees. His swollen leg was healed by native doctors—but not without prolonged pain and anxiety—he was fed, he was amused, he was lionised by the valley. His hosts were savages; they were idolaters, they were inhuman beasts who licked their lips over the roasted thighs of their enemies; and at the same time they were crowned with flowers, sometimes exquisite in beauty, courteous in manners, and engaged all day long in doing not only what they enjoyed doing, but what, so far as Melville could judge, they had every right to enjoy doing. With Toby, Melville was consigned to the household of Kory-Kory. Kory-Kory, though a tried servitor and faithful valet, was, Melville admits, in his shavings and tattoos, a hideous object to look upon—covered all over with fish, fowl, and monster, like an illustrated copy of Goldsmith’s Animated Nature. Kory-Kory’s father, Marheyo, a retired gentleman of gigantic frame, was an eccentric old fellow, who seems to have been governed by no fixed principles whatever. He employed the greater part of his time in throwing up a little shed just outside the house, tinkering away at it endlessly, without ever appearing to make any perceptible advance. He would eat, sleep, potter about, with fine contempt for the proprieties of time or place. “Frequently he might have been seen taking a nap in the sun at noonday, or a bath in the stream at midnight. Once I beheld him eighty feet from the ground, in the tuft of a cocoanut tree, smoking, and often I saw him standing up to the waist in water, engaged in plucking out the stray hairs of his beard, using a piece of mussel-shell for tweezers. I remember in particular his having a choice pair of ear-ornaments, fabricated from the teeth of some sea-monster. These he would alternately wear and take off at least fifty times in the course of a day, going and coming from his little hut on each occasion with all the tranquillity imaginable. Sometimes slipping them through the slits in his ears, he would seize his spear and go stalking beneath the shadows of the neighbouring groves, as if about to give a hostile meeting to some cannibal knight. But he would soon return again, and hiding his weapon under the projecting eaves of the house, and rolling his clumsy trinkets carefully in a piece of tappa, would resume his more pacific operations as quietly as if he had never interrupted them.”

Kory-Kory’s mother was, so Melville reports, the only industrious person in all the valley of Typee: “bustling about the house like a country landlady at an unexpected arrival: forever giving the young girls tasks to perform, which the little huzzies as often neglected; poking into every corner, and rummaging over bundles of old tappa, or making a prodigious clatter among the calabashes. She could not have employed herself more actively had she been left an exceedingly muscular and destitute widow, with an inordinate supply of young children, in the bleakest part of the civilised world.” Yet was hers withal the kindliest heart imaginable. “Warm indeed,” Melville says, “are my remembrances of the dear, good, affectionate old Tinor!”

There also belonged to the household, three young men, “dissipated, good-for-nothing, roystering blades of savages,” and several girls. Of these, Melville has immortalised Fayaway, his most constant companion. He has anatomised her charms in the manner of his first Fragment from a Writing-Desk. But it is Fayaway in action, not Fayaway in still life, that survives in the imagination. At Melville’s intercession, the taboo against women entering a boat was lifted. Many hours they spent together swimming, or floating in the canoe: diversions heightened in their heinousness by the fact that Fayaway for the most part clung to the primitive and summer garb of Eden—and the costume became her. Nor did Melville’s depravity cease with his unblushing approval of nakedness. “Strange as it may seem,” Melville writes in the ’40’s, “there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the act of smoking.” Fayaway not only smoked,—but she smoked a pipe, as they drifted in the canoe. One day, as they were gliding along, Fayaway “seemed all at once to be struck with a happy idea. With a wild exclamation of delight, she disengaged from her person the ample robe of tappa which was knotted over her shoulder (for the purpose of shielding her from the sun), and spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe. We American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a prettier mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any craft.” John La Farge has painted Fayaway in this attitude.

And the occupation of Toby during all this? Soon after their arrival, Toby had been despatched to Nukuheva under pretence of procuring relief for Melville’s swollen leg, actually to facilitate his and Melville’s escape. Toby never again returned to Typee. He had been treacherously beguiled on board a whaler, unable to escape until he left his vessel at New Zealand. “After some further adventures,” says Melville in The Story of Toby, written in July, 1846, ten days after the two men discovered each other’s existence through the instrumentality of Typee, and published as a “sequel” to that novel, “Toby arrived home in less than two years after leaving the Marquesas.”

While Melville had the companionship of Toby in Typee, he was even then eager to get back to civilisation. That savagery was good for savages he never wearied of contending. But despite the idyllic delights of Typee—an idyll with a sombre background, however—Melville was never tempted to resign himself to its vacant animal felicity. Melville, unlike Baudelaire and Whitman, was not stirred by the advantages of “living with the animals.” While among them, he evinced a desire neither to adopt their ways, nor to change them. He made them pop-guns, he astonished them by exhibiting the miracle of sewing. He tried to teach them to box. “As not one of the natives had soul enough in him to stand up like a man, and allow me to hammer away at him, for my own personal satisfaction and that of the king, I was necessitated to fight with an imaginary enemy, whom I invariably made to knock under to my superior prowess.”

Among the bachelors of the Ti, the men’s club of the valley, he chatted, he smoked, he drowsed: he witnessed the Feast of the Calabashes when, for the livelong day “the drums sounded, the priests chanted, and the multitude roared and feasted”—a scene reminiscent of a University whole-heartedly given over to “campus activity.” A mock battle was staged for his diversion. He entered the funeral fastnesses where the effigies of former heroes eternally paddled canoes adorned by the skulls of their enemies. He mused by pools, splashing with laughing bronze nymphs. Yet withal, Melville was a captive in the valley. His lameness, too, returned. His hosts began to make friendly but insistent suggestions that he be tattooed—a suggestion superlatively repugnant to him. He heard, moreover, the clamour of a cannibal feast, and lifted the cover of a tub under which lay a fresh human skeleton. Under these circumstances he taught old Marheyo two English words: Home and Mother. But he did not complete the trinity. Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. It was time for him to depart.

One profoundly silent noon, as Melville lay lame and miserable under Kory-Kory’s roof, Mow-Mow, the one-eyed chief, appeared at the door, and leaning forward towards Melville, whispered: Toby pemi ena—“Toby has arrived.” That evening Mow-Mow’s dead body floated on the Pacific, a boat-hook having been mortally hurled at his throat. And it was Melville who hurled the boat-hook.

An Australian whaler, touching at the harbour of Nukuheva, had been informed of Melville’s detention in Typee. Desirous of adding to his crew, the Captain had sailed round thither, and “hove to” off the mouth of the bay. Chary of the man-eating propensities of the Typees, the Captain sent in a boat-load of taboo natives from the other harbour, with an interpreter at their head, to procure Melville’s release. Accompanied by a throng of armed natives, Melville was carried down to the shore—being too lame to walk the distance. A gun and an extravagant bounty of powder and calico were offered for Melville’s release: but this bounty was clamorously and indignantly rejected. Karakoee, the head of the ransoming party, was menaced by furious gestures, and forced out into the sea, up to his waist in the surf. Blows were struck, wounds were given, and blood flowed. In the excitement of the fray, Melville was left to the guardianship of Marheyo, Kory-Kory, and Fayaway. Throwing to these three the articles that had been brought for his ransom, Melville bounded into the boat which was in immediate readiness to pull off towards the ship. It was not until the boat was about fifty yards from the shore that the savages recovered from their astonishment at Melville’s alacrity in escape. Then Mow-Mow and six or seven warriors rushed into the sea and hurled their javelins at the retreating boat—and some of the weapons passed as close as was desirable. The wind was freshening every minute, and was right in the teeth of the retreating party. Karakoee, who was steering the boat, gave many a look towards a jutting point of the bay they had to pass. When they came within a hundred yards of the point, the savages on the shore dashed into the water, swimming out towards the boat: and by the time Melville’s party reached the headland, the savages were spread right across the boat’s course. The rowers got out their knives and held them ready between their teeth. Melville seized the boat-hook. Mow-Mow, with his tomahawk between his teeth, was nearest to the boat, ready the next instant to seize one of the oars. “Even at the moment I felt horror at the act I was to commit; but it was no time for pity or compunction, and with a true aim, and exerting all my strength, I dashed the boat-hook at him. I struck him below the throat, and forced him downward.” Mow-Mow’s body arose in the wake of the boat, but not to attack again. Another savage seized the gunwale, but the knives of the rowers so mauled his wrists, that before many moments the boat was past all the Typees, and in safety. In the closing tableau, Melville fell fainting into the arms of Karakoee.

Though later, when Melville was a sailor in the United States Navy, he touched at the Marquesas, he never again set foot within the valley of Typee. Melville had known the Typees in their uncorrupted glory—strong, wicked, laughter-loving and clean. Mr. O’Brien visited Typee not many years ago, to find it pathetically fallen from its high estate. “I found myself,” he says, “in a loneliness indescribable and terrible. No sound but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the sombre silence.... Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a weight, upon leaf and flower. The thin, sharp buzzing of the nonos was incessant.” Mr. O’Brien discovered in the heart of the valley fewer than a dozen people who sat within the houses by cocoanut-husk fires, the acrid smoke of which daunted the nonos. “They have clung to their lonely paepaes despite their poverty of numbers and the ferocity of the nonos. They had clearings with cocoanuts and breadfruits, but they cared no longer to cultivate them, preferring rather to sit sadly in the curling fumes and dream of the past. One old man read aloud the Gospel of St. John in Marquesan, and the others listlessly listened, seeming to drink in little comfort from the verses, which he recited in the chanting monotone of their uta.... Nine miles in length is Typee, from a glorious cataract that leaps over the dark buttress wall where the mountain bounds the valley, to the blazing beach. And in all this extent of marvellously rich land, there are now this wretched dozen natives, too old or listless to gather their own food.”

Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!