In 1898, there appeared the Memories of a Rear-Admiral Who Has Served for More Than Half a Century in the Navy of the United States. S. R. Franklin, the author of this volume, had lived a long and useful life, with no design during his years of activity, it would seem, of bowing himself out of the world as a man-of-letters. But in the leisure of elderly retirement, he was persuaded by his friends to get rid of his reminiscences once for all by putting them into a book. Rear-Admiral Franklin took an inventory of his rich life, and accepted the challenge. Had he not roamed about the globe since he was sixteen years of age? And he had known a dozen famous Admirals, three Presidents, three Emperors, two Popes, five Christian Kings and a properly corresponding number of Queens, not to mention a whole army of lesser notables.

In 1842, as midshipman aboard the United States frigate, Franklin cruised the Pacific. The United States stopped at Honolulu, touched at the Marquesas. Franklin reports that the Bay of Nukuheva “makes one of the most beautiful harbours I have ever seen.” But upon the natives he bestowed the contempt of a civilised man: “for the Marquesans were cannibals of the worst kind, and no one who desired to escape roasting ever ventured away from the coast.” The United States did not remain long in these waters, “where there was nothing to do but look at a lot of half-naked savages.” So off sailed the frigate to Tahiti, where a queen came aboard. But Franklin cannot remember whether it was Pomare or some other queen: “Ladies of that rank were not uncommon in those days in the South Seas.”

Franklin had then been cruising among the islands of the Pacific for some months, and he was “not sorry when the time came to get under way for the coast.” Men of Franklin’s type are a credit to civilisation: men proud of their heritage, but unobtrusive in their pride. Franklin was unmoved by any sanctimonious hankering to improve the heathen, or by any romantic anxiety to ease into the mud of barbarism. “Savage and half-civilised life becomes very irksome,” he says, “when the novelty is worn off.”

“At Tahiti,” he goes on to state, “we picked up some seamen who were on the Consul’s hands. They were entered on the books of the ship, and became a portion of the crew. One of the number was Herman Melville, who became famous afterwards as a writer and an admiralty lawyer. He had gone to sea for his health, and found himself stranded in the South Pacific. I do not remember what the trouble was, but he and his comrades had left the ship of which they were a portion of the crew. Melville wrote a book, well known in its day, called White-Jacket, which had more influence in abolishing corporal punishment in the Navy than anything else. This book was placed on the desk of every member of Congress, and was a most eloquent appeal to the humane sentiment of the country. As an evidence of the good it did, a law was passed soon after the book appeared abolishing flogging in the Navy absolutely, without substituting any other mode of punishment in its stead; and this was exactly in accord with Melville’s appeal.”

“I do not think that I remember Melville at all,” Franklin goes on to say; “occasionally will flash across my memory a maintop-man flitting across about the starboard gangway with a white jacket on, but there is not much reality in the picture which it presents to my mind. In his book he speaks of a certain seaman, Jack Chase, who was Captain of the maintop, of whom I have a very distinct recollection. He was about as fine a specimen of seaman as I have ever seen in all my cruising. He was not only that, but he was a man of intelligence, and a born leader. His top-mates adored him, although he kept them up to the mark, and made every man do his share of work. Melville has given him considerable space in his book, and seems to have had intense admiration for him. He mentions also a number of officers whom it is not difficult to recognise. The Commanding Officer, who had a very red face, he called Captain Claret; a small but very energetic Midshipman, who made himself felt and heard about the decks, he called Mr. Pert; the Gunner was ‘Old Combustibles.’ He gives no names, but to any one who served in the Frigate United States it was easy to recognise the men by their sobriquets. Melville certainly did a grand work in bringing his ability as a writer and his experience as a seaman to bear upon the important matter—I mean corporal punishment—which had been the subject of so much discussion in and out of Congress.”

The essential accuracy of Melville’s account of life on board the Frigate United States is thus, in the above as in other passages, vouched for by a Rear-Admiral. Franklin, himself, however, is not exhaustively familiar with the life and works of Melville, making him an “admiralty lawyer” who went to sea for his health. And according to Franklin’s account, Melville shipped on board the United States from Tahiti. According to Melville’s own account, he left Eimeo—from the harbour of Tamai—not on board a man-of-war, but on board an American whaler bound for the fishing grounds off Japan.

The itinerary of Melville’s rovings in the Pacific after he left Tahiti cannot be stated with any detailed precision. In an Appendix to the American edition of Typee, Melville says: “During a residence of four months at Honolulu, the author was in the confidence of an Englishman who was much employed by his lordship”—Sir George Paulet. In both Typee and Omoo he speaks of conditions in the Sandwich Islands with the familiarity of first-hand observation. The Frigate United States sailed from Hampton Roads early in January, 1842. It doubled the Horn late in February, and joined the Pacific squadron at Valparaiso. After spending the winter of 1842-3 off Monterey, the United States returned to Callao in the spring, and sailed for Honolulu, arriving in the early summer of 1843. According to his own account, Melville left Tahiti in the autumn of 1842. The United States left Tahiti in the summer of 1843. Melville speaks of revisiting the Marquesas and Tahiti after the experiences recorded in Typee and Omoo. In Typee he says: “Between two and three years after the adventures recorded in this volume, I chanced, while aboard a man-of-war, to touch at these islands”—the Marquesas. Though in this statement Melville is patently careless in his chronology, there is no reason to doubt his geography. According to the hypothesis that offers fewest difficulties—and none of these at all serious—it would appear that Melville left the Society Islands in the autumn of 1842, on board a whaler bound for the coast of Japan, to arrive in Honolulu some time in the early part of 1843, where, according to Arthur Stedman, he was “employed as a clerk.” In the Introductory Note to White-Jacket he says: “In the year 1843 I shipped as ‘ordinary seaman’ on board a United States frigate, then lying in a harbour of the Pacific Ocean. After remaining in the frigate for more than a year, I was discharged from the service upon the vessel’s arrival home.” Melville was discharged in Boston, in October, 1844. It would appear that Melville shipped on board the United States, from Honolulu, in the summer of 1843, touching again at the Marquesas and at Tahiti, and returning home by way of the Peruvian ports.

Of Melville’s experiences between the time of his leaving the Society Islands and that of his homeward cruise as a sailor in the United States Navy, nothing is known beyond the meagre details already stated.

In White-Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War (1850) Melville has left a fuller account, however, of his experiences on board the United States. The opening of White-Jacket finds Melville at Callao, on the coast of Peru—the last harbour he touched in the Pacific. In Typee and Omoo he had already recounted his adventures in the South Seas, with all the crispness and lucidity of fresh discovery. While on board the United States he returned to old harbours, and sailed past familiar islands. But White-Jacket is not a Yarrow Revisited.

On the showing of White-Jacket, Melville’s life in the navy was, perhaps, the happiest period in his life. It is true that in Typee he wrote: “I will frankly confess that after passing a few weeks in the valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But, alas, since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.” And in White-Jacket he has many a very dark word to say for the navy. Sailors, as a class, do, of course, entertain liberal notions concerning the Decalogue; but in this they resemble landsmen, both Christian and cannibal. And in Melville’s day—as before and after—from a frigate’s crew might be culled out men of all callings and vocations, from a backslidden parson to a broken-down comedian. It is an old saying that “the sea and the gallows refuse nothing.” But withal, more than one good man has been hanged. “The Navy,” Melville says, “is the asylum for the perverse, the home of the unfortunate. Here the sons of adversity meet the children of calamity, and here the children of calamity meet the offspring of sin.” According to this version, a typical man-of-war was a sort of State Prison afloat. “Wrecked on a desert shore,” Melville says, “a man-of-war’s crew could quickly found an Alexandria by themselves, and fill it with all the things which go to make up a capital.” The United States, surely, lacked in none of the contradictions that go to make up a metropolis: “though boasting some fine fellows here and there, yet, on the whole, charged to the combings of hatchways with the spirit of Belial and unrighteousness.” Or it was like a Parisian lodging house, turned upside down: the first floor, or deck, being rented by a lord; the second by a select club of gentlemen; the third, by crowds of artisans; and the fourth—on a man-of-war a basement of indefinite depth, with ugly-looking fellows gazing out at the windows—by a whole rabble of common people.

The good or bad temper, the vices and virtues of men-of-war’s men were in a great degree attributable, Melville states, to their particular stations and duties aboard ship. Melville congratulated himself upon enjoying one of the most enviable posts aboard the frigate. It was Melville’s office to loose the main-royal when all hands were called to make sail: besides his special offices in tacking ship, coming to anchor, and such like, he permanently belonged to the starboard watch, one of the two primary grand divisions of the ship’s company. And in this watch he was a main-top-man; that is, he was stationed in the main-top, with a number of other seamen, always in readiness to execute any orders pertaining to the main-mast, from above the main-yard. In Melville’s time, the tops of a frigate were spacious and cosy. They were railed in behind so as to form a kind of balcony, that looked airily down upon the blue, boundless, dimpled, laughing, sunny sea, and upon the landlopers below on the deck, sneaking about among the guns. It was a place, too, to test one’s manhood in rough weather. From twenty to thirty loungers could agreeably recline there, cushioning themselves on old sails and jackets. In being a main-top-man, Melville prided himself that he belonged to a fraternity of the most liberal-hearted, lofty-minded, gay, elastic, and adventurous men on board ship. “The reason for their liberal-heartedness was, that they were daily called upon to expatiate themselves all over the rigging. The reason for their lofty-mindedness was, that they were high lifted above the petty tumults, carping cares, and paltrinesses of the decks below.” And Melville attributed it to his having been a main-top-man, and that in the loftiest yard of the frigate, the main-royal-yard, “that I am now enabled to give such a free, broad, off-hand, bird’s-eye, and more than all, impartial account of our man-of-war world; withholding nothing; inventing nothing; nor flattering, nor scandalising any; but meting out to all—commodore and messenger boy alike—their precise descriptions and deserts.”

Melville says that the main-top-men, with amiable vanity, accounted themselves the best seamen in the ship; brothers one and all, held together by a strong feeling of esprit de corps. Their loyalty was especially centred in their captain, Jack Chase—a prime favourite and an oracle among the men. Upon Jack Chase’s instigation they all wore their hats at a peculiar angle; he instructed them in the tie of their neck handkerchiefs; he protested against their wearing vulgar dungaree trousers; he gave them lessons in seamanship. And he solemnly conjured them, with unmitigated detestation, to eschew the company of any sailor suspected of having served in a whaler. On board the United States, Melville wisely held his peace “concerning stove boats on the coast of Japan.”

Melville’s admiration for Jack Chase was perhaps the happiest wholehearted surrender he ever gave to any human being. Jack Chase was “a Briton and a true-blue; tall and well-knit, with a clear open eye, a fine broad brow, and an abounding nut-brown beard. No man ever had a better heart or a bolder. He was loved by the seamen and admired by the officers; and even when the captain spoke to him, it was with a slight air of respect. No man told such stories, sang such songs, or with greater alacrity sprang to his duty. The main-top, over which he presided, was a sort of oracle of Delphi; to which many pilgrims ascended, to have their perplexities or difficulties settled.” Jack was a gentleman. His manners were free and easy, but never boisterous; “he had a polite, courteous way of saluting you, if it were only to borrow a knife. He had read all the verses of Byron, all the romances of Scott; he talked of Macbeth and Ulysses; but above all things was he an ardent admirer of Camoen’s Lusiad, part of which he could recite in the original.” He spoke a variety of tongues, and was master of an incredible richness of Byronic adventure. “There was such an abounding air of good sense and good feeling about the man that he who could not love him, would thereby pronounce himself a knave. I thanked my sweet stars that kind fortune had placed me near him, though under him, in the frigate; and from the outset, Jack and I were fast friends. Wherever you may be now rolling over the blue billows, dear Jack, take my best love along with you,” Melville wrote; “and God bless you, wherever you go.” And this sentiment Melville cherished throughout his life. Almost the last thing Melville ever wrote was the dedication of his last novel, Billy Budd—existing only in manuscript, and completed three months before his death to “Jack Chase, Englishman, wherever that great heart may now be, Here on earth or harboured in Paradise, Captain in the war-ship in the year 1843, In the U. S. Frigate United States.”

In White-Jacket, Melville glows with the same superlative admiration for Jack Chase that Ouida, or the Duchess, exhibit in portraying their most irresistible cavaliers; an enthusiasm similar to that of Nietzsche’s for his Übermensch. So contagious is Melville’s love for his ship-mate that strange infections seem to have been caught therefrom. Though it is certainly not true that “all the world loves a lover,” Melville’s affection for Jack Chase won him at least one rather startling proof that Shakespeare’s dictum is not absolutely false. The proof came in the following form:

Besides the “Master piece of all Gods works Jack Chase” and his comrades of the main-top, Melville was fortunate in finding a few other ship-mates to admire. There was Lemsford, “a gentlemanly young member of the after-guard,” a poet, to whose effusions Melville was happy to listen. “At the most unseasonable hours you would behold him, seated apart, in some corner among the guns—a shot-box before him, pen in hand, and eyes ‘in a fine frenzy rolling.’ Some deemed him a conjurer; others a lunatic. The knowing ones said that he must be a crazy Methodist.” Another of Melville’s friends was Nord. Before Melville knew him, he “saw in his eye that the man had been a reader of good books; I would have staked my life on it, that he had seized the right meaning of Montaigne.” With Nord, Melville “scoured all the prairies of reading; dived into the bosoms of authors, and tore out their hearts.” Melville’s friend Williams “was a thorough-going Yankee from Maine, who had been both a pedlar and a pedagogue in his day. He was honest, acute, witty, full of mirth and good humour—a laughing philosopher.” Beyond these, Melville was chary of his friendship, despite the personal intimacies imposed by the crowded conditions on shipboard. For living on board a man-of-war is like living in a market, where you dress on the doorsteps and sleep in the cellar.

Yet even on board the United States Melville did find it possible to get some solitude. “I am of a meditative humour,” he says, “and at sea used often to mount aloft at night, and, seating myself on one of the upper yards, tuck my jacket about me and give loose to reflection. In some ships in which I have done this, the sailors used to fancy that I must be studying astronomy—which, indeed, to some extent, was the case. For to study the stars upon the wide, boundless ocean, is divine as it was to the Chaldean Magi, who observed their revolutions from the plain.”

Melville was not only fortunate in his friends on the top, and above, but also in the mess to which he belonged: “a glorious set of fellows—Mess No. 1!—numbering, among the rest, my noble Captain Jack Chase. Out of a pardonable self-conceit they called themselves the Forty-two-pounder Club; meaning that they were, one and all, fellows of large intellectual and corporeal calibre.”

In White-Jacket, Melville’s purpose was to present the variegated life aboard a man-of-war; to give a vivid sense of the complexity of the typical daily existence aboard a floating armed city inhabited by five hundred male human beings. And no one else has ever done this so successfully as has Melville. “I let nothing slip, however small,” he says; “and feel myself actuated by the same motive which has prompted many worthy old chroniclers to set down the merest trifles concerning things that are destined to pass entirely from the earth, and which, if not preserved in the nick of time, must infallibly perish from the memories of man. Who knows that this humble narrative may not hereafter prove the history of an obsolete barbarism?” For White-Jacket is, certainly, written with no intent to glorify war. It is a book that a militaristic country would do well to suppress. “Courage,” Melville teaches therein, “is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.” Of a celebrated and dauntless fighter he says: “a hero in this world;—but what would they have called him in the next?” “As the whole matter of war is a thing that smites common sense and Christianity in the face,” he contends, “so everything connected with it is utterly foolish, unchristian, barbarous, brutal, and savouring of the Feejee Islands, cannibalism, saltpetre, and the devil.”

But Melville’s anti-militaristic convictions in no sense perverted his astonishingly vital presentation of life on board the United States. Though in contemplation he despised war, and was open-eyed to the abuses and iniquity on all sides of him on board the frigate; in actual fact he seems to have been unusually happy as a sailor in the navy, among his comrades of the top. The predominant mood of the book is the rollicking good-humour of high animal spirits.

There were black moments in his pleasant routine, however: the terrible nipping cold, and blasting gales, and hurricanes of sleet and hail in which he furled the main-sail in rounding Cape Horn; the flogging he witnessed; his watches at the cot of his mess-mate Shenley in the subterranean sick-bay, and Shenley’s death and burial at sea; the barbarous amputation he witnessed, and the death of the sick man at the hands of the ship’s surgeon—a scene that Flaubert might well have been proud to have written. And there were ugly experiences during the cruise that were among the most lurid in his life.

Throughout the cruise, it seems, for upward of a year he had been an efficient sailor, alert in duties, circumspect in his pleasures, liked and respected by his comrades. The ship homeward bound, and he within a few weeks of being a freeman, he heard the boatswain’s mate bawling his name at all the hatchways and along the furtherest recesses of the ship: the Captain wanted him at the mast. Melville’s heart jumped to his throat at the summons, as he hurriedly asked Fluke, the boatswain’s mate at the fore-hatchway, what was wanted of him.

“Captain wants you at the mast,” Fluke replied. “Going to flog ye, I guess.”

“For what?”

“My eyes! you’ve been chalking your face, hain’t ye?”

Swallowing down his heart, he saw, as he passed through the gangway to the dread tribunal of the frigate, the quartermaster rigging the gratings; the boatswain with his green bag of scourges; the master-at-arms ready to help off some one’s shirt. On the charge of a Lieutenant, Melville was accused by the Captain of failure in his duty at his station in the starboard main-lift: a post to which Melville had never known he was assigned. His solemn disclaimer was thrown in his teeth, and for a thing utterly unforeseen, and for a crime of which he was utterly innocent, he was about to be flogged.

“There are times when wild thoughts enter a man’s breast, when he seems almost irresponsible for his act and his deed,” writes the grandson of General Peter Gansevoort. “The Captain stood on the weather-side of the deck. Sideways, on an unobstructed line with him, was the opening of the lee-gangway, where the side-ladders are suspended in port. Nothing but a slight bit of sinnate-stuff served to rail in this opening, which was cut right to the level of the Captain’s feet, showing the far sea beyond. I stood a little to windward of him, and, though he was a large, powerful man, it was certain that a sudden rush against him, along the slanting deck, would infallibly pitch him headforemost into the ocean, though he who so rushed must needs go over with him. My blood seemed clotting in my veins; I felt icy cold at the tips of my fingers, and a dimness was before my eyes. But through that dimness the boatswain’s mate, scourge in hand, loomed like a giant, and Captain Claret, and the blue sea seen through the opening at the gangway, showed with an awful vividness. I cannot analyse my heart, though it then stood still within me. But the thing that swayed me to my purpose was not altogether the thought that Captain Claret was about to degrade me, and that I had taken an oath with my soul that he should not. No, I felt my man’s manhood so bottomless within me, that no word, no blow, no scourge of Captain Claret could cut me deep enough for that. I but swung to an instinct within me—the instinct diffused through all animated nature, the same that prompts even a worm to turn under the heel. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose.”

Captain Claret ordered Melville to the grating. The ghost of Peter Gansevoort, awakening in Melville, measured the distance between Captain Claret and the sea.

“Captain Claret,” said a voice advancing from the crowd. Melville turned to see who this might be that audaciously interrupted at a juncture like this. It was a corporal of marines, who speaking in a mild, firm, but extremely deferential manner, said: “I know that man, and I know that he would not be found absent from his station if he knew where it was.” This almost unprecedented speech inspired Jack Chase also to intercede in Melville’s behalf. But for these timely intercessions, it is very likely that Melville would have ended that day as a suicide and a murderer. There is no lack of evidence, both in his writings and in the personal recollections of him that survive, that the headlong violence of his passion, when deeply stirred, balked at no extremity. And that day as the scourge hung over him for an offence he had not committed, he seems to have been as murderously roused as at any other known moment in his life. Though hating war, he boasted “the inalienable right to kill”: and the ghost of Mow-Mow, at the day of final reckoning, can attest that this boast was not lightly given. Like the whaling Quakers that he so much admired, he was “a pacifist with a vengeance.”

This scene happened during the run of the United States from Rio to the Line. At Rio, Melville had gone ashore with Jack Chase and a few other discreet and gentlemanly top-men. But of the dashing adventures—if any—that they had on land, Melville is silent: “my man-of-war alone must supply me with the staple of my matter,” he says; “I have taken an oath to keep afloat to the last letter of my narrative.”

In so far as fine weather and the ship’s sailing were concerned, the whole run from Rio to the Line was one delightful yachting. Especially pleasant to Melville during this run were his quarter watches in the main-top. Removed from the immediate presence of the officers, he and his companions could there enjoy themselves more than in any other part of the ship. By day, many of them were industrious making hats or mending clothes. But by night they became more romantically inclined. Seen from this lofty perch, of moonlight nights, the frigate must have been a glorious sight. “She was going large before the wind, her stun’-sails set on both sides, so that the canvases on the main-mast and fore-mast presented the appearance of two majestic, tapering pyramids, more than a hundred feet broad at the base, and terminating in the clouds with the light cope-stone of the royals. That immense area of snow-white canvas sliding along the sea was indeed a magnificent spectacle. The three shrouded masts looked like the apparition of three gigantic Turkish Emirs striding over the ocean.” From there, too, the band, playing on the poop, would tempt them to dance; Jack Chase would well up into song during silent intervals: songs varied by sundry yarns and twisters of the top-men.

One pleasant midnight, after the United States had crossed the Line and was running on bravely somewhere off the coast of Virginia, the breeze gradually died, and an order was given to set the main-top-gallant-stun’-sail. The halyards not being rove, Jack Chase assigned to Melville that eminently difficult task. That this was a business demanding unusual sharp-sightedness, skill, and celerity is evident when it is remembered that the end of a line, some two hundred feet long, was to be carried aloft in one’s teeth and dragged far out on the giddiest of yards, and after being wormed and twisted about through all sorts of intricacies, was to be dropped, clear of all obstructions, in a straight plumb-line right down to the deck.

“Having reeved the line through all the inferior blocks,” Melville says, “I went out to the end of the weather-top-gallant-yard-arm, and was in the act of leaning over and passing it through the suspended jewel-block there, when the ship gave a plunge in the sudden swells of the calm sea, and pitching me still further over the yard, threw the heavy skirts of my jacket right over my head, completely muffling me. Somehow I thought it was the sail that had flapped, and under that impulse threw up my hands to drag it from my head, relying upon the sail itself to support me meanwhile. Just then the ship gave another jerk, and head foremost I pitched over the yard. I knew where I was, from the rush of air by my ears, but all else was a nightmare. A bloody film was before my eyes, through which, ghost-like, passed and repassed my father, mother, and sisters. An unutterable nausea oppressed me; I was conscious of groping; there seemed no breath in my body. It was over one hundred feet that I fell—down, down, with lungs collapsed as in death. Ten thousand pounds of shot seemed tied to my head, as the irresistible law of gravitation dragged me, head foremost and straight as a die, towards the infallible centre of the terrequeous globe. All I had seen, and read, and heard, and all that I had thought and felt in my life—seemed intensified in one fixed idea in my soul. But dense as this idea was, it was made up of atoms. Having fallen from the projecting yard-arm end, I was conscious of a collected satisfaction in feeling, that I should not be dashed on the deck, but would sink into the speechless profound of the sea.

“With the bloody, blind film before my eyes, there was a still stranger hum in my head, as if a hornet were there; and I thought to myself, Great God! this is Death! Yet these thoughts were unmixed with alarm. Like frost-work that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm.

“So protracted did my fall seem, that I can even now recall the feeling of wondering how much longer it would be, ere all was over and I struck. Time seemed to stand still, and all the worlds seemed poised on their poles, as I fell, soul-becalmed, through the eddying whirl and swirl of the Maelstrom air.

“At first, as I have said, I must have been precipitated head foremost; but I was conscious, at length, of a swift, flinging motion of my limbs, which involuntarily threw themselves out, so that at last I must have fallen in a heap. This is more likely, from the circumstance that when I struck the sea, I felt as if some one had smote me slantingly across the shoulder and along part of my right side.

“As I gushed into the sea, a thunder-boom sounded in my ear; my soul seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me with the billows. The blow from the sea must have turned me, so that I sank almost feet foremost through a soft, seething, foamy lull. Some current seemed hurrying me away; in a trance I yielded, and sank deeper and deeper into the glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm now around me, flecked by summer lightnings in an azure afar. The horrible nausea was gone; the bloody, blind film turned a pale green; I wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying. But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through.

“For one instant an agonising revulsion came over me as I found myself utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expended; and there I hung, vibrating in the mid-deep. What wild sounds then rang in my ear! One was a soft moaning, as of low waves on the beach; the other wild and heartlessly jubilant, as of the sea in the height of a tempest. Oh soul! thou then heardest life and death: as he who stands upon the Corinthian shore hears both the Ionian and the Ægean waves. The life-and-death poise soon passed; and then I found myself slowly ascending, and caught a dim glimmering of light. Quicker and quicker I mounted; till at last I bounded up like a buoy, and my whole head was bathed in the blessed air.”

With his knife, Melville ripped off his jacket, struck out boldly towards the elevated pole of one of the life-buoys which had been cut away, and was soon after picked up by one of the cutters from the frigate.

“Ten minutes after, I was safe on board, and, springing aloft, was ordered to reeve anew the stun’-sail-halyards, which, slipping through the blocks when I had let go the end, had unrove and fallen to the deck.” Amphitrite had, indeed, interceded with Neptune, and the sea-gods strove to answer Melville’s prayer. But Melville always, even in the lowest abyss of despair, clung passionately to life. And the night he was hurled from the mast he was hurled from among friends, and into waters that washed the neighbouring shores of his birth.

Melville’s long wanderings were nearly at an end. With the home port believed to be broad on their bow, under the stars and a meagre moon in her last quarter, the main-top-men gathered aloft in the top, and round the mast they circled, “hand in hand, all spliced together. We had reefed the last top-sail; trained the last gun; blown the last match; bowed to the last blast; been tranced in the last calm. We had mustered our last round the capstan; been rolled to grog the last time; for the last time swung in our hammocks; for the last time turned out at the sea-gull call of the watch. We had seen our last man scourged at the gangway; our last man gasp out the ghost in the stifling sick-bay; our last man tossed to the sharks.”

And there Melville has left this brother band—with the anchor still hanging from the bow—with the land still out of sight. “I love an indefinite infinite background,” he says,—“a vast, heaving, rolling, mysterious rear!”