Consider, now, a sailor altogether unused to the tumult of a man-of-war, for the first time stepping on board. —White Jacket
Call him a bluejacket first and foremost. Before he was Herman Melville, author, celebrated for living among the cannibals, he was Herman Melville, U.S. Navy, #572 on the General Muster of the USS United States, the “Old Waggon,” flagship of the Pacific Squadron and the fastest frigate in the Navy. The 14 months Melville served on board as an ordinary seaman subject to the Articles of War have been largely overlooked notwithstanding the telling account of that ordeal in White Jacket. Those martial months arguably made all the difference for the 24-year-old beachcomber, for they turned a rover into a writer. A storyteller of genius. They also brought him back home. In that metamorphic span, bluejacket Melville spent 141 days in port and 179 days at sea and logged more than 38,000 miles in the Pacific and Atlantic before entering Boston harbor in October 1844, four years after he shipped for the Pacific on board a whaler out of New Bedford.
Before Ishmael then there was “White Jacket,” the “universal absorber” of daily life on board a man-of-war, Melville’s alter-ego garbed in a spectral patchwork that gave him license to roam the deck of the Neversink at will. Written in two months, talk about a fast sailor, White Jacket gives us an unsparing look at that naval life fore and aft, below decks and high above. A master class in the good, bad, and ugly of bluejacket life. Unlike his “sea brother” Richard Henry Dana, whose Two Years Before the Mast remains the great cinema verité account of going to sea as a jack tar, Melville applied a thin coat of factitious varnish—he took docudrama liberties, the United States is never mentioned—to his “man-of-war experiences and observations.” The subtitle, “Or The World In A Man-Of-War,” speaks to Melville’s metaphorical reach, his large ambition, which could never confine itself to an actual vessel. He meant to write the world tout court, even if that world was but 178 feet long and numbered some 500 souls total in the port and starboard watch sections.
Melville the author was desperate to win back the readership that had acclaimed him the equal of Dana. The man who had gone Dana one better, gone native in the three-month prelapsarian idyll described in Typee. Mardi, his third book and first fantastic voyage, went off the allegorical rails and was widely lambasted as unreadable, so to recoup his losses Melville, now with a wife and child to support, dashed off the autobiographical Redburn and White Jacket in rapid-fire succession. A return to the tried and true, two voyages recounted as picaresque, as exotic fare. A formulaic “botch.” Or so he disparaged them, minor masterpieces each. He confessed to Dana that he had written the two “almost entirely for “lucre”—by the job, as a wood sawyer saws wood.”
Melville was in a hurry to get to whaling, the first soundings of Moby Dick had been made in his reading, and the prospect of the Big Book that would win fame and fortune and a place in the literary pantheon caused him to move the family from the “brick-kiln heat ”of Manhattan to the pastoral idyll of Pittsfield, to the old family farmstead. There he could write his greatest adventure the way he wanted, Mount Greylock in daily communion, surrounded by scrivening women doting on him. An American Typee.
But first things first, back in brick kiln New York. In giving grudging priority to his naval service Melville acknowledged its importance in his literary development. Some woodpile. Without White Jacket, no Moby Dick, without the duress of sudden enlistment for “three years or Cruze” no return to the Arrowhead he loved as a boy, where he was to write his great masterpiece.
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The “naturally roving disposition” had brought Melville to the Pacific, and the naturally recusant sensibility had landed him in hot water. The cooking pot as it were, only the cannibals were “sanctimonious” missionaries, Americans who didn’t cotton to his outspoken views on their colonial depredations in the Sandwich Islands. Melville had decided to stay in Honolulu—he had just signed a one year dry-goods indenture with an Englishman he admired—when the British suddenly annexed the islands, a move Melville welcomed a tad too fulsomely.
Since Melville was still a “wanted” man—having deserted one whaling ship in the Marquesas and mutinied aboard another, subsequently jailed in Tahiti, and escaped to Moorea, he feared the worst, that he would be found out and sent to Sydney in irons. (The Lucy Ann, which took him aboard in Fatu Hiva, was Australian). One exercised American grandee had it out for him. It was only a matter of time before the Acushnet would come calling, looking for its deserters. Enter the United States into Honolulu harbor. The British flag came down after a fortnight and the Islands reverted to native sovereignty, which meant American suzerainty resumed even more moralistic and punitive. Which meant Melville had better think of a plan B, and fast.
If Melville had kept a low profile, it is not hard to imagine that he would have gone native on Oahu as well. Dana said about the Hawaiians he met in California that they were “the most interesting, intelligent, and kind-hearted people that I ever fell in with.” Indeed, it is not hard to envisage Melville and his Hawaiian Fayaway enjoying the good life—far from the reach of the missionaries who found sugar-baron mammon more to their liking—tucked into some verdant valley where he would write Typee and Omoo and Mardi and take a stab at a book about his whaling days.
But to write about the white whale he first had to write about the white jacket, and the only way that would happen would be if he broke his indenture and enlisted in the United States Navy for three years or a cruise of undetermined length. Which is precisely what happened. Melville was on the lam, so he joined the outcasts in the Navy—“that asylum for the perverse, the home of the unfortunate”—and cast off once again for the South Seas, this time under strict martial discipline. The monthly reading of the Articles of War—so many offenses “under penalty of death”—quickly disabused him of any fleeting thought of jumping ship in the Marquesas and find succor once more in the valley of the Typees. That Eden was gone, the angel with the flaming sword wore a naval uniform and punished desertion with death by hanging. In its place a Valley of Despond. Shut up with 500 men on a vessel not half again as long as the Acushnet, granted all of eighteen inches leeway for his hammock, chronically sleep deprived Melville could only rue his fate once more. Not a week out of Oahu he must have felt that the watery part of the world had it out for him.
The Commodore, the “Flying Welshman” Thomas ap Catesby Jones, was in flight himself, another sailor on the lam, which is why the ship diverted some 7800 miles to the Marquesas, Tahiti, and the Society Islands before returning to Chile and Peru, where Jones would face the music, be relieved of Pacific Squadron command. Jones knew the Secretary of The Navy had it out for him, for having jumped the gun and seized California for a day, and so a fugitive himself decided to take the Old Waggon for one last tour of the Pacific of his youth.
Thus, Melville returned to the scene of the crime, this time with no chance of getting off the ship. There was no liberty call in any of the islands. No native welcome either. The French were building fortifications and the American missionaries were rooting out heathen practices, not least the traditional female aquatic greeting. Typee would convey Melville’s outrage at what he was seeing from the deck of the United States. “The white civilized man is the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.”
Shut up then with the “people,” with the assortment of “beachcombers, drifters, vagabonds, petty criminals and deserters” who made up the crew, Melville gravitated to Jack Chase, captain of the main top, an Englishman then in his mid-50s, a natural leader, fluent in five languages, who conducted something of an ongoing symposium in literature high above the tumult of the main deck. He had an “abounding air of good sense and good feeling about him that he who would not love him, would thereby pronounce himself a knave.”
Books were held in the highest regard (the ship had a well-stocked library) and the long-winded recitation of poetry from memory revered as a gift from the gods. As Hershel Parker puts it “a whaleship may have been his Yale College and his Harvard, as Ishmael says in Moby Dick, but a frigate was his Vatican Library and his Scriblerus Club.” One night on watch he and a book-loving companion “scoured all the prairies of reading; dived into the bosoms of authors and tore out their hearts.”
Melville discovered his story-telling gifts on the main top. Indeed, he came out of his circumspect shell to hold his auditors in thrall as he recounted his time ashore in the libertine valley of the Typees. The writer-in-waiting had found his first audience, which he later eulogized in this striking passage from White Jacket:
We had rare times in that top. We accounted ourselves the best seaman in the ship, and from our airy perch literally looked down upon the land-lopers below…We maintop men were brothers, one and all; and we loaned ourselves to each other with all the freedom in the world.
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Literature and freedom above, bestiality and baseness below. Pig-killing, as Jack Chase derisively called whaling, was not half as brutal as the soul-slaying bluejacket Melville witnessed on board the United States. The “cat” was liberally applied for the slightest of offenses, sometimes at the sadistic caprice of a young officer enamored of his newfound authority. Melville was forced to stand at attention to witness 163 floggings. Which enraged him no end. He devotes fully four chapters to the hated practice. Indeed, he goes after it with all his verbal gifts. The disarming voice-over of White Jacket drops away and the cri-de-couer of a jeremiad takes command, Melville the author venting his wrath at the wanton defilement of the democratic oversoul. American ships, he notes, are the “most excessively neat, and have the greatest reputation for it. And of all men-of-war the general discipline of the American ships is perhaps the most severe.” He becomes an inveterate foe of that severity, of the officers who sanction and take pleasure in the practice, which violates the very core of his being and his understanding of what it means to be an American. He weighs taking the captain with him over the side should he be flogged.
White Jacket is the great panegyric to the democratic promise, to liberation from the slave-ship mentality that had brought the young nation to the brink of civil war. Ever the recusant Melville makes his declaration of independence known in the very uniform he crafts for himself. The French aristocrat wrote the great treatise on American Democracy, the American democrat ascends to his aristocratic perch to embody liberty and declaim his birthright as a natural born writer:
And I feel persuaded in my inmost soul that it is to the fact of my having been a main-top man . . . 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.
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Total immersion for the writer. Nothing off limits. That world was full of criminality, thievery to rape, and the “almost incredible corruption pervading nearly all ranks” makes the savage discipline of the main deck all the more revolting. Save for the Commodore and Mad Jack, who saves the ship from a Cape Horn disaster, the “anchor button” caste invite White-Jacket’s scorn. Respect goes to the natural leaders, not to the uniform or rank. Indeed, those who wear the uniform of rank are loathsome in their dereliction of duty. Captain Claret is a besotted supernumerary. The license below deck countenances any number of crimes against the human spirit but dare to bring it to the attention of the First Lieutenant or Officer of The Deck and invite a flogging. Human ballast—“the close cribbing and confinement of so many mortals in one oaken box on the sea”—enables the man-of-war to stay afloat, but at a high price to the world. “Like pears closely packed, the crowded crew mutually decay through close contact and every plague-spot is contagious.”
Melville can’t resist allegory, even if appended at the end, and so his man-of-war becomes “a fast-sailing, never-sinking world frigate, of which God was the shipwright.” “Under sealed orders” we sail for “ages and ages,” destination unknown “yet our final haven was predestinated ere we slipped from the stocks of Creation.” Herman, American democrat, meet Dutch Calvinist Melville. Meet Ishmael and the story of the doomed Pequod. White Jacket is the first draft of Moby Dick. White Jacket falls from the mast and deep under water is brushed by a “fashionless form.” When he finally surfaces, he is very nearly harpooned, mistaken for a white shark. That fashionless form will become the white whale, and the man-of-war, having served its purpose in bringing the exile home in one piece, will become the slayer of whales, harpooners from the antipodes “federated along one keel.” Jettisoning the patchwork quilt, worn-out as a literary conceit, that patchwork will reappear in Moby Dick larger than life, as its warp and woof, it’s very structure. Moreover, Melville will again go Dana one better, by making the cinema veritae of the whaling industry the ballast of his fugitive tale.
In other words, the United States Navy supplied Herman Melville author with the necessary “experiences and observations” to write Moby Dick. Melville the minor author would have been known for living among the cannibals had not Melville the bluejacket been invited aloft, to join Jack Chase and the literary brotherhood in “scouring the praries of reading.” Chase was the great mentor, as the dedication to Billy Budd makes clear.
In diving into the bosom of Herman Melville pride of place goes to the bluejacket, not the whaler. There were any number of books about whaling, Melville gives some idea in the “Extracts,” but only one book about bluejacket life aboard a Navy frigate written by an “unfolding” genius. White Jacket is an entertaining read, jaunty and even jocular. But it is deadly serious, subversive, a gravamen, a mutiny as it were from the colorful literature of the sea. Melville was after bigger fish. As the great critic Alfred Kazin writes in his introduction: “His ambition as a writer, though he did not know this, would soon be limitless. White Jacket made Moby Dick possible.”
Guert Gansevoort, Melville’s cousin, was second in command of the USS Somers when a mutiny was put down and the three conspirators hung from the yardarm. Melville was in Callao—his first liberty port in months—when he learned of the incident, which was the talk of the fleet. Drumhead justice was the verdict of the people. His cousin never lived it down even after heroics in the Mexican War. Too close to home. Melville too never lived it down. It gnawed at him all his life. One last tour of the Pacific of his bluejacket days. The world owes the US Navy Billy Budd as well.
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Dana would praise White Jacket. Melville was more than gratified. He looked up to his older sea brother. Dana the lawyer would lead the legal charge against flogging in the merchant service, the publication of White Jacket would ensure its prohibition in the Navy. “Tied & welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy,” as Melville put it in a letter to Dana, could also be said of their respective books, which together remain the great classics of America at sea in the 19th century.
Melville the author and Melville the bluejacket also are tied and welded together. That reciprocal bond deserves full recognition now that Herman Melville turned 200 on 1 August 2019. Although he was opposed to “ceremonials” I think the occasion called for a 21-gun salute at the Naval Academy. The bluejacket teaches midshipmen that life on a man-of-war is no idyll. Nor is it a hell on earth any longer, no little thanks to the publication of White Jacket itself. Give Melville the author the last word on his bluejacket days:
Let us leave the ship on the sea—still with the land out of sight—still with brooding darkness on the face of the deep. I love an indefinite, infinite background—a vast, heaving, rolling, mysterious rear!
Sources:
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Two Years Before the Mast (New York: Modern Library 2001)
Jay Leda, The Portable Melville (New York: Viking Press 1952)
Herman Melville, White Jacket (New York: New American Library 1979)
Hershel Parker, Herman Melville, A Biography, Volume 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 1996)
Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville, A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996)
