Herman Melville

This historical work has been digitally restored using the latest technology, making it available in digital and printed form. The original is painstakingly manually quality-checked, leaving fresh, easy-to-read literature in modern fonts whilst keeping the author’s intent in place wherever possible. This also enables Kindle versions to use the technology available such as Text-to-Speech, as our books are not simply printed scans. Excerpt from the book: For Melville’s life between 1841, when he sailed in the “Acushnet”, and 1844, when, after wanderings to and fro, in Atlantic and Pacific, after adventures on land and escapes to sea, he returned to Boston, the story is to be sought almost exclusively in the books he wrote as soon as he returned—Typee, Omoo, White Jacket and Moby-Dick. It is not a concentrated story, and there are frequent difficulties when an attempt is made to distinguish what is true in memory from what is true in imagination. Melville’s love of pseudonymity is not a rare characteristic in imaginative artists, but it was very strongly marked in him and makes the task of outlining his life as uncertain as a shadow chasing a shadow. Maybe he subdued himself in order to exalt himself, but it is clear that he sought shadows rather than light and, in the absence of recognition, proudly invested himself with obscurity. It has been suggested by one who knew Melville, Arthur Stedman, that the impulse to sea-roving was given by the publication in 1840 of Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. Restless he must have been, but I doubt whether the spirit of adventure was strong enough to lead him to join a whaler; and I doubt whether Melville was ever deeply stirred by the curiosity which seeks satisfaction in movement and spectacle. He was introspective and seldom showed a desire to visit the unfamiliar and explore his own ignorance. The curiosity that led him to visit Palestine, his farthest voluntary visit, was abstract and philosophical and might have been almost completely satisfied by staying at home. This, however, was much later in his life, and when he wrote White Jacket he set himself to telling only of what took place on board, and does not hint at the least temptation to let his thoughts stray ashore. His impulse to whaling was much more direct and definite—the desire to make a living independently; and if a further impulse be discerned it was the desire for isolation amid activity, and silent remoteness for years, perhaps, from all that had made youth painful and manhood perplexed. He fled from the city to the desert where, if once his comrades were silent, the waves and the wind spoke.