HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)

Dana had voyaged to the Pacific at the advice of his physician; Herman Melville went to sea from pure love of adventure. Though of New England descent, he was born in New York. He lived there during his boyhood, and after 1860 he made it his home. College had no attractions for him. Before he was twenty he had become a sailor, and at twenty-two he had joined the crew of a whaler bound for the Pacific. Never was voyage more full of adventure. During eighteen months he experienced all the hardships and excitements of the sperm whale fishery; he found brutality equal to that which Dana had experienced; he deserted the ship and with a single companion lived for four months among the Marquesas cannibals, was rescued after a sharp fight by an Australian whaler, and after two more years of wandering came home on an American man of war.

His experiences he recorded first in Typee: a Peep at Polynesian Life During a Four-Months' Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas, 1846, and then in Omoo, 1847. These books, which purport to be plain narrative of facts, he followed with Mardi: and a Voyage Thither, 1849, 'a romance of Polynesian Adventure' as he termed it, and by Redburn: His First Voyage, 1849, a story undoubtedly based upon his own first voyage to Liverpool. These he followed. with White-Jacket; or, the World in a Man of War, 1850, and Moby Dick; or, the Whale, 1851, the latter a wild mélange of adventure and of Gothic romance which he dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. As a novelist Melville was a failure. He was strong, however, in his pictures of life on the ocean. In some chapters of stirring action few have surpassed him. In descriptions of life in the forecastle and of all that pertains to nautical adventure he was a realist, and his pictures are first-hand documents for the history of a vanished epoch.

THE SOCIAL CONDITION AND
GENERAL CHARACTER OF
THE TYPEES

damsel's ornaments. In her estimation its price is far above rubies - and yet there hangs the dental jewel by its cord of braided bark, in the girl's house, which 5 is far back in the valley; the door is left open, and all the inmates have gone off to bathe in the stream.

There seemed to be no rogues of any kind in Typee. In the darkest nights the natives slept securely, with all their worldly wealth around them, in houses the doors of which were never fastened. The disquieting ideas of theft or assassina- 10 land of the valley, whether it was the

tion never disturbed them. Each islander
reposed beneath his own palmetto thatch-
ing, or sat under his own bread-fruit tree,
with none to molest or alarm him. There
was not a padlock in the valley, nor any- 15
thing that answered the purpose of one;
still there was no community of goods.
This long spear, so elegantly carved and
highly polished, belongs to Warmoonoo;
it is far handsomer than the one Marheyo 20
so greatly prizes; it is the most valuable
article belonging to its owner. And yet
I have seen it leaning against a cocoa-
nut tree in the grove, and there it was
found when sought for. Here is a 25
sperm-whale tooth, graven all over with
cunning devices: it is the property of
Karluna: it is the most precious of the

So much for the respect in which such matters are held in Typee. As to the

joint property of its inhabitants, or whether it was parceled out among a certain number of landed proprietors who allowed everybody to roam over it as much as they pleased, I never could ascertain. At any rate, musty parchments and title-deeds there were none in the island; and I am half inclined to believe that its inhabitants hold their broad valleys in fee simple from nature herself.

Yesterday I saw Kory-Kory hie him. away, armed with a long pole, with which, standing on the ground, he knocked down the fruit from the topmost boughs of the trees, and brought them home in his basket of cocoa-nut leaves. To-day I see an islander, whom I know to reside in a distant part of the valley, doing the self