Talking one day of a public discourse, Henry remarked, that whatever succeeded with the audience, was bad. I said, “Who would not like to write something which all can read, like ‘Robinson Crusoe’; and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody.”

—Emerson, “Thoreau”

1

Accounts of encounters with Pacific peoples in antebellum texts by Euro-Americans are marked and marred by anxiety. In discovery narratives, government documents, and popular fiction alike, the Pacific emerges as a theater in which regressive and deathly American fantasies of laissez-faire capitalism and Jacksonian speculation play out under the guise of scientific research or juvenile adventure. Where, in nineteenth-century novels, these fantasies involve “race,” they become openly fetishistic, as if racial representations must return uncannily, cutting through parody's defensive humor. Nowhere are these dynamics more evident than in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a work that, though situated in the Pacific and linked to nautical narratives, has rarely been discussed as a “South Seas” text.

If scholarly discussion has repressed Pym's participation in nationalistic Pacific imaginings, it is in part because such discussion generally gives precedence to the latent meanings of Poe's texts over their manifest content. His own poetic theories, excessive dictions, and even his desire at times, as Leslie Fiedler claims about Pym, to “convince himself that his primary purpose in publishing the tale was to perpetrate a hoax on the reader,” suggest that his “real” investments are couched elsewhere than in “plots,” “details,” and a material world “Poe” believes must be disintegrated.¹ Even readings of Pym as historical, social document generally assume that Poe's buried subject requires critical exhumation. As Harry Levin argues, “in the troubled depths of Poe's unconscious, there must have been not only the fantasy of a lost heritage, but a resentment and a racial phobia. These impulsions seldom manifest themselves upon the surface of his writing.” Daniel Hoffman may be taken as representative of the degree to which this reading has become canonical: “It is incontestable that Poe's island of Tsalal represents in one aspect the American South. This land that resembled a bale of cotton with its brutal pickaninnies is conceived out of Edgar Poe's most atavistic fears.”²

It is not necessary to contest these statements—which treat Pym's maritime sources as ballast for “psychic content”—in order to suggest that Poe invests equally in trade and the opening of American markets in the South Seas, or to suggest that reading the Tsalal episode primarily as an allegory of antebellum slavery involves a textual obliteration of Pacific islanders that contributes, however inadvertently, to American Pacific Orientalism. In fact, insofar as Pym activates Pacific contexts (generic and historical), Poe, his nineteenth-century reviewers, and contemporary critics all move in alliance with a rim/basin logic that empties the interior Pacific of any significance as a zone of cultural interaction and dialogue. As Paul Sharrad observes, the Pacific “basin” is “represented not as a political space or an economic one in an active, productive sense, but as … a space for European adventuring … natural science, history, anthropology.”³ Euro-American writers and critics, that is, have tended to imagine an interior Pacific inhabited by fetishized, cannibalistic “Stone Age savages,” or one in which the voyaging self moves backward in time and consciousness rather than engaging the material present—Pym's village of Klock-Klock as anthropological clock wound back. D. H. Lawrence exemplifies this aspect of Pacific Orientalism, which “insubstantializes” Pacific cultures by seeing the Pacific as “aeons older than the Atlantic or the Indian Oceans,” meaning that “it has not come to any modern consciousness.”⁴

American criticism today still largely omits reference to the rich systems of cultural exchange, as well as to material history, in the Pacific. Thus, while John Carlos Rowe provides a necessary, trenchant critique of the ahistoricism of Poe's (post)modernist canonizers, and in particular of their tendency to overlook Poe's complicity with proslavery discourses, Rowe's own analysis defines a located moment in Americanist revisionism, in which a circumscribed understanding of race in America displaces a more immediate historical reading of imagined and actual interventions into Pacific places. To look at one detail, for instance, Rowe associates James W. Parker, one of the judges in the Nat Turner case, with the Richard Parker cannibalized in Pym. Given Poe's extensive plundering of Benjamin Morrell's Narrative of Four Voyages, however, Morrell's naming of Thomas Parker as one of the “unhappy victims of savage treachery and cannibal ferocity” in the South Seas seems as likely a source.⁵ As Rowe notes, Parker is a common enough name. At stake in reading the detail, then, is the difference between preferring a possible source with an American context to a known historical source involving the death of a man in the Solomon Islands.

It is certainly time, as argued in recent forums, to see the global and domestic arenas of early American literature in clearer relation. Reading Poe's relentlessly parodic, and thus potentially corrective or redirecting, text as messily “about trade” and a nascent “South Seas” discourse (which always appends the word “science” to “commerce”) does not negate Pym's implication in proslavery antebellum discourses. As its subtitle intimates, Pym may be located not only in “the South Seas” but also “still farther South.”⁶ A South Seas emphasis thus suggests the significance of displacing antebellum debates about race into a vast, resource-rich, phantasmal Pacific space. Such a reading posits a circulation of racial discourses in which arguments about slavery and Indian Removal color the perception of South Seas natives, while rhetorical debasement of those natives in various reports undergirds the emerging scientific racism around which paternalistic proslavery arguments and Indian policy arrange themselves.

South Seas discourse does proceed, of course, from a constitutive sense of discovery: the “knowledges” gained in the Pacific about islanders are not the same as those gained in the American West about Indians or in Africa about Blacks. Principles derived from narratives about one location, however, are appropriated and deployed elsewhere, especially in the formation of US policies, validating a confused “logic” that is at once de-differentiating and predicated upon a scale of races. In one sense, Poe's Tsalalians are a confused racial farrago: “black Indians (with Polynesian overtones).”⁷ But Poe otherwise does seem to follow that pseudo-scientific, classificatory Euro-American belief in “a regular scale of gradation” in human types, where whites occupy the top and “dark races” the lowest rungs of the ladder. As expressed in “Mellonta Tauta,” Poe's defensive parody that ridicules anti-hierarchical political thought, “laws of gradation” are “visibly impressed upon all things both in the moral and physical universe.”⁸ In Poe's time, indigenous peoples were characteristically classified according to their perceived social complexity, which in turn suggested the pace of their movement in history. Pym's presentation of Tsalalian dwellings as more “miserable [than] those of even the lowest of the savage races with which mankind are acquainted” ([Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Barton R. Pollint, 1994-, hereafter P], 172), then, speaks not so much of a Black/White schism as it does of degrees of difference that are universally inscribed in social organization—one pole of which Pym represents at its penultimate moment in a human figure with “skin … of the perfect whiteness of the snow” (P, 206).

2

Pym registers and actively participates in the general antebellum transition to a market economy, whose growth was linked to exploration and the discovery of resources and routes. That Poe has his sights on trade, including the sensation-loving contemporary marketplace that his reviews and criticism at once disparage and desire,⁹ is signaled by the introduction of the book's principal characters. Pym's father is “a respectable trader in sea stores” in Nantucket, center of the whaling industry and of investment in the Pacific, and his grandfather has “speculated very successfully in stocks of the Edgarton New-Bank” (P, 57). Of Dirk Peters, Pym writes, “His father was a fur-trader, I believe, or at least connected in some manner with the Indian trading-posts on Lewis river” (P, 87). (From among the books “thoughtfully provided” in the hold of the Grampus, Pym will select one that records “the expedition of Lewis and Clarke to the mouth of the Columbia,” which “amuse[s]” him until he sleeps, only to wake “strangely confused in mind” [P, 70]). And Augustus is a sea captain's son who “had been on a whaling voyage with his father in the John Donaldson” and constantly regales Pym with “his adventures in the South Pacific Ocean [involving] natives of the Island of Tinian, and other places he had visited in his travels” (P, 57).¹⁰

These stories motivate Pym to go to sea, even though he believes “more than one half of them” to have been “fabrications” (P, 57). Fabrications or otherwise, they enter and transform Pym's cognitive reality, shaping Pacific fantasies that involve “shipwreck and famine … death or captivity among barbarian hordes”—fates he quickly acknowledges as “desires” (P, 65). Pym will at once materialize these desires and expose them as psychic props within aggressive material ventures. After the crew of the Grampus mutinies, half of the men want to be pirates, while the others are “bent upon pursuing the course originally laid out for the brig into the South Pacific; there either to take whale, or act otherwise.” The would-be pirates hold sway because Peters is able to dwell “on the world of novelty and amusement to be found among the innumerable islands of the Pacific, on the perfect security and freedom from all restraint to be enjoyed, but, more particularly, on the deliciousness of the climate, on the abundant means of good living, and on the voluptuous beauty of the women,” descriptions that take “strong hold upon the ardent imaginations of the seamen” (P, 93).

Before they can meet barbarian hordes, however, the survivors of a contest between the mutineers must draw boundaries around their identity as civilized people by confronting the spectre of cannibalism, which functions in antebellum texts as a phobic synonym for South Seas natives.¹¹ Chapter 12—in which Pym, Parker, Peters, and Augustus draw lots to decide whose body will feed the others—performs a representative American man's psychic need to differentiate himself from the “natural” cannibals nearly every discovery narrative has prepared him to find. Pym insists that if he and his fellows were “possessed of sufficient strength of mind” they would not even entertain these “bloody and cannibal designs,” and he implores Parker, the instigator, to abandon them in the “name of everything which he h[olds] sacred” (P, 133). But Parker prevails, and he is inevitably eaten, as if in retribution for acceding to cannibal “logic.” Later, as if to stress that this scene has been a ghostly demarcation—in addition to a displaced literalization of both Pym's desires and those Poe attributes to his readers—it becomes clear that the cannibalism was unnecessary, since, ironically, the four men have been floating on an abundant food source; growing a few feet out of sight and revealed only when the brig overturns, these “large barnacles, which proved to be excellent and highly nutritious food” (P, 145), resemble the abundant biche-de-mer (or bêche-de-mer) the survivors will find in Tsalal.

Pym and Peters are finally rescued by the Jane Guy of Liverpool, “bound on a sealing and trading voyage to the South Seas and Pacific” (P, 147). The British Captain Guy has experience in “the southern traffic” but lacks the “spirit of enterprise” that is “requisite” for the Pacific business. (Significantly, in the nationalistic context of maritime narrative, it is the British captain who lacks commercial “energy” and Pym of Nantucket who becomes virtual captain of the ship). The Jane Guy's business is imagined not as slavery but as the beginnings of competitive international trade in the Pacific. Guy is “invested with discretionary powers to cruise in the South Seas for any cargo which might come most readily to hand. He ha[s] on board, as usual in such voyages, beads, looking-glasses, tinderworks, axes, hatchets, … calico, trinkets” (P, 148). In other words, the Jane Guy is outfitted to meet natives who, the British know from prior accounts, desire such artifacts, although the Pym/Poe account makes no attempt to render the dynamics of such barter intelligible. After an “occasional meeting with whaling-ships” (P, 149), and after looking for seal (Pym and Peters are only able to “procure three hundred and fifty skins in all” [P, 154]), the Guy's crew falls in among the natives of Tsalal, or the Solomon Islands, with whom they seek to establish a trading post.¹²

Many critics have considered the Tsalalians—called in turn “islanders,” “savages,” and “natives”—to be images of “Africans” because they are described as “jet black, with thick and long wooly hair” and “thick” lips (P, 168, 174). While rightly considering Poe's fetishistic passages “unmistakeable and vicious,” Richard Wilbur also finds them “incidental,” not indicative of a sustained punning between “South Seas” and “South.”¹³ Certainly, the Tsalalians remind Pym of Africans, and in Poe's source, Morrell, they are “nearly as dark-skinned as Africans” ([Benjamin Morrell, A Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Sea, North and South Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antartic Ocean From the Year 1822 to 1831, 1970, hereafter NFV], 395; emphasis mine). But the Tsalalians and their environs are also beyond anything with which Pym has been “formerly conversant” (P, 171). Before concluding with Fiedler that Pym/Poe is psychically “carried back to Ole Virginny,” then, one should note that Poe largely follows Morrell's descriptions of Melanesians in these passages, and further, that there has been a widespread and persistent tradition, extending from the early discovery narratives through Poe's surrealistic savages to Jack London's “oceanic niggers,” of demonizing black Pacific islanders as part of the project of constructing, in contrast, romantic images of noble Polynesian savages.¹⁴ Even details like the black teeth of the savages, often read as evidence of Poe's Manichaean racial polarizing, or simply of his wild imagination, have a specific reference to exotic customs available to Poe and his readers from many sources. To take one instance, Captain Amasa Delano describes the habit of chewing betel nut as “prevailing all over the eastern islands”: “The nut produces in the mouth a crimson liquor which looks like blood when it is thrown out. When it is mixed with other substances … it leaves the mouth and the teeth black, an effect which the natives consider as a beauty, and think that white teeth should be the privilege of only brute animals.”¹⁵ Tsalal turns out to be a composite land drawn largely from details found in maritime narratives of discovery in the Pacific or around what is now considered the Pacific Rim.

3

Poe's fantasticalness … seems strangely “material.” … Even in his most unbounded imagining, he betrays the true American.

—Dostoevski

Accessing Poe's position on “race” has depended, in part, on locating him—either as a Southerner with sectionalist pride or a classic American romantic with little concern for social issues “in time—in space.” In general, the “Southern” Poe winds up mired in history, while the “American” Poe floats in a textual or mythic sublime. Such a binary is debatable on every count. Suffice it to say here that being a Southerner and being an American are not mutually exclusive, and that being a “classic” writer no longer affords freedom from history and politics. To read Poe as Southerner for the purposes of convicting him of racism reproduces a pattern (which persists to this day) of quarantining the issue of race in America to “the South,” thereby obscuring how, as Dana Nelson notes of the antebellum era, a “growing eagerness to substantiate Anglo racial superiority was not particular to the South.”¹⁶ What emerges from seeing Pym as a text about the South Seas that at the same time illustrates the antebellum racial discourses underpinning both proslavery and Indian Removal arguments is a sense in which Southern interests are not neatly separable from American interests, especially where they involve attitudes toward native peoples. Exploration, whether conducted in a scientific, commercial, or metaphysical register, must go “through” the native, and its logic is shaped by the encounter. In this sense, the South Seas or Antarctic Expedition, which was stridently nationalistic, functioned to suture North/South divisions along the axis of race at the same time that issues of race and civilization were never absent from narratives of exploration.

Such “American” consolidations are embodied in the person of James Kirke Paulding, who is most familiar to Poe scholars as the author of Slavery in the United States, a defense of slavery on biblical grounds that Poe allegedly reviewed with favor. Many critics have debated the authorship of the “Paulding-Drayton Review,” as if attributing it to Poe would confirm his support of “the institution of slavery.” Others consider the point moot, since there can be no doubt that, whatever his beliefs or needs, Poe gave positive reviews to many racist texts while editing the Southern Literary Messenger, a proslavery journal.¹⁷ For the purposes of reassessing Pym, however, it is worth foregrounding ways in which Paulding's interests in Pacific transactions intersect with Poe's.

Such a consideration calls up the immediate context of Pym: the approval by Congress in May 1836, after a decade of debate, of the South Seas Expedition. The expedition's leading exponent was the charismatic J. N. Reynolds, with whom Poe identified, and with whom he invested sublime aspirations.¹⁸ While composing Pym, Poe reviewed, in August 1836, the Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs and, in January 1837, Reynolds's Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas. Catching the spirit of these documents, Poe argues that “all which is now in operation, is but as a dim shadow to the mighty results which may be looked for, when this vast field for national enterprise is better known.” And continuing in an uncharacteristically straightfaced and jingoistic mode, he declares, “Our pride as a vigorous commercial empire, should stimulate us to become our own pioneers in that vast island-studded ocean, destined, it may be, to become not only the chief theatre of our traffic, but the arena of our future naval conflicts” ([Essays and Reviews, hereafter ER] 1228-29, 1231). The review of Reynolds's Address, written during the formation of the expedition, praises Jefferson's advice to Lewis and Clark as “second only to the Declaration of our Independence” among expressions of his “genius” (ER, 1246). Here Poe adopts an imperative mode, merging with Reynolds's rhetoric as he gives advice on how to outfit and manage the voyage, including relations with natives. Because “[t]he savages in these regions have frequently evinced a murderous hostility[,] they should be conciliated or intimidated,” Poe writes, assuring readers that “the armament of the expedition should be sufficient” to help unfortunates living “among hordes of savages” (ER, 1236, 1245). Pym will give similar advice to prospective biche-de-mer traders—“It is absolutely necessary that [boats] should be well armed” (P, 147)—and as his protagonist approaches Tsalal, Poe will briefly tip his hat to the maligned Reynolds, “whose great exertions and perseverence have at length succeeded in getting set on foot a national expedition, partly for the purpose of exploring these regions” (P, 159).

4

Indeed, while there yet remains a spot of untrodden earth accessible to man, no enlightened, and especially commercial and free people, should withhold its contributions for exploring it, wherever that spot may be found on the earth, from the equator to the poles!

—J. N. Reynolds, Address

One of Paulding's first jobs as Secretary of the Navy was to provide sailing orders for Charles Wilkes, commander of the South Seas Expedition.¹⁹ Based on a variety of others' research, the “Wilkes letter” stresses the “important interests of our commerce embarked in the whale-fisheries, and other adventures in the great Southern Ocean,” and insists that “[t]he Expedition is not for conquest, but discovery. Its objects are all peaceful; they are to extend the empire of commerce and science” ([The Letters of James Kirke Paulding, ed. Ralph M. Aderman, 1962, hereafter LP], 223, 227). Wilkes is ordered to explore and survey the South Ocean “with a view to ascertain its resources and facilities for trade” (LP, 223); his team of scientists, cartographers, and ethnologists, Paulding directs, are to map coastlines, inventory resources, and if possible, establish contacts with natives.

Paulding's letter does not suggest that making such contacts might involve considering native interests. Pacific islands, it should be noted, were not at this time regarded as ends in themselves so much as strategic stations for protecting what was already an enormous American industry, as well as for securing trade routes to China.²⁰ Paulding, like Poe on Reynolds, both considers “[e]nlightened liberality” as “the truest economy” (ER, 1230) and looks to the need for a more permanent military presence in the Pacific. Wilkes receives instructions, for example, to pay particular attention to selecting a “safe harbor” in Fiji, “it being the intention of the government to keep one of the squadron of the Pacific cruising near these islands in the future.” He is then to “ascertain the disposition of the inhabitants of the islands … for commerce, their productions and resources,” and to teach the natives “modes of cultivation … encouraging them to raise hogs in greater abundance” (LP, 224, 225).

Paulding's instructions reveal his own Jacksonian disposition. While confident of American benevolence and secure in a fact-based understanding of the nature of the savage, his letter is fraught with contradictory sentiments, a kind of schizophrenic liberalism. He seems to recognize that natives have systems of knowing that could be considered cultural, and reminds Wilkes “that we seek them, not they us; and that if we expect to derive advantages from the intercourse, we should endeavour to confer benefits in return” (LP, 227-28). The sentiment is crucial to the expedition's self-understanding; as Mary Louise Pratt puts it, “[r]eciprocity has always been capitalism's ideology of itself.”²¹ At the same time, though, Paulding follows writers of the period in deploying ideas derived, often in self-interested ways, from Locke's ruminations in the Second Treatise on the state of nature and on property, which connect individuality itself to the ownership, enclosure, and development of land. In Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West (1835), for instance, Judge James Hall concludes of Native Americans that “insecurity of property, or rather the entire absence of all ideas of property, is the chief cause of their barbarism.”²² Property was considered the right of individuals capable of self-discipline, as evidenced by a forwardthinking work ethic, and resources belonged to those who understood their value. Jacksonians thus found sanction for dislodging tribal land claims, replacing them with notions of land as commodity for productive settlement and cultivation. Paulding conflates these discourses of property-unconscious natives with accounts of innately larcenous natives: wanting Western goods but “unacquainted with, or possessing but vague ideas of the rights of property,” he contends, savages most often come into “collision with civilized visitors” over “the offence and punishment of theft” (LP, 226). Paulding cannot admit native notions of material objects and exchange as alternatives to his own understanding, since doing so would jeopardize the reciprocating basis of an expandable American economy.

This economic viewpoint gives rise to a characteristic panic in the face of social organizations that may not desire commodity exchange. While Paulding advocates a tactical policy of “kindness towards the natives” and forbids “any wanton interference with the customs, habits, manners, or prejudices, of the natives of such countries or islands as [the expedition] may visit,” throughout his instructions he warns against considering “them” rational partners, because native “customs” and “habits” are not to be trusted. He insists that “the rights of the natives must be scrupulously respected and carefully guarded,” for instance, but declares almost immediately thereafter that “[t]reachery is one of the invariable characteristics of savages and barbarians; and very many of the fatal disasters which have befallen preceding navigators, have arisen from too great a reliance on savage professions of friendship” (LP, 226-27). There was of course no shortage of eyewitness testimonies of disastrous encounters with duplicitous savages to enliven Paulding's romance-writer imagination as he articulated US policy toward natives, and to impress upon him the importance of maintaining strict protocol. To some degree, policies for dealing with natives already existed; because captains depended heavily on prior accounts, there was considerable overlap in the regulations given to various crews on approaching native peoples. Captain Edmund Fanning, for example, recorded in 1833 of an earlier voyage, “When our ship first came in sight of the Marquesas Islands, the crew had been gathered together, in order to hear and know a set of rules and regulations, that had been prepared for our government in all our future dealings and trade with the natives.” And Lieutenant David Porter, on nearing the Marquesas, advised his crew: “We are going among a people much addicted to thieving, treacherous in their proceedings. … Let the fate of the many who have been cut off by savages of the South Seas islands be a useful warning to us.”²³

Many of the American discovery narratives indicate that the nature of the savage makes failure to follow instructions disastrous. In an episode from Irving's presumably nonfictional Astoria that Poe was to plunder and refigure in the Tsalal section of Pym, a crewman on watch allows natives on board—against John Jacob Astor's policies, and even “very much against the advice of his Indian interpreter, who warned him against the perfidious character of the natives of this part of the coast.” Despite their “great professions of friendship” and their “signs indicative of a wish to trade,” the “natives” subsequently massacre the crew of the ship, with the exception of an officer, who detonates the ship with many natives still aboard.²⁴ In his long 1837 review of Astoria, Poe underlines Irving's moral: “The danger and folly, on the part of agents, in disobeying the matured instructions of those who deliberately plan extensive enterprizes … is … justly and forcibly shown” (ER, 624). After a tragic engagement in Fiji, Wilkes would conclude that “if the precautions directed in the orders given for the conduct of the officers on boat duty had been adhered to, this misfortune would not have occurred” ([Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, 1970, hereafter NEE], 3:284). The narratives, that is, stress the importance of Pacific knowledges as cumulative, and of maintaining an order steered by prior accounts. Allied with the powers of American institutions, then, individual reports become “privileged as sources of knowledge.”²⁵

Since the 1790s, the American public had devoured pamphlets and collections of sea narratives about American adventure in the Pacific, including efforts like Astor's to secure the Pacific Northwest for trade. By the 1820s hundreds of whale ships cruised the Pacific, touching at various islands for refreshment; many of these ships produced narratives, and it was customary for captains to depend upon libraries of such prior accounts.²⁶ By the 1830s there was a vast intertextual web of South Seas literature, generated by captains engaged in confirming or competitively rewriting each other—plagiarizing, or trying to outdo predecessors in supplying information useful to commerce. Morrell notes in his own text, “In order to render the following Narrative more useful to mariners, as well as interesting to the general reader, I have occasionally availed myself of information from other sources than my own personal observation”—a considerable understatement, since the text was extensively “got up” by a literary back who ransacked prior accounts and maritime encyclopedias (NFV, xx).

Captains sold their journals, and there was as much of a growing market for accounts that produced the Pacific for imaginative consumption as there was for all manner of curios for museums. Captains like Morrell were caught in a double bind: often outright solicitations for investors, their texts needed to present trade with the natives as safe; yet journals sold better if they included sensational episodes, offering up savages, shipwrecks, and storms in Crusoesque detail as if all were natural disasters. Morrell's own title page trumpets forth “New and Valuable Discoveries, including the Massacre Islands, where thirteen of the author's crew were massacred and eaten by cannibals.” As a consequence of such contrary impulses, these narratives are often riddled, like Paulding's “Wilkes letter,” with incommensurate passages, some expressing liberal sentiments about natives (Morrell, for instance, waxes tearful at the sight of oppressed Blacks) and others stigmatizing them as cannibals. In his Voyages of Commerce and Discovery (1817), Amasa Delano shows this double face: “It is my deliberate opinion, that most of that which we complain in the character and conduct of the natives of different countries toward us, is owing to ourselves, to our avarice,” he writes, but then goes on to proclaim, “The natives of every part of the coast of New Guinea we visited were negroes, hostile and treacherous.”²⁷

Nautical narratives held a connoisseur's interest for Paulding, a leading literary nationalist and bestselling author of the 1820s and 1830s, who had a twenty-year involvement in naval affairs. Paulding was a close confidant to President Martin Van Buren and friend and collaborator to Irving, who declined the position of Secretary of the Navy before Paulding accepted. In an 1832 letter to Levi Woodbury, former Secretary of the Navy, Paulding singles out for praise his friend Porter's Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean (1815)—the account of Porter's efforts at “annoying the enemy's commerce” during the war of 1812” ([David Porter, Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean, 1815, reprint 1986, hereafter J], 73)—and also Morrell's Narrative of Four Voyages, a bestseller for Harpers in 1832:

Having lately read with great attention and pleasure Captain Benjamin Morrell's Narrative of Voyages and Discoveries, it occurred to me that it would make a valuable, and appropriate addition to the Libraries of the Public Vessels & Naval Schools.

The conduct of Captain Morrell during the whose [sic] course of these Voyages … I cannot but think affords, an excellent example to our Young Naval Officers … [and] furnish[es] a body of usefull practical experience, equal at least, to any work of the Kind that has ever fallen under my notice.

(LP, 126)

Many of Paulding's later directions to Wilkes about commerce and natives might have been patterned after Morrell's narrative, with its visions of opening avenues “of trade, more lucrative than any which our country has ever yet enjoyed” and of Americans “reaping the golden harvest which now awaits the sickle of enterprise in the Pacific Ocean” (NFV, 341, 461). Though he clearly considered Morrell exemplary, whether or not Paulding composed with Four Voyages before him matters less than what his enthusiasm for Morrell reveals about his own credulity and desire.

Morrell's text exemplifies an enterprising American spirit that places ethnology and discovery firmly in the service of commercial ambition. For Morrell, natives are reasonable, ethical beings precisely to the degree that they facilitate commerce: obliging natives who “are very honest in their commercial transactions, carefully performing whatever they promise,” figure in his narrative as “a civilized, rational business people” (NFV, 228, 372). Four Voyages is full of successful trading and celebration of items not prized by Pacific islanders but immensely profitable to Americans through the China trade: Morrell exults in “a new world of countless riches … treasures which lie scattered, in boundless profusion, around the shores of these highly favoured islands: treasures which are now unvalued by the natives” (NFV, 253). In a passage echoed in Pym, where the crew is “assured” that biche-de-mer can “be found in great abundance” (P, 174), Morrell reports: “On showing them a piece of biche-de-mer, they gave me to understand that they could collect any quantities of it, and wondered what use I could make of it. They intimated the same also when I inquired for mother-of-pearl” (NFV, 381).

But Morrell's reliance on native cooperation and naiveté coexists with wariness: hearing “much of the treachery of [one] tribe,” for example, he “resolve[s] to place no confidence in the promises of their chief” (NFV, 204). Suspecting that “treachery” is a “part of their education” (NFV, 393), he assumes in the Solomon Islands that if commerce fails betrayal will be the reason: “I had entered into a sort of treaty of amity in commerce, with the utmost good faith on my part. How well this implied contract was fulfilled on the part of his sable majesty yet remains to be seen” (NFV, 400). In Morrell's retrospective narrative, native deception when discovered retroactively bestows hostile physiognomy: “The expression of their countenance … when not softened by pleasure, or distorted by mirth, is extremely savage and ferocious. … They are extravagantly tattooed … in a most frightful manner, which increases the expression of ferocity to hideousness” (NFV, 399).²⁸ What follows the breakdown of commercial negotiation is therefore the reappearance of savagery: “we were completely surrounded by nearly four hundred ferocious cannibals, who were determined on our destruction, and only waiting … to carve us” (NFV, 408).

Extensively ghostwritten by Samuel Woodworth, who would a year later turn the book's most lurid scene into a Broadway play entitled The Cannibals; or, Massacre Islands,²⁹ Morrell's Four Voyages was a key source for Pym's native portraiture. When in Poe's narrative savages are allowed on board the Jane Guy, they at first display “the most friendly manner” (P, 170). When the crew subsequently follow the natives ashore to their village during an “adventure,” they see “nothing in the demeanor of the natives calculated to create suspicion,” and eagerly inquire after “the chief productions of the country, and whether any of them might be turned to profit” (P, 176). After discovering “the ease with which the vessel might be loaded with biche de mer, owing to the friendly disposition of the islanders,” the crew, according to Pym, “establishe[s] a regular market on shore, just under the guns of the schooner, where [their] barterings [are] carried on with every appearance of good faith.” Even Captain Guy enters into “negotation” for the building of drying stations to cure biche-de-mer for the China trade. Pym emphasizes the businesslike (e)quality of these transactions:

A bargain was accordingly struck, perfectly satisfactory to both parties, by which it was arranged that, after making the necessary preparations … the schooner should proceed on her route, leaving three of her men on the island to superintend the fulfilment of the project, and instruct the natives. … In regard to terms, these were made to depend upon the exertions of the savages in our absence.

(P, 177)

This description follows Morrell, who likewise describes scenarios in which the “terms” are set by visitors who make no attempt at understanding how they may offend native customs (by waving a white flag at islanders for whom the color white is taboo, for instance), or how natives appropriate and adapt Western objects into their noetics.³⁰ If natives do not interfere with the visitor's terms of exchange, the visitor need not consider how natives value what they receive: “I believe that not one of us had at this time the slightest suspicion of the good faith of the savages. They had uniformly behaved with the greatest decorum, aiding us with alacrity in our work, offering us their commodities frequently without price” (P, 179).

After the Guy's crew is ambushed, however, Pym concludes with a Morrell-like sense of injury that “the islanders for whom we entertained such inordinate feelings of esteem were among the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe” (P, 180). Wilkes will draw, in his narrative, upon a similar Swiftian lexicon to describe Fijians: “they are, in many respects, the most barbarous and savage race now existing upon the globe” (NEE, 3:73).³¹ In their retrospective narratives, Pym's and Wilkes's lesson seems clear enough. No matter how obliging savages are, no matter how well they feed you, no matter how generously and inexplicably they offer their commodities “without price,” no matter if “the women especially” prove “obliging in every respect,” until out of the port you are in danger. Poe's text seems at once to know this and not to know it. Pym asserts that the crew “should have been the most suspicious of human beings had [they] entertained a single thought of perfidy”—a claim that undercuts itself by implying the need for reserves of suspicion capable of withstanding kindness, since the motives for kindness must always be suspect (P, 180). Moreover, for all of Pym's declarations of pre-massacre trust, the crew of the Jane Guy visibly engages in defensive preparations prior to the massacre.

Like Pym, who claims you can never really know what the savage is thinking or desiring, Slavoj Zizek notes that the Other is “precisely a person about whom it is never clear ‘what he really wants’—that is, his actions are always suspected of being guided by some hidden motives.”³² In commercially oriented discovery texts, desire for trading remained stronger than fear of duplicity. Morrell's text, for example, with its commerce-centered visions of Americans “reaping” the Pacific, presents cannibals as a negligible occupational hazard. Like Delano, whom Melville would parody in “Benito Cereno” for his belief that he, “Jack of the Beach,” could not be murdered “at the ends of the earth,” Morrell claims providential protection—an instance of American exceptionalism at the individual level. “[T]he same gracious Being who … preserved me from the cannibals,” he insists, “[will] protect me from assassins of every description,” and so he determines to go back, better armed, to secure a cargo (NFV, 417).

However, accounts like Morrell's—which claims to “have had much to do with cannibals” (NFV, 368)—could too easily be taken as literal by readers. While Paulding declares that “[i]t is the nature of the savage, long to remember benefits, and never to forget injuries” (LP, 227), the insight seems as applicable to travellers. Out of the accumulating literature of contact and exchange, savages emerged as those who hide “behind the mask” of friendliness. This “hiding of one's real nature, this duplicity,” came to be seen as “a basic feature” of savage nature, creating an incrementally rationalized reliance on force.³³ Misreported precedents thus produced dangerous preconceptions. Texts that suppressed knowledge of the terms under which barter took place—especially in what became the biche-de-mer trade, which required long periods of cultural interaction—contributed to a founding denial of cultural dialectic between Euro-Americans and islanders. As a result, in Pym, though carried out with “every appearance of good faith,” trade must take place “just under the guns of the schooner.”

After the Tsalalians have detonated themselves, Pym, resignifying Morrell, concludes that they have “reaped the full and perfect fruits of their treachery.” He reports exultantly that “[p]erhaps a thousand perished by the explosion, while at least an equal number were desperately mangled. The whole surface of the bay was literally strewn with the struggling and drowning wretches … [who] made no efforts at assisting one another” (P, 190). Pym displaces all responsibility for violence onto savages who merit no compassion and express none even for each other. Like many of its source texts, Pym thus destabilizes the confidence that might be placed in cultural dialogue: it forestalls consideration of customs that could explain native behavior, and then withholds knowledge it has purportedly gained, positioning its readers as disinterested in such details: “Today, by repeated questioning of our captive, we came to the knowledge of many particulars in regard to the island of the massacre, its inhabitants, and customs—but with these how can I now detain the reader?” (P, 203).

5

Real life is fraught with adventures, to which the wildest fictions scarcely afford a parallel.

—James Kirke Paulding, “National Literature”

I thought we were already over-stocked with Books of Travels: That nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary; wherein I doubted, some Authors less consulted Truth than their own Vanity or Interest, of the Diversion of ignorant Readers. That my Story could contain little besides common events, without the ornamental Descriptions of strange Plants, Trees, Birds, and other Animals; or the barbarous Customs and Idolatry of savage People, with which most writers abound.

—Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Paulding in all likelihood would have read Pym before posting his instructions to Wilkes; he had a special interest in Poe, whom he considered “decidedly the best of all our going writers” (LP, 171). In March of 1836, Paulding had acted as intermediary for Poe's tales with the Harpers, and passed along to the author through T. W. White the judgment of the Harpers' reader that Poe's parodies were too obscure. Seconding that appraisal, Paulding wrote, “I hope Mr. Poe will pardon me if the interest I feel in his success should prompt me to take this occasion to suggest to him to apply his fine humour … to more familiar subjects of satire; to the faults and foibles of our own people” (LP, 174). In a letter written two weeks later he further advised Poe “to undertake a Tale in a couple of Volumes,” as the stronger market for a sustained narrative meant the desperately poor author could earn “handsome remuneration” (LP, 178). A few months later, after Congress approved the Wilkes Expedition, Poe began Pym, choosing for “parody” a genre, event, and theme about which, in words from his review of Reynolds's Address, “the public mind” was “thoroughly alive” (ER, 1235). In that review Poe continues, “We look forward to this finale—to the published record of the expedition—with an intensity of eager expectation, which we cannot think we have ever experienced before” (ER, 1240-41).

If, as suggested, Paulding's “Wilkes letter,” Morrell's doctored Four Voyages (which credentials itself in part by reproducing official letters and documents), Wilkes's Exploring Expedition, and Poe's Pym belong to the same discursive formation, then in Pym the “letter,” however parodic it proves to be, might be said to represent a cultural logic “hidden in plain sight.” Much of Wilkes's high-minded account of the Great Scientific Expedition reads like Pym—he can refer to a native language as “one of the most disagreeable we had yet heard, full of gutturals, and the sounds of klick, kluck, and tsck” (NEE, 4:297). What then does the “letter” of Poe's heteroglossic parody of the “Pacific voyage narrative” say about antebellum American desires? And to what extent might the fact of a hypertextualized parody—one that strings the juvenile adventure and the marvelous along the same narrative line as the “scientific”—mitigate Poe's seeming complicity in a nationalistic commercial project that graphically imagines, fetishizes, and punishes presumptive native treachery? One might argue here that the discernment of parody is crucial to any historically sensitive reading of Pym. As Bakhtin observes, “If we do not recognize the existence of [a] second context … and begin to perceive stylization or parody,” then “stylization will be taken for style, parody simply for a poor work of art.”³⁴

As Burton Pollin has noted, Poe trained himself by writing parody, and thus the “habit of parody” was “deeply entrenched” by the time he began Pym.³⁵ But though Pollin emphasizes that “mockery of an author's subject matter implies criticism of his basic point of view,” he does not speculate on what in particular Poe mocks, or whether the parody serves any conventional, corrective function. It is not necessary, that is, to assume that parody of form amounts to critique of content. As Margaret Rose argues, there is a long tradition that sees parody not as a Bakhtinian “arena of battle” but as a more passive, conservative, sympathetic engagement.³⁶ In other words, the Bakhtinian agonistic model, in which parody is an “unofficial language” opposed to its “official” target, may obscure senses in which a parody works in alliance or complicity with its target.

Part of the difficulty in arguing a specific intonation for Pym's parodies stems from the lack of any sustained cultural subtext. The genre parodied is one “demanding no unity” or “employment” of plot (ER, 15, 482), as Poe writes of Robinson Crusoe, one of his favorite works. His parody could thus be a pastiche that caricatured a formulaic mode of pastiche; even plagiarized passages could, recontextualized, enter a general parody of reportorial conventions characterized by wild juxtapositions and insertions (including stolen ones). Poe mocks recurrent aspects of the genre: the Crusoesque ejaculatory religious tags; the gratuituous philosophical reflection or the Latin citation juxtaposed to description of flora; the fustian passage italicized for effect; the addition of times and dates, obviously ex post facto. He derides (British) scientific authority when Pym's outlandish tale claims to confirm Morrell and Reynolds as opposed to “the Royal Geographical Society of London” (P, 162); in contrast, some of Pym's statements will seem so improbable that he must trust to “progressing science” eventually to “verify” them (P, 88). In these instances, Pym foregrounds the promiscuous and unprincipled quality of travel narratives, especially those written well after the fact for the contemporary market. Poe shows how these narratives gesture toward providing information for the public welfare while yet being driven by the sort of equivocal, and ultimately personal, ambition suggested by Morrell's profession of “duty … to my employers, to my country, and to myself” (NFV, 416).

In its Swiftian “Preface” (Gulliver too had troubles with “the Dates of [his] several Voyages and Returns”), the Poe-text parodies the conventional dynamic by which duty, prompted by “friends,” is allied to a writing that authenticates itself and excuses its contradictions by claiming absence of forethought. Morrell, for instance, excuses culpable omissions in his “plain narrative of facts” (NFV, 410) as follows:

Had I kept a journal with a view to publication, a thing I never contemplated until I returned from my last voyage, when my friends urged me to the measure, I could perhaps have produced a volume much more interesting and valuable than the present. As it is, I hope this humble attempt will be taken as an earnest of my wish to be useful to my country.

(NFV, 456)³⁷

A few pages later, the explorer, with a Franklinian conflation of civic virtue and self-interest, will claim that he excludes particulars to protect a lucrative discovery: “We are now approaching a period of this eventful voyage, in the narrative of which I shall, for reasons which must be obvious to every reader, suppress dates, courses, distances, bearings, and locations” (NFV, 463).

Like Morrell, Pym argues an external, nationalistic motivation for penning his narrative:

Upon my return to the United States a few months ago, after the extraordinary series of adventures in the South Seas and elsewhere, of which an account is given in the following pages, accident threw me into the society of several gentleman in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited, and who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public.

At first, Pym says, he declined the duty, for reasons “some of which were of a nature altogether private, … others not so much so.” Additionally, he observes,

having kept no journal during a greater portion of the time in which I was absent, I feared I should not be able to write, from mere memory, a statement so minute and connected as to have the appearance of that truth it would really possess, barring only the natural and unavoidable exaggeration to which all of us are prone when detailing events which have had powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties.

(P, 55)

Where Morrell had Woodworth to make still less avoidable the “exaggeration” of what excited antebellum “imaginative faculties,” Pym has “Mr. Poe, lately of the Southern Literary Messenger.” Poe, that is, recognizes Morrell's narrative—and the hundreds of pamphlets in like mode that perforce needed to get more and more outrageous as the audience's threshold for sensation grew higher—as at once imaginative and manipulative in their means of claiming authority. Poe's excesses challenge the integrity of the journal form that inveigles “the reader to accept, and maneuvers the reader to adopt, the author's judgments.”³⁸

But no matter how much Pym ridicules and destabilizes sensationalist narratives, its “true” romance cannot simply sacrifice relation to the material world. There is a “real,” in which captains make or lose fortunes and sailors interact with natives, however little the nature of these exchanges ultimately touched Poe where he lived. That Morrell's narrative could be taken as fact and even as exemplary text, recommended by the future Secretary of the Navy as essential reading for naval officers, suggests that the relays between imaginary worlds and government policy were real enough. Certainly, it is possible in such contexts to see Poe “out-heroding Herod,” going his lurid sources one better, saying, “If you want to paint the natives black, I’ll show you blackness of darkness incarnate.” But if so, it is not clear that he does not simultaneously make love to his employment. Such a reading might find in Pym a series of profoundly ambivalent errors that, being “graven” within the text, furnish a blueprint for a counter-reading that the text itself does not care to perform. While critics like Sam Worley and Dana Nelson do not deal with the problem of parody—its tendency to fail in racial representation—they detail ways in which Pym's tantalizing ambivalences can form the basis for just such counter-readings.³⁹

In other words, Pym cannot disengage itself from the materials of history and the sedimented discourses that it has appropriated and around which it has organized its parodic and poetic flights. As Eric Mottram notes, “Pym is a mirror with a hole in it through which life itself rushes. The climax of the tale is an extreme situation for the engulfed self, but even this moment of psycho-geography has an origin outside Poe's psyche.” Poe, that is, has “anchor[ed] his opening firmly in the economic center of America from the 1830s to the 1860s,” and “it is from here that Pym makes his figure of outwards.”⁴⁰ In this sense, Pym is as much an instance as a parody; if it exposes slippages between genres as ideological relay, it indulges in those slippages itself. Pym is on one level brought to face-to-face with its deformations in its own mirror. As critics have noted, every image of Tsalalian treachery has its mirror image among the Grampus's crew. At the same time, Pym cannot muster concern for natives who, composite abstractions or not, are somehow necessary, yet necessarily shown as incapable of self-reflection, unable to achieve mirror-stage or the foundations of Western individuation. Where Pym, disguised as a murdered mate, is momentarily stricken by his image in “a fragment of looking-glass” by “the terrific reality” that he is “thus representing” (P, 109), the savage is horrified at his own image: “Upon raising his eyes and seeing his reflected self in the glass,” Pym writes, “I thought the savage would go mad” (P, 169). If at such moments Pym exaggerates what it deems already exaggerated, it does so not in the spirit of refracting or redirecting “originals” but in a spirit that seemingly accedes to their ethos.⁴¹ Poe's manner of parodying himself and the market thus involves, as part of its submission to market logic, an emergent Pacific Orientalist style of depicting islands and islanders according to the needs of commerce. However nonchalantly, hoaxically, or cynically—and he later called Pym “a very silly book”⁴²—Poe is pickled in his own parody.

6

He further protested that Lincoln's belief that the Declaration of Independence applied to people of color would make the debate's listeners, who sometimes chanted ‘White men, white men’ during his speeches, the equals of Fiji Islanders.

—David Roediger on Stephen Douglas, The Wages of Whiteness

Though requiring exemplary conduct from Wilkes and his men, Paulding's “Wilkes letter” lacked any mechanism for flexible adaptation to native cultural systems. Paulding attributed “misunderstandings” to inherent qualities within specific tribes (so a “friendly” tribe could border on a “hostile” one), rather than to differing native cultural responses to a strange, intrusive presence. Drawing on reports from beachcombers, natives, and prior voyagers, Wilkes developed a better sense of the chiefly system through which exchange took place, but he too was firmly convinced that “barbarous ferocity” was fundamental to native “character.” Like Paulding, he insisted that “Feejeeans are addicted to stealing, are treacherous in the extreme. … [T]he most universal trait of their character is their inclination to lying” (NEE, 2:76). Beyond this conviction, he loathed the Fijians' “horrible instinct of cannibal appetite,” a manifestation, in his view, of irrationality (NEE, 3:265). Given Wilkes's preconceptions and overbearing personality, violent conflict seems to have been inevitable.⁴³

Bruce Greenfield generalizes the point, suggesting that Poe, by “dramatizing the romantic discovery impulse in an extreme form,” shows “how the violence of its curiosity wreaks destruction on the object. … [I]t seems impossible to separate the desire for knowledge from the desire to profit from and dominate the exotic world.”⁴⁴ Recalling the push toward the Pole, Pym insists:

While, therefore, I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention.

(P, 166)

By linking such dehumanizing enterprise to juvenile discourses and fantasies. Pym intimates the power of boy-adventure/romance to shape the character and conduct of future officers. Wilkes, whom David Jaffé contends was a specific model for Captain Ahab, would write, “I came to the conclusion, at whatever hazard to ship and crew, that it was my duty to proceed, and not give up the cruise until the ship should be totally disabled, or it should be evident to all that it was impossible to persist any longer” (NEE, 2:320). When two of Wilkes's crew were killed in Malolo, Fiji, including his nephew, he conducted a full-scale attack, burning several native villages, destroying all provisions he could find, and leaving eighty-seven Fijians dead. He then insisted, “[T]he whole of the natives of the island should come to me by the time the sun [is] overhead, to beg pardon and sue for mercy; and … if they [do] not do so, they must expect to be exterminated” (NEE, 3:230). Justifying his conduct, Wilkes writes,

Some, no doubt, will look upon [these actions] as unnecessarily severe; but if they duly considered the wanton murders that have been committed on the whites in this group of islands, merely to gratify the desire of plunder and the horrid appetite for cannibal repasts, they would scarcely think the punishment too severe.

(NEE, 3:284)⁴⁵

Wilkes adds in his own defense that “high praise” was in order for “the promptitude” with which his men buried the massacred Fijians, thus saving them “from ministering to the cannibal appetites of the murderers.” He excuses his actions, in other words, by reaffirming the bestial nature of his victims: “I thought they had been long enough to kill and eat with impunity” (NEE, 3:285, 286). The navy did not find that this entirely exonerated Wilkes, who was court-martialed on charges that included “oppression of his men, cruelty in killing natives and burning their villages in reprisal for the murder of two officers, one his nephew; disobedience to orders,” and “scandalous conduct in making a false entry as the date on which he sighted ‘Antarctic Land.’”⁴⁶ In an odd 1843 review of a preliminary account of the Wilkes Expedition, Poe notes that some “disgrace has attached to its conduct” but declares that, though the “mere history” would be written by Wilkes, the expedition would always be associated in Poe's mind with Reynolds, whose “mental powers” claimed the “high honor” of the endeavor (ER, 1251-52). Perhaps Poe emphasized Reynolds's poetic vision over Wilkes's material conduct because, on most of the counts above, Pym (if not “Mr. Poe”) would have been found guilty—and as unrepentent as Wilkes, who finally escaped with a light reprimand.

The anxiety and loathing that Wilkes expressed for Fijians, and the leniency ultimately shown him, open a window into the formation of American Pacific Orientalist discourses, which came to underlie the making of policy in America's colonial expansion into the Pacific. Images of Pacific islanders, African Americans, and Native Americans would become increasingly interconnected as America looked westward.⁴⁷ In this moment, captured in Pym as in the words of many antebellum imaginative writers and politicians alike, the polar opposite of the “civilized” white man appears, not as an African, but as the “savage” South Seas islander found at the other end of the earth, in lands that at once offer the modern equivalent of the fabled riches of Ophir, Solomon's islands, and require preemptive military force.

Notes

1. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 392. Fiedler echoes Poe's claim in a February 1836 letter to John Pendleton Kennedy that his tales were “intended for half banter, half satire—although,” Poe admits, “I might not have fully acknowledged this to be their aim even to myself.” See The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 1:84. I would like to thank Cindy Franklin and Craig Howes for commenting on versions of this essay.

2. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 121; Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 270. For recent reassessments of Poe's/Pym's relation to antebellum debates about slavery, see John Carlos Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), 117-38; and Sam Worley, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Ideology of Slavery,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 40 (1994): 219-50. Fiedler concludes, “Insofar as Gordon Pym is finally a social document as well as a fantasy, its subject is slavery; and its scene, however disguised, is the section of America which was to destroy itself defending that institution” (Love and Death, 397).

3. Paul Sharrad, “Imagining the Pacific,” Meanjin 49 (summer 1990): 597. Sharrad's essay on imaginative constructions of the Pacific briefly mentions Pym as a classic example of the way in which “the [Euro-American] viewer's refusal of recognition” of Pacific cultures generates “action” or “despair” (600). For further discussion of early imaginings of the Pacific and the origins of nativist countertexts, see also Sharrad's “Making Beginnings: Johnny Frisbie and Pacific Literature,” New Literary History 25 (1994): 121-36.

4. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1966), 132. The term “insubstantialization” is David Spurr's; he defines it as the trope whereby the “movement into exotic geographical space is understood as inner exploration of the boundaries of consciousness.” See Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993), 146. However unwittingly, assertions like Pollin's that the Tsalalians are at “a cultural level lower than the most primitive Stone-Age savages” help perpetuate anthropological understandings of the culture by denying it coevality. See “Notes and Comments” for Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in The Imaginary Voyages, vol. 1 of Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Burton R. Pollin, 4 vols. to date (New York: Gordian Press, 1994-), 323. Pym is hereafter cited parenthetically as P.

5. See Benjamin Morrell, A Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Sea, North and South Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antarctic Ocean from the Year 1822 to 1831 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Gregg Press, 1970), 414; hereafter cited parenthetically as NFV. For Rowe's discussion of a “discrepancy between intellectual and material history” in Poe criticism that reduplicates Poe's flight from history, see “Poe, Antebellum Slavery,” 122-32.

6. These phrases are from the title page of the American edition. The British editions do not include the phrase “still farther South” but use larger billboard letters to emphasize “South Seas,” Many critics have noted Poe's use of South Seas materials; I am indebted especially to Pollin's extensive “Notes and Comments” and to Harold Beaver's introduction and notes to Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975). Among the most useful essays that point to an expansionist trajectory in Pym are Eric Mottram, “Poe's Pym and the American Social Imagination,” in Artful Thunder: Versions of the Romantic Tradition in American Literature, in Honor of P. Vincent, ed. Robert J. DeMott and Sanford E. Marovitz (Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 1975), 25-53; and Dana D. Nelson, “Ethnocentricism Decentered: Colonialist Motives in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” chap. 5 in The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 90-108. Nelson is less interested in the Pacific locations of Pym than in discursive strategies that are applicable to colonial motives in general; her analysis of Pym thus loses some historical purchase since, in Poe's time, American policy for the Pacific is more concerned with economic hegemony than territorial acquisition. With the exception of improvisational acts of imperialism, like Lieutenant David Porter's in the Marquesas, government-backed ships intervened in local or tribal politics primarily as a way of unifying islands to stabilize them as places of trade and refurbishment.

7. Edwin Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), 154.

8. Joseph de Gobineau, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, trans. H. Hotz (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), 379; Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, 1843-1849, vol. 3 of Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), 1299. Poe's passage goes on to assert that abuses perpetrated by the “Mob” teach us “never to run directly contrary to the natural analogies” (1300). However, on Poe's complex interest in the “rationality of nature as a model for the ‘reflection’ of a rational observer,” see Worley, “Ideology of Slavery,” 233-35. On “gradation,” see Thomas Carlyle, whose Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (1849) argues that “[i]f precisely the Wisest Man were at the top of society, and the next-wisest next, and so on until we reached the Demerara Nigger (from whom downwards, through the horse, etc., there is no question hitherto), then were this a perfect world” (quoted in Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, 66).

9. For instance, Poe derides as “dogma” the notion that “[n]o work of fiction can fully suit, at the same time, the critical and the popular taste,” yet Pym seems caught up in ambivalent feelings about the market. See Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), 226; hereafter cited parenthetically as ER. In a review of Cooper's Wyandotté published after Pym's poor sales, Poe remarks that the failure of a book about Indians or “life upon the ocean” to achieve popular success “might be properly regarded as conclusive evidence of imbecility on the part of the author” (ER, 479). While Poe's relation to the marketplace is not addressed until the end of this article, and then only briefly, it should be seen at play throughout Pym.

10. Pollin and Beaver give no sources for the John Donaldson. One candidate might be John Donelson, patriarch of the clan into which Andrew Jackson married, who was much involved in speculations over Indian lands. On Donelson, see Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991) 81-84. For discussions of how Pym adopts and redirects basic conventions of the discovery narrative, see Bruce Greenfield, Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790-1855 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992), esp. 165-82; and William E. Lenz, The Poetics of the Antarctic: A Study in Nineteenth-Century American Cultural Perceptions (New York: Garland, 1995), which explores the cultural work done by images of the Antarctic in the popular imagination.

11. For a compelling discussion of cannibalism as a British fantasy and as a feature that Euro-American readers expected to find in accounts of native contact, see Gananath Obeyesekere, “‘British Cannibals’: Contemplation of an Event in the Death and Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 630-54.

12. Although the reference is to the Solomon Islands, site of Morrell's “Massacre Islands,” Poe clearly puns on the biblical Solomon and draws upon works like John L. Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land; Stephen's book, which Poe reviewed in 1837, furnishes many of the details for the desiccated landscapes of Tsalal. See Pollin, “Notes and Comments,” 315, 331. For the identification of “The Isles of Solomon” with the legendary Ophir, the place that supplied Solomon his gold, see Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 39-44; see also Rennie's account of Defoe's fictitious New Voyage around the World, in which Defoe's narrator finds “Solomon's Islands” and describes them as “utopias of trade and empire” (75).

13. Richard Wilbur, Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 199.

14. Fiedler, Love and Death, 398. For an overview of the tradition of contraposed representation, see Eric P. Kjellgren, “Rousseau and Hobbes in the Pacific: Western Literary Visions of Polynesia and Melanesia,” Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 10, no. 1 (1993): 95-111. As Kjellgren notes, the dichotomy, largely based on skin color, “continues to the present day. Travellers go on ‘adventure tours’ in Melanesia to experience ‘primitive’ cultures; they go on ‘island getaways’ in Polynesia to experience ‘Polynesian hospitality’ and ‘aloha’ spirit” (110).

15. Delano's Voyages of Commerce and Discovery: Amasa Delano in China, the Pacific Islands, Australia, and South America, 1789-1807, ed. Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves (Stockbridge, MA: Berkshire House Publishers, 1994), 21, 69; published in 1817 as A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. See Pollin, “Notes and Comments,” 353, for further possible sources for the black teeth; Delano's description of the preference for black teeth to white, however, seems closer to the reaction of the natives in Pym. Elsewhere, Pollin does suggest Poe's familiarity with Delano's text, which refers to a ship called Jane that was active in the South Pacific (“Notes and Comments,” 260).

16. Nelson, Word in Black and White, 93. For a discussion of how “American” identity is constituted in and through legal debates about slavery and indigenous rights that were motivated by the drive to expansion, see Priscilla Wald, “Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation,” Boundary2, 19 (fall 1992): 77-104.

17. On attribution of the “Paulding-Drayton Review,” see, for example, Bernard Rosenthal, “Poe, Slavery, and the Southern Literary Messenger: A Reexamination,” Poe Studies 7 (1974): 29. For overviews of the controversy, see Nelson, Word in Black and White, 90-92; Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery,” 117-21; Worley, “Ideology of Slavery,” esp. 244 n. 11; and J. V. Ridgely, “The Authorship of the ‘Paulding-Drayton Review,’” PSA Newsletter 20 (fall 1992): 1-3, 6. Paulding's letters to T. W. White (editor of the Southern Literary Messenger) suggest that he assumed White's proslavery sympathies; in a letter to Martin Van Buren, who would appoint him Secretary of the Navy, Paulding described the Messenger as a prime “vehicle through which to communicate with the Public.” See The Letters of James Kirke Paulding, ed. Ralph M. Aderman (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 173; hereafter cited parenthetically as LP. Poe's views on race seem at times markedly ambivalent. See, for instance, his comment in Marginalia, made in the context of a suggestion to rechristen the US as “Appalachia,” about “Aborigines, whom, hitherto, we have at all points unmercifully despoiled, assassinated and dishonored” (in The Brevities, vol. 2 of Collected Writings, 310). And in Pym, Peters evinces an Indian's “natural ferocity of … countenance” and “an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of most negroes)” (P, 87), but is later grouped among the “only living white men upon the island” (P, 185).

18. On his deathbed, Poe apparently called out the name “Reynolds” repeatedly. Even after the Wilkes Expedition had returned, Poe insisted that it be called “The Expedition of Mr. Reynolds” (ER, 1252). Clearly, there is a self-reflexive dimension to Poe's generalized call (vis-á-vis Reynolds, a misrecognized scrounger like himself) for patronage of those who “enlighten their country by their talents, strengthen it by their philosophy, enrich it by their science, and adorn it by their genius” (ER, 1244-45).

19. As Richard Drinnon explains in Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1980), “Paulding's stand on abolition and removal made his appointment as secretary of the navy acceptable to Southerners and Westerners” (129). For contextualizations and assessments of the Wilkes Expedition, see William Stanton. The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975); and William H. Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery (New York: Viking, 1986), 270-97. Goetzmann implies that the sailing orders are not in fact Paulding's, pointing out that they are written “over Secretary Dickerson's signature” (273)—though the letter reprinted in the Wilkes Expedition account is signed by Paulding. See Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, 5 vols. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Gregg Press, 1970); hereafter cited parenthetically as NEE.

20. In 1825, President John Quincy Adams, petitioned by maritime businessmen, had argued that “a flourishing commerce and fishery extending to the islands of the Pacific and to China … require that the protecting power of the Union should be deployed under its flag as well upon the ocean as upon the land” (quoted in Goetzmann, New Lands, 266). For useful overviews of the opening of Pacific trade, see especially John Curtis Perry, Facing West: Americans and the Opening of the Pacific (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994); and Donald D. Johnson with Gary Dean Best, The United States in the Pacific: Private Interests and Public Policies, 1784-1899 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995).

21. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 84.

22. James Hall, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West (Philadelphia: H. Hall, 1835), 128, quoted in Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 34. In a favorable response to Hall's book, Poe writes that the author is “excellently qualified” to review “the policy of our government in regard to the Aborigines” (The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902], 8:108; quoted in Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery,” 131). On the deployment of Lockean notions of property against Native Americans, see Michael Paul Rogin, “Nature, Property, and Title,” chap. 3 in Fathers and Children, 75-110; Eric Cheyfitz, “Translating Property,” chap. 3 in The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan” (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 41-58; and Spurr on colonial rhetorics of “Appropriation,” chap. 2 in Rhetoric of Empire, 28-42. Also see chaps. 2 and 5 in John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. J. W. Gough (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966).

23. Edmund Fanning, Voyages around the World (New York: Collins and Hannay, 1833; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Gregg Press, 1970), 213; David Porter, Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean (1815; reprint, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986), 284, hereafter cited parenthetically as J. Paulding instructs Wilkes, “You will permit no trade to be carried on by the squadron … except for necessaries or curiosities, and that under express regulations established by yourself” (LP, 226). As Greg Dening notes, part of what was at issue in regulating the ship's trade was the potential spoiling of the market through “inflationary prices”; see Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774-1880 (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1980), 124. Fanning was selected by Madison for a US government-backed expedition, but the War of 1812 forced him to abandon it. Along with Reynolds, who later joined him in forming the South Sea Fur Company and Exploring Expedition (1829), Fanning continued to petition Congress for an exploring expedition. Of particular interest to Poe would have been his “Views upon the Practicability of Sailing or Advancing to the South Pole” (Voyages around the World, 472-77).

24. Washington Irving, Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains, ed. Richard Dilworth Rust (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 73, 74. Morrell similarly stations a man “at the magazine with a lighted match, to be applied to the powder if the natives g[e]t command of the deck” (NFV, 413). In the Poe text, of course, it is the natives who, through ignorance and greed, detonate themselves.

25. Greenfield, Narrating Discovery, 11. See also Lenz, “The Tradition of American Sea Fiction and the Antarctic,” chap. 2 in Poetics of the Antarctic, 29-54.

26. While the narratives characteristically claim to represent the discovery of virgin land, there is by Poe's time a sense that the world has grown smaller: In his review of Crusoe, Poe would write, “There is positively not a square inch of new ground for any future Selkirk” (ER, 201). And Fanning, recalling an 1801 voyage, describes entering a remote harbor in which he found “a small fleet of American sealers, being five ships and a schooner, from whom we learned there were upwards of thirty sail of American sealing vessels on this coast” (Voyages around the World, 306). On early American geopolitical interest in the Pacific, see M. Consuelo Leon W., “Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific,” in Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, ed. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), 17-29. Consuelo argues that cartography and literature contributed importantly to early nineteenth-century images of the Pacific in the American imagination.

27. Delano's Voyages, 21, 29.

28. Beginning with Columbus, who believed he could detect cannibalism merely by physical appearance, sailors often projected their fears into fetishized descriptions of islanders: Fred Stuart, a clerk on the Wilkes Expedition, “took one look at Fijian heads and concluded from the phrenological evidence that the cannibal propensity was marked” (Stanton, United States Exploring, 193). And Morrell would characterize “indians” on the shores of Dekay's Bay as “negroes of a large stature” whose expression was “a mixture of ferocity, malevolence, and crafty treachery. In one word,” he declares, “their visage is a true index of their character, and it bears the most savage, inhuman, bloodthirsty appearance I have ever met with, the cannibals of the Massacre Islands when most infuriated not excepted” (NFV, 460).

29. For a thorough analysis of the Poe-Morrell/Woodworth connection, see Burton R. Pollin, “The Narrative of Benjamin Morrell: Out of ‘The Bucket’ and into Poe's Pym,” Studies in American Fiction (1976): 157-72. Pollin cites twentieth-century critics as asserting “that Morrell was known as ‘the biggest liar of the Pacific’” (165). While speculating that Poe must have been able to “evaluate properly this spurious and meretricious book” (163), Pollin is cautious about claiming that Poe knew Woodworth was the ghostwriter.

30. On the complexities of exchange during the early contact period, see Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991); and for specifics about the biche-de-mer trade, many of which were circulating during the 1820s and 1830s, see R. Gerard Ward, “The Pacific Bêche-de-Mer Trade with Special Reference to Fiji,” in Man in the Pacific Islands: Essays on Geographical Change in the Pacific Islands, ed. R. Gerard Ward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 91-123.

31. For an account of how Swift's Yahoos potentially derive from William Dampier's descriptions of New Hollanders in Australia, see Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, 59-66. Dampier calls the Aborigines “the miserablest People in the world” (quoted in Rennie, 63), a phrase that resonates with Pym's characterization of the Tsalalians.

32. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 114.

33. Zizek, Sublime Object, 49.

34. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 185.

35. Pollin, “Notes and Comments,” 5.

36. Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 45-46.

37. On the role of friendly importunity, also see Porter: “my friends have become more pressing; and I have at length consented. I give it to you, as it was written in the midst of anxious duties” (J, Dedication). Delano similarly claims, “[M]y friends too were solicitous that I should draw up this narrative” (Delano's Voyages, 16).

38. Lenz, Poetics of the Antarctic, 20. See also Greenfield, Narrating Discovery, 1-13; and for an illuminating treatment of the relations between fact and fiction in Euro-American South Pacific literature, see Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, 55-82.

39. Nelson argues that, “while on one level Pym is a racist text, on another the text provides a reading that counters racist colonial ideology and the racialist, scientific knowledge structure” (Word in Black and White, 92). In a persuasive reading, Worley links proslavery arguments to issues of “linguistic authority” and then proposes that, while implicated in proslavery representation, Poe's text foregrounds “the instability of language and interpretive authority” in ways that allow “contradictions inherent in antebellum thought [to] emerge.” “We are left,” Worley argues, “with a work that both constructs and deconstructs social hierarchy along the axis of language” (“Ideology of Slavery,” 242).

40. Mottram, “American Social Imagination,” 31, 33.

41. For counter-readings, see J. Gerald Kennedy's insistence that Pym is distinct from Poe: “In short, if Pym exhibits colonialist racism he is also portrayed, unmistakably, as a fool who cannot decipher the most obvious signs and portents. In this sense his political consciousness must be distinguised from Poe's” (“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and the Abyss of Interpretation [New York: Twayne, 1995], 62). Also see David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), 225-48. Reynolds considers Poe's work as simultaneously “enthusiastic absorption and studied redirection of the sensational”; combining “exaggeration and analysis,” he argues, “allowed Poe to capitalize on popular sensational themes but at the same time to gain firm control over them and to redirect their energy” (226, 231). Though Michael T. Gilmore mentions Poe only in passing, his notion of authorial “indecision” about a “relation to the mass reading public which [the American romantics] wished to cultivate as much as they resented” might be applied usefully to Pym. See American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 11.

42. Poe to William E. Burton, [Philadelphia, 1 June 1840], Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1:130.

43. For an assessment of Wilkes in Fiji that draws upon various ship accounts, see Stanton, United States Exploring, 186-215. Wilkes's versions of the Malolo incident are recorded in Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U. S. Navy, 1798-1877, ed. William James Morgan, David B. Tyler, Joye L. Leonhart, and Mary F. Loughlin (Washington, DC: Naval History Division, Department of the Navy, 1978), 469-72; and in NEE, 3:265-316.

44. Greenfield, Narrating Discovery, 187.

45. Displacing blame onto the natives becomes a staple of apologias for American conduct in the Pacific. For instance, Porter begins his defense: “Many may censure my conduct as wanton and unjust. In the security of the fireside, and under the protection of the laws which are their safeguards … they may question the motives of my conduct, and deny the necessity which compelled me to pursue it.” Like Morrell and Wilkes, Porter argues in the wake of a massacre, “The evils [the natives] experienced they brought upon themselves, and the blood of their relations and friends must be on their own heads” (J, 397, 398).

46. David Jaffé, The Stormy Petrel and the Whale: Some Origins of “Moby-Dick” (Baltimore: Port City Press, 1976), 20. In fairness to Wilkes, he is generally high-minded and occasionally strong in defense of native rights (see, for instance, NEE, 2:376). The self-vindicating Autobiography hints at Wilke's state of mind at the death of his nephew: “The sight of our dead was disheartening and my mind was almost overcome with sorrow at the thought of the stroke it would be to his poor, widowed mother” (470).

47. Such images circulated in a variety of ways, with Pacific islanders often described as “Indians” or “blacks”: during the drive toward the illegal annexation of Hawai‘i, Queen Liliou‘kalani figured repeatedly in cartoons as African American; and American politicians were stigmatized by being represented as South Seas islanders. The complexity of such circulations is further suggested by Porter's account of Marquesan chiefs calling themselves “Pickineenee Apotee” (son of Porter), “the word pickineenee having by some means been introduced among them by the sailors of the ships which have touched here” (J, 406).