[In the following excerpt, Gilman examines the parallels between Melville's early years and that of his fictional character, Wellingborough Redburn.]

If the exposition of Melville's intentions in writing Redburn and his own awareness of the artistic process working in him casts light on the book, a detailed study of his method ought to make its nature even more clear. For the framework of fact he selected liberally from the events of his youth and of the voyage to Liverpool late in his twentieth year. His homes on Bleecker Street and Broadway become Redburn's “in old Greenwich Street.” Allan Melvill, like Walter Redburn, was an importer of French goods and a veteran of many trips across the Atlantic. In Melville's home were most certainly the English and French books, the old European guidebooks, and the portfolios of French prints that delighted Redburn. Into the boy's domestic recollections Melville worked even such minute details as those of his own mother's formidable house cleanings.¹ Both the author and his fictional creation had declaimed speeches on the stage of the high school. Both enjoyed happiness, comfort, and great expectations as the sons of well-to-do gentlemen. Both suffered spiritually and physically as a result of the bankruptcies and early deaths of their fathers.

Despite these parallels, Melville romanticized freely in working up the materials of his youth. For example, Redburn recollects an old uncle, a sea captain, who had traveled with Captain Langsdorff and used to tell stories of sailing to Archangel and crossing Siberia in a dog sled. Redburn saw him only once, for he was killed in the White Sea a few years afterwards. Although the reminiscence refers to Herman's uncle, Captain John D'Wolf, whose career is more or less truthfully represented, he did not die in the White Sea but was alive when Melville was writing Redburn, and for twenty-three years afterwards. His fictitious death adds the charm of sadness to the young boy's recollections.

A more noteworthy example of romantic rifacimento is the story of the little glass ship, modeled after a famous French frigate, that stood on a table in the sitting room of the Redburn home. It was the principal influence in converting Redburn's dreams of being a “great voyager” into the “definite purpose of seeking [his] fortune on the sea.” Thirty years before, Walter Redburn had brought “La Reine” home from Hamburg as a present to Senator Wellingborough, Redburn's great-uncle, “who had died a member of Congress in the days of the old Constitution” and from whom Redburn received his name. On the Senator's death the gift had been returned to its donor.² In real life, however, this ship was most probably the one that rested in the parlor of Thomas Melvill, Herman's grandfather. Allan Melvill may have presented it to his parent; he certainly did not present it to Herman's great-uncle, Leonard Gansevoort, “in the days of the old Constitution,” that is, between 1781 and 1789. Besides, though Leonard Gansevoort had been a member of Congress from 1787 to 1788, he did not die until 1810; Allan Melvill is not known to have met any of the Gansevoort family until 1813; and Herman was not named after his great-uncle but after his mother's brother, Herman Gansevoort. The embellishments in this anecdote are obvious. The idea of having a superbly real glass ship crystallize a boy's dreams of travel into a firm purpose is ingenious, but Melville's own history was somewhat different.

Such alterations, however, provide only the external coloring, not the inner artistic design of the story. In reading Redburn, we quickly perceive a highly significant discrepancy between the life of the hero and that of his author. As we know, Melville's father went bankrupt in 1830, moved to Albany, began a financial recovery, but died from overwork two years later. The Melville family, after a period of crisis, enjoyed over four years of relative prosperity before Gansevoort's failure forced them in 1838 to move to Lansingburgh. It was still another year before Herman went to sea. In Redburn's story, however, his father becomes bankrupt and dies in New York. Thereupon his mother moves “to a pleasant village on the Hudson River,” and the period of this move is “some time previous” to Redburn's taking to the sea.³ Redburn's calamities fall upon him in fairly rapid sequence and at a tender age. He has barely made the transition from childhood into youth, from riches to rags, before he is thrust out by hard times to earn his living as a sailor.

The central fact in Melville's artistry is that he conceives Redburn as a young boy. All the physical trials and the emotional anguish are intensified in poignancy because they happen to a wide-eyed adolescent. “I was then but a boy,” says Redburn on the very first page. His age, we judge, is about fifteen, for he is eight years younger than his brother, who is evidently in his early twenties. Later, Redburn describes himself as “young and small” and “quite young and raw,” and he speaks of his “boy's bulk” and his small backbone.⁴ He is a pathetic character, pious, tender, and courageous but woefully untried and full of boyish illusions. He has never had to work before he enters a sailor's life. He has little knowledge of what physical equipment to take with him, knows nothing about sea usages, and is uninformed about the city to which he is bound. But at every turn he feels the shock of physical distress, embarrassment, and disillusion. The chief appeal of the story of Wellingborough Redburn is founded on the youthful hero's complete inexperience and immaturity.

The picture of Melville in June 1839 testifies to his skill in conceiving Redburn's character. He was nearly twenty years old, less than four years younger than his brother Gansevoort. In contrast to Redburn's pathetically small stature, Melville was taller than all but two of the other men on the “St. Lawrence.” He had worked nearly a year on his uncle's farm. For years he had heard from his cousins about the life of a sailor; Leonard Gansevoort had made the very same voyage as a sailor on a merchant vessel that Herman was preparing for, and he knew how dull Liverpool was. Undoubtedly Herman faced hardship and disappointment, but he was much better prepared through experience and maturity to endure them than was Redburn. However, if he had represented his own mature reactions, he would have sacrificed much emotional appeal. The public for which Melville wrote was familiar, through Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, with the experiences of a twenty-year-old son of a gentleman. To avoid the perils of imitation, into which several others had fallen, Melville developed a younger character and looked at the harsh realities of the world largely through his eyes. He sought to create the greater drama implicit in the struggles of a completely inexperienced boy against an environment that nearly overwhelms him. It was thus that he attempted to solve the problem posed by contemporary literary conditions.⁵

As Melville fashioned the story of the poor, embittered, outcast Redburn, he introduced scores of artistic embellishments on his own experience and many a scene that originated only in his imagination. It is undoubtedly true that his own motives for going to sea are reflected in Redburn's. As the latter explains it:

Sad disappointments in several plans which I had sketched for my future life; the necessity of doing something for myself, united to a naturally roving disposition, had now conspired within me, to send me to sea as a sailor.⁶

Here are the unmistakable echoes of Melville's failure to find work in his chosen career of surveying and engineering and perhaps of a defeated ambition to write.

In other respects, however, Melville's story differs quite widely from Redburn's. He left home suddenly, and though he was “agitated,” he was also “happy,” to quote his mother. Almost certainly, he departed at some prosaic hour in the afternoon. And he was able to look forward to the company and help of his older brother Gansevoort in New York. On the other hand, Redburn had been preparing for his trip for months. There was ample time for his mother to knit him a pair of mittens. His departure occurs at the romantic hour of dawn, and it is completely melancholy. After breaking away from his weeping mother and sisters, he runs as fast as he can to the corner where his brother is waiting. The older boy accompanies him part way to the steamboat, filling him with “sage advice above his age” and making him promise to take care of himself.

We walked on in silence till I saw that his strength was giving out—he was in ill health then,—and with a mute grasp of the hand, and a loud thump at the heart, we parted.

It was early on a raw, cold, damp morning toward the end of spring, and the world was before me; stretching away along a muddy road, lined with comfortable houses, whose inmates were taking their sunrise naps, heedless of the wayfarer passing. The cold drops of drizzle trickled down my leather cap, and mingled with a few hot tears on my cheeks.

I had the whole road to myself, for no one was yet stirring, and I walked on, with a slouching, dogged gait. The gray shooting-jacket was on my back, and from the end of my brother's rifle hung a small bundle of my clothes. My fingers worked moodily at the stock and trigger, and I thought that this indeed was the way to begin life, with a gun in your hand!⁷

This is indeed a lugubrious scene. The mute but moving farewell, the lonely road, the pathetic little bundle of clothes at the end of the rifle, the indifference of the world's comfortable householders, the rain and the teardrops, the extravagant self-pity and youthful bitterness—it is a sentimental and woeful picture. But there was no elder brother to make Herman's departure quite so painful, and the other objective evidence argues most potently that the scene is literary contrivance rather than personal history.

The proportion of literal truth and fiction in the next episode is more difficult to determine. On leaving home Redburn wears a miserable pair of old trousers with a large patch sewed on by his mother. The evening before, his brother has given him an old shooting jacket, to save the expense of another, and his fowling piece, to be sold for cash. He carries no food for the trip and only a dollar for money. On board the boat for New York he finds that the fare has suddenly been raised to two dollars, “owing to the other boats not running.” After forcing the captain's gruff agent to accept his dollar, he gets angry at the comfortable passengers who have witnessed his excruciating embarrassment and observed his shabby clothes and points his gun directly at one of them. Having cowed the entire group, he leaves the cabin to spend the rest of the trip on deck.

It is barely possible that this incident had its source in Melville's own trip on the Hudson boat in 1839. Transportation was controlled by monopolies, but an “antimonopoly” boat had appeared on the river on May 29, when it made its first run from New York to Albany, advertising a fare of one dollar.⁸ Within a day or two she was removed for alterations and did not resume running until June 5, so that Melville could not have traveled on her.⁹ Since the other antimonopoly boat did not run on Saturday, when Melville must have made his trip,¹⁰ it may well have been that the combined monopoly lines unexpectedly raised their fares. Thus Herman may have had to pay more than he had planned.

On the other hand such sudden shifts in rates were commonplace at the time,¹¹ and the Melvilles could hardly have been ignorant of the practice. It is scarcely credible that Herman's mother sent him off without food for the eleven-or twelve-hour journey. Gansevoort could not have given him the shooting jacket and the fowling piece the night before. The incident as described is melodramatic and unreal. Under any normal circumstances, a young boy who menaced people with a gun would hardly have been allowed to go scot-free by passengers and crew. And the New York and Albany newspapers, which carefully reported all untoward events on the river steamers, would hardly have missed an opportunity to air such a scandal.¹² The truth of all or even most of the circumstances in the episode is open to grave question.

So is the following scene, the interview on the “Highlander” between Redburn, his brother's friend Mr. Jones, and Captain Riga, which smacks much more of deliberate humor than of fact. The witty Captain smiles, and jokes, and pats young Redburn on the head while he blandly mocks his ancestry, punctures foolish Mr. Jones's well-intentioned pretense that Redburn is being sent to sea by rich relations, and withholds Redburn's advance in the best-humored manner imaginable and for reasons all admit are unimpeachable. If Melville drew any of these details from an actual interview with Captain Brown, we may be sure that he amply embellished them. Perhaps he was recalling from J. Ross Browne's Etchings of a Whaling Cruise a somewhat similar episode, which in his review of the book he had called “irresistibly comic.”¹³ If it was Alexander W. Bradford who helped Melville find a berth on the “St. Lawrence,” it is hard to believe that with his intellect and practical training as a lawyer he could have been a silly young fop like Mr. Jones. And what ship captain would pat anyone on the head who was five feet eight and a half inches tall?¹⁴

For the story of Redburn's stay in New York, Melville deftly altered his own experience to emphasize the loneliness and helplessness of the young boy forced to shift for himself on the most slender means. Redburn receives a welcome dinner and kind treatment at the home of Mr. Jones, but to buy a few articles for his voyage, such as a knife, a red-flannel shirt, a belt, and some stationery, he pawns his brother's fowling piece for ＄2.50. He spends part of his time writing to this brother a letter full of misanthropic thoughts. After three nights at Mr. Jones's, Redburn goes to the “Highlander” alone, finds that the expected sailing has been delayed because of the rain, spends the night in the forecastle, and goes hungry till the next day for want of a single penny. Once at sea, he finds himself without tin pot, pan, spoon, dungarees, practical shoes, or bedding, equipment which he has had neither the means nor the foresight to provide. His consequent suffering makes a distressing picture of improvidence.

In creating this somewhat harrowing sequence, Melville conveniently omitted the facts that Allan and Gansevoort were staying at Alexander W. Bradford's and that Gansevoort had been instructed by their mother to help him obtain everything within his means that would make him comfortable. Unlike Redburn, Melville was not cut off from his family and thrown on his own resources. He probably had help and companionship in buying his equipment. It would have been unnatural for his brothers not to have accompanied him to the “St. Lawrence,” and that he slept in the forecastle and went hungry for a full day is doubtful. One suspects also that, through Leonard Gansevoort, Melville was far more familiar than Redburn with a sailor's needs; from his mother's reference to “his means,” it would seem that he was better able to provide for himself. However, adherence to all the literal facts in creating the story of Redburn's trials would have turned upon it the light of common day. Melville preferred to deepen the picture with all the somber hues at his command.

On the basis of Redburn's juvenile character and of certain debts to sea lore and literary tradition, we can safely assign a large number of other incidents to Melville's invention. In preparation for his career Redburn cuts off his hair because he thinks that every little bit will help in making him “a light hand to run aloft.” Finding it difficult to follow the mate's orders to push some shavings into the long boat at a certain place, he chooses a more convenient spot and when the mate berates him, he insists, boylike, that his own place is better and demands to know why the mate has chosen another. His worst error is an ill-fated attempt to pay a social call on the captain in his cabin. Such humorous incidents, playing on the ignorance and conceit of young boys at sea for the first time, were commonplace in forecastle tradition, and they were the stock in trade of a generation of nautical writers. Their subject was the greenhorn sailor, who belongs as much to folklore as Mike Fink or Paul Bunyan. In one standard situation the young greenhorn would refuse to obey an officer until he had secured his rubbers. Thus a cartoon in David Claypoole Johnston's Scraps (Boston, 1840) captioned “A Lesson in Seamanship” has the following dialogue:

“Well now capting it's tew bad to send me up this rope lather in sich weather as this.”

“You must obey orders whether or no.”

“Well if I must go won't you be so good as to step down stairs for my rumbrella and ingee-rubber shoes?”¹⁵

Melville builds the situation into a much more comic vignette:

… The water began to splash about all over the decks, and I began to think I should surely get my feet wet, and catch my death of cold. So I went to the chief mate, and told him I thought I would just step below, till this miserable wetting was over; for I did not have any waterproof boots, and an aunt of mine had died of consumption. But he only roared out for me to get a broom and go to scrubbing, or he would prove a worse consumption to me than ever got hold of my poor aunt. So I scrubbed away fore and aft, till my back was almost broke, for the brooms had uncommon short handles, and we were told to scrub hard.¹⁶

Several such episodes dot the callow mariner's first days on board ship. Many are suspiciously like those in Captain Marryat's Peter Simple, published fifteen years before. By the time of Redburn Peter Simple had become a byword for the greenhorn sailor, and many reviewers promptly saw the resemblance.¹⁷ Thus one of Peter's difficulties arises from his ignorance of slang and nautical terms. On his second day afloat, a veteran midshipman says to him:

“So, Master Simple, old Trotter and his faggot of a wife have got hold of you—have they?”

I replied, that I did not know the meaning of faggot, but that I considered Mrs. Trotter a very charming woman. At which he burst into a loud laugh.¹⁸

Similarly, when Redburn first boards the “Highlander,” the mate asks him, “Have you got your traps aboard?”

I told him I didn't know there were any rats in the ship, and hadn't brought any “trap.”

At this he laughed out with a great guffaw, and said there must be hayseed in my hair.¹⁹

Peter Simple has an aristocratic grandfather whose name and position he constantly invokes; Redburn is always referring to his great-uncle the senator or to his father, the wealthy merchant. When Peter thinks he is insulted by a foretopman, he declares:

“I am an officer and a gentleman. Do you know who my grandfather is?”

… “Who is he! why he's the Lord knows who.”

“No,” replied I, “that's not his name; he is Lord Privilege.” (I was very much surprised that he knew that my grandfather was a lord.)²⁰

In a similar passage, Redburn's ancestry is mocked. A sailor calls him “Jimmy Dux [he says], though that was not my real name, and he must have known it; and also the ‘son of a farmer,’ though as I have previously related, my father was a great merchant and French importer in Broad Street.”²¹ Redburn and Peter have much the same kind of difficulty with nautical terminology. When stirrups are mentioned, Peter looks around but can see no horses, and he thinks that the surgeon, not the boatswain, must be the proper gentleman to “bleed all the buoys.”²² In a much less broad vein of humor, Redburn is constantly getting into the bad graces of the mate for using land terms for sea objects, saying pails instead of buckets, pegs instead of plugs.

Thus it is forecastle tradition and the work of literary predecessors rather than personal experience that account for many of Redburn's perplexities.²³ But Melville was capable of higher powers of creation, as he shows in a scene in which a sailor who had come aboard drunk rushes suddenly up from the forecastle, throws himself overboard, and drowns, all to the immense horror of Redburn, which, with his subsequent abuse from the sailors for seeming cowardly, is traced out in meticulous detail.²⁴ The incident reads like the truest of confessions; Melville seems to be saying with indisputable conviction that “this is what happened to me; this was my sorrow and my terror.” In sober reality, however, there could have been no such occurrence aboard the “St. Lawrence.” The ship's papers reveal that all the men who composed the crew in New York arrived safely in Liverpool.²⁵ Thus, although the story of the suicide, with its sequence of fright and suffering, is vivid, impassioned, and convincing, it is not autobiography but an admirably dramatic piece of fiction.

With only scraps of objective evidence upon which to rely, few judgments of Melville's art in depicting the crew of the “Highlander” can be made. He used real people, like the Greenlander, the Irishman, and Jackson, the mates, the cook, and the steward, but where fact leaves off and invention begins is impossible to say. We do know that Melville described Max, the Dutchman, as having red hair and red whiskers, a distinction held by none of the real sailors. The point would be too trivial to mention except that Melville's modification of fact in this instance, like his clear invention of the suicide and the consequent actions of the crew, suggests that he manufactured the traits of his sailors whenever his models lacked qualities sufficiently exploitable in literature.

A paucity of sources also makes it impossible to study in any detail Melville's artistry in utilizing the materials the outward-bound voyage of the “St. Lawrence” afforded him. He adhered to fact, as we know, in representing the “St. Lawrence” as a “regular trader” and in certain details of time and place such as the fact that the ship left New York late in the spring, that she spent about a month in the crossing, that she arrived in Liverpool early in July, and that she was berthed in Prince's Dock, the haven for most of the American trading vessels on the Liverpool run. These matters indicate that Melville made no changes in his own story where there was nothing to gain by them and where something might be lost. Redburn owes much of its power to a realistic account of life at sea. Both critics and public admired this quality more than any other, and Melville's craft had always included a certain accuracy about basic nautical matters, designed to secure credibility not only for his fanciful elaborations but for the straightforward realism as well. Indeed, if Melville had not been deterred by the fastidiousness of his audience, many of his scenes would have been more realistic than they are.²⁶

The chapters describing Redburn's existence in Liverpool, which seem for the most part to be a truthful description of that city, rely for their appeal on the same vivid realism that flavors the nautical chapters. The sailor's boardinghouse, the crowds of men, women, and children milling around in the open streets at night, the long lines of beggars outside Prince's Dock, each with his peculiar stratagem to attract charity, the wretched family who starve to death—these and many other scenes have the ring of direct reporting. Although some of them may have been inspired by newspaper or other accounts, known conditions in Liverpool in 1839 substantiate Melville's lurid depiction of poverty and woe. From the effect of the city on other travelers, we can safely feel that Melville shared some of Redburn's disillusion. We also know that he drew upon his personal experience in such incidents as hearing the Chartist orator, encountering the entrance to the tunnel of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, and visiting Lord Nelson's monument in the courtyard of the Exchange. The truth of these few reminiscences suggests that many of the others are real and that much of Melville's art in the middle portion of the book consists of heightened journalism.

Nevertheless, the hand of the imaginative artist is still busy. Redburn's crowning disillusion occurs when he finds that Riddough's Hotel, where his father had stayed thirty years before, has been torn down. The precious old guidebook to Liverpool he had venerated as infallible because his father had used it turns out to be valueless, and Redburn, utterly stunned, sits down on a shop step to draw the moral from his experience. Like the suicide incident, this illuminating discovery—it is the climactic event in Redburn—sounds unassailably authentic. It has been generally accepted as the straightforward record of an event that defeated his fond hopes and completely robbed him of his cherished sentimentalizings.²⁷ But such a view is only another unwitting tribute to Melville's powers of imagination.

The first clues to Melville's inventiveness come to light when we compare the account of Walter Redburn's visit to Liverpool with the information furnished by Allan Melvill in his diaries and letters. The fictional father had written in the old guidebook which his son later used, “Walter Redburn, Riddough's Royal Hotel, Liverpool, March 20th, 1808.” Among the memorandums he made on various fly-leaves were expenses for a “Dinner at the Star and Garter” and a “trip to Preston (distance 31 m.).” He also jotted down notes—“Dine with Mr. Roscoe on Monday,” “Call on Sampson & Wilt, Friday”²⁸—which indicate that he remained at least six days since March 20, 1808, fell upon a Sunday. On the other hand, we learn from Allan Melvill's carefully kept travel journal that on March 20, 1811, after a coach trip from Carlisle, he “reached the Liverpool Arms at [frac12] p 2 A. M.” and that he left for Manchester on the twenty-third. On May 13, 1818, at the end of a twenty-one-day voyage from Boston, he “left the Ship in a Boat, landed at 8 AM & took lodgings at the Liverpool Arms,” and on the fifteenth he took a coach for the North. These were his only visits to Liverpool. Neither one occurred in 1808 nor lasted more than three days, and Allan Melvill stayed at the Liverpool Arms, not at Riddough's Hotel.²⁹ His journal reveals no separate trip to Preston (it is true that he passed through the town on the way to Carlisle in 1818). He may have dined at the Star and Garter, for that was a well-known Liverpool hotel, like Riddough's and the Liverpool Arms.³⁰ However, he did not meet William Roscoe until 1818, and even then he did not apparently dine with the great banker and poet.³¹

It is evident from this comparison that Melville must have had some exact information about his father's trips to Liverpool. He dates Walter Redburn's stay at Riddough's Hotel March 20, 1808, the very month and day of his father's first visit, if a different year. It is unthinkable that this is a mere coincidence. The senior Redburn's memorandum that he was to dine with William Roscoe indicates that Melville was aware of his father's association with the poet. The guidebook that Walter Redburn and his son used was an actual volume, The Picture of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1808), though Melville dates it 1803, and he made use of it in composing Redburn.³² It seems undeniable that he possessed the very copy owned by his father, which probably contained memorandums and dates in Allan Melvill's hand. If Melville had access to the journal, as he undoubtedly did, he would have found there also the mention of the Liverpool Arms and the date “March 20.”³³

These details have important implications. If Melville took his father's guidebook to Liverpool, he would presumably have found written in it the correct name of the hotel where Allan Melvill stayed, which was not Riddough's, but the Liverpool Arms. Its location, halfway down Castle Street, was supplied in the text and on the accompanying map,³⁴ and it was still standing in 1839, under the name of the Queen's Arms.³⁵ However, the old name was well within the memory of living individuals, and since the hotel had been famous in its day, being the Liverpool Corporation House and the headquarters of the Canning party, there should have been little trouble in identifying it.³⁶ Thus it is more than likely that if Melville actually attempted to find the very hotel where his father had “slept and dined, smoked his cigar, opened his letters, and read the papers,”³⁷ his efforts were successful. On the other hand, if he did not have the guidebook with the dotted lines showing Allan Melvill's course, then his story of Redburn's disappointed search must have been fabricated ten years later. Without knowledge of where his father stayed or what he did, Melville could not have attempted to follow his career, and he most certainly could not have suffered Redburn's crushing disenchantment. Hence, Melville's narrative is either a modification or even a reversal of the facts or a complete invention, depending on the information he possessed in 1839 about his father's trips to Liverpool.

In any event, it is indisputable that Melville did not find that his father's hotel had been leveled to the ground as Redburn did. Was the incident purely imaginary? Or did Melville find a hint in the guidebook from which he drew so many other details of Liverpool? In this volume the description of Riddough's Hotel as an elegant hostelry with every accommodation for the elite traveler invests it with a certain hopeful grandeur.³⁸ Its location at the foot of Lord Street is mentioned for the convenience of the reader. However, if Melville went with his guidebook in hand to compare the real hotel with the one described, he would have found that it had been converted into shops.³⁹ The transmutation from splendid hostelry to lowly mercantile establishments could easily have supplied him with a hint for the example of worldly mutability that he developed later in Redburn.

After Redburn has assimilated the shock of finding his father's hotel razed to the ground, he makes one more attempt to vindicate his faith in the treasured guidebook. A passage concerning “The Old Dock” impels him to walk to the place where he may see the astonishing sight of “so great a number of ships afloat in the very heart of the town.”⁴⁰ When he arrives at the designated spot, he finds neither dock nor ships, and a policeman explains that the place had been filled in years before to make room for the Customs House. At this unforeseen announcement, Redburn breaks into another sardonic outburst on the uselessness of “old morocco,” and his disillusion is virtually complete. It is, however, almost certainly a literary disillusion and not Melville's own reminiscence. Redburn had studied the guidebook carefully on the passage to Liverpool; he had “perused one by one the elaborate descriptions of public edifices” and mastered all details in the accompanying engravings.⁴¹ Had Melville done the same he would have found, in the middle of the description of the Exchange buildings, the information that because the Old Dock interfered with pedestrian traffic and many people fell into it and drowned, the Corporation of Liverpool was about to fill it up and lay it open for a market place.⁴² Thus he could scarcely have shared Redburn's utter surprise at finding that the project had been carried out. Melville's use of the guidebook in Redburn, including the hotel incident, shows that here again, instead of reproducing his own experience, he is employing his familiar technique of adaptation and invention for dramatic ends.

The first half of Redburn concludes with the climactic failure to find Riddough's Hotel. The second half, with its long descriptions of the docks, its straightforward narratives of poverty and crime, and its pious editorial comment, is not so artistically wrought as the first. Nevertheless, Melville continues in his role of literary magician, transforming the cold facts of guidebook information into decorative anecdotes, fashioning illusions of a mighty reality from little glimpses of life, and producing living experiences from the insubstantial air of his imagination.

To enlarge on Redburn's disillusion with England, Melville pictures him as frightened away from a peaceful field by a sign reading “Man Traps and Spring Guns” even though such treacherous devices had been forbidden by law twelve years before Melville saw Liverpool.⁴³ From the very guidebook he employed so skillfully in shaping a momentous disillusion for Redburn, he culls the substance of several “personal” observations. According to Redburn, a policeman tells him the history of the Old Dock, already referred to. From the lips of the shipkeeper of the “Highlander” he hears a tale about a one-hundred-year-old ship that entered King's Dock when it was first opened. Drunkards used to fall asleep on the tombstones of St. Nicholas' Church down near the docks, says Redburn, and one day, finding a rum-soaked figure stretched out there, he moved his arm and found underneath the ironic inscription, “Here Lyeth Ye Body of Tobias Drinker.”⁴⁴ Despite the convincing tone of these anecdotes, Melville cribbed them from The Picture of Liverpool, adding enough embellishment to lift them from the prosaic level of their original form.⁴⁵ It is characteristic of his bold plunder of sources that these stories are introduced soon after his refusal to quote from the book. Were he to do so, he says, he would be charged “with swelling out [his] volume by plagiarising from a guidebook—the most vulgar and ignominious of thefts.”⁴⁶ It was not the first time that Melville had practiced a harmless fraud upon his readers. But as if in confession of his methods, he wrote elsewhere in Redburn that “spun-yarn” is made on shipyard from “odds and ends of old rigging called ‘junk,’ the yarns of which are picked to pieces, and then twisted into new combinations, something as most books are manufactured.”⁴⁷

One suspects a similar literary source for at least part of the chapter on the “Irrawaddy,” a fascinating ship from distant India. The story of the ship is told to Redburn by one of the English-speaking lascar sailors, but the encyclopedic detail and the native Indian words are strongly suggestive of indebtedness to some marine dictionary. In the absence of evidence, however, it is unfruitful to devote space to speculation on minor matters. For there remains a major question about Melville's artistic method in Redburn, the question of the authenticity of the London trip, and of the scenes in Aladdin's Palace, the opulent gambling house where Redburn spends an adventurous night with Harry Bolton, a young aristocrat who has gambled away one inheritance and is about to gamble once more in order to avoid the alternative of seeking his fortune in America.

The episode has interested both literary critics and biographers for a century. The reviewer of Redburn in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine discarded it as being “in the very stalest style of minor-theatre melodrama” and asserted that the gambling den “existed nowhere (at least in London) but in our sailor-author's imagination.”⁴⁸ Raymond Weaver, while admitting the incident might be founded on fact, thought that the account of the adventure sounded “hollow and false” and that, “in this part of the narrative, Melville [was] making brave and unconvincing concessions to romance.”⁴⁹ Later he changed his mind and came to accept the London trip,⁵⁰ a point of view in which he has the company of Lewis Mumford, who thinks “the very vagueness and mysteriousness smells of reality.”⁵¹ John Freeman credits the story on the theory that the magnificence of the gaming house had so impressed Melville that he included it in Redburn, just as he had already drawn upon it for the luxurious details of the lady's apartment in the second “Fragments from a Writing Desk.”⁵² Finally, Willard Thorp believes the visit to the gambling den is imaginary, though he cites the biography of Melville in the Duyckincks' Cyclopaedia of American Literature as confirmation of the London journey.⁵³

The problem is clearly one of both art and biography. Some of the existing opinions may be disposed of without difficulty. The Duyckinck biography does not really confirm the London journey, for that detail was evidently borrowed from Men of the Time, an earlier biographical dictionary, and the latter may have taken it from Redburn.⁵⁴ Mumford cites as proof of his contention the fact that “Melville treated Israel Potter to a similar experience on his first visit to Paris, although there is no foundation in Israel's story for his being confined to his room until the time comes for departure.”⁵⁵ However, Israel Potter's adventure seems to have no bearing whatsoever on Redburn's. Israel carries secret dispatches from American agents in England to Benjamin Franklin, who confines him to an adjoining room for security, whereas Redburn merely remains in a vacant apartment in Aladdin's Palace while Harry goes off to gamble away his remaining funds. More proof than this is certainly demanded if we are to believe that Redburn's experience was Melville's. John Freeman's evidence, now that we know that the Liverpool voyage occurred after the writing of the second “Fragments” rather than before loses all value; in fact, the resemblance between the description in the second “Fragments” and in Redburn supports a theory quite the reverse of Freeman's.

A cogent argument for the imaginary character of the London gambling house lies in the extravagant description Melville furnishes. Was he depicting an interior that he had seen? Or was he relying on details derived from a literary source? A comparison between the lady's apartment in the second “Fragments” and the rooms in the gambling house in Redburn suggests an answer. In the first we find chandeliers hung by silver rods from the ceiling giving a “soft and tempered light” and a “dreamy beauty” to the scene.⁵⁶ In the second, the “vivid glare” from the gas lights is “softened by pale, cream-colored, porcelain spheres, shedding over the place a serene, silver flood.”⁵⁷ Tripods representing “the Graces bearing aloft vases” adorn the apartment;⁵⁸ in the gaming house “three marble Graces” hold a candelabrum over the stair landing.⁵⁹ The guide in the “Fragments” conducts the narrator “through a long corridor” to a door that “open[s] to the touch”;⁶⁰ similarly, Harry Bolton leads Redburn “up the long winding slope of [the] … stairs” straight to a door that, “on magical hinges, [springs] softly open to his touch.”⁶¹ In the gorgeous rooms which the narrator and Redburn enter are further remarkable resemblances, best revealed by a parallel arrangement:

Besides these striking parallels in physical details and in phrasing, there are others in tonal quality. Oriental atmosphere dominates both scenes. In the “Fragments” the room is “as beautiful and enchanting as any described in the Arabian Nights,” and it is “filled up in a style of Eastern splendor,” including the familiar ottoman.⁶⁴ In Redburn the gambling house is named Aladdin's Palace. It has “Moorish-looking tables,” “oriental ottomans,” “Turkey rugs,” and “Persian carpeting,” and the waiters make salaams.⁶⁵ At some point in both narratives the hero is seized by a sense of dread and a desire to be safe in familiar surroundings, and each is self-conscious amidst the opulence in which he unexpectedly finds himself. However, the hero in the earlier sketch masters all his misgivings whereas Redburn is nearly overwhelmed by them. Although the gambling-house scene is much longer and richer in detail than the early sketch, the resemblances are substantial indications of a nonfactual source.

The extravagance, the apparent inspiration from literary sources, and the melodrama of this incongruous passage greatly diminish its authenticity. Furthermore, if we assume for the moment that Melville was telling things as they happened to him, a glaring disparity appears. Unless his memory was defective, Melville's schedule of action in Redburn shows that he could not have made the trip to London and still returned to America on the “St. Lawrence.” Redburn makes the acquaintance of Harry Bolton on the day following a Sunday stroll in the country when he had been in England “four weeks or more.”⁶⁶ Since the “St. Lawrence” arrived in Liverpool on Tuesday, July 2, the date of the encounter would have been Monday, August 5, or thereafter. Harry becomes Redburn's companion in his “afternoon strolls and Sunday excursions,” on one of which they meet Lord Lovely, an old friend of Harry's.⁶⁷ About a week after this meeting, Harry invites Redburn to go to London with him. This event, then, would have fallen approximately on August 12. They spend one night at a public house in Liverpool, take the train to London the next day, pass that night in the gambling house, and return the following evening to learn that the “Highlander” had been advertised that morning to sail in two days. By the calendar, it would have been August 14. In the next two days the crew of the “Highlander” build enough bunks to accommodate the five hundred emigrants she has taken aboard, and on the morning following the completion of their task, the ship sails. Her departure, according to the implications of Melville's account, would have occurred on August 17. However, the date of the departure of the “St. Lawrence” was August 13. Furthermore, whereas Redburn does not hear of her announced sailing date until three days beforehand, Melville must have known for weeks that departure was imminent. As early as July 9 he had heard a rumor that the “St. Lawrence” might go to Charleston.⁶⁸ The “St. Lawrence” had been advertised on July 19 to sail as early as August 1. On August 2 it was announced that she would sail the following day. On August 6 the captain had filled the places of the three deserters with three other seamen, an action that was usually taken just before sailing.⁶⁹ Melville had not left the ship before this time, for his name appears on the crew list as of that date. Unlike the names of the known deserters, it is not marked “Run,” a notation that would have been justified if he absented himself from the ship either before or after August 6 for a full forty-eight hours as Redburn did. If he had deserted between August 6 and 13, he would also have risked the loss of his wages and equipment,⁷⁰ and he would have had to find a berth on another ship for transportation back to New York.

Thus the truth of the flight to London is substantially challenged. Some other hints, if not conclusive in themselves, throw additional doubt on the story. For one thing, Melville gives no indication in his 1849 journal of having been in London before, though when he visited Liverpool seventeen years after his first voyage he returned to one of the scenes of his wanderings.⁷¹ Again, for a boy who notices a thousand sordid details of Liverpool life and who is prepared to exult in the real England with its picturesque abbeys and minsters, its historic landmarks, and its broad, green fields, Redburn shows surprisingly little response to the sights along the railroad to London. He passes off the journey in half a hundred words, mentioning villages, meadows, parks, arching viaducts, and tunnels in a very general manner. Yet the only route by which he could have gone ran through Coventry and Rugby; from the railroad station at Harrow one could glimpse an outline of the school; the grounds and ruins of Berkhampstead Castle, residence of the kings of England from the time of Henry III, were adjacent to the railroad.⁷² No one would be so foolish as to insist that Melville would have exclaimed over these scenes in Redburn if he had observed them personally, but their absence still broadens the base of disbelief for the whole fantastic episode.

In his account of the return trip of the “Highlander” Melville recovers speedily from the artistic lag of the central section of Redburn. In the very first chapter following the departure from Prince's Dock he writes a scene of thrilling realism. Just before the ship sailed, a one-eyed crimp had carried aboard an apparently drunken sailor whose sallow face indicated Portuguese nationality and whose name was “down on the ship's papers as Miguel Saveda.” That night the crew notice a horrible smell in the forecastle, which they attribute to the presence of a dead rat, but the real source is Miguel, whom Jackson finds dead in his bunk, where the crimp had placed him:

Upon this the men rushed toward the bunk, Max with the light, which he held to the man's face.

“No, he's not dead,” he cried, as the yellow flame wavered for a moment at the seaman's motionless mouth. But hardly had the words escaped, when, to the silent horror of all, two threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, darted out between the lips; and in a moment, the cadaverous face was crawled over by a swarm of worm-like flames.⁷³

Max drops the lamp, and the corpse, covered with “spires and sparkles of flame,” burns on with a faint crackling noise. Melville describes the open, fixed eyes, the mouth wearing “an aspect of grim defiance,” and even the way that the tattooed letters of the man's name burn white so that “you might read the flaming name in the flickering ground of blue.”⁷⁴

In a few minutes, the men pitch the body into the ocean, where it falls “among the phosphorescent sparkles of the damp night sea, leaving a coruscating wake” as it sinks.⁷⁵ Redburn is left speculating on the horrible revelation that the man had been dead for some time before the crimp brought him aboard to secure his month's advance.

This incident is as terrifying as any that Melville ever wrote, and its multitude of precise details gives it the authority of an eye-witness account. “This event thrilled me through and through with an unspeakable horror,” says Redburn, and we feel that the sentiments spring from Melville's somber memories. Yet, like the suicide with which the voyage began, this bizarre accident did not occur on the “St. Lawrence.” Of the three men who were shipped in Liverpool, none was named Saveda, and all crossed safely to New York, where their presence on board was attested by a customs official.⁷⁶ Perhaps Melville had read somewhere about a case of animal combustion. Whatever his source, the scene is a masterpiece of nautical realism, terse, graphic, and horrible. And because Melville carefully controls the element of horror, he rises well above the sensationalist school of nautical writers. While avoiding a cultivated morbidity, he rivals Poe's artistry in depicting the grotesque.

Melville sustains this quality of dramatic realism in his account of the Irish immigrants who compose most of the “Highlander's” cargo. Nearly six of the fifteen chapters he devotes to the homeward journey describe the ingenuousness, improvidence, and misery of these hapless refugees. So ignorant are they of geography that they think Cape Clear, at the exit of the Irish Channel, is America. They bring food for a two or three weeks' passage, and when it is gone, “scores” of them wander the decks, plundering the chicken coop, waylaying the steward, and robbing the bread barge. Of those who do have enough food, many “scores” get no chance to do their cooking, for the ship has only one galley and in the constant fighting for places, many lose out. Worst of all, this swarming mob—there are about five hundred of them, according to Melville⁷⁷—is shut up for nearly a week in the dark, unventilated steerage, filthy with human offal, and the breeding place of a pestilential fever that infects over thirty-six passengers, thirty of whom die. During the panic, the crew, including Redburn, are ordered into the steerage to throw down a barricade foolishly erected by the healthy around the bunks of the sick to prevent spread of the disease. This is Melville's supposed reporting of the scene:

The sight that greeted us, upon entering, was wretched indeed. It was like entering a crowded jail. From the rows of rude bunks, hundreds of meager, begrimed faces were turned upon us; while seated upon the chests, were scores of unshaven men, smoking tea leaves, and creating a suffocating vapor. But this vapor was better than the native air of the place, which from almost unbelievable causes, was fetid in the extreme. In every corner, the females were huddled together, weeping and lamenting; children were asking bread from their mothers, who had none to give; and old men, seated upon the floor, were leaning back against the heads of the water-casks, with closed eyes and fetching their breath with a gasp.⁷⁸

At the mate's orders, the crew attempt to knock down the barricade.

But hardly had we touched the chests composing it, when a crowd of pale-faced, infuriated men rushed up; and with terrific howls, swore they would slay us, if we did not desist.

“Haul it down!” roared the mate.

But the sailors fell back, murmuring something about merchant seamen having no pensions in case of being maimed, and they had not shipped to fight fifty to one. … we were obliged to depart, without achieving our object.⁷⁹

This scene and all the others describing the poor immigrants gave Melville “most bitter occasion to reflect on the criminal nature of the universe,” according to one of his romantic biographers.⁸⁰ But such facts as are now available reveal an entirely different character in Melville's narrative. For example, his description of the ignorance of the passengers who mistake Cape Clear for America, though possibly true reporting, may have been an elaboration of a hint in Nathaniel Ames's A Mariner's Sketches (1830), especially since the anecdote immediately following bears an unmistakable resemblance to one in the passage from Ames.⁸¹ Melville describes an old Irishman who stands in the bows for hours as if expecting to see New York any minute (it is two thousand miles away).

The only thing [he writes] that ever diverted this poor old man from his earnest search for land was the occasional appearance of porpoises under the bows; when he would cry out at the top of his voice: “Look, look, ye divils! look at the great pigs of the s'a!”⁸²

In Ames's account of his trip from Ireland with one Irish family aboard, the story reads:

While on the passage a large school of porpoises played around the ship; the oldest boy ran to the after hatchway and called to his sister, “Jasus, Molly, come up stairs and see the wild bastes of the sa!”⁸³

Considering that Melville borrowed one of the most exciting scenes in White-Jacket from Ames's book,⁸⁴ his reliance on Ames for this snatch of humorous monologue seems credible. Melville refined the profane naturalism but retained the earthiness and enlarged it a trifle to suit his own needs.

This literary pilfering, however, is trivial in comparison with the large-scale appropriation which, unless Melville relied entirely upon his imagination, he must have committed to gather the details of immigrant life on the “Highlander.” He was probably struck by newspaper or magazine accounts of immigrant ships, which in 1849 were bringing to America hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Irish famine under exactly the same conditions he described.⁸⁵ In fact, he virtually acknowledges his source: “the only account you obtain of such events is generally contained in a newspaper paragraph, under the shipping head.”⁸⁶ In any event, it is evident that the stirring scenes in Redburn are fictional, for the “St. Lawrence” did not carry four or five hundred starved and miserable immigrants to New York, nor even the “scores” who wandered hungry about the decks and drove out the craven crew. In the steerage of the “St. Lawrence” there were only thirty-two passengers, none of whom died on the voyage.⁸⁷ Melville's multiplication of this handful into the vast herd of living and suffering and dying people on the “Highlander” is an excellent achievement in the art of visualization.

The discovery of the passenger list of the “St. Lawrence” supplies further clues to Melville's inventiveness. The “Highlander” carried a young Italian emigrant named Carlo whose physical beauty, charming conversation, and ability to produce a wide repertory on his hand organ inspire an entire chapter of intimate feelings, yet nobody named Carlo, nor any Italian for that matter, appears on the official list.⁸⁸ Another chapter narrates the adventures of two sets of triplet boys named O'Brien and O'Regan, though none of the thirteen children on the “St. Lawrence” were even twins. Melville also invented some thirteen beings to inhabit the cabin in addition to the two men actually there on the “St. Lawrence,” “Mr. L. A. Kettle” and “Mr. Andrew Coats.”⁸⁹ Either may have provided some suggestions for the “abominable-looking old fellow, with cold, fat, jelly-like eyes,”⁹⁰ the only one of the fifteen cabin passengers to be described at any length, but the “two or three buckish-looking young fellows” who talk about “going on to Washington to see Niagara Falls” are creatures of fiction as are the several ladies and the American lady who dies on the voyage. But the absence of real-life models was no deterrent to Melville, who describes with great contempt the cowardice and hysterical prayers of these apparently real travelers when threatened by the plague and even “reports” a dialogue in which one of the young blades ridicules the speedy recovery of his friends' courage after the danger is past.

In one more event that marks the homeward course of the “Highlander” Melville displays his capacity for dramatic description. He tells the story with photographic accuracy:

[Jackson's] hat and shoes were off; and he rode the yard-arm end, leaning backward to the gale, and pulling at the earing-rope, like a bridle. At all times, this is a moment of frantic exertion with sailors, whose spirits seem then to partake of the commotion of the elements, as they hang in the gale between heaven and earth; and then it is, too, that they are the most profane.

“Haul out to windward!” coughed Jackson, with a blasphemous cry, and he threw himself back with a violent strain upon the bridle in his hand. But the wild words were hardly out of his mouth, when his hands dropped to his side, and the bellying sail was spattered with a torrent of blood from his lungs.

As the man next him stretched out his arm to save, Jackson fell headlong from the yard, and with a long seethe, plunged like a diver into the sea.

It was when the ship had rolled to windward, which, with the long projection of the yard-arm over the side, made him strike far out upon the water. His fall was seen by the whole upward-gazing crowd on deck, some of whom were spotted with the blood that trickled from the sail, while they raised a spontaneous cry, so shrill and wild, that a blind man might have known something deadly had happened.⁹¹

For all its pictorial realness, which includes even the blood-spattered faces of the spectators, this awesome scene is purely fictional. Robert Jackson was still aboard the “St. Lawrence” when she ended her voyage in New York, nor did Melville transfer to him the fate of some other shipmate, for all the members of the original crew who had not deserted in Liverpool returned alive.⁹² The death of Jackson instead of being inspired reporting is one of the many artistic tours de force with which the pages of Redburn are liberally strewn.

With this incident, Melville returns, as far as is known, to a largely factual narration of the ship's progress, past quarantine and up the Narrows into the lower harbor. He remembered that the “St. Lawrence” had passed in sight of the battleship “North Carolina,” which had come to anchor in New York late in June 1839, and made Captain Riga point it out to the cabin passengers.⁹³ But what else in the few remaining pages of Redburn is refurbished truth or impassioned romanticizing, it is difficult to tell. Presumably the bitter scene in which the Captain refused Redburn his wages because he ran away to London was not something Melville had to face. Besides the evidence against the London escapade, a defect in the logic of Redburn's story suggests that Melville really received his pay. Redburn leaves the “Highlander” quite penniless, but his creator neglects to explain how the boy got money to pay his fare on the steamboat he boards for the journey home. Perhaps Melville departed from the “St. Lawrence” with his earnings, but when he came to write his book he determined to expose the battered hero to one final defeat. From a literary point of view, at least, the painful blighting of Redburn's last expectation has the value of consistency.⁹⁴

Although the sources in the oral traditions of the forecastle may be beyond recovery, it is undeniably possible to extend the study of the literal truth in Redburn. The pages of magazines, newspapers, and obscure books, perhaps dime novels, may well contain the original stories on which many incidents in Redburn are based. It would be interesting to see these sources arranged in parallel form as a means of examining Melville's habits of composition more precisely.⁹⁵ But the background of enough of the book is now known to reveal Melville's highly artistic techniques. The author of Redburn was a great illusionist, a master of literary legerdermain. It has been fashionable for some time to consider his book autobiography with elements of romance. It is more nearly correct to call it romance with elements of autobiography.

The question of spiritual truth in Redburn is far more difficult to deal with. It can be easily contended that despite all the discrepancies research can expose between Melville and Redburn, the book is a romance only on the surface, that its real meaning as autobiography lies deep below, where all but the obdurate will quickly find the tragic story of Melville's own youth. Redburn, to quote the biographer who founded the modern autobiographical interpretation, is Melville's attempt to revenge himself “upon his early disillusion by an inverted idealism,—by building for himself ‘not castles, but dungeons in Spain.’” It is a book of “malicious self-satire, and its obverse gesture, obtrusive self-pity.”⁹⁶ And the most studied exponent of biography through psychological revelations presumably included Redburn when he said that Melville's early work is the “biography of his self-image.”⁹⁷

In the absence of an early diary or letters or such evidence as the autobiography that Dickens incorporated into David Copperfield, it is difficult to give more than guarded and tentative acceptance to such assessments of Redburn, regardless of brilliance or confident appeals to mental science. It seems undeniable that Melville's own poverty and disappointments account in large measure for those features in Redburn's story. But to insist that Redburn's emotions were Melville's neglects the fact that Melville was older and more experienced than Redburn and that many of the fictional hero's passionate outbursts arose from incidents which did not occur. The bitterness in the book adumbrates the bitterness and misanthropy to be found in Pierre and The Confidence Man, but to sift out the exact proportions of Melville's and Redburn's personal discontent would be an arduous task indeed. At any rate, to argue that Melville's own experience dictated his book is to make the much more dangerous and essentially antiliterary assumption that writing is merely the product of physiological determinism and to deny that the artist has freedom to choose effects for dramatic purposes. The real concern of the critic is the validity of these created effects just as the real concern of the biographer is the validity of the evidence that Melville was truthfully representing his youth in Redburn. Without a great deal more evidence by which the book may be tested, it seems the legitimate source only for the most general impressions of Melville's spiritual history.

Notes

1. “Washing down the decks,” says Redburn, “… was worse than my mother's house-cleanings at home, which I used to abominate so” (p. 68). See p. 18.

2. Redburn, p. 7.

3. Ibid., p. 1.

4. Ibid., pp. 72, 148, 331, 155. Other references to Redburn as a boy are on pp. 13, 79, 192, 193.

5. Knowing that Melville's Liverpool trip occurred in 1839 when he was nearly twenty and reasonably mature might have deterred biographers from taking Redburn as autobiography thinly veiled. But for nearly a century it was assumed that the date of the voyage was 1837 and Melville seventeen-eighteen. The error may have originated in the office of Richard Bentley, whose announcement Works Published in 1849 stated that “Melville sailed in 1837 as ship's boy from New York to Liverpool and back.” All subsequent accounts down to 1946 repeat the error, including innumerable editions, both American and English, of Men of the Time (1st ed.; London, 1852), every nineteenth- and twentieth-century encyclopedia or biographical dictionary, and even records by those who supposedly knew Melville well: Evert and George Duyckinck, in their Cyclopaedia of American Literature (New York, 1855), Melville's friend, J. E. A. Smith (Herman Melville, 1891), and Melville's wife. The latter wrote in her commonplace book that Herman “made his first voyage before the mast in 1837, in a New York merchantman bound for Liverpool & returned after a short cruise (see Redburn)” (MS. in the possession of Eleanor Melville Metcalf, who has kindly permitted me to quote it). Even the recent biographies of Melville by Richard Chase (1949) and Geoffrey Stone (1949) perpetuate the error of dating Melville's first voyage in 1837.

6. Redburn, p. 1.

7. Ibid., p. 11.

8. New York Post, May 28, and Albany Argus, June 3, 1839.

9. Albany Argus, May 31 and June 4, 1839.

10. It ran Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (Albany Evening Journal, May 30, 1839).

11. See John Morrison, History of American Steam Navigation (New York: W. F. Sametz, 1903), chap. iii.

12. All the New York and Albany papers for the two weeks following June 1, 1839, have been carefully checked without discovering any report of such an incident as Melville describes.

13. Literary World, I (March 6, 1847), 105, reprinted in [Willard] Thorp, Herman Melville, Representative Selections, [(New York: American Book Company, 1938)] pp. 321-27. Melville summarizes Browne's scene in which two young gentlemen are cajoled by a courteous and facetious shipping agent into signing up for a whaling voyage that proves thoroughly disillusioning. Browne's narrative is amusing, but Melville's précis amounts to a complete revision, vastly superior in style, imagination, and ironic humor and artistically fitted up with vivid details which the original lacks. (Browne and his companion climb a flight of stairs to interview the agent; Melville transforms this simple act into “Our author and his friend … hurry up a ladder, to a dark loft above, where the old man lurks like a spider in the midst of his toils.”) Besides revealing Melville's irrepressible originality, the review hints directly at the scene in which Captain Riga hires Redburn. The young lad likes his future employer “amazingly”; Browne and his friends had been “delighted with the agreeable address” of the agent. When Mr. Jones asks what the captain generally pays a “handsome young fellow like Redburn,” the captain offers only three dollars a month, because he is “not so particular about beauty.” Melville had said in the review that the shipping agent was “not so particular about weight as beauty.” The intent of the two speeches is different, to serve the purpose of the speakers, but the phrasal resemblance and the introduction of the irrelevant question of beauty help to link the scene in Redburn with what Melville saw in Browne's narrative.

14. If Captain Oliver P. Brown was the sailor who, at the age of twenty-six, was five feet eight inches tall (see chap. iv, n. 37, p. 334), he would hardly have been more than that at the age of forty. Thus his height would have been about the same as Melville's, and the idea of his patting him on the head becomes entirely absurd.

15. I am indebted to Jay Leyda for pointing out Johnston's cartoon.

16. Redburn, p. 67.

17. E.g., Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, LXVI (November 1849), 570; Athenaeum, No. 1150 (November 10, 1849), 1131; Spectator, XXII (October 27, 1849), 1020.

18. Peter Simple (“Everyman Library” [London: J. M. Dent, (1907)], p. 31.

19. Redburn, p. 29.

20. Peter Simple, p. 43.

21. Redburn, p. 62.

22. Peter Simple, p. 32.

23. For further evidence, see App. D, pp. 277 and 280.

24. Redburn, chap. x.

25. See the sworn statement of Captain Oliver P. Brown before Francis B. Ogden, United States consul at Liverpool, August 6, 1839, in the consular certificate for the ship “St. Lawrence” (National Archives). Jay Leyda discovered this valuable document.

26. See his remark in Redburn, p. 370, that because people are finicky they miss many scenes of realism which literature might bring them.

27. [Raymond] Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic [(New York: George H. Doran and Company, 1921)] p. 103; [Lewis] Mumford, Herman Melville, [(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929)] p. 33; [John] Freeman, Herman Melville [New York: Macmillan, 1926] pp. 15-16; [Ellery] Sedgwick, Herman Melville, The Tragedy of Mind, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944)] p. 66.

28. Redburn, p. 184.

29. Further proof that Allan Melvill did not go to Liverpool in 1808 lies in his statement in a copy of a letter to David Swan, Boston, August 25, 1812 (G-L): “I had been repeatedly in Europe [prior to his 1811 trip] but only once before in England which was in 1800 my first voyage.” His travel journal reveals that in 1800 he sailed from Boston to London, where he spent September 2 to 20, and that he then went directly to the Continent.

30. J. A. Picton, Memorials of Liverpool (London, 1875), II, 148.

31. Allan Melvill met Roscoe in 1818, through an introduction by William Lodge, a mutual friend. Although he speaks of receiving very civil attentions from Mr. Maury, the United States consul, and of having dinner with an old friend, Eben Appleton, he says nothing of a dinner engagement with Roscoe, an event he would hardly have ignored in his methodical accounts of meetings with illustrious people (Allan Melvill to Maria Melville, May 12, 1818 [G-L]).

32. Thorp, “Redburn's Prosy Old Guidebook,” PMLA, LIII (December 1938), 1146-56.

33. The Journal descended to Eleanor Melville Metcalf. Its green morocco binding possibly inspired Melville's description of the guidebook as “bound in green morocco, which from my earliest recollection has been spotted and tarnished with time; the corners are marked with triangular patches of red, like little cocked hats; and some unknown Goth has inflicted an incurable wound on the back” (Redburn, p. 183). The added details sound like Melville's characteristic embellishments.

34. The Picture of Liverpool, p. 174. Redburn (p. 185) found Riddough's Hotel marked on the map in The Picture of Liverpool, though no such designation is actually made. Riddough's Hotel was at the foot of Lord Street (see n. 39).

35. Letter to the author from J. F. Smith, city librarian of the Liverpool Public Libraries, January 24, 1947. Redburn thinks that Captain Riga boards at the Arms Hotel (Redburn, p. 173). Was this the Queen's Arms, formerly the Liverpool Arms, where Allan Melvill had stayed? Did Melville involuntarily reveal, in this allusion, a knowledge that the hotel still existed?

36. Picton, Memorials, II, 22. The full name of the hotel was Lillyman's Liverpool Arms, in reference to its proprietor.

37. Redburn, p. 199.

38. The Picture of Liverpool, pp. 174-75. The inn had “accommodations for families of the first rank, their retinues, carriages, and horses; as also every other description of travellers who wish to be accommodated.”

39. The Picture of Liverpool, p. 174, locates “Riddiough's [sic] Royal Hotel at the bottom of Lord Street,” a short street running at right angles to Castle Street, where the Liverpool Arms stood. As both were important thoroughfares, the first being lined with expensive shops and the second connecting the Merchant's Exchange with the Customs House, Melville had undoubtedly traversed them, just as Redburn did (Redburn, pp. 199, 260). That Riddough's Royal Hotel had been converted into shops by 1839 is apparent from Picton's sketch of the history of a hotel built “at the bottom of Lord Street” about 1785, first called the New Hotel, and later the Royal Hotel, or Bates's. Although Picton does not mention Riddough in connection with the establishment, the two are undoubtedly the same, for there would hardly have been two “Royal” hotels in the same location at approximately the same time. According to Picton (II, 127), the Royal Hotel was turned into shops about 1805.

40. Redburn, p. 202. The phrase is adapted from The Picture of Liverpool, p. 30, where the word “very” is missing.

41. Redburn, p. 192.

42. The Picture of Liverpool, [(Liverpool, 1808)] p. 144.

43. Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th ed.; 1943), XIV, 829, and XXI, 226.

44. Redburn, p. 229.

45. Thorp, “Redburn's Prosy Old Guidebook,” [PMLA, LIII (December 1938), 1146-56] pp. 1152-55.

46. Redburn, p. 191.

47. Ibid., pp. 145-46.

48. LXVI (November 1849), pp. 575, 576.

49. Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, p. 107.

50. His opinion, based on a conversation in 1935, is reported by [Jean] Simon, Herman Melville, marin, metaphysicien, et poète, [(Paris: Boivinet Cie., 1939)] p. 64.

51. Herman Melville, p. 35.

52. Herman Melville, p. 19.

53. Herman Melville, Representative Selections, p. xlix.

54. Compare the accounts: “When about eighteen years of age [Melville] made a voyage from New York to Liverpool, before the mast, visited London, and returned home in the same capacity” (Men of the Time [London, 1852], p. 546; The Men of the Time, or Sketches of Living Notables [New York, 1852], p. 350). “In his eighteenth year, [Melville] shipped as a sailor in a New York vessel for Liverpool, made a hurried visit to London when he arrived in port, and returned home ‘before the mast’” (Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, II, 672-73). Geoffrey Stone has suggested that Melville either wrote this biographical sketch or approved it, for he notes that “the MS. for it, which survives in the Duyckinck Collection of the New York Public Library, has corrections and additions in Melville's hand” (Melville, p. 45, n. 3). Aside from the fact that the MS. referred to consists of only three pages, or a small fraction of the final article, the corrections are few in number, many of them are instructions for the compositor, and it is doubtful if the handwriting is actually Melville's.

55. Herman Melville, p. 35.

56. App. B, p. 270.

57. Redburn, p. 294.

58. App. B, p. 270.

59. Redburn, p. 297.

60. App. B, p. 269.

61. Redburn, p. 297.

62. App. B, p. 270. I have reversed the order of the two passages.

63. Redburn, pp. 297-98. See chap. vii, n. 31.

64. App. B, p. 269.

65. Redburn, pp. 294-97.

66. Ibid., p. 278.

67. Ibid., pp. 284-86.

68. See p. 143.

69. See chap. iv, n. 92, p. 337.

70. Statutes of the United States, July 20, 1790, chap. lvi, § 5.

71. See p. 140. When Melville passed through London in 1856, he also made no note in his journal of any adventure there in 1839. His brief descriptions of Birmingham and of the railroad trip from there to Liverpool read like the record of first experiences, though a railroad trip to London in 1839 would have introduced him to these scenes (see his Journal Up the Straits, ed. [Raymond M.] Weaver, [(New York: The Colophon, 1935)] pp. 171-75).

72. Mogg's Handbook for Travellers; or, Real Iron-Road Book (London, 1840), pp. 212-20; Felix Summerly, Travelling Charts; or, Iron Road Books, for Perusal on the Journey: London to Rugby and Birmingham (London, n.d.), unpaged.

73. Redburn, p. 316.

74. Ibid., pp. 316-17.

75. Ibid., p. 317.

76. Records of the Collector of Customs, New York, Inspector's Certificate for the ship “St. Lawrence,” September 30, 1839. One of the men shipped in Liverpool, named Antono [sic] Ton, may have suggested the Portuguese, Miguel Saveda.

77. Redburn, p. 310. Elsewhere, Melville places the number of immigrants at “four or five hundred” (p. 340).

78. Ibid., pp. 370-71.

79. Ibid., p. 371.

80. Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, p. 108.

81. See Redburn, p. 335, and Ames, p. 186. Ames writes: “We had an Irish family on board that amused me much. Before we were out of the Irish Channel, they began to ask, ‘Sure now, and ain't we most there?’” Melville's anecdote could well have been suggested by Ames's. Cape Clear has just been sighted: “At the cry [of land ho] the Irish emigrants came rushing up the hatchway, thinking America itself was at hand.

    “‘Where is it?’ cried one of them, running out a little way on the bowsprit. ‘Is that it?’

    “‘Aye, it doesn't look much like ould Ireland, does it?’ said Jackson.

    “‘Not a bit, honey:—and how long before we get there? to-night?’”

82. Redburn, p. 336. The oldest steerage passenger on the “St. Lawrence” was 56 (see n. 87).

83. [Nathaniel Ames] A Mariner's Sketches, [(Providence, 1830)] p. 186.

84. [Charles R.] Anderson, Melville in the South Seas, [(New York: Colombia University Press, 1939)] pp. 412-17.

85. See, for example, [Robert Whyte], The Ocean Plague: or A Voyage to Quebec in an Irish Emigrant Vessel (Boston, 1848), a lurid description of the effects of insufficient food, overcrowding, and ship's fever on a hundred Irish emigrants in 1847.

86. Redburn, p. 378. The review of Redburn in the Literary World, V (November 17, 1849), 420, says that in the steerage scenes in Redburn “A little newspaper item, such as we have often read this last season, is filled out in its terrible details. …”

87. The official passenger list was discovered in 1949 in the National Archives by Professor Wilson L. Heflin, who has generously shared his find with me. It lists thirteen men, three women, and sixteen children, giving, in most instances, the full names of adults and the given names or initials of children, with the ages of all individuals.

88. Despite this evidence, one cannot help being fascinated with the possibilities suggested by the name of the author of Storia popolare di Napoleone III (Milan, 1852)—Carlo Melvil.

89. The names of these cabin passengers are not included in the regular passenger list, but they are listed in the New York Journal of Commerce, October 1, 1839, and the New York Evening Post, October 2, 1839.

90. Redburn, p. 338.

91. Ibid., pp. 381-82.

92. Records of the Collector of Customs, New York, Inspector's Certificate for the ship “St. Lawrence,” September 30, 1839 (National Archives). This lists three of the original crew as “Absent,” and shows that their places were taken by three others (see p. 197). A notation on the verso of the crew list, reading “2 Absent,” is evidently an error.

93. Redburn, p. 387. The “North Carolina,” 90 guns, arrived in New York about the end of June 1839 (New York American, July 1, 1839). She was stationed in the port until 1866 (letter to the author from Captain John B. Heffernan, Office of Naval Records and Library, Navy Department, Washington, D.C.).

94. It is true that in this final scene Captain Riga also charges Redburn with the expense of several hammers and scrapers which the boy lost overboard. Legally he could do this ([Joseph] Blunt, [The Merchant's and] Shipmaster's Assistant, [(New York, 1832)] p. 124), and if Melville was guilty of the same negligence, he may have been denied his wages for that reason. On the other hand, Redburn's tally of lost hardware is suspiciously high—three hammers and two scrapers. One wonders whether a more mature youth would have been quite so careless. Redburn's account of losing the tools is humorous but not very convincing if applied to Melville (p. 155).

    In addition, even though a sailor had deserted, he was entitled to his wages if the captain received him back on board ship ([Richard Henry, Jr.] Dana, The Seaman's Friend, [(Boston, 1841)] p. 124). In the scene in Redburn in which the sailors are paid, Captain Riga does not deny wages to other sailors who, as Redburn had said, had been absent from the ship longer than he had (p. 308). It seems strange that Redburn should have known that the captain could have legally refused to receive him on board after his absence but did not know that once accepted, he was entitled to his wages.

    Thus all relevant evidence, though not conclusive, opposes the veracity of Melville's story.

95. It is possible, for example, that Melville found hints for various incidents and reflections in Redburn in John Codman's [Captain Ringbolt] Sailor's Life and Sailor's Yarns, which he reviewed for the Literary World, March 6, 1847 (see Thorp, Herman Melville, Representative Selections, pp. 326-27). Codman tells of shipping a crazy man who was thought to be merely drunk but who jumped overboard and had to be rescued. He describes a “dismasted and water-logged” ship, which “sluggishly rose and fell in the trough of the sea, wallowing like one of its huge monsters, dead” (pp. 74-75). He pleads in one sketch for captains to investigate all wrecks to be sure that no one perishes for want of aid; in another he calls upon look-outs and steersmen to keep careful watch and not fall asleep; and in another he describes two ships crashing at night. Similar incidents or appeals occur in Redburn, pp. 63, 132, 133, 120, 148, 118-19. But it is impossible to prove Melville's indebtedness.

96. Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, p. 79.

97. Pierre, ed. Murray, p. xx.

The sources for a study of Melville's early life and Redburn are the book itself and various collections of letters, books, and memorabilia associated with Melville and his family: the Melville Collection in the Harvard College Library, the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection in the New York Public Library, and the Shaw Collection in the Massachusetts Historical Society. These collections are denoted as M, G-L, and S, respectively.