[In the following essay, Schwendinger studies the similarities between Melville's language and the language of nineteenth-century sea shanties—songs with a swinging, or lilting rhythm, often sung by sailors while onboard ship.]

Over the years Herman Melville's language becomes the language of the sea as do sea shanties of the 19th Century, and similarities exist between both, in tone, symbols, figurative language, and subject matter. That Melville was concerned about the men who lived, worked and died upon the immutable sea, is readily evident,¹ and his poetic expression is a combination of fact and myth, two worlds of the great imagination, not unlike folk songs, themselves creative renderings of the forces from love through hate that play prophetic parts in the human drama.² The relationships we find between Melville's writings and the songs help us to gain a further appreciation of the folk materials that were present during Melville's day, and of the author-seaman who undoubtably absorbed these materials into his art, thereby capturing the spirit and authenticity of his times.

Consider Melville's treatment of the perennial diet of salt meat, beef or pork, available at the seaman's mess during the 19th Century. It was a time before refrigeration, when fresh meat and vegetables were rarities on long voyages: “… many South Sea whalemen do not come to an anchor for eighteen or twenty months at a stretch. When fresh provisions are needed, they run for the nearest land—heave to eight or ten miles off, and send a boat ashore to trade.”³ Meat was packed in barrels and stored aboard the sailing vessel. When needed, the barrels would be opened and the meat put into harness casks to be pickled in brine, then cooked, and served day after day. In appearance, the meat was no more than stringy-looking flesh, tough and unappealing. Little wonder, then, why seamen called it “salt horse,” as testimony to the unpalatable nature of the meat and with reference to the harness cask, “the horse in its harness.”⁴ Melville offers these caustic comments:

… beef and pork … are carefully packed in salt and stored away … affording a never-ending variety in their different degrees of toughness, and in the peculiarities of their saline properties.⁵

… The business of dining became a bore, and digestion was seriously impaired by the unamiable discourse we had over our salt horse.

I sometimes thought that the junks of lean pork—which were broiled in their own bristles, and looked gaunt and grim, like pickled chins of half-famished, unwashed cossacks—had something to do with creating the bristling bitterness at times prevailing in our mess. The men tore off the tough hide from their pork, as if they were Indians scalping Christians.⁶

There is a sea shanty⁷ of the 19th Century that was sung just before the men would start to eat or when the meat was transferred to the casks. Ceremonial and delivered in the form of a chant, the shanty was named “Salt Horse” or “The Sailor's Grace.”⁸

SALT HORSE

Salt horse, salt horse, both near and far
You're food for every hard worked-tar.
In deepest brine you have been sunk
Until you're coarse and hard as junk.
To eat such tough and wretched fare
Would whiten e'en a bo'sun's hair.
Salt horse, salt horse, what brought you here?
Salt horse, salt horse, we'd have you know
That to the galley you must go.
The cook without a sign of grief,
Will boil you down and call you beef.
And we poor sailors standing here
Must eat you though you look so queer.
Salt horse, salt horse, what brought you here?

With the death of his father in 1832, when Melville was 13 years old, the family became plagued with financial failures, and young Herman by a series of disappointments in employment.⁹ He was twenty years old when he made that fateful decision to ship aboard a “regular trader,” which plied the New York to Liverpool seas year after year.¹⁰ Like most other “packet rats” who worked the Atlantic,¹¹ Melville also served his apprenticeship as a “boy.”¹² Until the 1860's our country was very much a seafaring nation, and hundreds of thousands of men went to sea.¹³ Some were lured by the romance, only to return from a voyage completely disillusioned by the harsh realities of seafaring life.¹⁴ Others remained with the sea, occasionally taking jobs on inland waterways, becoming migrant seamen the year round.¹⁵ Others would wake up in the morning and find that they were out of sight of land, that they had been shanghied aboard a whaler or China Tea Clipper with no hope of return until years hence.¹⁶ Many others were unemployed immigrants who spoke English poorly or not at all and served the sea for the sake of having little else available. And still others stuck to the sea as one becomes attached to the only thing he knows well, no matter how closely it can be compared to any living hell. They were all manner of men, from the religious to the irreligious, the educated to the illiterate, the humanely sensitive to the inhumanely insensitive.¹⁷

Herman Melville recalls his experience aboard the St. Lawrence eight years later in Redburn, in which the merchant ship is named the “Highlander.” Much of the voyage he recalls with bitterness as he underwent the ritual of initiation into a life much different than the protective society he had known in his formative years.¹⁸ It was bitter knowledge to discover that evil and misery stalked the earth, whether found in the contemptible seaman, Jackson, or in the poverty-ridden town of Liverpool, where death and disease retired to out-of-the-way shadowy places. Young Melville learned this and more, about the brothels ready to consume any sailor with a coin in his pocket, about the boardinghouses where landlords like Rappor Brown¹⁹ staked a sailor to lodgings in return for an advanced note, signing away the sailor's first month's wage of his next voyage, about the innumerable, indelicate traps, that, for a delicate and sensitive youth like Herman shocks and scores indelible marks.

Wellingborough Redburn describes Liverpool in this way:²⁰

At twelve o'clock the crews of hundreds and hundreds of ships issue in crowds from the dock gates to go to their dinner in town. This hour is seized upon by multitudes of beggars to plant themselves against the outside of the walls, while others stand upon the curbstone to excite the charity of seamen. The first time that I passed through this long line of pauperism, it seemed hard to believe that such an array of misery could be furnished by any town in the world.

Every variety of want and suffering here met the eye, and every vice showed here its victims … Old women, rather mummies, drying up with slow starving and age; young girls incurably sick, who ought to have been in the hospital; sturdy men with the gallows in their eyes … young boys, hollow-eyed and decrepit; and puny mothers, holding up puny babes in the glare of the sun, formed the main features of the scene.

… Poverty, poverty, poverty, in almost endless vistas: and want and woe staggered arm in arm along these miserable streets.

As for the traps laid for seamen, Redburn continues:

… Liverpool, perhaps, most abounds in all variety of landsharks, land-rats, and other vermin, which make the hapless mariner their prey. In the shape of landlords, barkeepers, clothiers, crimps and boardinghouse loungers, the landsharks devour him limb by limb, while the land-rats and mice constantly nibble at his purse.

We can detect the all-too human touch of self-pity in Redburn, a moving and perceptive touch that attracts rather than repels. The combination of young Herman's dejected feelings due to his personal problems and his harsh initiation into a world mostly unkind, create a melancholy tone, not unlike many of the lives that lived, worked and died upon the sea.

There is a sea shanty, “Off to Sea Once More,” in which the seaman-narrator bemoans his general condition and wishes he was dead. Death is a strong motif in Melville's sea narratives, and it exists almost always as a result of the difficult and oftentimes extreme conditions seamen labored under, such as whalers vanishing overboard to swift, watery graves;²¹ the violent storm that turned a vessel into a ghost ship, still afloat, with its dead crew lashed to the taffrail;²² seamen decaying in rat-infested forecastles from disease;²³ the wounded topman dying under the surgeon's saw;²⁴ men and ship ending up cataclysmically as in Moby Dick; the repeated dangers while crawling along the weather-yardarm during an ice storm, or being pitched from the yard to almost certain death below, and the many periods of bitterness or despair.²⁵

Melville was an experienced and accurate listener who was able to enrich our language by preserving for it expressive words and phrases, terms that were familiar to the seamen of his day, but as yet alien to literature.²⁶ One such phrase is “all-night-in,” and is in the same sea shanty, “Off to Sea Once More.” The boardinghouse owner who “devours” seamen “limb by limb” is also in the song. Considering the minor key of the melody, which produces a haunting, plaintive quality; considering the melancholy tone and hapless tale, the similarities to Melville's writings, especially Redburn, become apparent.

OFF TO SEA ONCE MORE²⁷

When first I landed in Liverpool, I went upon a spree.
Me money at last, I spent it fast, got drunk as drunk could be.
And when me money it was all gone, t'was then I wanted more,
But a man must be blind to make up his mind to go to sea once more.
I slept that night with Angeline, too drunk to roll in bed.
Me watch was new and me money too, in the morning with them she fled.
And when I roamed the streets that day, the girls they all would roar:
“There goes Jack Rat, the poor sailor lad, he must go to sea once more.”
As I was walking down the street, I met old Rappor Brown.
I asked for him to let me in, and he looked at me with a frown.
He said: “The last time you was paid up, with me you took no score;
But I'll give you a chance an' take your advancin' an' send you to sea once more.”
He shipped me aboard a whaling ship bound for the Arctic Sea.
Where the cold winds blow through the ice and snow, and Jamaica rum would freeze.
And whilst I was there I had no gear, for I'd lost all me money ashore;
It was then I wished that I was dead, so I'd go to sea no more.
Come all of you bold seafaring men who listen to my song.
When you come off of them long trips, take heed you don't go wrong.
Take me advice, drink no strong drink, don't go sleeping down by the shore;
But get married, me lads, and have all-night-in, and don't go to sea no more.

Melville's characters hear and sing sea shanties in several narratives, notably Omoo, Redburn, White Jacket, and Moby Dick.²⁸ As to the meanings the songs had for the seamen of the 19th Century, we can turn to Redburn and this description:²⁹

… the mate suddenly stopped and gave out an order, and the men sprang to obey it. It was not much, only something about hoisting one of the sails a little higher up the mast. The men took hold of the rope, and began pulling upon it; the foremost man of all setting up a song … a strange musical rise and fall of notes. In the dark night, and far out upon the lonely sea, it sounded wild enough … I soon got used to this singing; for the sailors never touched a rope without it. Sometimes, when no one happened to strike up, and the pulling, whatever it might be, did not seem to be getting forward very well, the mate would always say: “Come men, can't any of you sing? Sing now, and raise the dead.” And then some of them would begin, and if every man's arms were as much relieved as mine by the song, and he could pull as much better as I did, with such a cheering accompaniment, I'm sure the song was well worth the breath expended on it. It is a great thing in a sailor to know how to sing well, for he gets a great name by it from the officers, and a good deal of popularity among his shipmates. Some sea-captains, before shipping a man, always ask him whether he can sing out at a rope.

The sea shanty, then, is also a work song, a folk song in the finest tradition; like that of the songs of the longshoreman, the lumberjack, the cowboy, and the chain-gang,³⁰ a song that helped to establish and maintain the pace of men at labor, a song that became a record of the life and times of the men who sang them. The years, 1820-1860, are considered the great reconstructed period of the sea shanty, when the increased activity of shipping, especially American, put new life into the form.³¹ Melville's sea experiences and writings about the sea, up to and including Moby Dick, cover the years 1839-1851, falling directly into the period of reconstruction.

In the above quote, Wellingborough Redburn refers to the ropes onboard a square-rigger that had a general length of 250 feet, registered about 700 tons, and when fully rigged, boasted at least 20 massive sails with at least three times that number in ropes and numerous other parts of the ship that were indispensable to the seaman's knowledge. This was knowledge that Melville acquired and used in most of his voyages, both actual and creative.³² He writes that “the business of a thorough-bred sailor is a special calling, as much of a regular trade as a carpenter's or a locksmith's. Indeed, it requires considerably more adroitness, and far more versatility of talent.”³³ Melville also learned that to a seaman crossing the Banks of Newfoundland where icy winds blow, and going around trecherous, unpredictable Cape Horn,³⁴ clothes, especially all manner of jackets, are of major concern. “It became unspeakably unpleasant, when we got into rather cold weather, crossing the Banks of Newfoundland, when the only way I had to keep warm during the night, was to pull on my waistcoat and roundabout, and then clap on the shooting jacket over all.”³⁵

The jacket plays an important role in the development of Melville's use of symbolism. There is the jacket of Redburn and that of White Jacket, both preparing the groundwork for the genius that shapes the great symbols of Moby Dick. The narrator of White Jacket explains that garments importance to the seaman of Melville's time:

Colder and colder; we are drawing nigh to the Cape. Now gregoes, pea-jackets, monkey jackets, reefing jackets, storm-jackets, oil-jackets, paint-jackets, round jackets, short jackets, long jackets, and all manner of jackets, are the order of the day, not excepting the immortal white jacket, which begins to be sturdily buttoned up to the throat, and pulled down vigorously at the skirts, to bring them well over the loins …

This is the time for oil-skin suits, dread-naughts, tarred trousers and overalls, sea-boots, comforters, mittens, woolen socks, Guernsey frocks, Havre shirts, buffalo-robe shirts, and moose-skin drawers. Every man's jacket is his wigwam, and every man's hat his caboose …

Colder, and colder, and colder, till at last we spoke a fleet of icebergs bound north. After that it was one incessant ‘cold nap’ that almost snapped off our fingers and toes. Cold! It was cold as Blue Flujin, where sailors say fire freezes.

(p. 105)

The jacket became an important part of the seaman's way of life in the 19th Century; it was a trademark, a symbol of his sub-culture. Observe the well-seasoned sailor swaggering down the street and you recognize the “old salt,” whether thirty years old or fifty, the kind of able-seaman who are “looked up to, and thought much of by the ordinary-seamen and boys, who reverance their pea-jackets, and lay up their sayings in their hearts.”³⁶ The sea shanty, “The Banks of Newfoundland,” sings of the monkey-pea jacket and its indispensable use when passing those “Virgin Rocks.”³⁷ The first and fifth stanzas are particularly instructive:

You rambling boys of Liverpool, I'd have you to beware,
When you ship on a Yankee packet ship, no dungarees do wear,
But have a monkey pea-jacket all ready at your command,
To protect you from the cold nor'westers on the banks of Newfoundland!
It's now we're passing the Virgin Rocks and stormy winds do blow,
                                                            With a crowd of sailors on the deck a-shoveling off the snow.
We'll wash her down, we'll scrub her decks with holystone and sand,
And we'll bid adieu to the Virgin Rocks on the Banks of Newfoundland!

There is another sea shanty named “Paddy West,” which bespeaks a jacket also, but in another way. For the young aspiring sailor who is called upon to look his best, the jacket becomes a symbol of pride, the kind of pride that eluded Melville's heroes in Redburn and White Jacket because of their own unique, outlandish symbolical jackets.³⁸ Paddy West, now a name in seamen folklore, was a tavern owner who gave mock lessons in seafaring.³⁹ The humor in the song is not unlike the humor that is Melville's, especially the kind we find in White Jacket and the early pages of Moby Dick.⁴⁰

PADDY WEST⁴¹

As I was walking down London Road I came to Paddy West's Inn.
He taught me the ropes of a seafarin' swab as he filled my glass with gin.
He said: “There's a ship a-waitin' me lad, and on her you'd quickly sign;
Her mate is a blackguard, her bosun's worse, but she will suit you fine.”
Put on your dungaree jackets, and walk up looking your best,
And tell 'em that you're an old sailorman who came from Paddy West.
Well, when I had my drink, my boys, the wind began to blow.
He sent me up in the attic, the main royal for to stow.
But when I got up in the attic, no main royal could I find,
So I turned around to the window, and I furled the window blind.
Now, suppose we're off to the starboard, boys, to Frisco we'd be bound.
Old Paddy, he called for a length of rope and he laid it on the ground.
And we all stepped over and back again, and he says to me: “That's fine!
Now when they ask if you've been to sea, you can tell 'em you've crossed the line.”
“Now, there's one more thing for you to do before you sail away.
That's to step around the table where the bullock's horn does lay.
And when they ask were you ever at sea, you can tell 'em ten times around the horn,
And by Jesus, you were a sailor since the day that you was born.”

The humor Melville achieves in White Jacket when someone forgot to bring the grog aboard the frigate Neversink, will perhaps always stand as a high point in American literature. Grog was watered down rum, and most of the time the terms, whiskey and grog, were interchangeable.⁴² When the news about the grog spread throughout the man-of-war, which meant no daily ration—as necessary to the navyman of the 19th Century as ships were to sailing—the following took place:⁴³

“The grog gone!” roared an old sheet-anchor man.

“Oh, Lord! What a pain in my stomach!” cried a main-top man.

“It's worse than the cholera!” cried a man of the afterguard.

“I'd sooner the water-casks would give out!” said a captain of the hold.

“Are we ganders and geese, that we can live without grog?” asked a corporal of the marines.

“Aye, we must now drink with the ducks!” cried a quarter-master.

“Not a tot left?” groaned a waister.

“Not a toothful!” sighed a holder, from the bottom of his boots …

In due course, it seemed that an enterprising man of their number, who had suffered severely from a common deprivation, had all at once been struck with a brilliant idea. It had come to his knowledge that the purser's stewart was supplied with a large quantity of eau-de-Cologne, clandestinely brought out in the ship, for the purpose of selling it … but the supply proving larger than the demand, and having no customers onboard the frigate but Lieutenant Selvagee, he was now carrying home more than a third of his original stock … This functionary was readily prevailed upon to part with a dozen bottles, with whose contents the intoxicated party had regaled themselves …

The news spread far and wide among the men, being only kept secret from the officers and underlings, and that night the long, crane-necked cologne bottles jingled in and out-of-the-way byplaces, and being emptied, were sent flying out of the ports. With brown sugar taken from the mess-chests, and hot water begged from the galley-cooks, the men made all manner of punches, toddies, and cocktails, letting fall therein a small drop of tar, like a bit of brown toast, by way of imparting a flavour. Of course the thing was managed with the utmost of secrecy …

Next day, fore and aft, the whole frigate smelled like a lady's toilet; the very tar buckets were fragrant; and from the mouth of many a grim, grizzled old quarter-gunner came the most fragrant of breaths. The amazed lieutenants went about snuffing up the gale; and for once, Lieutenant Selvagee had no further need to flourish his own perfumed handkerchief. It was as if we were sailing by some odoriferous shore, in the vernal season of violets …

There are many sea shanties that deal with the subject matter of drinking, especially relative to women and the shore. There is one in particular that reflects the incident aboard the Neversink in humor and high spirit. The shanty, “Whiskey, Johnny,” has a strong chorus, was excellent for the “long-haul,” and was a favorite with seamen of Melville's time. It is very likely that he heard any number of versions of the song.

WHISKEY, JOHNNY⁴⁴

Oh, whiskey is the life of man,
                    Oh, whiskey, Johnny!
It always was since time began,
                    Oh, whiskey for my Johnny!
A whiskey ship and a whiskey crew,
When whiskey goes then I'll go too.
Oh, whiskey made me wear old clothes,
And whiskey gave me a broken nose.
Oh, whiskey caused me much abuse,
And whiskey put me in the calaboose.
Oh, whiskey killed my poor old dad,
And whiskey drove my mother mad.
Oh, whiskey here and whiskey there,
Whiskey almost everywhere.
If whiskey comes too near my nose,
I tip her up and down she goes.
I drink it hot and I drink it cold,
I drink it new and I drink it old.
Oh, whiskey straight and whiskey strong,
We'll raise the yard to this old song.
Oh, bring a drink to the shantyman,
In a glass, or a cup, or an old tin can.
A glass of grog for every man,
And a bottle full for the shantyman.
Oh, whiskey made the bosun call,
Pull altogether one and all!

Melville's art is rich in symbolism, from making use of such materials as ship, sea, whale and man, and expanding them to achieve general, universal applications. No less can be said for his language of metaphor and simile, which, like the language of 19th Century seamen, grew from folk materials present in the daily encounter. The ship was a dominant material for seamen, and was used to express ingenious comparisons. Melville also made creative use of the ship. The following are a few examples of his usage:

… She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long-seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four seasons, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenedier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like spines of the three kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flagstone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled.

(Moby Dick, p. 67)

Out of sight of land, at this extremity of both the inhabitable and uninhabitable world, our peopled frigate, echoing with the voices of men, the bleating of lambs, the cackling of fowls, the grunting of pigs, seemed like Noah's old ark itself, becalmed at the climax of the deluge.

(White Jacket, p. 106)

… With its crew of 800 or 1,000 men, a three-decker is a city on the sea.

(White Jacket, p. 144)

But surely, if there is anything hateful, it is this shipping of the quarter-deck face after wearing a merry and good-natured one.

(White Jacket, p. 265)

… As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air.

(White Jacket, p. 374)

… (the Highlander) went plunging along, shaking off the foam from her bows, like foam from a bridle-bit. Every mast and timber seemed to have a pulse in it that was beating with life and joy …

(Redburn, p. 64)

… For in itself, each ship is an island, a floating colony of the tribe to which it belongs …

(Redburn, p. 158)

… Here, under the beneficient sway of the Genius of Commerce, all countries and climes embrace; and yard-arm touches yard-arm in brotherly love.

(Redburn, p. 158)

The sea shanty, “Blow the Man Down,” is the classical tale of a pretty woman who lures an unsuspecting seaman into the hands of unscrupulous mates. The first few stanzas are clear examples of the seaman's metaphorical language.⁴⁵

As I was walking down Paradise Street,
                    To me way, hey, blow the man down!
A saucy young clipper I chanced for to meet,
                    Give me some time to blow the man down!
Her flags were three colors, her masts they were low,
She was round in the counter and bluff in the bow.
From larboard to starboard and so sailed she,
She was sailin' at large, she was runnin' free.
She was blowlin' along with the wind blowin' free,
She clewed up her courses and waited for me.
I dipped her my ensign, a signal she knew,
She back round her main-yards and hove herself to.
So I tailed her by flipper and took her in tow,
And yardarm to yardarm away we did go.

There are other relationships between Melville's language and the sea shanty. There are the Homewardbound and Outwardbound shanties such as “The Leaving of Liverpool,” which takes place at Prince's Dock on the River Mersey, echoing Redburn again and the sometimes profound meanings attached to leaving and returning that we find in Melville's sea novels.⁴⁶ Some shanties like “The Flying Cloud” treat the subject of the slave trade in a unique narrative voice that is reminiscent of Benito Cereno, and reveals the horrors of slavery, both for Blacks and Whites, that Melville undoubtably perceived.⁴⁷

.....

It all went well until the day we came to Africa's shore,
When five hundred of them poor slaves from their native land we bore.
Each one was weighted down with iron chains as we sent them on below;
Just eighteen inches of space was each man had to show.
The plague it came and fever too, and killed them off like flies.
We dumped their bodies on the deck and hove them in the sea.
For sure the dead were lucky for they'd have to weep no more;
Nor drag the chain or feel the lash in Cuba evermore.

.....

A group of shanties grew out of the period of Irish immigration, such as “Across the Western Ocean,” of which the tone and circumstance is similar to the immigrant's plight in Redburn.⁴⁸

Oh, the times are hard and the wages low,
                    Amelia, where ya bound to?
The Rocky Mountains is my home,
                    Across the Western Ocean.
A land of promise there you'll see,
I'm bound away across the sea.
To Liverpool I'll make my way,
To Liverpool that Yankee school.
Beware them Packet Ships I pray,
They'll steal yer gear an' clothes away.

There are the numerous shanties of the whaling industry that sing out the myriad aspects connected with the hunt and bearing down on the whale, the dangers and remorse, the heat of the capture, the “cutting in” and “trying out,” and the raw poetry that Melville experienced as a man and shaped as a writer. There are “The Greenland Fishery,” “Tom's Gone to Hilo,” “A Fitting Out,” “The Wounded Whale,” “Desolation,” “Blow Ye Winds,” “The Coast of Peru,” and many more where we can find direct relationships to the same earthy substance from which Moby Dick was wrought.⁴⁹

Obvious throughout the sea shanties and Melville's sea narratives are the necessary haulings and heavings on the ropes that made the most difficult work, at the very least, bearable, and at the very most, pleasurable, especially when the long awaited order to get underway rang out: “All hands up anchor! Man the capstan. High die! my lads, we're homeward bound!”⁵⁰ and “from many a forecastle, came the deep mellow old song, Ho-o-he-yo, cheerily men!”⁵¹

Man at labor aboard Melville's immortal ships was germane to the creative process of keeping them afloat, as meaningful as rope-in-hand was to the sea shanty. And just as Melville's cities on the sea are microcosms, so are sea shanties reflections of a large range of human sensibilities. Some of the songs “are as rough as a teak board, others—the majority probably—are gentle lyrical romances spliced to tunes full of secrets.”⁵²

For a final consideration, reference is made to “Billy in the Darbies,” the last, moving statement about Billy Budd. Melville writes that the poem was the effort of a foretopman who was one of Billy's “own watch.” It is not difficult to believe that Melville the sailor heard many a forecastle shanty, ballads describing the lives of seamen in sometimes vivid, poetic narratives.⁵³ Appropriately, the poem is designated a “ballad” in the novel. Granted, the poem is a literary product by one of America's major authors, yet, Melville does state that the foretopman was also “gifted, as some sailors are, with an artless, poetic temperament.”⁵⁴

Author and sailor, Melville's creative power was a combination of both.

Notes

1. Immediate reference is made to Melville's writings and the numerous range of characters portrayed. Critical studies also give insight into the material, both men and things, that Melville drew from his experiences on the sea. To mention a few studies, they are those by Newton Arvin, Howard Vincent, Richard Chase, James D. Hart, and Harrison Hayford. I note F. O. Matthiessen's study in particular for the profound results of Melville's language, such as this quote from American Renaissance: “In his efforts to endow the whaling industry with a mythology befitting a fundamental activity of man in his struggle to subdue nature, he came into possession of the primitive energies latent in words.”

2. Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York, 1927), B. A. Botkin, A Treasury of American Folklore (New York, 1944), and A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England (New York, 1967), give definitions of the folk song, explicit and implicit. For a lively discussion about definitions and the need for their revision, see the introduction to John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (New York, 1960). C. Merton Babcock, “Melville's Proverbs of the Sea,” Western Folklore, XI (January, 1937), 254-265, writes about Melville's relationship to the folk idiom: “The Spicy eloquence, the colorful imagery, the simple wisdom or common sense, the earthy and salty flavor of the folk idiom transcends every page of Melville's writing.”

3. Herman Melville, Omoo (Massachusetts, 1951), p. 13.

4. Several studies mention the harness casks. Stan Hugill, Shanties and Sailors' Songs (New York, 1969) and William M. Doerflinger, Shantymen and Shantyboys (New York, 1951) are two worthy of note.

5. Herman Melville, Typee (Bantam: New York, 1958), p. 21.

6. Herman Melville, White Jacket (Grove: New York, 1956), p. 68. All quotations from White Jacket will be taken from this particular edition. Whenever possible, title and/or page references will appear parenthetically in this study.

7. There appears to be considerable discussion as to the spelling of the term, from shanty to chauntey. The most interesting, it seems to me, are those by Hugill; Joanna Colcord, Songs of American Sailormen (New York, 1964); and David Bone, Capstan Bars (New York, 1932).

8. Variations of the shanty are in Doerflinger; Hugill; Colcord; Gale Huntington, Songs the Whalemen Sang (Massachusetts, 1964); and Frank Shay, A Sailor's Treasury (New York, 1951). Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (Modern Library: New York, 1964), p. 304, also gives a version and relates a story that was circulating among seamen during the 1830s: “… that a beef-dealer was convicted, at Boston, of having sold old horse for ship's stores, instead of beef, and had been sentenced to be confined in jail until he should eat the whole of it, and that he is now lying in Boston jail.”

9. Among others, Arvin and Lewis Mumford deal with the circumstances of Melville's disappointments before he made his first voyage. See also S. Foster Damon, “Why Ishmael Went to Sea,” American Literature, II (1930), 263-266.

10. Herman Melville, Redburn (Doubleday Anchor: New York, 1957), p. 101. All quotations from Redburn will be taken from this particular edition. Whenever possible, title and/or page references will appear parenthetically in this study.

11. Discussion about “packet rats” are in Bone; Stan Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas (New York, 1961); and a somewhat different definition appears in E. Keble Chatterton, Seamen All (London, 1924).

12. Redburn, pp. 57-58. Various categories of seamen are dealt with by Melville. For a fuller study of rank and duties in the Merchant Service, see R. H. Dana, Seamen's Friend (Library Editions, Ltd.: New York, 1970), pp. 131-174.

13. See Samuel Morison's The Maritime History of Massachusetts (Sentry Edition: Massachusetts, 1961) and his The Oxford History of the American People (New York, 1965).

14. See Morison, Maritime History, in which he states: “Seafaring at best, was a rough, dangerous calling, sometimes rendered unbearable by the brutality of master or mate,” and this particular quote concerning whalemen: “Men were hazed until they deserted, became cringing beasts, or mutinied. The ingenuity of whaling skippers in devising devilish punishments surpasses belief” (pp. 259, 324, respectively). Melville deserted in Typee (as he had in actual life) because of unbearable conditions aboard, and in Omoo there existed the volatile situation of possible violent mutiny by the crew of the Julia. That was the reason Captain Guy had the ship remain offshore, because “by lying in harbour, he ran the risk of losing the remainder of his men by desertion” (p. 13).

15. See Morison, Maritime History; Doerflinger, Shantymen; and Frank Shay, American Sea Songs and Chanteys (New York, 1948).

16. For interesting discussions about being shanghied see Morison, Maritime History; Hugill, Seven Seas; and Stan Hugill, Sailortown (New York, 1967).

17. Melville's writings show the vast range of men who were seamen; also their various nationalities are mainly indicated, from South Sea Islanders to Americans to Europeans. See also Hugill, Seven Seas; and Morison, Maritime History, p. 322, writes about the various ways some men are gotten for whaling voyages: “… Shipping agents, with offices in New York, Boston, and inland cities like Buffalo, circulated lurid handbills depicting the excitement of the chase and the fat profits of a voyage. Their principal victims were farmer boys from New England and New York, bitten with the lure of the sea. Unemployed immigrants and mill-hands, fugitives from justice, and human derelicts were also drawn in.”

18. Arvin and Mumford deal with these years and important implications.

19. Brown had several first names, particularly Rappor Brown of Liverpool and Shanghai Brown of San Francisco. Hugill's Sailortown has an excellent study about these characters. See also Hugill's Seven Seas; and A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song.

20. Redburn, pp. 179-180, 194, 131, respectively.

21. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Norton Critical: New York, 1967). All quotations from Moby Dick will be taken from this particular edition. Whenever possible, title and/or page references will appear parenthetically in this study. Captain Mayhew of the Jeroboam tells the “dark tale” of his chief mate, Macey, who was “smitten bodily into the air” by Moby Dick, “and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards,” and “the mate for ever sank.” Melville writes that this kind of fatal accident is “perhaps almost as frequent as any” in the Sperm-Whale Fishery (p. 268).

22. Redburn, pp. 88-89.

23. Two men in Omoo “died one night within an hour of each other” from disease (p. 47). Miguel Saveda in Redburn was thought sick on his bunk, when in fact, he was in a state of decomposition, having been dead for days (pp. 235-237). In White Jacket, Shenly collapsed in his labors and was taken to sick bay where he died from physical exhaustion (p. 317-318). Many ships were old and rotten, easy breeding grounds for disease; such as the Julia: “… Myriads of cockroaches, and regiments of rats, disputed the place with us … You may seal up every hatchway, and fumigate the hull till the smoke forces itself out at the seams, and enough [rats and roaches] will survive to repeople the ship in an incredibly short period … the vermin seem to take actual possession …” (p. 42).

24. Fleet Surgeon, Cadwalleder Cuticle, while removing a leg from a foretopman in White Jacket, and using the operation as an opportunity to give an interminably long lecture to a group of surgeons from the fleet, has the misfortune of losing his patient irrevocably (pp. 236-254).

25. Several times, Melville's narrators are at that point where imminent destruction is close at hand, as in Omoo, when the Julia is nearly smashed at the coral reef: “It seemed all over with us; and I was just upon the point of throwing the ship full into the wind—a step which, saving us for an instant, would have sealed our fate in the end” (pp. 101-102); in White Jacket, when Captain Claret ordered the narrator to be flogged, and the thoughts that went through White Jacket's mind were: “I meant to drag Captain Claret from this earthly tribunal of his … The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has, of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose … My eye was measuring the distance between him [Captain Claret] and the sea” (pp. 268-269); also when White Jacket was pitched from the yardarm “with the heavy skirts” of his jacket over his head, and plunged into the sea over one hundred feet below and miraculously escaped death (pp. 368-372); again in White Jacket when the men were aloft during a storm of snow and freezing rain and “the entire yard was now encased in ice, and our hands and feet were so numb that we dare not trust our lives to them” (p. 113); and in Moby Dick there is the often quoted statement about going to sea, because “This is my substitute for pistol and ball,” while throughout the novel the presence of death is always at hand, examples being Queequeg's coffin, and Ahab's obsession with the course for Moby Dick that could only lead to ultimate destruction. It is interesting to note that in his second sea narrative, Melville likens the act of going to sea aboard a whaler with the thought of suicide, as he points out in Omoo: “Ropey went to the sign of the Pipe and Tankard; got fuddled; and over his fifth pot meditated suicide—an intention carried out; for the next day he shipped as landsman aboard the Julia, South Seaman” (p. 59).

    Flogging represents a shameful and brutal act that Melville recalls with anger and despair in White Jacket. See C. R. Anderson, Melville in the South Seas (Dover: New York, 1966) for Melville as a voice crying out for reform. Also, an excellent study of flogging in the U.S. Navy of the 19th Century is in Harold D. Langley, Social Reform in the United States Navy (Illinois, 1967). And in White Jacket, Melville writes: “Of some twenty offenses—made penal—that a seaman can commit … thirteen are punishable by death” (p. 279).

26. See Babcock's “Melville's Proverbs”; Babcock, “Herman Melville's Whaling Vocabulary,” American Speech, XXIX (1954), 161-174; Babcock, “Melville's ‘Moby Dictionary’,” Word Study, XXLX (December, 1953), 7-8; Babcock, “The Vocabulary of Moby Dick,” American Speech, XXVIII (1953), 91-101; and James M. Purcell, “Melville's Contribution to English,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], LVI (1941), 797-808.

27. Variations of the shanty are in Doerflinger; Hugill; Lloyd; and the recording by A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, “Off to Sea Once More” (Stinson, SL-81).

28. In White Jacket, Melville writes the following about singing in a man-of-war: “I could not help murmuring against that immemorial rule of men-of-war, which forbids the sailors to sing out, as in merchant vessals, when pulling ropes, or occupied at any other ship's duty. Your only music at such times, is the shrill pipe of the boatswain's mate … or else … all hands … singing out mechanically, one, two, three, and then pulling altogether” (p. 67). The lines and names of songs mentioned or implied, nonetheless, are a forecastle or capstan shanty, “Spanish Ladies” (p. 295) (for variations see Shay; and Hugill, Seven Seas), what is apparently a variation of a long haul shanty (p. 67), a martial song (p. 73), and music hall or popular songs of the day, such as those written by the brothers Charles and Thomas Dibdin, foremost naval balladeers of the period, as White Jacket notes: “… and many other salt-sea ballads and ditties …” (p. 295) and “… Dibdin's True English Sailor …” (p. 361). See Agnes D. Cannon, “Melville's Use of Sea Ballads and Songs,” Western Folklore, XXIII (1964), for a study of various songs Melville used as literary devices.

29. Redburn, p. 43. The sea shanty is generally considered to have four major groupings: the short haul or short drag shanties; the long haul or halyard shanties; the capstan shanties; and the forecastle shanties. Each grouping represents certain kinds of work activity aboard, whether at the ropes, on the yardarms, at the windlass, around the capstan, or holystoning the decks. Some songs overlapped into other groups, according to the pace established by the lead singer, called the shantyman, as Frederick P. Harlow, Chanteying Aboard American Ships (Massachusetts, 1962), p. 2, states concerning the importance of the shantyman: “A good chanteyman … was often paid more than the common sailor for his ability to get work out of the men.” For studies on the sea shanty see also Hugill; Colcord; A. L. Lloyd; and Doerflinger. A terse, informative definition appears in Gershom Bradford, A Glossary of Sea Terms (New York, 1927).

30. See Botkin, American Folklore and A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song for a discussion about work songs.

31. See Doerflinger; and Hugill, Sailors' Songs. Also A. L. Lloyd, who begins the period ten years later: “… shanty-singing as we know it best emerged during the American-dominated packet-ship days of, roughly, 1830-1850 …” (p. 295).

32. Melville's experiences as a seaman, especially a whaler, and his intense concern with the experiential level, is evident throughout his sea tales. Through his creative genius, this level became a point of departure and return when diving to lower depths. The marriage of fact and the imagination was essential to Melville's creative process, as Melville himself writes in Moby Dick: “… fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole …” (p. 406).

33. Redburn, p. 114.

34. Weather was a formidable antagonist for men before the mast, and numerous sea shanties describe the plight of seamen and ships under the strain. As with Melville, other sea narratives of the period, such as Dana's Two Years, draw vivid scenes during storms, especially when rounding Cape Horn. Melville praises Dana's treatment of this task in White Jacket: “… if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana's unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast … His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle …” (p. 105). For a study comparing the two contemporaries, see James D. Hart, “Melville and Dana,” American Literature, IX (1937), 49-55. In his one major work of the sea, Dana lists eleven sea shanties that were sung during his voyage.

35. Redburn, p. 72.

36. Ibid, p. 57.

37. Variations appear in Doerflinger; Hugill, Sailors' Songs and Seven Seas; A. L. Lloyd; Colcord; Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (New York, 1966); and the recording by A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, “Blow Boys Blow” (Tradition, TLP-1026).

38. See studies by Arvin and Mumford for discussions about the meanings of the jackets. Also John J. Gross, “The Rehearsal of Ishmael: Melville's ‘Redburn’,” Virginia Quarterly Review, XXVLL (Autumn, 1951) 591-600. Marilyn J. Anderson, “Melville's Jackets: Redburn and White Jacket,” Arizona Quarterly, XXVI (1970), traces the increased sophistication in Melville's use of the jacket as literary symbolism. I will deal with further implications of the jacket in a subsequent study.

39. See Doerflinger; and Hugill, Sailors' Songs, Seven Seas, and Sailortown.

40. See Constance Rourke, American Humor (New York, 1931); E. H. Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit (Massachusetts, 1955); Joseph Jones, “Humor in Moby Dick,” Studies in English, University of Texas, XXV (1946), 35-37; and Jones, “Melville: A ‘Humorist’ in 1890,” American Notes and Queries, VIII (August, 1948), 68.

41. Variations appear in Hugill, Seven Seas and Sailors' Songs; Doerflinger; and the recording by the Seafarers Chorus, “We Sing of the Sea” (Electra-182).

42. For a comprehensive study of the drink and its role in the United States Navy of the 19th Century, see Harold D. Langley, Social Reform.

43. White Jacket, pp. 63-65. A literary source for this scene appears in Keith Huntress, “Melville's use of a source for White Jacket,” American Literature, XVII (1945), 66-74.

44. Variations are in Doerflinger; Colcord; Shay; Bone; Lloyd; Harlow; Hugill, Sailors' Songs and Seven Seas; W. B. Whall, Sea Songs and Shanties (Glascow, 1910); and in recordings such as Lloyd's “Blow Boys Blow” and Seafarers “We Sing of the Sea.”

45. Variations appear in Doerflinger; Bone; Whall; Harlow; Lloyd; Colcord; Hugill, Sailors' Songs and Seven Seas; and the recording by A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, “Haul on the Bowlin'” (Stinson, SLP-80).

46. Babcock's “Proverbs of the Sea” (see footnotes 2 and 20) lists the term, “floating hell,” as an example of one of the many terms from Melville's writings that is part of the overall accumulation of the seaman's lore, especially the whaleman's, that Babcock indicates is “made up of maxims, proverbs, and unique phrases of the old sea dogs and whiskerandoes.” The term, “floating hell,” appears in White Jacket (p. 354), and although it refers to what frigates were considered during Melville's day, it was becoming popular as a characterization of any ship that had its crew mercilessly driven, particularly to meet sailing schedules, as did the Western Ocean Packets. The term is also in the sea shanty, “The Leaving of Liverpool.”

47. Variations are in Doerflinger; Colcord; Creighton; Hugill, Sailors' Songs and Seven Seas; Shay, Songs and Chanteys; and the recording by Lloyd, “Haul on the Bowlin'.”

48. Variations are in Colcord; Whall; Shay, Songs and Chanteys; Hugill, Sailors' Songs and Seven Seas; and in the recording by Sam Eskin, “Loggers' Songs and Sea Shanties” (Folkways-FA2019).

49. An excellent source for whaling songs is Huntington's Songs the Whalemen Sang; see also Hugill, Sailors' Songs and Seven Seas; and Doerflinger.

50. White Jacket, p. 19.

51. Redburn, p. 232.

52. Folk Song in England, p. 277.

53. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Massachusetts, 1953), has a letter written to Melville from Toby Greene, sailorman and friend who becomes the “Toby” of Typee: “My mind often reverts to the many pleasant moonlight watches we passed together on the deck of the ‘Acushnet’ as we whiled away the hours with yarn and song till ‘eight bells’” (p. 195). The tropics were probably the one place that afforded enough time for leisure. There, long periods of calm made hauling and heaving not as much an activity as it was in the Western Ocean. Melville's reading also reveals an interest in folk ballads as evidenced in Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York, 1951) and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Melville's Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed,” Harvard Library Bulletin, II, III, IV (1948-1950).

54. Raymond M. Weaver, ed., Shorter Novels of Herman Melville (New York, 1928), pp. 271-272. In Redburn, while at the Liverpool docks, the narrator notes the “number of sailor ballad-singers, who, after singing their verses, hand you a printed copy, and beg you to buy” (Chapter 29). See Hennig Cohen, Selected Poems of Herman Melville, for an explication of “Billy in the Darbies.”