SOURCE: “The Voyage in American Sea Fiction after the Pilgrim, the Acushnet, and the Beagle,” in Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, pp. 3-18.

[In the following excerpt, Bender traces the transformation of American sea literature from its “golden age” of the 1840s through the end of the nineteenth century.]

You got to have confidence steering.

—Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., “changed the face of maritime fiction” in America by publishing his “voice from the forecastle” in Two Years Before the Mast.¹ He influenced James Fenimore Cooper's last sea novels and prepared the way for many less significant books that immediately capitalized on the new value he had given to the actual experience of ordinary seamen (Nicholas Isaacs's Twenty Years Before the Mast, 1845, for example); he initiated “the genre of journey narratives that was to play a central role in the literature of the American Renaissance”; and, most significantly, he exerted a profound influence on the career of Herman Melville (Philbrick, Introduction, 22-23). On first reading Two Years Before the Mast, shortly after returning from his own first voyage, Melville had been filled with “strange, congenial feelings” of being “tied and welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy,” as he wrote to Dana on 1 May 1850 (Leyda). At the time he confessed this “shock of recognition” (we might say) that he had felt ten years earlier, he thought that he was “half way in the work” of writing Moby-Dick. Four months later, he would feel and express the more famous “shock of recognition” that he knew in his relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and that would alter the course of his voyage and prolong it. But he had already made a career for himself as a sea-writer. And beginning in the 1890s, long before the Melville revival, his work would begin to exert a recognizable influence on the tradition of American sea fiction, as successive generations of writers looked not only to Dana as an example, but to Melville and, increasingly, to others, just as Melville had looked to Dana in 1849. Having completed two books, Redburn and White-Jacket, which were heavily influenced by Two Years Before the Mast, Melville acknowledged his debt to Dana, asked for his help in defending White-Jacket if its “aggressive” condemnation of “the usages to which a sailor is subjected” should offend the public, expressed his “thanks for your kindness,” and signed himself, “fraternally yours—a sea-brother” (Leyda 1:317).

But in the beginning, before the existence of any sea-brotherhood, there was the sea itself. Long before man began to recognize that, as with all life, he had emerged from the sea, he was irresistibly drawn to the sea—as the biblical mind was drawn into the watery darkness that existed before there was light, when “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1.2); or, not so long before the sea origin of our own species was scientifically established, as Melville was drawn to the water when he wrote that “meditation and water are wedded forever” ([Moby-Dick], “Loomings”).² It is unimaginable that any individual of any culture or any time could ever see and think about “the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean” without yielding to wonder (MD, “The Blacksmith”). And certainly no one who has ever experienced or even imagined the experience of being alone in the “open ocean” can deny the “intolerable lonesomeness” that Melville describes: “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” (MD, “The Castaway”). I would begin this study by observing that no one person can tell it, finally, not even Melville himself. Most cultures of the world have a literature or at least a mythology of the sea, and these have developed over time as man's knowledge of himself and of the sea has evolved. The dimensions of this literature are determined in general by the ancient mythic appeal of the voyage and, no doubt, by something like the oceanic feeling that Freud discussed in Civilization and Its Discontents. Although he could not “discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in [him]self,” he contemplated his friend's description of it as “a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic.’ … [It] is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is,” his friend thought, “the true source of religious sentiments” (11). The similarity between this feeling and that which Melville expressed about the actual ocean is clear: “In landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God” (MD, “The Lee Shore”). And without this sense we cannot appreciate the essential motive for all literary voyages: the desire for renewal, discovery, light. Just as in antiquity, troubled nations initiated voyages of exploration and discovery as part of their strategies for survival, the troubled mind finds its own natural strategy in the mythic or literary voyage. Moreover, as Melville suggested, the mythic voyage and the myth of Narcissus are as inseparable as are the concepts of self and other. The voyaging mind can never escape itself, and the myth of Narcissus is no less hauntingly relevant in twentieth-century sea fiction than it was when Melville cited it in his conclusion to the incomparable meditation on water that he gave us in “Loomings”: “That image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the ungraspable phantom of life; and that is the key to it all.” Melville wrote his great sea book at a time when the Western mind seemed more troubled than ever with the old problem “Know thyself.” But if the voyagers of successive generations have envisioned the phantom of life from different perspectives and therefore in different forms from that which Melville saw reflected in the water, none can claim to have grasped it. In this study of American sea fiction from 1851 to the present I hope to describe what a series of American writers have seen of themselves—as individuals in life, as Americans, and as participants in our maritime heritage—as each has turned to the sea in his own time.

The larger story of the sea's influence on American literature has never been told.³ It would be a monumental undertaking that would require contributing scholars working in poetry, fiction, nonfiction narrative, drama, history, and natural history. But the first chapters in the study of American sea fiction have already been told by Thomas Philbrick in James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (1961). Sensing that “Moby-Dick is too often thought of as the first appearance of the sea in American literature,” Philbrick demonstrated how Cooper's twelve sea novels justify our remembering him as the “originator of the sea novel,” as well as the creator of the Leatherstocking tales (vii-viii). Moreover, Philbrick helped us to see that the national character as it is reflected in literature is more deeply influenced by maritime experience than many imagine it to be: “During the first half of the nineteenth century, the sea occupied much the same place in the imaginations of many Americans that the continental frontier was to fill after 1850” (1). Philbrick develops this general thesis in his chapters “The Sea in American Literature Before 1820,” “The Work of Cooper's Contemporaries,” and on Cooper's own sea fiction. He shows clearly that our early literature of the sea is characteristically romantic (in the manner of Byron) and nationalistic, and he explains how Cooper liberated “the fictional treatment of the sea from the satiric tone of Smollett.” More important, he describes Cooper's three “essential services” to the tradition of sea fiction: he created “a tone which, by evoking a mood of high romance, lent the narrative the aura of legend”; he created, in the middle period of his sea fiction, a tone or “atmosphere of sober realism, an atmosphere that gave the seaman the full dignity of a human being and made him, as a man, the center of the reader's concern”; and in his last novels, particularly in The Sea Lions (1849), he transformed “the sea novel from a fiction in which the chief interest depends on the depiction of a special occupation and a special environment into a fiction in which that occupation and environment become the symbolic ground for the dramatic conflict of ideas and attitudes having universal significance” (264).

Philbrick's work laid the foundation for succeeding chapters in the history of American sea fiction such as those I offer here. But we must challenge Philbrick's conclusion that the tradition of American sea fiction virtually drew to a close in 1851 with the publication of Moby-Dick: “Melville's work, like the great clipper ships which were its contemporaries, was something of a historical anomaly, the last, magnificent flowering of a plant that was dying at the roots” (262). This conclusion mistakenly assumes a parallel between the intensity of American maritime industry and the production of sea literature; it distorts the significance of a single element among the three that are featured in traditional sea fiction, the sea, the sailor, and the ship; it suggests that only sailing ships can excite the writer's imagination; and it does not account for the very impressive quantity and quality of American sea fiction that has appeared during the last century and a quarter. There certainly was a “golden age” of American sea fiction in the 1840s, as Jeanne-Marie Santraud has called it (77). Far from ending in 1851, however, the tradition extends into the present and includes significant contributions to American literature by Stephen Crane, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Peter Matthiessen, and the several less famous—by now even forgotten—writers whom I discuss in Chapters 7 and 8 [of Sea-Brothers]: Thornton Jenkins Hains, James Brendan Connolly, Arthur Mason, Felix Riesenberg, Bill Adams, Lincoln Colcord, William McFee, Richard Matthews Hallet, and Archie Binns. The tradition continued intermittently after Moby-Dick in Melville's own work, in Israel Potter, “Benito Cereno,” John Marr and Other Sailors, and Billy Budd, Sailor. Then, coinciding with Melville's return to writing sea fiction in the late 1880s, and partly in response to the careers of Dana and Melville as well as to the certain but prolonged expiration of the sailing life, the tradition began to renew itself in the 1890s. A series of writers who were born between the 1860s and the 1890s and who went to sea as working seamen—most of them as sailors before the mast who knew full well that they were, in effect, chasing ghosts: these men produced a considerable volume of serious and highly acclaimed sea fiction between the 1890s and the 1930s. And in the work of Ernest Hemingway and Peter Matthiessen the tradition has reasserted its vitality in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The tradition as it exists after Moby-Dick is greatly transformed, indeed, from what it had been in its golden age. This transformation, evident in Melville's career in the difference between Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, can be broadly attributed to the passing of the sailing ships, to the related developments in America as the western frontier advanced and then closed officially in 1890, and, by far the most important, to the repercussions of Darwinian thought. American sea fiction after 1890 reflects the revolutionary significance of biological thought by emphasizing the sea itself as the essential element of sea fiction. As I hope to explain in Chapter 2 on Moby-Dick, the tradition's emphasis on biology and the sea originated with Melville, particularly in the cetological materials in Moby-Dick. But Melville's cetology conforms to the kind of biological thought (“natural theology”) whose foundations were destroyed by the Origin of Species in 1859. Thus, when the tradition began to renew itself late in the century, it would be shaped not only by what Dana and Melville had made of their voyages on the Pilgrim and the Acushnet but by what Charles Darwin had produced from his voyage on the Beagle. From the 1890s onward, the course of American sea fiction is determined largely by the writers' intent to explore the implications of our biological reality, or, as Hemingway suggested in his original title for The Old Man and the Sea, “The Sea in Being.” Still, transformed as it was in responding to the eclipse of sail by steam and, more important, to the new biology, the tradition is continuous from Melville to the present in two major ways: first, in its return to Melville's sense that the “ungraspable phantom of life”—all life, “the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse”—is at least more nearly graspable in the watery world than it is ashore (MD, “Loomings,” “Brit”); and second, in its tendency, as in Melville, to affirm and celebrate this life.

To suggest a two-stranded continuity in American sea fiction from Melville to the present is, more deeply, to suggest its essential Americanness. That is, the tradition has survived this enormously stressful period by finding in the sea experience a way of preserving, perhaps more fully than in any other discernible tradition in our literature, some of the essential values and qualities of our cultural heritage: a desire for simplicity that entrusts itself more to the faculty of wonder or the naive vision than to reason, analysis, or authority; a corresponding faith in the democratic individual and the validity of his “enormous sense of inner authority”; and, first in Melville and then with an increasing sense of desperation in many others toward and after the turn of the century, a willful commitment to something like “the Christian belief in equality and brotherhood” that had contributed so much to the “extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression” that F. O. Matthiessen described in American Renaissance (656, vii, xi).⁴

We can see a good deal of the essential Americanness of our tradition of sea fiction during these years by comparing its characteristic way of responding to Darwinian thought with that of Joseph Conrad. Conrad began his career as a sea writer during the years when our tradition renewed itself, and he knew, knew of, or influenced a number of writers in that tradition, including Morgan Robertson, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Lincoln Colcord, and Peter Matthiessen. But his response to Darwin is as different from that of the typical American sea-writer as is his fictional point of view. Writing from the captain's point of view and exhibiting his sympathy with the captain's need to maintain his discipline and dignity, he could not sympathize with the simple seaman—particularly one like Ishmael, who could “marry” a cannibal like Queequeg, sit down with him “all the morning long” while squeezing spermacetti, and affirm, “let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness” (MD, “A Squeeze of the Hand”). Rather, as Redmond O'Hanlon has remarked in Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin (1984), “Conrad's quiet heroes … command the symbolic ship of society, guide their vessels safely through the worst that nature blindly can do either from within or from without, the brute or the storm, and they carry out their life's work upon the surface of the sea, and sail home, as Marlow says, to ‘touch their reward with clean hands’” (121).⁵

By contrast, in their characteristic tendency to affirm the vitality of a simple, primitive existence, even when, after the Origin of Species, that requires an affirmation of our animal nature, writers in the American tradition have (with a certain willfulness) created heroes whose promise is identifiable with their primordially organic, even reptilian, power: Wolf Larsen, in whose flesh is embodied the “essence of life,” that “which lingers in a shapeless lump of turtle meat and recoils and quivers from the prod of a finger” (London, Sea-Wolf, 14); the “old shell-back,” Captain Crojack, in Thornton Jenkins Hains's The Voyage of the Arrow (1906); Captain Glade, “the old spouter,” in Felix Riesenberg's Mother Sea (1933); Harry Morgan, in Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (1937), whose lovemaking is compared to that of a loggerhead turtle (112); or Captain Raib, the turtle fisherman in Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga (1975). Whereas such characters as these in the tradition of American sea fiction have a natural affinity with water and survive, often as fishermen, because they are successful participants in the elemental order, Conrad views water with a good deal of alarm, often associating it with “the unconscious depths [and] the speechless desires of the instinctive evolutionary past” (O'Hanlon 60-61). Thus it is only when he wishes to portray characters as evolutionary degenerates that he portrays them as reptilian—as when “the captain of the Patna oozes and secretes,” or the chief engineer remembers “the sinking Patna” as having been “full of reptiles” (59, 63). As O'Hanlon observes, these “reptiles” are the degenerate “old mankind” who had “flowed” aboard the Patna:

Below the officers upon the bridge (ostensibly, at least, the seat of reason, discipline, and command) the old mankind, in search of the impossible fulfilment of wishes for immortality, “upheld by one desire,” in a mystical dream of eternal self-preservation, “flowed forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship—like water filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and crannies, like water rising ever silently within the rim.”

(60-61)

American writers of this period were also interested in the idea of degeneration, but, expressing a democratic faith in the common man, they tended to construe it in a positive sense: the idea itself—degeneration as “progressive simplification of structure,” as opposed to “progressive elaboration”—is inherently appealing to writers who wish to idealize the simple sailor (Chamberlin 266). Conrad, on the other hand, recoils from the degenerate Kurtz and the uncivilized darker races with a sense of horror that parallels Max Nordau's fear of those “who place pleasure above discipline, and impulse above self-restraint,” for this is to wish “not for progress, but for retrogression to the most primitive animality” (O'Hanlon 49).⁶ With his abhorrence of mysticism (a characteristic tendency among American writers of the sea, as D. H. Lawrence noted with approval in his essays on Dana and Melville: “The Best Americans are mystics by instinct” [Lawrence 125]), and with his distrust of “democracy” and the idea of “universal brotherhood” (O'Hanlon 127), Conrad could not bear to read Melville.⁷ Nor could he have agreed with Jack London's attitude toward degeneration as expressed in The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914). The Elsinore's crew were a degenerate bunch of “gangsters,” “broken men and lunatics” (51), but London suggests that they, along with the ugly new iron ships, were the products of a brutal industrial society, the price of “progress” according to the Social Darwinist captains of industry. Although the representatives of social order do put down the mutiny aboard the Elsinore, London mocks them, reserving his sympathy only for the deformed ordinary seaman, Mulligan Jacobs. London sees at least some hope in Jacobs's defiance and intellectual power; among other things, he expresses his very low opinion of Joseph Conrad's latest work (96). Similarly, Conrad would have been repulsed by Eugene O'Neill's suggestion that the degenerate seamen in The Hairy Ape might eventually enable them to reclaim their dignity as human beings from the higher but far less vital social order that had victimized them.

Despite the enormous changes in American life between the time of Melville's first sea books and London's Mutiny of the Elsinore—especially the disruptive new biological thought—there is an obvious continuity in their work that derives from their shared sympathy with the common seaman. Similarly, despite the years that separate Conrad from Darwin, one can see a good deal of Conrad in The Voyage of the Beagle (which appeared long before “Darwinian” thought had evolved)—in the naturalist's “astonishment” at first seeing a “barbarian” “in his native haunt”: “One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? … I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between the savage and civilized man” (506-7). In view of “the march of improvement, consequent in the introduction of Christianity throughout the South Sea,” evident in the recent rise of Australia “into a grand centre of civilization,” Darwin confessed that it was “impossible for [himself as] an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag, seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity, and civilization” (508).

Still, however continuous the tradition of American sea fiction has been in its sympathy for the common seaman, the way has not been easy. Traditionally, the chief problem has been how to resolve the conflict between the ideal of brotherhood and the reality of discord necessitated by the Darwinian view of warring nature and the Spencerian idea of the survival of the fittest. As I have already suggested, in preserving this essential ideal, these writers from Melville to Peter Matthiessen have survived a long spiritual struggle only by exerting something like what William James would call the “will to believe”: a kind of “faith”—even when “our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies” make it impossible “to worship unreservedly any God of whose character [nature] can be an adequate expression”—“in an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained”; a “Belief that life is worth living” (James, Will, 43, 51, 62). Indeed, American sea fiction from Melville to the present dramatizes a long series of crises of belief that usually correspond to crises in navigation, and for this reason there could be no more fitting epigraph for a study of these voyages than the line spoken by Harry Morgan in Hemingway's To Have and Have Not: “You got to have confidence steering” (67). Moreover, in their choices to go to sea and to claim the authority of their sea experience, the sea-brothers of this tradition exemplify the optimistic tendency of many other American writers, as in Thoreau, to affirm life by actively embracing it. That is, as Thoreau's desire or will “to live deep and suck out the marrow of life” led inevitably to his sense that life is “sublime” and that he could “know it by experience,” the sea-brothers of our tradition imply in their emphasis on actual sea experience that the will to believe and the will to live are perhaps indistinguishable, as James himself suggests in his “belief that life is worth living.” This tendency to affirm life is particularly evident in our literature of the voyage, for the decision to embark upon any voyage, actual or literary, is an implicit act of faith. Invariably, as our sea-brothers from Dana to Matthiessen have looked back at their actual voyages or sea experiences (usually in their youth), they have affirmed and celebrated that life, realizing, as does Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical character Edmund, that the “high spots in [his] memories … [are] all connected with the sea” (Long Day's Journey into Night, IV).

The difficult but ultimately successful struggle for faith is clear in Melville's early work, but after 1850 it is first evident in the conflict between Ahab's doubt and Ishmael's faith in “the great God absolute, the centre and circumference of all democracy” (MD, “Knights and Squires”). By 1891 the struggle had become a much darker one for Melville, but, like many other late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers, he could accept the apparent fact of evolution by natural selection and still deny that it should “exclude the hope,” as he had written in the epilogue to Clarel: “If Luther's day expand to Darwin's year, / Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?” In Billy Budd, Sailor, comparing Claggart with “certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep,” the “serpent” and the “torpedo fish,” Melville suggests that the Darwinian interpretation of evolution need not exclude traditional Christian thought (GSW [Great Short Works of Herman Melville], 476). In the fallen world that he envisioned, “the envious marplot of Eden has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet earth”; thus, as he links Claggart's satanic power to the dark evolutionary past, he sees that even Billy is flawed: this story “is no romance,” Melville insists (439). But though Billy's illiteracy, his general simplicity, his feminine beauty, and his flawed speech would be conclusive proof of his degeneracy to Max Nordau and Conrad (who would see a resemblance between Billy's weaknesses and Lord Jim's), Melville proclaims Billy an innocent. Billy's “stigmata” (symptoms of degeneracy, as Nordau and his predecessors B. A. Morel and Cesare Lombroso would refer to them) may be taken as part of Melville's effort to portray him as “an angel of God!” (478).⁸

No major writer in the tradition after Melville was able to invoke a biblical reality, but all would regard life with a degree of wonder and mystery, often reflecting in their imagery of the natural world a lingering sense of Christian values. And each would sustain himself in his voyages by affirming his faith in the possibilities of brotherhood. Stephen Crane, who had written that “God lay dead in heaven,” discovered the “subtle brotherhood of men” in “The Open Boat.” Jack London, his faith in a possible brotherhood of American workers badly shaken, still envisioned a time when the common man might, by organized action, successfully engage in the social-biological struggle for power and justice; and in his last story he affirmed his faith that a primitive, simple fisherman could somehow save him from civilization. At a time when, to many, the world seemed hopelessly wasted, Hemingway could affirm the life force in a simple, brutal man, Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not. Despite his despair over the “stench of comrades” (Green Hills, 145), he could, by an extreme act of will, affirm the bloody but biologically innocent or “saintly” brotherhood among his warring seamen in Islands in the Stream (362); and in his parable of a simple fisherman he could willfully accept his role in the brotherhood of all creatures, ritualistically affirming the voracious biological order. Finally, in Far Tortuga, a story that returns to the Caribbean waters where Columbus first found the New World, Peter Matthiessen envisions the island of Far Tortuga as “a shadow in the eastern distance, under a sunken sky, like a memory in the ocean distance” (336) and tells of half-brothers who make their separate ways on the spiritually and ecologically depleted “bleak ocean.” Yet even in this “modern time” Matthiessen suggests through his strongest characters that the capacity for simple dignity, gentleness, and brotherhood among men can survive.

In addition to our democratic heritage, there is undoubtedly a simple psychological basis for the prominent theme of brotherhood in American sea fiction. That is, in the actual shipboard circumstances of men working together to survive, in their having to endure the mutual hardships of storm, shipwreck, and sometimes brutal authority, there is a powerful cohesive force, a natural bonding in actual experience. For this reason, and because of the typical forecastle point of view, there are surprisingly few mutinies in our sea fiction; when they do arise (as in “The Town Ho's Story” in Moby-Dick), they are usually understood to be natural outbreaks that lead to a natural and healthy resolution. If, after shipwreck, in the precarious confinement of an open boat, the conflict among individuals struggling to survive is intensified because of limited water, for example, the bonds of equality and brotherhood are correspondingly strengthened and sometimes justifiably enforced even by brute strength, as in the story “Thirst” by Lincoln Colcord, or in the conclusion of Far Tortuga. Once the dinghy in Crane's “The Open Boat” has pulled away from the sinking Commodore (thus escaping the absolute threat to brotherhood and equality posed by the desperate survivors who remained with the ship because there was no space in the dinghy), an ideal brotherhood exists. And even under the most desperate circumstances in our maritime experience, after the sinking of the Essex, the survivors willingly submitted to the final horror of cannibalism. In such stories and experiences there is surely a universal necessity that extends well beyond our national identity. Still, these are typically American stories that bespeak our democratic heritage and “a common faith,” as John Dewey suggested in his book by that title. Writing about the “religious values inherent in natural experience,” Dewey wrote that “whether or not we are, save in some metaphorical sense, all brothers, we are at least all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean. The potential religious significance of this fact is infinite” (28, 85).

Moreover, the social and political possibilities are integral with the potential ideal or religious significance of brotherhood in American sea fiction. Larzer Ziff has explored the first of these in his chapters on Melville in Literary Democracy. Sensing that “Melville's sailors go to sea principally to find the community denied them on land,” Ziff argues that “Melville's primary theme is that of social, not political, democracy, the inherent dignity of the common man and the way communities are shaped by this quality” (264-65). In choosing to go to sea as a common sailor, Melville consciously joined the “bottommost economic class,” and from the forecastle he had the perspective of “a native-born outsider” that enabled him to express “America's deepest anxieties about savagery and civilization” (262-63). Dana had provided the example of serious literature written from a common sailor's point of view, but he expressed equally his fear of being imprisoned among that class of men, as Thomas Philbrick has emphasized in his discussion of Two Years Before the Mast as a “narrative of captivity and redemption” (Introduction, 28). Far more wholeheartedly than Dana, Melville overcame “the psychological distance between himself and those suffering fellow creatures”—“the most exploited segment of the American working class” (25, 9)—and in doing so, he more nearly realized the ideal of democratic expression than has any other writer; he established in the sea story from the common sailor's point of view a major (but too little recognized) contribution to the literature of the American labor movement.⁹

From another perspective, whereas Larzer Ziff develops his point about the social significance of Melville's forecastle experience—“a confinement so intense that an intimacy well beyond that of the tightest rural village was inescapable” (2)—Robert K. Martin develops the political significance of this situation. Examining the way in which Melville's work constitutes “a critique of power in the society [he] depicted,” Martin begins by observing how “the fluidity of the sea itself, and the absence of social norms, serves as a constant reminder of the power of the natural world and of man's very small place in it” (3). But because of the captain's “extraordinary authority” (almost “an absolute monarchy”), there is a “violent clash” in Melville's sea fiction between “the claims of nature and its ultimate mysteries with those of man, incarnate in the captain, and his attempt to assert authority over the ever-changing” (3-4). Building on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, but arguing that what Fiedler sees as a “failure” in Melville's work is actually an “accomplishment,” Martin explains the dynamics of Melville's critique of power. He focuses on “the conflict between two erotic forces: a democratic eros strikingly similar to that of Whitman, finding its highest expression in male friendship … reflecting the celebration of a generalized seminal power not directed toward control or production; and a hierarchical eros expressed in social forms of male power” (4).

Although many readers might prefer to ignore Martin's emphasis on the “institution of male friendship … [that Dana] called aikane and Melville called tayo” (Martin 19), to do so would be contrary to the essential spirit of openness, freedom, and discovery that is embodied in American literary voyages.¹⁰ From its democratic center, our literature of “the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean” radiates in many directions—religious, biological, social, political—and in its desire to perpetuate the ideal of brotherhood, it ranges from the ethereal sense of Whitman's vision of the soul as shipmate—

Joy, shipmate, joy!
(Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry)—

to the erotic sense of Allen Ginsberg's image of “those human seraphim, the sailors” (Whitman, “Songs of Parting,” Leaves of Grass; Ginsberg, “Howl”). There is no better way to grasp the full range of democratic possibilities and the full extent to which they inform the tradition of American sea fiction than to note how, in its towering masterwork, Melville brought so much together in the juxtaposed chapters “The Castaway” and “A Squeeze of the Hand” in Moby-Dick. Before Pip becomes a castaway, Stubb advises him on how important it is to “Stick to the boat.” Stubb could not “afford” to pick him up if he fell overboard, because “‘a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind and don't jump any more.’ Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.” Then it “happened,” and Pip experienced “the intense concentration of self in the middle of [the] heartless immensity”; his “ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably.” But when he was “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes,” Pip came to “the celestial thought”: “Among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it.” Concluding this chapter, Melville indicates how much of his book is shaped by this vision. Pip's experience, says Ishmael, is “common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will be seen what like abandonment befell myself.” In the next sentence, the first of “A Squeeze of the Hand,” the story resumes, after Stubb's “so dearly purchased” whale is brought alongside, and Ishmael sits down with his shipmates:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

In these two chapters, Melville brought together the essential materials of Moby-Dick that gave him—in the sea life—so powerful a basis for affirming and celebrating his vision of a coherent universe. Viewed in a different light by successive generations of sea-brothers, as they would be viewed in a different, darker light by Melville himself after 1851, these materials have remained essential in the tradition of American sea fiction: the image of man immersed in the biological order of life, which, in Moby-Dick, Melville understood in terms of natural theology; of men in social, political, and—for the writers from the 1890s onward—biological conflict with themselves; and of men together as brothers “in the boat.” The coherence of existence that Melville celebrates in Moby-Dick is evident in these chapters in his extensive use of the imagery of circles: in “Pip's ringed horizon,” the “colossal orbs” of creation, and the “squeeze [of] hands all round.” As, in his view, the “mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; … seems the tide-beating heart of earth” (MD, “The Pacific”) and as its waters seem to exert a magnetic attraction on crowds of men, causing them to “unite” at the water's edge with Ishmael (“Loomings”), so does he trace to the very center of existence the source of “democratic dignity”: “on all hands, [it] radiates without end from God; Himself! The Great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!” (“Knights and Squires”). Thus it is for Melville that the ideal sea experience is not available on “merchant ships” or “Men-of-War” and certainly not on “Slaveships,” “pirate” ships or “privateers”; on such ships there cannot “be much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love”: “But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-and-easy whaler!” (MD, “The Gam”). And Melville can assert that, because of the Nantucketer's deeply intimate relationship with the sea, he “owns” the sea: he “lives on it” and draws his “living from the bottomless deep itself” (MD, “Nantucket”).

In his playful exuberance for the sea life as whalers know it, Melville was in part developing Dana's “hint” that he write of his experiences on a whaler and a man-of-war, doing for those kinds of maritime experience what Dana “had done for the merchant marine in Two Years Before the Mast” (Lucid 244-45). But if we note also the vast difference between what he could make of the man-of-war and the whaling experiences, we can best account for the relative absence of fiction of naval warfare in the tradition of American sea fiction. In the considerable volume of American war fiction there are many great works, but among them are no great novels of naval war. Although a number of Americans have written about war from their position as experienced seamen—in recent years, Marcus Goodrich (Delilah, 1941), Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny, 1951), E. L. Beach (Run Silent, Run Deep, 1955)—none of them has earned a significant place in our tradition of sea fiction. For the very idea of war at sea runs contrary to the traditional writer's sense of wonder and mystery, his will to believe that in accepting our place in the natural order of ocean, bloody as it is, we may find our way. As Melville wrote in White-Jacket, the true sailor “expatriates [himself] to nationalize with the universe”: “Life in a man-of-war … with its martial formalities and thousand vices, stabs to the heart the soul of all free-and-easy honourable rovers” (WJ, “The Jacket Aloft”); he reiterated this feeling in Moby-Dick in Father Mapple's admonition to be a patriot “only … to heaven,” and in his remark that men-of-war are only “floating forts” (“The Sermon,” “Nantucket”). He would later dramatize these feelings in the explicit context of naval warfare in Israel Potter and Billy Budd, Sailor. When later writers in the tradition do write about warfare at sea (for example, Morgan Robertson, Hemingway, and Peter Matthiessen), they are guided by biological considerations and an essentially Melvillian willingness to accept and affirm the simplest processes of life in our continued voyaging through time.

I conclude this introductory chapter [of Sea-Brothers] by pointing out that the sea is a far more powerful presence in our literature and that American sea fiction has contributed a great deal more to our literature than is normally accepted. To press this point is, of course, to invite the objection that, as Frederick Jackson Turner, Henry Nash Smith, and many others have shown, the frontier, not the sea, has been the great shaping force in our cultural development. Setting out, more or less in Turner's footsteps, to trace “the impact of the West, the vacant continent beyond the frontier, on the consciousness of Americans and [to follow] the principal consequences of this impact in literature and social thought down to Turner's formulation of it,” Smith came eventually to Moby-Dick (4). He had already shown that up until the middle of the nineteenth century “the Wild West considered as untouched nature proved to be unsuitable material for major literature” (84), but in his determination to show the frontier's “impact in [our] literature,” he seems to have been compelled to emphasize how “metaphorical material derived from the Wild West plays such as important part in Moby-Dick” (85). His discussion of Moby-Dick, however, deals only with what he calls “the pivotal” chapter on the whiteness of the whale, and the only point he can make about it is that “the native wildness of the West [as in the White Steed] served him as a means of expressing one of his major intuitions”—that about the ambiguity of life (my emphases). If this were the end of critical interpretations of Moby-Dick as Western fiction, there would be no problem. But as later critics have developed the idea, one could almost forget that it is a sea novel. In Edwin Fussell's Frontier: American Literature and the American West, for example, Moby-Dick is presented as “basically … a hunting story” and, as “an American hunting story,” therefore “inevitably a story about the West”: “Everything [in Moby-Dick] follows from the initial interchangeability of sea and West” (257, 263).¹¹ Such sere formulations evaporate the very source of Moby-Dick's poetry and impoverish our sense of a national literary heritage with oceanic dimensions.

In his review of Jeanne-Marie Santraud's La mer et le roman américain dans la première moitié du dix-neuvième siècle, Thomas Philbrick wrote ironically that her book would comfort “subscribers to the heretical proposition that the sea was at least of equal importance to the inland wilderness” in shaping early nineteenth-century American literature (Review, 456). But if we can measure the relative influence of the frontier and the sea by the number of significant literary works that are centrally either of the frontier or of the sea, there is no basis for comparison. If to the group of sea novels that Philbrick has analyzed in James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction, we add the sea fiction that Melville wrote before and after 1850, as well as the sea fiction written by other Americans from 1890 to the present, such as The Sea-Wolf, “The Open Boat,” The Old Man and the Sea, and Far Tortuga, the sea's enduring vital presence in American fiction is undeniable.

It is important to distinguish between what we can think of as the “American mind” (to use Henry Nash Smith's term) and the literary imagination: “the consciousness of Americans” as they felt and responded to “the magnetic attraction of [the] untouched” West, the attraction of “free land” that could yield either personal or national empires as America grasped its “manifest destiny”—as opposed to the writer's imagination that, in America, often envisioned another kind of empire (4, 6). In choosing “landlessness,” the freeing vision, instead of free land, the American sea writer is free to envision the ideal American, a Bulkington, perhaps (as in “The Lee Shore”). He can find at sea the characteristically American perspective that Richard Poirier has described in A World Elsewhere—an environment created through language “in which the inner consciousness of the hero-poet can freely express itself, an environment in which he can sound publicly what he privately is” (232). Building his “world elsewhere” in terms of “the mystical experience to which William James alludes, an ‘enormous sense of inner authority,’” the American writer (Poirier points to Melville as his example) differs from the characteristic Englishman (Defoe, for example). Robinson Crusoe is “a sort of idyllic parable of man's gaining merely economic control over an environment out of which he could try to make anything he chose. … [Defoe] has no interest whatever in merely visionary possession of landscape” (9). Similarly, I would add, drawn to landlessness, Melville's mind (like those of his later sea-brothers) is essentially at odds with the “American mind” that, in Smith's analysis, was drawn to free land in the West. A writer of Melville's sensibility was of course repelled by the thought of “progress and civilization,” of building a personal or national empire on the “free” land of the American Indian. He had sailed (as many other American writers would) to and then away from such possibilities in the South Seas. In Lightship (1934)—the beautiful but forgotten novel by the last working seaman in our tradition who was born in the nineteenth century—Archie Binns tells this story from a few miles off the coast of Washington State, within sight of an Indian village. Like Melville, our ideal sea writer, he could imagine (as Smith suggests that Turner could not) “what was to become of democracy” once “the westward advance of civilization across the continent had caused free land to disappear” (Smith 301). And he chose the sea experience of the common sailor, preferring in Larzer Ziff's phrase, to “be a native-born outsider” (262). This tendency among the sea-brothers of our tradition is explicit not only in Melville's exuberant claim that “we [sailors] expatriate ourselves to nationalize with the universe,” but in Lincoln Colcord's more matter-of-fact claim in reference to his birth at sea off Cape Horn that “I am a native of a latitude and a longitude” (WJ, “The Jacket Aloft”; An Instrument of the Gods, Preface).

From this perspective we are perhaps better able to see how the mythology of the American frontier and the inland wilderness forms only a small part of the “Western spirit,” which, as Turner saw in his chapter “The West and American Ideals,” is essentially the spirit of the voyaging mind. Thus Turner concluded his chapter by quoting “Tennyson's Ulysses [as its] symbol”:

… for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the Western stars until I die” (310)

A similar sense consoled Melville when in 1888 he wrote of his retired, now landlocked old sailor John Marr. Withdrawn into the “frontier-prairie,” Marr could see “the remnant of Indians thereabout—all but exterminated” by the war they waged “for their native soil and natural rights” (GSW, 419). Seeing also the decaying remnants of white settlers, he was aware that “the unintermitting advance of the frontier” attested to “yet another successive overleaped limit of civilized life; a life which in America can to-day hardly be said to have any western bound but the ocean that washes Asia” (420). With this sense, Melville gives his old sailor John Marr a peaceful end, in a “visionary” “reunion” with his shipmates (421). In a similar visionary or metaphorical sense we might also see that, as the tradition of American sea fiction preceded the development of frontier literature and as it has survived even the passing of the sailing ships and the exhaustion of the continental frontier, American literature in English was itself born at sea, in the logs, journals, and sermons of Captain John Smith, William Bradford, and John Winthrop.¹²

Notes

1. Thomas Philbrick in his Introduction to Two Years Before the Mast (1981); here, far more strongly than in his earlier book on Cooper's sea fiction (1961), Philbrick emphasizes Dana's influence on American sea fiction.

2. See W. H. Auden's remarks that, in the literature of Western culture, the sea's timeless appeal is based in “cosmology”—the idea in Genesis that “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” or the idea “in one of the Greek cosmologies” that everything began when “Eros issued from the egg of Night which floated upon chaos.” Tracing this idea from ancient cosmologies through Shakespeare's late plays, Auden describes how the revolutionary change in sensibility that came about during the romantic period is observable in the “treatment of a simple theme, the sea.” Perceived as “the symbol of primitive potential power,” the sea, according to the romantic attitude, is “the real situation and the voyage is the true condition of man” (Auden 7, 20, 13).

3. Even here, in describing the tradition of “sea-brothers,” working seamen who based their fiction on their direct experience with the sea, I cannot deal with the extensive volume of American fiction by other writers in which the sea is of central importance. The list of authors and titles—for example, work by Frank Norris, Joseph C. Lincoln, Ralph D. Paine, Conrad Aiken, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Gore Vidal, James Gould Cozzens, Charles Nordhoff, James Hall, John Barth, and others—would fill a book. Similarly, one could compile an endless list of nonfiction prose and poetry of the sea, including Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World, John Steinbeck's The Log of the Sea of Cortez, Robert Cushman Murphy's Logbook for Grace, William Beebe's Galapagos, World's End, and volumes of poetry by Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, Charles Olson, T. S. Eliot, and many others. Such lists of American sea fiction and poetry could not begin to measure the sea's remarkable influence on American writers, as in the extensive use of figurative language based on sea imagery and maritime experience in the work of Henry David Thoreau (see Bonner and Springer in the Bibliography), Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and others. The most complete listings of American sea fiction are those in Charles Lee Lewis's Books of the Sea and Myron J. Smith, Jr., and Robert C. Weller's Sea Fiction Guide.

4. This brief description of American values and qualities is shaped in part by Tony Tanner's The Reign of Wonder (11-12); Richard Poirier's A World Elsewhere (in describing the American writer's tendency to build “a world elsewhere” with language, Poirier refers to William James's phrase about “inner authority” [14]); and William James's The Will to Believe.

5. See also Allan Hunter's recent book Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism, in which he argues that Conrad's “overall concern is with that favourite problem of the Victorian age after Darwin: where does morality come from? If we have evolved over many millennia, has morality evolved as well?” (6).

6. O'Hanlon emphasizes the parallel between Nordau's sense of degeneration and Conrad's.

7. For Conrad's remarks on Melville, see Parker and Hayford 122-23.

8. For discussions of the “stigmata” of degeneration see Nordau (7-32) and Carlson (127-29).

9. Among those who emphasize the sailor's role, often as an exploited worker, in the American labor movement, are Morgan Robertson, Jack London, Richard Matthews Hallet (particularly in Trial by Fire), Eugene O'Neill, and Archie Binns. This is the central theme in B. Traven's The Death Ship: The Story of an American Sailor (1934), in which the main character, Pip Pip, an abused able seaman, comments extensively on American sea life and literature from an explicitly proletarian point of view. For examples of nonliterary treatises on seamen and the union movement, see Goldberg, Taylor, Riesenberg (“Communists”), and the International Seamen's Union of America in the Bibliography.

10. This is not to suggest that Martin's discussion of Melville and tayo is the last word on the subject. But it seems essentially compatible with James Baird's earlier and, in my view, more illuminating study of tayo in relation to Melville's primitivism. See, for example, Baird's definition and discussion of tayo in chapter 6 of Ishmael; his remark on how the concept of tayo, “the fraternal love of innocent and uncorrupted men,” provided Melville with one of the “three elements” he “fused in his total structure of symbols” (the other two elements being “primitive and fecund nature” and his “threadbare Protestant sacrament” [78-79]); and his sense of how “in the Pacific journey Melville was confirmed not in hatred, as some may suppose, but in the art of constructing symbols toward the restoration of belief” (94).

11. Richard Slotkin's discussion of Moby-Dick as a Western hunting story is similar to Fussell's (538-50).

12. An excellent discussion of the sea in colonial American literature is available in Donald P. Wharton's Introduction to In the Trough of the Sea.

Works Cited

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Baird, James. Ishmael: A Study of the Symbolic Mode in Primitivism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956.

Bonner, Willard H. Harp on the Shore: Thoreau and the Sea. Edited by George R. Levine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985.

Carlson, Eric T. “Medicine and Degeneration: Theory and Praxis.” In J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 121-44.

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———. James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961.

———. Review of La mer et le roman américain dans la première moitié du dix-neuvième siècle by Jeanne-Marie Santraud. American Literature 45 (1973): 456.

Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

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