In Melville’s late teens, his mother’s worsening financial position and his own inability to find suitable work forced him to leave home. In 1839, he signed on as cabin boy of the packet St. Lawrence. His four-month voyage to Liverpool established his kinship with the sea. It also introduced him to the shabbier side of England as well as of humanity, for the captain bilked him of his wages.
A deep reader of Shakespeare, French and American classics, and the Bible, he returned to New York and tried his hand as schoolmaster at Pittsfield and East Albany. Again disappointed in his quest for a life’s work and stymied by a hopeless love triangle, he returned to the sea on January 3, 1841, on the whaler Acushnet’s maiden voyage from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to the South Seas. This eighteen-month voyage served as the basis for Moby-Dick.
In July 1842, at Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands, he and shipmate Richard Tobias “Toby” Greene deserted ship to avoid intolerable conditions and a meager diet of hardtack and occasional fruit. They lived for a month under benign house arrest among the cannibalistic Typees. With his Polynesian mistress, Melville enjoyed a few carefree months as a beach bum. During this sojourn, he distanced himself from the Western world’s philosophies as well as nineteenth-century faith in “progress.”
Melville escaped the Typees aboard the Lucy Ann, an Australian whaler not much better than his former berth. He became embroiled in a mutiny, was jailed for a few weeks in a British prison, and deserted ship a second time in September 1842 at Papeete, Tahiti, along with the ship’s doctor, Long Ghost. For a time, he worked as a field laborer and enjoyed the relaxed island lifestyle.
Leaving Tahiti, he sailed on the Charles and Henry, a whaler, off the shores of Japan, then on to Lahaina, Maui, and Honolulu, Hawaii. To earn his passage home, he worked as a store bookkeeper and a pinsetter in a bowling alley. He was so poor that he could not afford a peacoat to shield himself from the cold gales of Cape Horn. In desperation, he fashioned a coat from white duck and earned for himself the nickname “White Jacket.”
The events of the final leg of the journey tell much of the young man’s spirit. At one point he was in danger of a flogging for deserting his post until a brave seaman intervened. In a second episode, Captain Claret ordered him to shave his beard. When Melville bridled at the order, he was flogged and manacled. Crowning his last days at sea was an impromptu baptism when he fell from a yardarm into the water off the coast of Virginia.
