Following brief stints as a clerk and schoolteacher, Melville signed on as a cabin boy with the trade ship St. Lawrence in 1839, completing a round trip to Liverpool. Upon his return, he again taught school, unsuccessfully sought work in New York City, and traveled on a Mississippi River steamboat. In January 1841, Melville’s life took a significant turn as he sailed as a crew member on the American whaler Acushnet, taking the Cape Horn (southern tip of South America) route to the Pacific Ocean and the Marquesas Islands. There, in the summer of 1842, he and a friend jumped ship in response to the wretched conditions on board and the brutality of the ship’s officers. Melville lived with friendly cannibals in the interior of Nuku Hiva for a month or so before joining the crew of the Australian whaler Lucy Ann. Melville’s difficulty with the stern discipline aboard ships of the day continued. At Tahiti in September 1842, he and several other rebellious sailors refused to follow orders and were imprisoned on land. Easily escaping a few weeks later, Melville sailed on an American whaler, the Charles and Henry, ending up in Hawaii where, in April 1843, he was discharged and worked as a clerk and a pinsetter in a bowling alley. He signed on with the U. S. Navy frigate United States, again visiting Tahiti and the Marquesas as well as various Latin American ports before being discharged in Boston in October 1844.
Approaching the age of thirty, Melville sought stability in a marriage (1847) to Elizabeth “Lizzie” Knapp Shaw, daughter of the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and a friend of his sister Helen. Relying on borrowed money from his wife’s family, Melville purchased a farm (1850), which he called Arrowhead, in Massachusetts. Nearby lived Nathaniel Hawthorne, fifteen years Melville’s senior, who published his most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter, that year; the two became friends.
