and
“The three boats, with the seventeen men divided among them, moved under the sun across ocean together until the 12th of January when, during the night, the one under the command of Owen Chase, First Mate, became separated from the other two.
“Already one of the seventeen had died, Matthew Joy, Second Mate. He had been buried January 10th. When Charles Shorter, Negro, out of the same boat as Joy, died on January 23rd, his body was shared among the men of that boat and the Captain’s, and eaten. Two days more and Lawson Thomas, Negro, died and was eaten. The bodies were roasted to dryness by means of fires kindled on the ballast sand at the bottom of the boats.”
Thus, Herman Melville was born. .
“. . which joyous event occured at 1/2 past 11 last night — our dear Maria displayed her accustomed fortitude in the hour of peril, & is as well as circumstances & the intense heat will admit — while the little Stranger has good lungs, sleeps well & feeds kindly, he is in truth a chopping Boy—”
But there is more to this, to the birth of Herman: what is it about legs that so possessed the later man? Age twenty-one, the father dead, the family without funds, Herman, unpaid for a year’s teaching, and unemployed, shipped on a whaler for the Pacific, and thus broke away from home; but reaching the Marquesas, he again broke away, deserting ship on the island of Nukahiva, and thus doubly escaped, twice radically changed his world; and, at the entrance to the valley of Typee,
“I began to feel symptoms which I at once attributed to the exposure of the preceding night. Cold shiverings and a burning fever succeeded one another at intervals, while one of my legs was swelled to such a degree, and pained me so acutely, that I half suspected I had been bitten by some venomous reptile. .”
And subsequently, the leg swelled and pained him whenever he thought or acted to escape from the Typees, subsiding when he was content with his life there: the leg saying to him — or he to himself—I cannot move.
Again, in OMOO, confined to the stocks in the Calabooza Beretanee (British Jail):
“How the rest managed, I know not; but, for my own part, I found it very hard to get asleep. The consciousness of having one’s foot pinned; and the impossibility of getting it anywhere else than just where it was, was most distressing.
“But this was not alclass="underline" there was no way of lying but straight on your back; unless, to be sure, one’s limb went round and round in the ankle, like a swivel. Upon getting into a sort of doze, it was no wonder this uneasy posture gave me the nightmare. Under the delusion that I was about some gymnastics or other, I gave my unfortunate member such a twitch, that I started up with the idea that some one was dragging the stocks away.”
Or, in WHITE-JACKET, the amputation performed by Dr. Cuticle:
“. . and then the top-man seemed parted in twain at the hip, as the leg slowly slid into the arms of the pale, gaunt man in the shroud, who at once made away with it, and tucked it out of sight under one of the guns.”
(Note: how Melville hated doctors!
And in MOBY-DICK, there is Captain Peleg (Pegleg) addressing young Ishmaeclass="underline"
“‘Dost see that leg? — I’ll take that leg away from thy stern. .’”
And Ahab:
“So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. ‘Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,’ said the old Gay-Head Indian once; ‘but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.’”
and
“His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the lineknife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby-Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.”
August 1, 1819, New York City, a hot, dark night: Maria Melville, Herman’s mother, has, for the third time, gone down into the valley, and Herman, still unborn, struggling in the Dardanelles, the Narrows of a white woman, and perhaps, like the baby whales, “still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence”—Herman dies, to the extent that all life, all vitality retreats trunkward from one leg — and then the “chopping Boy” is born.
“. . deep memories yield no epitaphs.” And yet, somewhere lies the thought: one must die to be born.
PIERRE:
“And here it may be randomly suggested. . whether some things men think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly comprehended by them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thing.”
ISRAEL POTTER:
“It was not the pang of hunger then, but a nightmare originating in his mysterious incarceration, which appalled him. All through the long hours of this particular night, the sense of being masoned up in the wall, grew, and grew, and grew upon him. . he stretched his two arms sideways, and felt as if coffined at not being able to extend them straight out, on opposite sides, for the narrowness of the cell. . He mutely raved in the darkness.”
WHITE-JACKET:
“Just then the ship gave another sudden jerk, and, head foremost, I pitched from the yard. I knew where I was, from the rush of the air by my ears, but all else was a nightmare. .
“As I gushed into the sea, a thunder-boom sounded in my ear; my soul seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me with the billows. .
“For one instant an agonizing revulsion came over me as I found myself utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expended; and there I hung, vibrating in the mid-deep. What wild sounds then rang in my ear! One was a soft moaning, as of low waves on the beach; the other wild and heartlessly jubilant, as of the sea in the height of a tempest. . The life-and-death poise soon passed; and then I found myself slowly ascending, and caught a dim glimmering of light.”
Perhaps on that hot night in August, 1819, the unborn Herman lingered like Queequeg in his coffin,
(a rehearsal of death that was all the cure the savage needed. .
(the same coffin, the death-box — unhinged from the sunken whaler — on which Ishmael ultimately survived. .
And we have this: the great, white, humped monster, that dismasted Ahab:
“Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth. .”
There is again a split, a division of awareness, as earlier, at the dinner table, and for some time I am still, aware of my stillness, aware of my surroundings, of the nineteenth-century attic whose dark, sloping lines seem an extension of frontal and parietal bones of the skull itself — aware that my attention is wandering, or perhaps fixed but inaccessible, and aware that this condition must be allowed to play itself out. .