Fogle on Melville's tortoise

Richard H. Fogle, The Unity of Melville's "The Encantadas" in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 10.1 (June 1955): 34-52 at 39:

"The tortoise is both black and bright," but one notes for what it is worth the entertaining implication that the bright side is not the right side; to see it you have to turn your tortoise upside down, and to maintain it you must keep him upside down.

<https://www.jstor.org/stable/304437>

Sketch First of The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles
in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, March 1854

1856 book version of "The Encantadas" can be found in

• The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville via Google Books.

Also accessible courtesy of the Internet Archive: