Hans Bergmann on Agatha and Hunilla

From God in the Street: New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville (Temple University Press, 1995) Chapter 7, pages 174-175:

One cannot help thinking that whatever the fate of "The Isle of the Cross," Melville's "Agatha" writing may have been part of what became "The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles," published in Putnam's in March, April, and May 1854.... "Sketch Eighth" of "The Encantadas," "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow," is most easily imagined as part of "The Isle of the Cross" project in that the principal image for Norfolk Island is the "rude cross" (155) that the Chola Widow has put up as memorial for her dead husband Felipe.

... What the "Agatha" story suggests, and the "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow" enacts, is the theme that "uncomplaining submission" is the admirable human reaction to the horror of a world in which God is silent.

Today I way belatedly added Bergmann's discussion of "The Chola Widow" in Chapter 7 of his 1995 book to my Agatha-Hunilla bibliography. No excuse for neglecting it until now, but I'm thankful to have God in the Street handy for a couple of weeks, on loan from my local library in Cambridge MN via Alcuin Library at St. John's University.

Related posts:

• Isle of the Crux
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/03/isle-of-crux.html
  

• Agatha and Hunilla, beginnings of a bibliography
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/agatha-and-hunilla-beginnings-of.html
  

Call her Hunilla

Juana Maria, Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island

 http://www.islapedia.com/index.php?title=JUANA_MARIA,_Lone_Woman_of_San_Nicolas_Island

via Islapedia

 More links to versions and research:

•  The Lone Woman and Last Indians Digital Archive
  http://calliope.cse.sc.edu/lonewoman/home

• Channel Islands National Park California
  https://www.nps.gov/chis/learn/historyculture/lonewoman.htm

• The True Story of Juana Maria - article by Erin Blakemore at JSTOR Daily
  https://daily.jstor.org/juana-maria-blue-dolphins/

• New twist found - report by Cheri Carlson at VC Star

Boston Semi-Weekly Atlas - January 9, 1847
via GenealogyBank

A FEMALE CRUSOE.

[Communicated for the Atlas.]

Off the coast of Alta California, about two degrees distant, bearing nearly west from Point San Pedro, which is in the latitude of 33 43 N. and longitude 118 14 W., will be found a small island, called by the Spaniards Saint Nicholas. This island was formerly inhabited by an inoffensive, indolent race of Indians, who subsisted almost entirely upon fish, which they caught from the rocks, and muscles, which they found in the sands of the beach. They were a listless, quiet race of beings, who seldom had communication with others of the human family, and who had but few wants, and fewer cares.

About the year eighteen hundred and eighteen or twenty, the Russians, from their settlements at the North, landed on this Island a party of Kodiac Indians, for the purpose of hunting the sea otter, which, at that period, abounded in those waters. This party remained on the island for more than two years: and were the means of sowing the seeds of disease and contention amongst its unsuspecting and unsophisticated inhabitants.

Some ten or twelve years after the departure of the Kodiacs, this tribe had become diminished to about twenty or thirty individuals, when the Governor of the department of California sent over a small vessel and removed them to the main.

In the last boat, which was embarking with the last of this people, (some six or eight perhaps in number) to convey them to the vessel, which was to carry them from the home of their nativity forever, was one of the tribe, small in stature, not far advanced in years, and his dusky mate, then in the bloom of life. The order had been given to shove from the shore; the oars had dipped in the wave, the boat was rising on the foaming surf, then breaking on the beach with awful roar, when, with the impulse of the moment as it were, this young and blooming bride of the red man, the imprint of whose footstep had been the last left on the sands of her island home, waved an adieu to her chosen mate, plunged into the abyss, “strove through the surge,” and, in another moment, stood alone on the shores of her native land. She turned, to give the last lingering look to her departing help-mate; and then, gathering around her form her flowing mantle, wet by the ocean wave, in an instant disappeared forever from the sight of her astonished and sorrowing companions.

The vessel weighed anchor, spread her canvass, and, in forty-eight hours, this remnant of the inhabitants of San Nicholas were landed on Point San Pedro, houseless and forlorn.

From that period to the present—if she be not dead, or has not left within the past eighteen months—has resided alone, on the Isle of San Nicholas, this female Crusoe, the monarch of all she surveys. She preferred to part even with her chosen mate, and sever every human tie that could be binding, rather than leave the home of her birth—that lonely little Isle, that had been to her a world, which she cared not to exchange for the abode of civilized man, with all its promised luxuries.

Since our Crusoe became sole monarch of the Isle, San Nicholas has been visited perhaps ten or twelve different times, by different individuals; but there she has continued to be found, with none to dispute her right—alone, solitary and forsaken.

Her dress, or covering, is composed of the skins of small birds, which she kills with stones, and sews them together with a needle of bone and the light sinews of the hair seal, sometimes found dead amongst the rocks. Her only food is a shell fish, which the surf sometimes throws on to the beach. She never remains long in one spot; but is constantly wandering around the shores of the Island, sleeping, which she seldom does, in small caves and crevices in the rocks.

During the few last years, it has been very difficult to obtain any communication with her. At the approach of the white man she flees, as from an evil spirit; and the only way to detain her, is by running her down, as you would the wild goat of the mountain, or the young fawn of the plains.

Those who have seen her at the latest period, report that she makes only a wild noise, altogether inhuman; and, when taken and detained against her will, becomes frightened and restless; that the moment she is liberated, she darts off, and endeavors to secrete herself in the wild grass, or amongst the rocks which hang over the never ceasing surf.

Every endeavor has been made, and every inducement offered, by different individuals, to prevail upon her to leave the Island, but in vain. The only home she appears to desire, is her own little isle. Her last hope, if she has any, is, to finish her journey alone. She has no wish now, to hear again the sweet music of speech. Its sounds are no longer music to her ear—and, as for civilized man, his tameness is shocking even to her dormant senses.

To all appearance, she is strong, healthy, and content to be alone. What can reconcile her to her lot, who can conjecture? Humanity may hope that contentment many continue to be hers, to the last hour; for she is destined to lie down and die alone, on the cold shore of her isolated home, with no one to administer to her last wants, and none to cover her cold body, when the spirit shall have left the clay.

But the story of our Crusoe’s chosen mate, the companion of her early life, has yet to be told. He saw her for the last time, as we have stated, when she stood alone on the shores of her own Isle; when the boat with himself and his companions was dashing through the wild surf, that broke in uninterrupted succession against the rocks which encircled the resting place of his fathers, and which he was then leaving forever. With the remnant of the family from San Nicholas, our hero was landed at San Pedro, and there left, with the others who had accompanied him, to find a home in that land of strangers.

San Pedro, it may be known, is a bleak, barren, bluff point, running out into the blue waters of the Pacific, on which no verdure is to be seen, and but one solitary abode of man, rising amidst the desolation which surrounds it. The Pueblo de los Angelos is situated ten leagues distant, with one farm house between the one on the point and those of the town. The mission of San Gabriel lies yet farther on, some three or four leagues; where, at that time, might be found perhaps three or four hundred converted Indians.

But our hero, as he may be called, never left the beach on which he was first landed. Alone and friendless, there he remained; an isolated being, till life ceased to animate his frame. True it is, that several times he was induced, and once or twice forced, to venture as far as the Pueblo, and even the mission of San Gabriel; but he always, as soon as at liberty, returned and resumed his old station on the beach, or fixed himself on the rocks which hung around the Point. And there he might always be seen, a solitary outcast, as it were, and more constantly when the sun was going down, with his eyes gazing on that celestial orb as it sunk into the western horizon, a direction which he well knew pointed to the lost but never forgotten home of his nativity.

With difficulty he sustained the want of nature by fishing about the rocks, gathering muscles, and sometimes receiving a scanty pittance of corn from the house on the Point, or a few pence from a passing stranger.

He studiously avoided, as far as possible, all intercourse with his fellow man, and sought to live and die in solitude; and so did he continue to live a life which manifestly appeared a burthen to him, till one morning, as the sun arose, not two years past, his body was found on the beach a stiffened corse, stretched out, and bleaching, as it were, in the white foam of the surf which was thrown about his lifeless remains as the mighty wave broke on the shore.

It is presumed his death was accidental—that whilst searching for shell fish, in the night, amongst the cliffs, he must have fallen from an eminence, and thus terminated his solitary existence. --Boston Atlas Thursday, January 7, 1847; found at GenealogyBank

In "The Encantadas," Herman Melville apparently used details and something of the tone in the widely reprinted 1847 account of A Female Crusoe on Saint Nicholas or San Nicolas island for his story of Hunilla, first published in the April 1854 issue of Putnam's Monthly Magazine ("Sketch Ninth / Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow"). The 1847 account presents the female Crusoe's husband as the victim of a fatal accident on the "bleak, barren, bluff point" of San Pedro where his body washes up on the beach. The closing image there of the husband's "stiffened" and "stretched out" corpse may have influenced Melville's darkly romantic depiction of the dead Felipe as a still-faithful lover:

"his body was found on the beach a stiffened corse, stretched out, and bleaching, as it were, in the white foam of the surf which was thrown about his lifeless remains as the mighty wave broke on the shore." --A Female Crusoe in the Boston Atlas, January 7, 1847; reprinted often, for example in the New York Tribune, January 18, 1847 and Littell's Living Age, Volume 12 (March 12, 1847).

"Felipe's body was washed ashore... But Felipe's body floated to the marge, with one arm encirclingly outstretched. Lockjawed in grim death, the lover-husband softly clasped his bride, true to her even in death's dream."  --The Encantadas Sketch Eighth, Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow.

To aid further study, here are some links to online texts and digitized volumes with Melville's story of Hunilla:

•  Power Encantadas - online version hosted by the New Bedford Whaling Museum

• The Encantadas, by Herman Melville online text of Sketch Eighth courtesy of The University of Virginia

• Sketch Ninth [Eighth] - Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow in Putnam's Monthly, April 1854

• Another copy of the Putnam's magazine volume with Melville's Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow, this one courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library

• Book version of Sketch Eighth in The Piazza Tales via Google Books

In print, the standard scholarly edition is in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle et al.

Related Melvilliana posts:

• 1847 report of Female Crusoe
• Early sources for Melville's Chola widow sketch
• Hunilla's lonely pregnancy

Melville's "Agatha" letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne

Herman Melville wrote three letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne regarding Melville's idea for a story based on the real-life misfortunes and heroic endurance of a Falmouth widow named Agatha Hatch Robertson. Melville's first "Agatha" letter dated August 13, 1852 is extant among the Herman Melville Papers at Houghton Library, Harvard University. It's a 21st century blessing for Melville students to be able now to see and study images of the August 13, 1852 letter online via the Harvard Library Viewer.

The August 13, 1852 letter was reprinted in the 1929 New England Quarterly article by S. E. Morison, Melville's "Agatha" letter to Hawthorne. Early, essential scholarship in print also includes the 1946 article in ELH by Harrison Hayford on The Significance of Melville's "Agatha" Letters; and Patricia Lacy's 1956 essay in The University of Texas Studies in English on The Agatha Theme in Melville's Stories. Some landmarks of more recent scholarship are the Historical Note by Merton Sealts in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860; the 1990 article in American Literature by Hershel Parker, Herman Melville's The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology; and the 1991 re-examination by Basem L. Ra'ad, "The Encantadas" and "The Isle of the Cross": Melvillean Dubieties, 1853-54.
 
In print, transcripts of all three "Agatha" letters are available in the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's Correspondence. Online, transcribed with other of Melville's Letters to Hawthorne at the venerable Life and Works of Herman Melville website.

The second of Melville's three "Agatha" letters has survived in the Berg Collection at The New York Public Library. Dated October 25, 1852, this letter is digitized and available online From The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

From The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne - October 25, 1852
From The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne - October 25, 1852
From The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne - October 25, 1852
From The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne - October 25, 1852
From The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Melville's third "Agatha" letter I guess remains unlocated. Julian Hawthorne published it in his 1884 biography Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife:

Introducing the undated letter (which must have been written between the 3rd and 13th of December 1852), Julian Hawthorne reports that Melville personally told him, "it was a tragic story, and that Hawthorne had not seemed to take to it."

From The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Related posts

• Isle of the Crux
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/03/isle-of-crux.html

• Agatha and Hunilla, beginnings of a bibliography
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/agatha-and-hunilla-beginnings-of.html 

• Early sources for Melville's Chola Widow sketch 
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/early-sources-for-melvilles-chola-widow.html 

• 1847 report of a Female Crusoe
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/1847-report-of-female-crusoe.html

Melville's "friendly critic" at the Springfield Republican, as rediscovered by Jay Leyda

Josiah Gilbert Holland (1816-1881)
Biographical Encyclopedia of Massachusetts via Wikimedia Commons

Let's don't forget about Jay Leyda's 1954 survey of pro-Melville notices and reviews in the Springfield Republican. Leyda published his Springfield Republican findings in "Another Friendly Critic for Melville" in the New England Quarterly, Vol. 27 (June 1954): 243-249.

Contemporary Reviews at p80 has the favorable notice of the revised edition of Typee in the Holland-era Republican from July 7, 1849, but lacks any citation of the earlier and "perfunctory" Omoo review that Leyda found in the May 8, 1847 Republican, before the announcement of Holland's arrival.

Gary Scarnhorst's "Sheaf of Uncollected Excerpts" in Melville Society Extracts 75 includes an item from the Springfield Republican (May 28, 1853) about the birth of Melville's third child and first daughter, Elizabeth ("Bessie," born May 22, 1853). Scharnhorst incorrectly identifies the newborn as Malcolm, but Leyda had it right when he introduced the same item:

[W]hen the birth notices included a line on a new daughter for the Melvilles, a joshing but not unfriendly item appeared in the same issue:

   By reference to our natal department, it will be seen that Herman Melville, author of "Omoo and Typee," "Pierre, or the Ambiguities," &c., has just issued a new work, which will doubtless be considered more original than any of his former ones."  --Another Friendly Critic p246.

Weirdly enough, Leyda apparently missed what became the next and last item on Scharnhorst's list in Extracts 75, also from the friendly Springfield Republican (June 11, 1853):

"Herman Melville has gone to New York to superintend the issue of a new work."

That "new work" did not appear in 1853, evidently because Melville was for some reason "prevented from printing" it, according to his 24 November 1853 letter to Harper & Brothers. Hershel Parker logically identified Melville's rejected 1853 book with the "Isle of the Cross" manuscript revealed, as Parker was the first to discover, in a letter to Melville's sister Augusta from his cousin Priscilla. Pointing out room for reasonable doubt, Basem L. Ra'ad introduced textual evidence for associating the Isle of the Cross project (presumably fruits of Melville's work on the Agatha story) with the tale of Hunilla the "Chola Widow" on one of the Galapagos Islands. Melville's story of Hunilla on an island with a cross was first published as part of "The Encantadas, Or Enchanted Isles" in the April 1854 issue of Putnam's magazine. In a previous attempt to sort all this out, enchantingly preserved to this hour at Moby-Dick™ (Wolf, wo bist du?) I volunteered my non-peer-reviewed two cents which briefly re-stated is this:

We don't now know for a certainty what "new work" Melville took to New York in June 1853 but was unable to publish then. We do know Melville's November 1853 letter to Harper & Brothers offers yet another book, about tortoise hunting. What if that book, the unfinished "The Tortoise-Hunters," contained the essence of "Isle of the Cross" along with other stuff that afterwards turned up in The Encantadas? In that case the other work, the one Melville was "prevented from printing" in June 1853, could have been something else, maybe even something unknown and unrecorded in the surviving archives--possibly one of the contemplated works for which he wanted "fifty fast-writing youths" in December 1850, or one related to the "silly thoughts and wayward speculations" he confessed to being preoccupied with in September 1851.

Here I might as well direct attention to two of the more popular posts at Melvilliana, one remarking the relatively early date at which Melville began acquiring source-material for The Encantadas, and another on the real-life Hunilla.

Whew! Alright, end of digression. So as Leyda explained way back when, the friendly critic of the Springfield Republican was associate editor J. G. Holland. 

Folder 13 in the Jay Leyda Collection, Melville Society Archive apparently has one offprint at least of the New England Quarterly article--and who knows what else:

9: Folder 13

Leyda, “Another Friendly Critic for Melville” 1954   (9 items)

adding Norman E. Hoyle to Agatha/Hunilla bibliography

How did I miss this one?  Must add now to the bibliography in progress:

Hoyle, Norman E. "Melville as a Magazinist."  Unpublished doctoral dissertation. 
Duke University, 1960.

Melville was always incredibly unreliable about projected publication dates.  It is unlikely, however, that even he would have made such a commitment without having a substantial amount of material already at hand.  If material was available, it was probably the result of his hard writing the previous winter, a by-product or even an outgrowth of the Agatha story.  The most fully developed sketch of "The Encantadas" (seemingly the final outcome of the "Tortoise" book) tells of Hunilla, a Chola woman who had gone to Norfolk Isle with her husband and brother to hunt tortoises and had been isolated there after her companions were killed in a fishing accident.  Like Agatha Hatch, she displays great patience, endurance, and "resignedness."  (Melville as a Magazinist, 107-108)

Hoyle's footnote 40 cites textual examples showing Hunilla's patience, endurance, and resignedness.  Impressively, Hoyle figured Melville must have had a good portion of the proposed book done, "already at hand"--WITHOUT KNOWING of Melville's November 24, 1853 letter to the Harpers, in which Melville in fact did claim to have "now in hand, and pretty well on towards completion" the manuscript for a book of "Tortoise Hunting Adventure."  Hoyle had to infer Melville's progress from the later letter of February 14, 1854, as excerpted in Jay Leyda's Melville Log (1.484).

1847 report of "A Female Crusoe"

via Islapedia

This 1847 story concerns the same woman and same island of San Nicolas described in the 1853 newspaper account of "A Female Robinson Crusoe" that Robert Sattelmeyer and James Barbour found and excerpted in their 1978 American Literature article The Sources and Genesis of Melville's "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow."

Oh! how thrilling to learn as I just now did a name for her, though late bestowed in Spanish: Juana Maria. The story of this Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island also inspired Scott O'Dell's 1960 children's book Island of Blue Dolphins. Update 10/21/2018: Islapedia gives the story with helpful links to versions and research in a variety of media:

Juana Maria, Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island

In the 1847 story the unnamed Indian woman chooses her lonely fate and does not want to be "rescued." In 1853 she was supposedly glad to leave, according to the updated newspaper report. The 1847 story is full of pathos, strong on the themes of self-exile, loneliness, horror of civilization, and silence. Much of the pathos derives from the separation of husband and wife, in consequence of the woman's fateful decision to swim back to shore rather than leave her native island. The husband-wife relationship, central to Melville's tale of Hunilla and her deep grief, is not mentioned in the 1853 account, whereas the 1847 story devotes considerable attention to the plight of the lost life-companion, even taking up the husband as "hero" of the story. The 1847 depiction of the husband's death may have informed Melville's treatment of the fatal accident that killed Hunilla's husband Felipe. Like Felipe, the female Crusoe's husband is presented as the victim of a fatal accident; and as in Melville's tale, his body washes up on the beach. The image of the pining husband's "stretched out" corpse washed up on the shore, may have influenced Melville's darkly romantic depiction of the dead Felipe as a still-faithful lover:

"his body was found on the beach a stiffened corse, stretched out, and bleaching, as it were, in the white foam of the surf which was thrown about his lifeless remains as the mighty wave broke on the shore."  (A Female Crusoe, 1847)

Felipe's body was washed ashore... But Felipe's body floated to the marge, with one arm encirclingly outstretched. Lockjawed in grim death, the lover-husband softly clasped his bride, true to her even in death's dream. 
(Encantadas, Sketch Eighth, Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow)

Melville would have recognized in the poetical language of "stiffened corse, stretched out, and bleaching" a borrowing from Winter Scenes in The Seasons by James Thomson.



The most obvious of quoted poets in the 1847 report is of course Cowper on Selkirk.

In Melville's "Encantadas" fiction, the narrator's view of Hunilla as "heroine" subtly corrects or complements the respect reserved in the 1847 newspaper account for the husband as "hero":

"....from her mere words little would you have weened that Hunilla was herself the heroine of her tale."  (Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow)

From the Boston Atlas, Thursday, January 7, 1847:

 

A FEMALE CRUSOE.

[Communicated for the Atlas.]

Off the coast of Alta California, about two degrees distant, bearing nearly west from Point San Pedro, which is in the latitude of 33 43 N. and longitude 118 14 W., will be found a small island, called by the Spaniards Saint Nicholas. This island was formerly inhabited by an inoffensive, indolent race of Indians, who subsisted almost entirely upon fish, which they caught from the rocks, and muscles, which they found in the sands of the beach. They were a listless, quiet race of beings, who seldom had communication with others of the human family, and who had but few wants, and fewer cares.

About the year eighteen hundred and eighteen or twenty, the Russians, from their settlements at the North, landed on this Island a party of Kodiac Indians, for the purpose of hunting the sea otter, which, at that period, abounded in those waters. This party remained on the island for more than two years: and were the means of sowing the seeds of disease and contention amongst its unsuspecting and unsophisticated inhabitants.

Some ten or twelve years after the departure of the Kodiacs, this tribe had become diminished to about twenty or thirty individuals, when the Governor of the department of California sent over a small vessel and removed them to the main.

In the last boat, which was embarking with the last of this people, (some six or eight perhaps in number) to convey them to the vessel, which was to carry them from the home of their nativity forever, was one of the tribe, small in stature, not far advanced in years, and his dusky mate, then in the bloom of life. The order had been given to shove from the shore; the oars had dipped in the wave, the boat was rising on the foaming surf, then breaking on the beach with awful roar, when, with the impulse of the moment as it were, this young and blooming bride of the red man, the imprint of whose footstep had been the last left on the sands of her island home, waved an adieu to her chosen mate, plunged into the abyss, “strove through the surge,” and, in another moment, stood alone on the shores of her native land. She turned, to give the last lingering look to her departing help-mate; and then, gathering around her form her flowing mantle, wet by the ocean wave, in an instant disappeared forever from the sight of her astonished and sorrowing companions.

The vessel weighed anchor, spread her canvass, and, in forty-eight hours, this remnant of the inhabitants of San Nicholas were landed on Point San Pedro, houseless and forlorn.

From that period to the present—if she be not dead, or has not left within the past eighteen months—has resided alone, on the Isle of San Nicholas, this female Crusoe, the monarch of all she surveys. She preferred to part even with her chosen mate, and sever every human tie that could be binding, rather than leave the home of her birth—that lonely little Isle, that had been to her a world, which she cared not to exchange for the abode of civilized man, with all its promised luxuries.

Since our Crusoe became sole monarch of the Isle, San Nicholas has been visited perhaps ten or twelve different times, by different individuals; but there she has continued to be found, with none to dispute her right—alone, solitary and forsaken.

Her dress, or covering, is composed of the skins of small birds, which she kills with stones, and sews them together with a needle of bone and the light sinews of the hair seal, sometimes found dead amongst the rocks. Her only food is a shell fish, which the surf sometimes throws on to the beach. She never remains long in one spot; but is constantly wandering around the shores of the Island, sleeping, which she seldom does, in small caves and crevices in the rocks.

During the few last years, it has been very difficult to obtain any communication with her. At the approach of the white man she flees, as from an evil spirit; and the only way to detain her, is by running her down, as you would the wild goat of the mountain, or the young fawn of the plains.

Those who have seen her at the latest period, report that she makes only a wild noise, altogether inhuman; and, when taken and detained against her will, becomes frightened and restless; that the moment she is liberated, she darts off, and endeavors to secrete herself in the wild grass, or amongst the rocks which hang over the never ceasing surf.

Every endeavor has been made, and every inducement offered, by different individuals, to prevail upon her to leave the Island, but in vain. The only home she appears to desire, is her own little isle. Her last hope, if she has any, is, to finish her journey alone. She has no wish now, to hear again the sweet music of speech. Its sounds are no longer music to her ear—and, as for civilized man, his tameness is shocking even to her dormant senses.

To all appearance, she is strong, healthy, and content to be alone. What can reconcile her to her lot, who can conjecture?   Humanity may hope that contentment many continue to be hers, to the last hour; for she is destined to lie down and die alone, on the cold shore of her isolated home, with no one to administer to her last wants, and none to cover her cold body, when the spirit shall have left the clay.

But the story of our Crusoe’s chosen mate, the companion of her early life, has yet to be told. He saw her for the last time, as we have stated, when she stood alone on the shores of her own Isle; when the boat with himself and his companions was dashing through the wild surf, that broke in uninterrupted succession against the rocks which encircled the resting place of his fathers, and which he was then leaving forever. With the remnant of the family from San Nicholas, our hero was landed at San Pedro, and there left, with the others who had accompanied him, to find a home in that land of strangers.

San Pedro, it may be known, is a bleak, barren, bluff point, running out into the blue waters of the Pacific, on which no verdure is to be seen, and but one solitary abode of man, rising amidst the desolation which surrounds it. The Pueblo de los Angelos is situated ten leagues distant, with one farm house between the one on the point and those of the town. The mission of San Gabriel lies yet farther on, some three or four leagues; where, at that time, might be found perhaps three or four hundred converted Indians.

But our hero, as he may be called, never left the beach on which he was first landed. Alone and friendless, there he remained; an isolated being, till life ceased to animate his frame. True it is, that several times he was induced, and once or twice forced, to venture as far as the Pueblo, and even the mission of San Gabriel; but he always, as soon as at liberty, returned and resumed his old station on the beach, or fixed himself on the rocks which hung around the Point. And there he might always be seen, a solitary outcast, as it were, and more constantly when the sun was going down, with his eyes gazing on that celestial orb as it sunk into the western horizon, a direction which he well knew pointed to the lost but never forgotten home of his nativity.

With difficulty he sustained the want of nature by fishing about the rocks, gathering muscles, and sometimes receiving a scanty pittance of corn from the house on the Point, or a few pence from a passing stranger.

He studiously avoided, as far as possible, all intercourse with his fellow man, and sought to live and die in solitude; and so did he continue to live a life which manifestly appeared a burthen to him, till one morning, as the sun arose, not two years past, his body was found on the beach a stiffened corse, stretched out, and bleaching, as it were, in the white foam of the surf which was thrown about his lifeless remains as the mighty wave broke on the shore.

It is presumed his death was accidental—that whilst searching for shell fish, in the night, amongst the cliffs, he must have fallen from an eminence, and thus terminated his solitary existence. --Boston Atlas Thursday, January 7, 1847 (accessible at GenealogyBank).

Reprinted many times, for example in the Philadelphia Public Ledger on January 16, 1847:

Sat, Jan 16, 1847 – Page 1 · Public Ledger (Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) · Newspapers.com

Below, more reprintings from the Boston Atlas:

New York Evening Express (January 8, 1847) --accessible at FultonHistory
Buffalo Commercial Advertiser (January 14, 1847)
New Bedford Mercury (January 15, 1847)

New York Tribune (January 18, 1847) Accessible via The Library of Congress-Chronicling America:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1847-01-18/ed-1/seq-4/

Batavia, New York Spirit of the Times (January 19, 1847)  PDF file at FultonHistory
Rondout [New York] Freeman (February 6, 1847)
Edgefield [South Carolina] Advertiser (February 10, 1847).
Windsor Vermont Journal (September 10, 1847)
Huntington, New York Long Islander January 21, 1848; and



Littell's Living Age 12 (March 27, 1847): 594-595.

Related posts:

• early sources for Melville's Chola widow sketch

• Agatha and Hunilla bibliography

• Norman E. Hoyle on Agatha and Hunilla

• Security in Tortoises

• 1853 news from Pittsfield 

• Friendly critic at Springfield Republican

Agatha and Hunilla, beginnings of a bibliography

Many commentators have noticed thematic and other parallels between representations of Agatha in Melville's Agatha letters to Hawthorne and Hunilla in the eighth sketch of The Encantadas. In his 1951 biography, Leon Howard observed that

"Through the character of Hunilla, in the eighth of his sketches, Melville at last managed to get his admiration for a strong patient widow into print."
--Leon Howard - Herman Melville, page 210

Howard went on to wonder if "Melville had hoped to let the Hunilla story carry the narrative burden of his book." That question in 1951 appeared "impossible to determine," but it is remarkable that Howard even ventured to raise the conjecture that Hunilla, like Agatha, might once have been envisioned as the heroine of a book-length work.

This of course was decades before Hershel Parker's momentous find in the NYPL Augusta Papers of two 1853 references to "Isle of the Cross" in letters from Herman Melville's cousin Priscilla to his sister Augusta.

Below, the start of a bibliography of published criticism linking the Agatha and Hunilla stories...

Agatha and Hunilla

 

Bergmann, Hans. God in the Street: New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville. Philadelpha: Temple University Press, 1995. From Bergmann's discussion of "The Chola Widow" in Chapter 7 ("Key: 'Bartleby, the Scrivner'") pages 174-5:

One cannot help thinking that whatever the fate of "The Isle of the Cross," Melville's "Agatha" writing may have been part of what became "The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles," published in Putnam's in March, April, and May 1854.... "Sketch Eighth" of "The Encantadas," "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow," is most easily imagined as part of "The Isle of the Cross" project in that the principal image for Norfolk Island is the "rude cross" (155) that the Chola Widow has put up as memorial for her dead husband Felipe....

... What the "Agatha" story suggests, and the "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow" enacts, is the theme that "uncomplaining submission" is the admirable human reaction to the horror of a world in which God is silent.

Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr. The Method of Melville's Short Fiction. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1975. See 18; and 115-116.

Dillingham, William B. Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856.  Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1977.

"Like all else in 'The Encantadas,' the story of Agatha—warmly humane and basically optimistic in outlook—was metamorphosed in the crucible of Melville’s suffering into dark and barren tragedy." --William B. Dillingham, Melville's Short Fiction - page 101

Ekner, Reidar.  "The Encantadas and Benito Cereno: On Sources and Imagination in Melville."  Moderna Språk 60.3 (1966): 258-273.

Fredricks, Nancy. "Melville and the Woman's Story." Studies in American Fiction
Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 1991. Reprinted in Herman Melville: New Edition, ed. Harold Bloom (Infobase Publishing, 2008).

"It is not clear whether Melville ever did write Agatha's story. A variant of the tale appears in "The Encantadas" in the story of Hunilla, the Chola woman and turtle hunter who witnesses the drowning of her husband and survives alone for years on a remote, uninhabited island."  --Nancy Fredricks, Melville and the Woman's Story in Harold Bloom, ed., Herman Melville: A New Edition, page 116. A revised version of this passage appears in chapter 9 of Nancy Fredricks' book Melville's Art of Democracy (University of Georgia Press, 1995), with "turtle hunter" deleted.

Hayford, Harrison. "The Significance of Melville's 'Agatha' Letters."  ELH 13.4 (December 1946): 299-310.  In a footnote, Hayford makes the connection to Hunilla:

“It is possible that Agatha would have belonged not with Billy Budd but rather with Bartleby and Hunilla, creations of the following year…”  (304 fn 13)

Howard, Leon.  Herman Melville: A Biography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951. 210.

Hoyle, Norman E. "Melville as a Magazinist." Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Duke University, 1960. See pp. 107-108 for prescient discussion of Agatha and Hunilla.

Kelley, Wyn. Herman Melville: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 108-110.

Lacy, Patricia. The Agatha Theme in Melville's Stories. The University of Texas Studies in English 35 (1956): 96-105.

Lee, A. Robert. "Voices Off and On: Melville's Piazza and Other Stories." In The Nineteenth-Century  American Short Story.  London and Totowa, N.J.:  Barnes and Noble, 1986.  76-102; see 89.

López Liquete, Maria Felisa. "When Silence Speaks: The Chola Widow"  In Melville and Women, ed. Elizabeth Schultz and Haskell Springer.  Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006.  213-228.

"The Harpers also supposedly rejected 'The Agatha Story,' which relates directly to Sketch Eighth, as well as 'The Tortoise Hunters,' which relates to 'The Encantadas.'"
(227, fn8)

Ra'ad, Basem L. "'The Encantadas' and 'The Isle of the Cross': Melvillean Dubieties, 1853-54. American Literature 63 (June 1991): 316-323.

Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. 338.

This sketch ["Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow"] seems to incorporate both the Agatha story and "The Isle of the Cross."  (338)

Sattelmeyer, Robert, and James Barbour. "The Sources and Genesis of Melville's 'Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow.'" American Literature 50 (November 1978): 398-417. Sattelmeyer and Barbour introduce and discuss newspaper accounts from late 1853 concerning a "Female Robinson Crusoe"; as hinted here, Sattelmeyer and Barbour do not mention an even earlier report of the same "Female Crusoe" (before she was "found" again in 1853), originally published in the Boston Atlas and reprinted in Littell's Living Age 12 (March 27, 1847): 594-595. The 1847 and 1853 stories are different reports, I now realize, about the same woman on the same island of Saint or San Nicholas--elusive with no wish to leave the island in 1847, but lately discovered and "rescued" in 1853. More on all that later, hopefully. For the earlier newspaper account, see this Melvilliana exclusive

•  1847 report of A Female Crusoe  

See also the post on early sources for Melville's Chola Widow sketch for more thoughts on the Sattelmeyer and Barbour article.

Sealts, Merton M., Jr. "Historical Note" in Melville's The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860.  Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987. Sealts observes

"echoes of the 'patience, & endurance, & resignedness' Melville associated with Agatha in much of the fiction he was to write over the next three years" including "above all, Hunilla...." (483)

"Security in tortoises."  http://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/security-in-tortoises.html

Smith, Herbert F. "Melville's Master in Chancery and His Recalcitrant Clerk." American Quarterly 17 (Winter 1965): 734-741.

Watson, Charles N., Jr. “Melville’s Agatha and Hunilla: A Literary Reincarnation.” English Language Notes 6 (December 1968): 114-118. 

Wheeler, K. M. 'The Half Shall Remain Untold': Hunilla of Melville's Encantadas. Journal of the Short Story in English 52 (Spring 2009).

Related posts:

• Isle of the Crux
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/03/isle-of-crux.html
  

• Melville's "Agatha" letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/10/melvilles-agatha-letters-to-nathaniel.html
  

• Reprintings of 1853 Pittsfield news
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/06/re-printings-of-1853-pittsfield-news.html
  

• Hunilla's lonely pregnancy
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2014/08/hunillas-lonely-pregnancy.html
  

• Early sources for Melville's Chola Widow sketch 
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/early-sources-for-melvilles-chola-widow.html
  

• 1847 report of a Female Crusoe
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/1847-report-of-female-crusoe.html