Merrily as a woodpecker

Photo by Prasad Chatterji

"But the artist, with a heart as callous as that of an army surgeon, continued his performance, enlivening his labours with a wild chant, tapping away the while as merrily as a woodpecker."

-- Typee, Professor of Tattooing

Tattooing in the Penny Cyclopaedia

Digitized by Google Books from a volume at NYPL, formerly (as the stamp in the front shows) in the Astor Library, New York.



As the Penny Cyclopaedia article indicates, illustrations and much of the text for this entry are from The New Zealanders. On Melville's imaginative uses of The New Zealanders in Moby-Dick, you have to read Whipscars and Tattoos by Geoffrey Sanborn. And Sanborn's classy website is well worth checking out, not least for the helpful links.

Did the entry on Tattooing prompt Melville to consult The New Zealanders? Howard Vincent suggested a similar pattern might be evident in White-Jacket, of seeing articles in the Penny Cyclopaedia, then consulting works cited as sources for those articles--for instance, Guthrie on Gun-Shot Wounds.

"...it is more probable that Melville had read these articles and then turned to the basic medical authorities from which the encyclopedists themselves had taken their materials."  --The Tailoring of Melville's White-Jacket, 131