iron belaying pins flying in the dark

Related posts:

• 1848 Journal is digitized and online
• Flogging John and Peter
• speaking a whaler, homeward bound

As reported previously here, the 1848 manuscript journal of William S. W. Ruschenberger is now available online "for use in research, teaching, and private study."

To my mind, certain portions of Ruschenberger's journal appear to have been mined by Herman Melville in the writing of White-Jacket (1850).

The Plymouth

For example, take a look at the belaying pin incident in Ruschenberger's eyewitness account, reported while on board  the sloop-of-war Plymouth in the entry for April 3, 1848.  Significantly, there is no entry for April 3rd in the published version of Ruschenberger's 1848 journal, as originally printed in the Southern Literary Messenger 16 (1852).  The Southern Literary Messenger series "Notes and Commentaries on a Voyage to China" jumps from April 2nd in the April 1852 installment to April 4th in the May 1852 installment, and thus entirely deletes Ruschenberger's dramatic narrative of the events of April 3, 1848:

Monday April 3d.  Wind ahead.  This day completes seventeen years since the day of my commission as a surgeon in the navy.  Capt. Gedney plays whist every afternoon in the cabin with different officers of the ship and Lt. Davis.  To day three men were brought up for card playing on the berth deck, and Gedney stood up on his stick, cripple as he is, and counted off a dozen lashes to each one of these men for doing what he does every day.  In consequence of the Master at Arms having reported the card-playing by these men, an iron belaying pin was thrown at his head in the dark.  Fortunately the missile missed its aim.  The offender could not be discovered.  With a view to his detection, all hands were called on deck, and Gedney hobbled up to the capstan and made the following speech:

"Men — I suppose you all know what you are mustered here for — if you don't, I'll tell you — Somebody threw a belaying pin last night at the Master at Arms.  It was my intention to give you liberty at Rio; but I won't give you no indulgence until I find the rascal that threw the pin.  If I find him out, I will try him by a drum head court-martial, without waiting for any flag-ship, and whatever the sentence is, if it is five hundred lashes, or hang him, I will carry it out, by God — lick him or hang him, I'll be damned if I don't.  Pipe down, Mr Page." — This is a specimen of quarter deck eloquence, and of the effects of reading the bible on Sundays & attending church service.  How can a man compound with his conscience to act in this silly way.  Nay, this bare faced injustice is monstrous when we consider that Gedney sets an example and then flogs the men for following it.

Citation:

Ruschenberger, W. S. W. (William Samuel Waithman), 1807-1895. William S. W. Ruschenberger journal. 18 Feb. 1848 - 6 Mar. 1849. William S. W. Ruschenberger Papers. 0629-b3-fa. East Carolina University Digital Collections. https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/2147.

The censored narrative which I have transcribed above from Ruschenberger's 1848 manuscript journal seems to have inspired Melville's portrait in White-Jacket chapter 42, "Killing Time in a Man-of-war in Harbor") of Captain Claret and that officer's response to an airborne belaying pin:

One other way of killing time while in port is playing checkers; that is, when it is permitted; for it is not every Navy captain who will allow such a scandalous proceeding. But, as for Captain Claret, though he did like his glass of Madeira uncommonly well, and was an undoubted descendant from the hero of the battle of the Brandywine, and though he sometimes showed a suspiciously flushed face when superintending in person the flogging of a sailor for getting intoxicated against his particular orders, yet I will say for Captain Claret that, upon the whole, he was rather indulgent to his crew, so long as they were perfectly docile. He allowed them to play checkers as much as they pleased. More than once I have known him, when going forward to the forecastle, pick his way carefully among scores of canvas checkercloths, spread upon the deck, so as not to tread upon the men— the checker-men and man-of-war's men included; but, in a certain sense, they were both one; for, as the sailors used their checker-men, so, at quarters, their officers used these man-of-war's men.

But Captain Claret's leniency in permitting checkers on board his ship might have arisen from the following little circumstance, confidentially communicated to me. Soon after the ship had sailed from home, checkers were prohibited; whereupon the sailors were exasperated against the captain, and one night, when he was walking round the forecastle, bim! came an iron belaying-pin past his ears; and while he was dodging that, bim! came another, from the other side; so that, it being a very dark night, and nobody to be seen, and it being impossible to find out the trespassers, he thought it best to get back into his cabin as soon as possible. Some time after—just as if the belaying-pins had nothing to do with it—it was indirectly rumoured that the checker-boards might be brought out again, which—as a philosophical shipmate observed—showed that Captain Claret was a man of a ready understanding, and could understand a hint as well as any other man, even when conveyed by several pounds of iron.

To be sure, at sea the iron belaying pin makes the handiest of weapons as any sailor or pirate knows.  Nautical literature is full of bludgeonings with belaying pins.  Nevertheless, consider the parallel particulars in the accounts of Ruschenberger and Melville.  In both narratives the incident happens at night, in the dark.  A belaying pin (or two, in Melville's telling) is sent flying in both narratives, in both accounts by the hand of an unknown assailant or assailants who are never discovered.  Moreover, the motives for the attacks are strikingly similar, having to with the enforced suppression of recreational games.  In Ruschenberger's 1848 narrative, the target of the flying belaying pin was enforcing Captain Gedney's unfair and hypocritical prohibition of card-playing.  In Melville's narrative, the hypocritical Captain Claret (who flogs sailors for drunkenness while tipsy himself) had prohibited checkers.  The big difference in the two accounts is in the reaction of the respective captains.  The belligerent and unrepentant Gedney vowed to flog or hang the unknown offender, but Melville's timid Claret is quick to change his mind and approve the playing of checkers, having been personally assaulted, twice.

Before getting too far along we have to consult Howard Vincent's essential study, The Tailoring of Melville's White-Jacket (Northwestern University Press, 1970). We need to know if Vincent located any source for the belaying pin incident in White-Jacket.

Whew!  At p. 123 Vincent does quote extensively from the passage in question.  And while Vincent does not identify Melville's source, he knows there is one:

When anything is "confidentially communicated," as he says this information was, to one of Melville's narrators, it is certain that a bookish source is the communicator.

And Vincent immediately goes on to say

Sources for the latter half of the chapter have not appeared.

 Hey, it's on and poppin!

On the same subject, check out Melvilliana posts on Flogging John and Peter and speaking a whaler, homeward bound.

Don't forget, as reported at Melvilliana in our inaugural message to the world, Ruschenberger's 1848 journal is digitized and online!

OMG, Ruschenberger's 1848 journal is digitized and online!

Some years back I had the pleasure of visiting Joyner Library at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina where I looked at the William S. W. Ruschenberger Papers.  Since that research trip I have been holding on to fifty pages of photocopies kindly furnished by the friendly and professional library staff from Ruschenberger's 1848 journal.  Incredibly, the whole thing is now available online "for use in research, teaching, and private study." 

Citation: 

Ruschenberger, W. S. W. (William Samuel Waithman), 1807-1895. William S. W. Ruschenberger journal. 18 Feb. 1848 - 6 Mar. 1849. William S. W. Ruschenberger Papers. 0629-b3-fa. East Carolina University Digital Collections. https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/2147.

What's Herman Melville got to do with it?

Well, Melville in Omoo (1847) cites "Ruschenberger, an intelligent surgeon" of the navy by name, footnoting Ruschenberger's Voyage Round the World.

Ruschenberger in his article "Education in the Navy" for the Southern Literary Messenger (September 1850) at 524-526 quotes copiously (all of chapter 27) from Melville's recently published White-Jacket (1850).

In between Melville's footnote and Ruschenberger's borrowings (plus critical commentary), came Ruschenberger's 1848 voyage on The Plymouth with the colorful and controversial (and sadly alcoholic) captain Tom Gedney, and journal which Ruschenberger wrote in the form of letters home to his wife, Mary.  As the manuscript journal indicates, Ruschenberger intended for Mary to make edited copies of all his letters with the idea of publishing them in book form.

Ruschenberger's 1848 journal was copied, edited, and serialized as Notes and Commentaries on a Voyage to China in the Southern Literary Messenger (1852-1853).

Reading Ruschenberger's published "Notes and Commentaries" in the Southern Literary Messenger a long time ago, I noticed close correspondences to a couple of passages in Melville's White-Jacket.  Certain parallels were so close that Ruschenberger would have seemed a likely source, except that White-Jacket was written in 1849, three years before Ruschenberger's edited journal appeared in print.  Impossible, obviously, for Melville in 1849 to make use of Ruschenberger in 1852-1853.  From the other end, Ruschenberger was describing daily life on board The Plymouth and had no reason or need to crib details from Melville.

However, after going to Greenville and reading Ruschenberger's manuscript 1848 journal, and seeing the doctor's repeated instructions to his wife (along with the handwritten notation "copied" at the top of many pages), I realized that multiple copies of the 1848 journal, or parts of it, might have been circulating in the Boston area for months and months, even before Ruschenberger's homecoming and well before 1852-1853 when the Southern Literary Messenger published Ruschenberger's 1848 journal as "Notes and Commentaries on a Voyage to China."

So one question is, could Melville somehow have procured Ruschenberger's 1848 journal in manuscript form, perhaps one of the copies made according to plan by Ruschenberger's wife Mary, the former Mary B. Wister? 

Now that Ruschenberger's 1848 journal is digitized and online for research and teaching, I find myself freshly motivated to re-examine those weird correspondences to Melville's White-Jacket. Stick around, this should be fun.

Related posts: 

• Flogging John and Peter

• speaking a whaler, homeward bound

• iron belaying pins, flying in the dark

Gansevoort Melville's Height

UPDATE: Turns out "small potato" was a common and freely exchanged slur in 1844, hurled at Democrat and Whig alike without regard to physical height. In Kentucky they called Gansevoort a small potato, but Gansevoort threw it right back at them in calling Theodore Frelinghuysen a "small potato Whig." From the Auburn Journal and Advertiser, October 30, 1844:

Gansevoort Melville.

A fortnight since we referred to the disgraceful terms used by the above “doughty champion of Democracy” in reference to Hon. Theodore Frelinghuysen. The Patriot man, forced by a sense of shame and mortification (perhaps, in a measure awakened by the impolicy of such language in this section) endeavors to help poor Melville out of the mire by a flat denial that any such language was by him used. This, however is altogether too barefaced to be of any service—as in the present case we chance to have in our possession the very language, taken down as heard by those present. After treating for a time of Mr. Clay, the speaker said,— “Theodore Frelinghuysen is a different sort of a Whig—a small potato Whig. He is as cold, selfish, sanctimonious and sacrilegious a man as God Almighty ever made, whose heart never felt one generous pulsation!” Here you have it, Mr. Patriot, word for word. While puffing the other portions of his speech, why did you not also devote a puff or two upon this also? So much for the “doughty” Melville! as well as for his “doughty” reporter of the Patriot.

Auburn [New York] Journal and Advertiser
October 30, 1844

Though dismissed in the New York Commercial Advertiser (and a day later in the New York Spectator, July 12, 1845) as a "small man," Gansevoort had been identified three months earlier by a Richmond, Virginia correspondent of the New York Herald (March 15, 1845) as

"the tall democratic spouter, par excellence."

How big was Herman Melville's big brother, Gansevoort?  Huge, according to the published tribute by family friend William E. Cramer:

"His figure was majestic--some might say colossal...."

Quoting from Cramer's memorial in the Washington Daily Union (June 13, 1846), Hershel Parker observes "there is no record of Gansevoort's height other than this word 'colossal'" (Herman Melville: A Biography, V1.426). Likewise, the obituary in the Albany Argus seemed bent on maximizing Gansevoort's stature, physical or otherwise, with subtly heightening references to his "large" mind and "elevated nature" (as reprinted in the Vermont Gazette, June 9, 1846)

majestic, colossal, large, elevated...

but really, was Gansevoort all that tall?  Taller than 5'9" or so Herman, tall as their "imposing" maternal grandfather Peter Gansevoort, legendarily "gigantic in frame, six feet and four like Washington"?

Peter Gansevoort
1794 by Gilbert Stuart via Wikimedia Commons

I'm thinking not.  Probably not.  For one thing, we already have Gansevoort Melville on record joking about himself as a relatively short person, under six feet tall.  In 1844 Gansevoort's fiery campaign speeches on behalf of Polk and the Democrats won him fame and dubious glory as "Orator of the Human Race."  One of Gansevoort's crowd-pleasing anecdotes rehearsed his encounter down south with a strapping backwoodsman. The humor of the thing lies in the contrast between the robust Tennessean and the slightly-built speaker:

On one occasion, after I had addressed a large popular assemblage, a sturdy frontier's man, who was about six feet high, without a superfluous ounce of flesh upon his stalwart frame, one of your men who never turn their backs on either friend or foe, and who looked as if he could whip his weight in wild cats, (laughter) strode up to me and grasped my hand with an iron energy that gets up reminded me forcibly of a vice, and suddenly withdrawing his grasp, slapped me on the back with tremendous force, sung out--"Old horse--I love you!" (Roars of laughter, repeated again and again.)

In other words, Gansevoort Melville meets Davy Crockett. The point of the story, and the ensuing "roars of laughter," are incomprehensible to me if Gansevoort looked about equal in size and strength to his hulking "six feet high" admirer. The vice-grip, the hearty smack on the back, the astonishing exclamation of support ("Old horse--I love you!") are mainly astonishing, and comical, because of the supposed incongruity in their physical appearances.

New York Herald, November 5, 1844

Corroborating evidence for Gansevoort's shorter-than-we-knew height exists in the form of two negative, not to say nasty remarks by admittedly biased critics in the Whig press. For all their politically motivated harshness, the following squibs independently attest to Gansevoort Melville's noticeably short stature, assuming (particularly in the case of no. 2, below) that "small" means "short in height" as well as more generally "unimpressive' or "insignificant."

1. From the Louisville Daily Journal (September 13, 1844):

“If all the potatoes in Ireland were as small as that chap, the Irish people would starve to death,” said a gentleman on Wednesday evening after hearing Mr. Melville’s speech. 

Here the reference plainly is to physical size. Again the point of the joke is Gansevoort's presumed shortness of stature. Were he a tall man, the joke would instantly self-destruct. As slander of a genuinely big man it won't work either, since the lie would have been obvious and too easily exposed.

2. From the New York Commercial Advertiser (July 11, 1845):

The Evening Post condemns the appointment of Mr. Gansevoort Melville to the clerkship of the London legation. But the Post cannot deny that there is a degree of consistency about it. This is the day of small things in the administration of the government. Mr. Polk is a small man—most of his Cabinet members are small men—and Mr. Gansevoort Melville is a small man—very small. There is one point, however, in which he is unlike Mr. Polk. The President has a faculty of being quiet, but Mr. Gansevoort Melville though a small man, contrives at times to make a prodigious noise.

Reprinted the next day, July 12, 1845 in the New York Spectator:

New York Spectator, July 12, 1845

"Mr. Gansevoort Melville is a small man..."  Indeed, "very small," maybe smaller than James K. Polk

 already nicknamed "Napoleon of the Stump."


As a "small man" might Gansevoort Melville have displayed traits of the Small Man Syndrome?  Any sign of a Napoleon Complex?  Unimaginable when we thought him "colossal," but now perhaps worth thinking about.  Depending on their politics and sensibilities, contemporary hearers found the speeches of Gansevoort (abbreviated "Gas." and sometimes maliciously) full of stirring eloquence, or "the veriest gas" (Albany Journal, July 16, 1845).  Possibly some strain of overcompensating Napoleonic ambition inspired at least a bit of the bluster that won Gansevoort Melville his ambiguous fame as an American Anacharsis Cloots, "Orator of the Human Race."

New York Semi-Weekly Courier and Enquirer, March 23, 1844

Anacharsis Cloots

Related posts:

• Glimpse of "tall, very tall" Gansevoort Melville
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/02/glimpse-of-tall-very-tall-gansevoort.html

• Tall after all! Gansevoort Melville the tall democratic spouter
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2012/05/tall-after-all-gansevoort-melville-tall.html

• 1846 memorial by William Cramer https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/09/gansevoort-melville-1846-memorial-by.html

snugged in the arms of Thorvaldsen's Night

Rest therefore, free from all despite,
Snugged in the arms of comfortable night.

These concluding lines of Herman Melville's poem Immolated picture the poetic effusions of youth as metaphorical children, somehow sacrificed yet safe and secure in the embrace of maternal night. Melville's vivid image is borrowed from the popular allegorical depiction of Night as a winged female figure, in flight with her twin children Sleep and Death. 

Night. Samuel Amsler after Bertel Thorvaldsen
© The Trustees of the British Museum

In Melville's time this image of Night was everywhere, reproduced frequently in sculpture, paintings, prints, plates, coins, and jewelry. Nearly all popular versions of the image derive from the 1815 marble relief Night, with Her Children Sleep and Death by Danish-Icelandic artist Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844).

Yes in those days Thorvaldsen's Night was all over the place, even Nathaniel Hawthorne's bed. Sketched there on the headboard by his wife Sophia, according to Julia Ward Howe:

I might almost say that the first time I saw Nathaniel Hawthorne I did not see him. The occasion was a summer Sunday in the forties (1845 I think) on which I had driven out to Concord with Dr. Howe, to spend the day with Mr. and Mrs. Horace Mann. These friends were then established for the summer in a farmhouse immediately adjoining the "Old Manse" from which the lovely "Mosses" were dated. This had then been for some years the residence of the Hawthomes, and I, like many others, had heard with great interest the romantic story of their first establishment there. Rich in friends and in public esteem, they had but a small portion of worldly goods to bestow upon each other. The outlay for the bride's outfit and furniture had corresponded with the limitation of their circumstances. But Mrs. Hawthorne's artistic gifts had enabled her to adorn her house with the beauties which money can only command at second-hand, but which genius can produce at will. The furniture of her bedroom had been made, by her order, of plain wood painted in the creamy color which is now so much in vogue. Upon this background she had drawn in India-ink a number of beautiful designs. At the head of her bedstead was outlined Thorwaldsen's " Night;" at its foot, his " Morning." The wash-stand bore the device of Venus rising from the Sea, copied from Flaxman, and on chairs were drawn his Muses. So much as this I knew by hearsay, but was not the less anxious to verify by sight. I was very glad, therefore, when Mrs. Mann proposed that we should visit her sister.* --The Critic 1.12 - June 18, 1881