Herman Melville's Review of The Sea Lions by James Fenimore Cooper

Vincennes amongst Ice-bergs
from Charles Wilkes, Narrative, 1845 via The Linda Hall Library

COOPER'S NEW NOVEL.

The Sea Lions; or, the Lost Sealers: a Tale of the Antarctic Ocean. By J. Fenimore
Cooper. 2 vols. 12mo. Stringer & Townsend.

AN attractive title, truly. Nor does this last of Cooper‘s novels disappoint the promise held forth on the title-page.

The story opens on the seacoast of Suffolk County, Long Island; and turns mainly upon the mysterious existence of certain wild islands within the Antarctic Circle, whose precise whereabouts is known but to a choice few, and whose latitude and longitude even the author declares he is not at liberty to make known. For this region, impelled by adverse, if not hostile motives, the two vessels, the Sea Lions, in due time sail, under circumstances full of romance.

After encountering a violent gale, described with a force peculiarly Cooper’s, they at last reach the Antarctic seas, finding themselves walled in by “thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.” Few descriptions of the lonely and the terrible, we imagine, can surpass the grandeur of many of the scenes here depicted. The reader is reminded of the appalling adventures of the United States Exploring Ship in the same part of the world as narrated by Wilkes, and of Scoresby’s Greenland narrative. In these inhospitable regions the hardy crews of the Sea Lions winter—not snugly at anchor under the lee of a Dutch shore, nor baking and browning over the ovens by which the Muscovite warms himself—but jammed in, masoned up, bolted and barred, and almost hermetically sealed by the ice. To keep from freezing into crystal, they are fain to turn part of the vessels into fuel. All this, and much more of a like nature, is told in a style singularly plain, downright, and truthful.

At length, after many narrow escapes from icebergs, ice-isles, fields, and floes of ice, the mariners, at least most of them, make good their return to the North, where the action of the book is crowned by the nuptials of Roswell Gardiner, the hero, and Mary Pratt, the heroine. Roswell we admire for a noble fellow; and Mary we love for a fine example of womanly affection, earnestness, and constancy. Deacon Pratt, her respected father, is a hard-handed, hard-hearted, psalm-singing old man, with a very stretchy conscience; intent upon getting to heaven, and getting money by the same course of conduct, in defiance of the scriptural maxim to the contrary. There is a good deal of wisdom to be gathered from the story of the Deacon.

Then we have one Stimpson, an old Kennebunk boatsteerer, and Professor of Theology, who, wintering on an iceberg, discourses most unctuously upon various dogmas. This honest old worthy may possibly be recognised for an old acquaintance by the readers of Cooper’s novels. But who would have dreamt of his turning up at the South Pole? One of the subordinate parts of the book is the timely conversion of Roswell, the hero, from a too latitudinarian view of Christianity to a more orthodox, and hence a better belief. And as the reader will perceive, the moist, rosy hand of our Mary is the reward of his orthodoxy. Somewhat in the pleasant spirit of the Mahometan, this; who rewards all the believers with a houri.

Upon the whole, we warmly recommend the Sea Lions; and even those who more for fashion’s sake than anything else, have of late joined in decrying our national novelist, will in this last work, perhaps, recognise one of his happiest. 
-- The Literary World 4 (April 28, 1849): 370

https://books.google.com/books?id=pzkZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA370&lpg=PA370&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

For more online texts of book reviews by Herman Melville, see

• Review of J. Ross Browne's Etchings of a Whaling Cruise
• Mr. Parkman's Tour (review of The Oregon Trail)
• Cooper's New Novel (review of The Sea Lions)
• A Thought on Book-Binding (review of The Red Rover)
• Hawthorne and His Mosses

Critical texts of the five known book reviews by Herman Melville are presented in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860.

Related post:

• Book reviews in manuscript

Herman Melville's Review of Etchings of a Whaling Cruise by J. Ross Browne

Except for the widely anthologized review essay Hawthorne and His Mosses, Herman Melville's known book reviews have been hard enough to find in print, and impossible to get online. Melvilliana began to fill the online gap with exclusive images and text of Mr. Parkman's Tour, Melville's unsigned 1849 review of The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman, Jr. To continue with this project of making Melville's book reviews more generally accessible, here is the first of Melville's known reviews for the New York Literary World, published March 6, 1847. Melville looks into two books, actually: Browne's Etchings together with Sailors' Life and Sailors' Yarns by John Codman, writing under the pseudonym of Captain Ringbolt.

In print, edited manuscript-based versions of the complete text are available in the Northwestern-Newberry editon of Melville's Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860; and in the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick. The New York Public Library, Archives & Manuscripts Division has the manuscript of this review in Melville's handwriting with the Duyckinck family papers, along with other reviews by Melville for the Literary World.

Text below is transcribed from pages 105-6 of The Literary World Volume 1 - 1847 at the University of Minnesota, as digitized by Google Books.

Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes of a Sojourn on the Island of Zanzibar. To which is appended, a Brief History of the Whale Fishery; its Past and Present Condition. By J. Ross Browne. Illustrated with numerous Engravings on Steel and Wood. Harper & Brothers: 1846. 8vo.
Sailors’ Life and Sailors’ Yarns. By Captain Ringbolt. New York: C. S. Francis & Co. 1847. 12mo.

FROM time immemorial many fine things have been said and sung of the sea. The days have been, when sailors were considered veritable mermen; and the ocean itself as the peculiar theatre of the romantic and wonderful. But of late years there have been revealed so many plain, matter-of-fact details connected with nautical life, that, at the present day, the poetry of salt water is very much on the wane. The perusal of Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast," for instance, somewhat impairs the relish with which we read Byron’s spiritual “Address to the Ocean.” And when the noble poet raves about laying his hands upon the ocean’s mane (in other words manipulating the crest of a wave), the most vivid image suggested is, that of a valetudinarian bather at Rockaway, spluttering and choking in the surf, with his mouth full of brine.

Mr. J. Ross Browne’s narrative tends still further to impair the charm with which poetry and fiction have invested the sea. It is a book of unvarnished facts, and with some allowances for the general application of an individual example, unquestionably presents a faithful picture of the life led by the twenty thousand seamen employed in the seven hundred vessels which now pursue their game under the American flag. Indeed, what Mr. Dana has so admirably done in describing the vicissitudes of the merchant-sailor’s life, Mr. Browne has very creditably achieved with respect to that of the hardy whaleman’s. And the book which possesses this merit, deserves much in the way of commendation. The personal narrative interwoven with it, also, cannot fail to enlist our sympathies for the adventurous author himself. The scenes presented are always graphically and truthfully sketched, and hence fastidious objections may be made to some of them, on the score of their being too coarsely or harshly drawn. But we take it, that as true, unreserved descriptions, they are in no respect faulty; and, doubtless, the author never dreamed of softening down or withholding anything with a view of rendering his sketches the more attractive and pretty. The book is eminently a practical one, and written with the set purpose of accomplishing good by revealing the simple truth. When the brutal tyranny of the Captain of the “Styx” is painted without apology or palliation, it holds up the outrageous abuse to which seamen, in our whaling marine, are actually subjected, or rather, which demands legislation. Mr. Browne himself, it seems, was, to some extent, the victim of the tyranny of which he complains, and, upon this ground, the personal bitterness in which he at times indulges, may be deemed excusable.

As the book professes to embrace a detailed account of all that is interesting in the business of whaling, and essentially possesses this merit, one or two curious errors into which the author has unaccountably fallen, may, without captiousness, be pointed out. We are told, for example, of a whale’s roaring when wounded by the harpoon. We can imagine the veteran Coffins, and Colemans, and Maceys of old Nantucket, elevating their brows at the bare announcement of such a thing. Now the creature in question is as dumb as a shad, or any other of the finny tribes; and no doubt, if Jonah himself could be summoned to the stand, he would cheerfully testify to his not having heard a single syllable, growl, grunt, or bellow engendered in the ventricle cells of the leviathan, during the irksome period of his incarceration therein.

That in some encounters with the sperm whale a low, indistinct sound apparently issues from the monster, is true enough. But all Nantucket and New Bedford are decided as to the causes which produce the phenomenon. Many suppose, however, that it is produced, not by the creature itself, but by the peculiar motion, in the water, of the line which is attached to the harpoon. For, if upon being struck, the whale “sounds” (descends), as is usually the case, and remains below the surface for any length of time, the rope frequently becomes as stiff as the cord of a harp, and the struggles of the animal keep it continually vibrating.

Considering the disenchanting nature of the revelations of sea-life, with which we are presented in Mr. Browne's book, we are inclined to believe that the shipping agents in our various cities, by the merchants of New Bedford, will have to present additional inducements to “enterprising and industrious young Americans of good moral character,” in order to persuade them to embark in the fishery. In particular, the benevolent old gentleman in Front street (one of the shipping agents of whom our author discourseth), who so politely accosted Browne and his comrade, upon their entering his office for the purpose of seeking further information touching the rate of promotion in the whaling service—this old gentleman, we say, must hereafter infuse into his address still more of the suaviter in modo.

As unaffectedly described by Browne, the scene alluded to is irresistibly comic. The agent’s business, be it understood, consists in decoying “green hands” to send on to the different whaling ports. A conspicuous placard, without the office, announces to the anxious world, that a few choice vacancies remain to be filled in certain crews of whalemen about to sail, upon the most delightful voyages imaginable (only four years’ long). To secure a place, of course, instant application should be made.

Our author and his friend, attracted by the placard, hurry up a ladder, to a dark loft above, where the old man lurks like a spider in the midst of his toils. But a single glance at the gentlemanly dress and white hands of his visitors, impresses the wily agent with the idea that, notwithstanding their calling upon him, they may very possibly have heard disagreeable accounts of the nature of whaling. So, after making a bow, and offering a few legs of a chair, he proceeds to disabuse their minds of any unfavorable impressions. Succeeding in this, he then becomes charmingly facetious and complimentary; assures the youths that they need not be concerned because of their slender waists and silken muscles, for those who employed him were not so particular about weight as beauty. In short, the captains of whaling vessels preferred handsome young fellows who dressed well, and conversed genteelly—in short, those who would reflect credit upon the business of tarring down rigging, and cutting up blubber. Delighted with the agreeable address of the old gentleman, and with many pleasant anticipations of sea-life, the visitors listen with increased attention. Whereupon the agent waxes eloquent, and enlarges upon his animating theme in the style parliamentary. “A whaler, gentleman,” he observes, “is the home of the unfortunate—the asylum of the oppressed,” &c., &c., &c.

Duped Browne! Hapless H———! In the end they enter into an engagement with the old gentleman, who subsequently sends them on to New Bedford, consigned to a mercantile house there. From New Bedford the adventurers at length sail in a small whaling barque bound to the Indian Ocean. While yet half dead with sea sickness, the unfortunate H——— is sent by the brutal captain to the masthead, to stand there his allotted two hours, on the look-out for whale-spouts. He receives a stroke of the sun which, for a time, takes away his reason, and endangers his life. He raves of home and friends, and poor Browne, watching by his side, upbraids himself for having been concerned in bringing his companion to such a state. Ere long the vessel touches at the Azores, where H———, being altogether unfit for duty, is left, to be sent home by the American consul.

He never recovered from the effects of his hardships; for, in the sequel, Browne relates that, after reaching home himself, he visited his old friend in Ohio, and found him still liable to temporary prostrations, directly referable to his sufferings at sea.

With a heavy heart our author, after leaving the Azores, weathers the Cape of Good Hope, and enters upon the Indian Ocean. The ship’s company, composed mostly of ignorant, half-civilized Portuguese from the Western Islands, are incessantly quarreling and fighting; the provisions are of the most wretched kind; their success in the fishery is small; and to crown all, the captain himself is the very incarnation of all that is dastardly, mean, and heartless.

We cannot follow Browne through all his adventures. Suffice it to say, that heartily disgusted with his situation, he at length, with great difficulty, succeeds in leaving the vessel on the coast of Zanzibar. There he tarries for some months, and his residence in this remote region (the eastern coast of Africa, near Madagascar) enables him to make sundry curious observations upon men and things, of which the reader of his work has the benefit. From Zanzibar he ultimately sails for home in a merchant brig, and at last arrives in Boston, thoroughly out of conceit of the ocean.

Give ear, now, all ye shore-disdaining, ocean-enamored youth, who labor under the lamentable delusion that the sea—the “glorious sea” is always, and in reality, “the blue, the fresh, the ever free!” Give ear to Mr. J. Ross Browne, and hearken unto what that experienced young gentleman has to say about the manner in which Barry Cornwall has been humbugging the rising generation on this subject. Alas! Hereafter we shall never look upon an unsophisticated stripling, in flowing “duck" trowsers and a light blue jacket, loitering away the interval which elapses before sailing on his maiden cruise, without mourning over the hard fate in store for him. In a ship’s forecastle, alas! he will find no Psyche glass in which to survey his picturesque attire. And the business of making his toilet will be comprised in trying to keep as dry and comfortable as the utter absence of umbrellas, wet decks, and leaky forecastles will admit of. We shudder at all realities of the career they will be entering upon. The long, dark, cold night-watches which, month after month, they must battle out the best way they can; the ship pitching and thumping against the bullying waves—every plank dripping—every jacket soaked—-and the captain not at all bland in issuing his order for the poor fellows to mount aloft, in the icy sleet and howling tempest. “Bless me, Captain, go away up there this excessively disagreeable night?” “Aye, up with you, you lubber—bare, I say, or look out for squalls”—a figurative expression, conveying a remote allusion to the hasty application of a sea-bludgeon to the head.

Then the whaling part of the business.—My young friends, just fancy yourselves, for the first time, in an open boat (so slight that three men might walk off with it), some twelve or fifteen miles from your ship, and about a hundred times as far from the nearest land, giving chase to one of the oleaginous monsters. “Pull, pull, you lubberly hay makers!” cries the boat-header, jumping up and down in the stern-sheets in a frenzy of professional excitement, while the gasping admirers of Captain Marryatt and the sea, tug with might and main at the truckling oars—“Pull, pull, I say; break your lazy backs!” Presently the whale is within “darting distance,” and you hear the roar of the waters in his wake. How palpitating the hearts of the frightened oarsmen at this interesting juncture! My young friends, just turn round and snatch a look at that whale. There he goes, surging through the brine, which ripples about his vast head, as if it were the bow of a ship. Believe me, it’s quite as terrible as going into battle, to a raw recruit.

“Stand up and give it to him!" shrieks the boat-header at the steering oar, to the harpooner in the bow. The latter drops his oar, and snatches his “iron.” It flies from his hands—and where are we then, my lovelies? It‘s all a mist, a crash,—a horrible blending of sounds and sights, as the agonized whale lashes the water around him into suds and vapor—dashes the boat aside, and at last rushes madly through the water, towing after him the half-filled craft, which rocks from side to side, while the disordered crew clutch at the gunwale to avoid being tossed out. Meanwhile, all sorts of horrific edged tools, lances, harpoons, and spades, are slipping about; and the imminent line itself—smoking round the logger-head, and passing along the entire length of the boat—is almost death to handle, though it grazes your person.

But all this is nothing to what follows. As yet, you have but simply fastened to the whale; he must be fought and killed. But let imagination supply the rest; the monster staving the boat with a single sweep of his ponderous flukes; taking its bows between his jaws (as is frequently the case) and playing with it as a cat with a mouse. Sometimes he bites it in twain, sometimes crunches it into chips, and strews the sea with them.

But we forbear. Enough has been said to convince the uninitiated what sort of a vocation whaling in truth is. If further information is desired, Mr. Browne’s book is purchasable, in which they will find the whole matter described in all its interesting details.

After reading the “Etchings of a Whaling Cruise," a perusal of “Sailor’s Life and Sailor’s Yarns” is, in one respect at least, like hearing “the other side of the question.” For, while Browne's is a “Voice from the Forecastle,” Captain Ringbolt hails us from the quarter deck, the other end of the ship. Browne gives us a sailor’s version of sailors’ wrongs, and is not altogether free from prejudices acquired during his little experience on ship-board; Captain Ringbolt almost denies that the sailor has any wrongs, and more than insinuates that sea-captains are not only the best natured fellows in the world, but that they have been sorely maligned. Indeed, he explicitly charges Mr. Dana and Mr. Browne with having presented a decidedly one-sided view of the matter; and he manfully exclaims that the Captain of the Pilgrim—poor fellow!—died too soon to vindicate his character from unjust aspersions. Now, as a class, ship-owners are seldom disposed partially to judge the captains in their employ; and yet we know of a verity, that at least one of the owners of the Pilgrim, an esteemed citizen of the good old town of Boston, will never venture to dispute, that to the extent of his knowledge, at least, Mr. Dana‘s captain was a most “strict and harsh disciplinarian,” which words, so applied by a ship-owner, mean that the man in question was nothing less than what Mr. Dana describes him to have been. But where is Browne’s captain? He is alive and hearty, we presume. Let him come forward then, and show why he ought not to be regarded in the decidedly unfavorable light in which he is held up to us in the narrative we have noticed. Now, for aught we know to the contrary, this same captain of the Styx, who was such a heartless, domineering tyrant at sea, may be quite a different character ashore. In truth, we think this very probable; for the god Janus never had two more decidedly different faces than your sea-captain. Ashore his Nautical Highness has nothing to ruffle him, friends grasp him by the hand, and are overjoyed to see him after his long absence—he is invited out, relates his adventures pleasantly, and everybody thinks what lucky dogs his sailors must have been to have sailed with such a capital fellow. But let poor Jack have a word to say. Why, sir, he will tell you that when they embarked, his Nautical Highness left behind him all his “quips and cranks and wreathed smiles." Very far, indeed, is the captain from cracking any of his jokes with his crew—that would be altogether too condescending. But then there is no reason why he should bestow a curse every time he gives an order—there is no reason why he should never say a word of sympathy to his men. True, in this respect all sea-captains are not alike; but still, there is enough of truth in both Mr. Dana’s and Mr. Browne's statements to justify nearly to the full, the general conclusions to be drawn from what they have said on this subject.

But Captain Ringbolt’s book is very far from being a mere plea for the class to which he belongs. What he has to say upon the matter is chiefly contained in one brief sketch under the head of “Sailor’s Rights and Sailor's Wrongs.” The rest of the book is made up of little stories of the sea, simply and pleasantly told, and withal entertaining.

--The Literary World - March 6, 1847

For more online texts of book reviews by Herman Melville, see

• Mr. Parkman's Tour (review of The Oregon Trail)
• Cooper's New Novel (review of The Sea Lions)
• A Thought on Book-Binding (review of The Red Rover)
• Hawthorne and His Mosses

Critical texts of the five known book reviews by Herman Melville are presented in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860.

Related posts

• J. Ross Browne, 1845 letter to Evert A. Duyckinck

• Book reviews in manuscript at NYPL

"The Kennebecker" (John H. Drew) remembers Tranque

Exhibition on the first floor of the Natural History Museum in Dublin, Ireland
Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

John H. Drew (1834-1890) of Hallowell, Maine sailed to Ireland with Captain Knott on The Sandwich. After tours of Dublin Castle and Trinity College, Drew visited the museum of the Royal Dublin Society where a view of the great whale skeleton there led naturally to thoughts of Moby-Dick:

"Herman Melville ought to see the skeleton of a whale that is in the grand hall. He never would write any more about that one in the island grove of his."

(From "The Kennebecker in Ireland Or, the Cruise of the 'Sandwich,' Capt. A. M. I. Knott" in the Boston Journal, Saturday, March 29, 1879)

Two whale skeletons (neither of a sperm whale) now hang from the ceiling of the National Museum of Ireland-Natural History in Dublin:

". . . of a fin whale, found at Bantry Bay in 1862, and a Humpback whale, which was found stranded at Inishcrone in County Sligo in 1893." --Paramount Hotel

Drew must have seen the Bantry Bay skeleton of a fin whale. Writing as "The Kennebecker," Drew pretends to think this fin whale skeleton even more impressive than the sperm whale skeleton at Tranque that Ishmael describes and ventures to measure in "A Bower in the Arsacides":

The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles. 

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver! pause! one word! whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet forever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. . . . (Moby-Dick, A Bower in the Arsacides)

This 1879 Melville mention by John H. Drew is earlier than others noted in previous Melvilliana posts on The Kennebecker: on the Plum Duff yarn about Herman's younger brother Tom, fondly remembered by the Kennebecker as a rollicking dare-devil sort of sailor; and Kennebecker identified.

Bird’s-eye View of Hallowell, Kennebec County, Maine, 1878
Image Credit: World Maps Online

More on Captain Drew from Emma Huntington Nason's Old Hallowell on the Kennebec (Augusta, Maine, 1909) pages 325-6:

One of the most familiar and honored names in the long list of later Hallowell sea-captains is that of John H. Drew, well known as an able and efficient ship-officer, and as the author of a series of breezy sea-letters and picturesque descriptions of "foreign parts," which, under the signature of "The Kennebecker," appeared in the columns of the Boston Journal.

Captain Drew was born in Chelsea, formerly a part of Hallowell, on the east side of the Kennebec. He was the son of Allen Drew, ship-carver, and a man of marked individuality in the town.

Born and bred in a seafaring community, the son of the old ship-carver early manifested a strong love of the sea and an irresistible longing for the life of the sailor. When but a boy of eleven years, John Drew set sail in the forecastle, and by his own energy and ability rose to the office of captain of the Fearless. He afterwards commanded the Franklin and the Sea Witch, and sailed in many seas and visited almost every foreign port frequented by American vessels. He "doubled the Cape" many times, and was often in the Chinese and East Indian waters.

In reference to Captain Drew and his literary work, the Boston Journal prints this tribute: "Captain Drew was a self-taught man, and the large fund of information which he possessed was the fruit of reading and observation and travel in every part of the globe. He wrote without affectation or straining for effect, in a vigorous, straightforward style, breezy and original, and with the savor of the sea in every line. His racy and vivid descriptions of life on shipboard and of strange experiences in distant ports were widely popular, and few New England writers in this particular department were better known than he."

Captain Drew was always a loyal son of Hallowell, and the Kennebec was the one river of the world to him. His letters abound in local allusions and interesting reminiscences that appeal to many readers. His life was marked by the wild longings and aspirations of the boy, and the well-earned success of a brave, persistent, and genuine lover of the sea. He spent the last two years of his life in the comforts of his own home in Farmingdale, where he died in 1891 [December 11, 1890 according to the obituary notice in the Boston Journal on Friday, December 12, 1890]. The following brief tribute expresses the sentiment of many who knew and esteemed the Kennebecker: "Captain Drew was our friend. When we looked into his flashing eyes and frank, manly countenance, and received his cordial hand-grasp, we could make no mistake in the man. His friendship was unfailing, his helpfulness of the sort that assisted without embarrassing, and his heart was as free from guile as that of a child. Verily, a manly man has gone from the loving embrace of home and friends to join the innumerable multitude." -- Old Hallowell on the Kennebec 

Author of Omoo "a thorough scamp"

Papeete Bay, Tahiti
Le Magasin Pittoresque (Paris, 1843) via Shutterstock

OMOO, OR ADVENTURES IN THE SOUTH SEAS, by Hermann Melville. (Murray’s Home and Colonial Library) two parts.

This is a clever and amusing book, and if no higher qualities were demanded to entitle it to a place in Murray’s Library, it might pass muster. But the general character of the series is so high, that we confess we must regard it, like the Typee and Toby of the same author, as no better than an intruder. It is impossible to judge from internal evidence whether the book is fact or fiction, or, what is most likely, a mixture of both. One thing at least is certain, that Mr. Melville, by his own shewing, is a thorough scamp, utterly destitute of principle, and as far as we can discover in the picture he gives of himself in this his personal narrative, without one redeeming quality. It is impossible to trust to his facts, and the nature of his book forbids it to be received as fiction.

--Royal Cornwall Gazette, Friday, 28 May 1847; found at The British Newspaper Archive

Herman Melville's burned-up Seneca

UPDATE 2: Check out the later Melvilliana post on marginalia in Melville's lost Seneca, as reported by Jay Leyda in vol. 1 of The Melville Log. Leyda described this volume of Seneca's Workes from the collection of Carl Haverlin as the 1620 second edition, not the 1614 edition.

Two volumes of Seneca, old (London, 1746) and older (1614!), are listed in the catalog at Melville's Marginalia Online. One survives in the NYPL Gansevoort-Lansing collection: the 1746 London edition of Seneca's Morals (Sealts 458). That's the volume Herman inscribed to his brother Tom:

"Thomas Melville from Herman Melville"; "My Dear Tom, This is a round-of-beef where all hands may cut & come again. Jan: 26th 1854. Pittsfield. Mass:"

Yow! For more on the book that does exist still in the physical world, see the update at the end, please. Ishmael definitely knew his Seneca:

"What matters it how many masters we have, when it is but one slavery?"
--Seneca's Morals: By Way of Abstract

The 1614 volume (Sealts 457) most likely burned up in a fire. Reportedly it contained Melville's annotations as well as markings:

This copy of Seneca's Works was described to Merton M. Sealts, Jr., by Carl Haverlin, whose library in California was destroyed by fire on 4 January 1954. Among the contents of this 1614 edition of Seneca's Works is "The Life of Lucius Annaeus Seneca Scribed by Iustus Lipsius." --Melville's Marginalia Online

That lost, probably incinerated 1614 volume was published in London by William Stansby. First, let's see if we can find it. No luck just yet at Google Books. How about trusty Hathi Trust? Bingo! And what a treasure! Now that we have in a way rescued Seneca (not Melville's annotated copy you understand, but the same edition he had) from oblivion, let's check and see if this precious volume has Seneca's Letters from a Stoic.

 

His Epistles I see listed second in the Contents. Would those include Letter 47 on masters and slaves? I want to know, being lately re-interested in Seneca as perhaps the guiding spirit behind Ishmael's interrogative challenge, "Who aint a slave? Tell me that" in the first chapter of Moby-Dick.

Yes, that letter XLVII is here.

Only in this volume Seneca's servus "slave" is translated servant. So the whole letter deals with the right treatment of and relation to "servants" which is to say, slaves:

Is hee a servant? But happily a free man in minde. Is he a servant? Shall this hurt him? Shew one that is not. One serveth his lust, another his avarice, another ambition, another feare. I will shew you a man that hath beene Consul, serving an old woman. I will let you see a rich man serving a poore maid: I will shew you the noblest yong men, the very bond-slaves of Players. There is no servitude more foule, then that which is voluntarie. For which cause, thou hast no reason that these disdainfull fellowes should deterre thee from shewing thy selfe affable to thy servants, and not proudly superiour. --The workes of Lvcius Annaevs Seneca p238

But later the more usual translation of servus is "slave," thus:

Is he a slave? His mind may yet be free: is he a slave? Why should this prejudice you against him? Shew me the man who is not a slave. One is a slave to lust; another to covetousness; another to ambition; and all to fear. I can shew you a man of consular dignity, a slave to an old woman; a very rich man a slave to his handmaid; and many a young nobleman, who are the very bond-slaves of players. No slavery is more infamous than that which is voluntary: there is no reason, therefore, that some over-nice persons should deter you from shewing yourself affable and good-humour'd to your servants; instead of carrying yourself proudly as their superior. --The epistles of Lucius Annaeus Seneca

As Ishmael's subtext, Seneca aint no stretch. In the paragraph immediately before the one where Ishmael asks "Who aint a slave?" Ishmael invokes the Roman Stoic by name, presenting his brand of moral philosophy as the most consoling one around for downwardly mobile intellectuals:

The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. --Moby-Dick, Loomings

Well, you can see why Melville liked old books. There's so much to marvel over in the 900-plus pages of this rich and rare old book, The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, both Morrall and Naturall. Translated, I almost forgot to mention, by Thomas Lodge.

More later--time to read.

UPDATE 1: Great news! that one surviving volume of Seneca from Melville's library (Sealts 458), the one he gave to his brother Tom in January 1854, also has the letter on masters and slaves. Numbered 17 for some reason--EPISTLE XVII.--, not the usual 47.

So let's cut again, now from the book Melville lovingly bestowed, Seneca's Morals: By Way of Abstract. Though not from his fifteenth edition which I don't yet see online. This passage I take to be the classical basis not only of Ishmael's "Who aint a slave?" challenge, but also Melville's critique of elitism in Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail:

When we affect to contemn savages, we should remember that by so doing we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also. Who can swear, that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found? Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us—Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks, and Indians—sprung from one head, and made in one image. --Melville's review Mr. Parkman's Tour

Here you go, Seneca on virtue as the true nobility, in this 1806 edition printed by John Prentiss under the headings, "We are all equal by blood" and "Tenderness to servants":

. . . The original of all mankind was the same, and it is only a clear conscience that makes any man noble: for that derives even from heaven itself. It is the saying of a great man, that, If we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes, and all princes from slaves: but fortune has turned all things topsy turvy, in a long story of revolutions. It is most certain, that our beginning had nothing before it, and our ancestors were some of them splendid, others sordid, as it happened. We have lost the memorials of our extraction; and, in reality, it matters not whence we came, but whither we go. Nor is it any more to our honor the glory of our predecessors, than it is to their shame the wickedness of their posterity. We are all of us composed of the same elements; why should we then value ourselves upon our nobility of blood, as if we were not all of us equal, if we could but recover our evidence?

. . . It is worthy of observation, that the most imperious masters over their own servants are, at the same time, the most abject slaves to the servants of other masters. I will not distinguish a servant by his office, but by his manners. The one is the work of fortune, the other of virtue. But we look only to his quality, and not to his merit. Why should not a brave action rather dignify the condition of a servant, than the condition of a servant lessen a brave action? I would not value a man for his cloathes, or degree, any more than I would do a horse for his trapping. What though he be a servant! Shew me any man that is not so, to his lusts, his avarice, his ambition, his palate, to his mistress; nay, to other men's servants; and we are all of us servants to fear: insolent we are, many of us at home; servile and despised abroad; and none are more liable to be trampled upon than those that have gotten a habit of giving affronts by suffering them. What matters it how many masters we have, when it is but one slavery? and whosoever despises that is perfectly free, let his masters be never so many. --Seneca's Morals: By Way of Abstract, 1806 ed.

Related post:

• Marginalia in Melville's lost Seneca 

Dana's 1869 N-words

Harpers' Family Library, Public domain
 via Wikimedia Commons

For the first of two epigraphs to the chapter on White-Jacket in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, Jeannine Marie DeLombard chooses a vivid passage on flogging from Dana's Two Years Before the Mast featuring two exclamatory uses of the N-word, the second in all capital letters. 

• https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/new-cambridge-companion-to-herman-melville/whitejacket-telling-who-is-and-aint-a-slave/4C89FEDFCBCB609C42122EC9E13277AB

In parentheses, DeLombard gives the date as 1840, thus presenting the doubly loaded epigraph as a quotation from the first edition of Two Years Before the Mast.

This date is important for historically grounding the ensuing argument, as DeLombard makes sure to point out early on, at the start of the second paragraph:

"My epigraphs indicate antislavery rhetoric's pervasive influence on antebellum culture." --"White-Jacket: Telling Who Is--and Aint--a Slave" in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge University Press, 2014) page 51.

Maybe so for the second epigraph from Moby-Dick, although a case can be made for Seneca as the inspiration for Melville's philosophical question "Who aint a slave?"

"He is a slave." His soul, however, may be that of a freeman. "He is a slave." But shall that stand in his way? Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear. I will name you an ex-consul who is slave to an old hag, a millionaire who is slave to a serving-maid; I will show you youths of the noblest birth in serfdom to pantomime players! No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed. --Seneca, EPISTLE XLVII

Plato, Seneca, and Aristotle
Devotional and Philosophical Writings, MS Hunter 231 (U.3.4), page 276
Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library

But that first epigraph from Dana's book rather exemplifies the rhetoric of postbellum culture. At any rate, the Dana epigraph is not taken from any publication in 1840 or any year before the Civil War. It really comes from 1869 and after. Dana's 1840 edition reads as follows:

"You see your condition! You see where I've got you all, and you know what to expect!"—"You've been mistaken in me—you didn't know what I was! Now you know what I am!"—"I'll make you toe the mark, every soul of you, or I'll flog you all, fore and aft, from the boy, up!"—"You've got a driver over you! Yes, a slave-driver—a negro-driver! I'll see who'll tell me he is n't a negro slave!" --1840 Two years before the mast

This same passage with "negro-diver" and "negro" instead of the capitalized N-word was quoted in the October 1840 review in the New York Knickerbocker.

Now perhaps Dana in 1869 was aiming to restore the sadistic captain's offensive language as he originally heard it, not as first printed in 1840. OK but even so, you would need to explain that line of reasoning. You can't give 1840 as the publication date of a text first published in 1869. Well you can, it turns out, but you shouldn't. For comparison, Hathi Trust digital library also has the 1869 revised edition with the passage that DeLombard excerpts for her epigraph.

You could say the vocabulary does not matter a bit for DeLombard's argument, that either way, in either version, Dana's sailors are explicitly compared to and treated as slaves. Yes indeed! So why bother at all with the anachronistic (in a discussion focused on Melville's 1850 White-Jacket and antebellum culture) and for us in our time gratuitously offensive 1869 version?

The crazy thing is, on page 284 of her book In the Shadow of the Gallows (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), DeLombard did accurately quote the 1840 passage from the 1981 Penguin edition (where editor Thomas Philbrick followed "the text of the original Harper edition"). And as in the New Cambridge Companion, DeLombard juxtaposed Dana with Ishmael.

https://books.google.com/books?id=zEH8Rjmwi-EC&pg=PA284&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

What's going on?

Northeast and sequestered

Chart of the Galapagos / Surveyed in the Merchant-Ship Rattler
and Drawn by Capt. James Colnett of the Royal Navy in 1793, 1794 ; Engraved by T. Foot

Adapted from my post to the Google group Ishmailites back on 7/10/2011:

Far to the northeast of Charles's Isle, sequestered from the rest, lies Norfolk Isle, and, however insignificant to most voyagers, to me, through sympathy, that lone island has become a spot made sacred by the strangest trials of humanity.

So Melville begins (after three fine poetic epigraphs, that is) his tale of "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow" from "The Encantadas."  Great prose, bad geography? 

John Woram in chapter 9 of his book Charles Darwin Slept Here (Rockville Press, 2005) points out that Melville's Norfolk Isle "would seem to identify the place known today as Isla Santa Cruz.  But it doesn't....The island with this name actually lies due north of Charles, not far away at all, and certainly not sequestered from the rest." 

However, Woram in these appreciative remarks is not reckoning with the geography or rather cartography of Colnett, one of Melville's principal Galapagos authorities.  Colnett's earliest maps show Norfolk Isle in the same relation to Charles that Melville gives, northeast and apart from the others.

Not the later improved version,

but the older one shown above, drawn in 1793-4 and published in A voyage to the South Atlantic (1798). 

• https://hdl.handle.net/2027/aeu.ark:/13960/t9m33jq1j?urlappend=%3Bseq=248

Yep, there's lonely little Norfolk Isle sitting there northeast of Charles and appearing, just like Melville says in the sketch, sequestered.

Melville probably knew at least one of the other names for Norfolk Isle, Indefatigable. When and how did Norfolk get the name Santa Cruz? Could Melville have possibly known the name Isla Santa Cruz or Isle of the Holy Cross as an alternative for Norfolk Isle? If so, oh my! Perfect. If not, the current name gives us a wonderful literary coincidence to consider in light of the literal crosses in "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow" (cross of sticks over the grave of Hunilla's husband Felipe, the crossed letter X in her brother's name Truxill, Hunilla's worn crucifix, her donkey's cross), and remembering too how Melville introduces the place as "sacred." Maria Felisa López Liquete points out in print that

"if Saint/Holy Cross were the island’s name instead of Norfolk, the tale would start and finish with the same word, 'cross' . . . ." --When Silence Speaks: The Chola Widow, in Melville and Women, page 221. 

Related post

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