It Happened Here -- Drawn to Sea

It was a fairly large house.  Plain. Utilitarian. The latest in a series of moves. The Melvills had always moved, choosing houses that reflected their circumstances, or, more often, their aspirations. The first house at 6 North Pearl Street in New York City was a few steps from the waterfront. The second house. a larger house on Cortlandt Street, was followed by a grand house on Bleeker Street, then a fashionable house on Broadway. Two years later, in 1830 Allan Melvill, a dealer in imported fine fashion accessories and his family  was on the move again.  But this time it was to a house less grand, less fashionable, and in Albany--less convenient for his creditors and closer to his wife's relatives to whom he would appeal for help to cover his daily expenses. Allan Melvill's business was bankrupt. He had lost out to competitors who worried less about refining their own good taste, than in knowing what their customers wanted. In two years he would be dead after having made a start in an Albany branch of a cap and fur business, and not much of a start in diminishing the mountain of debt that had followed him.

Gansevoort Melville, the family's oldest son had followed his father into the cap and fur business. (Maria Melville had added a final "e" to the family name, perhaps to signify a break with the past.) And a position had been found in the firm for the second oldest son, Herman, now that college was out of the question for him. The Melville family's fortunes had begun to rise when a fire in 1835 destroyed the family store and most of its stock, then the Panic of 1837 collapsed their remaining hopes. In 1838 seeking to reduce expenses, they moved to the house in Lansingburgh, adjacent to the north end of Troy.

Herman began studying for job as a surveyor on the Erie Canal but after completing his studies no job was forthcoming.  Perhaps it was while he waited on his front porch or strolled on the grassy shore opposite his home and watched Hudson's waters rolling ceaselessly to the great port of New York that he thought of his walks with his father to the waterfront.  In Moby Dick he would recall that scene:

        Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean

        reveries. Some leaning against spiels; some seated upon pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships

        from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better peep. But these are all landsmen; of      

        week days pent up in lath and plaster-- tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this?              

       Are the green fields gone? What do they here?  

Inevitably like some of the thousands of watching landsman he would be drawn to sea. In June 1839 he shipped out on the packet St.Lawrence as a cabin boy, to Liverpool from the port of New York. 

By the end of October he was back, back into the family drama of bill paying and survival and doing a short and unhappy stint as a teacher in Greenbush, some thirteen miles distant. June 1840 brought another scheme to find work out west. With a friend, Eli Fly, Herman Melville crossed the Hudson to the mouth of the Erie Canal. From there it was a succession of canal boats and steamers until he was at the farm of his uncle, Thomas Gansevoort, in Galena Illinois, on the Mississippi.  But his mother's brother was struggling, himself and Herman returned, unsuccessful, to his mother's house on the banks of the Hudson. There, he no doubt watched the succession of freezes and thaws when the ice chunks, large and small marched in perfect unison to the sea. After months of frustrated idleness he could wait no longer and prevailed on his brother to take him to the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts in the depths of winter. In January 1841 Herman Melville signed onto the crew of the whaler Acushnet. He would be gone until the summer of 1844.  In those four years he would experience a lifetime of adventures--whaling, jumping ship, finding another ship, participating in a "mutiny", imprisonment, and living among Polynesian "cannibals" before joining the crew of an American frigate and returning home again.  

Locked away in an upstairs bedroom he wrote down his adventures. His brother Gansevoort asked a friend going to England to take his manuscript with him and show it to a publisher there.  Intrigued, the publisher published it but insisted Typee: a Peep at Polynesian Life be published as fiction because some of it seemed too exotic to be believed by Westerners. Herman Melville's work became an overnight success and was soon published in America.  The Brooklyn Eagle. where Walt Whitman  

NYSHM at Melville's Home. Across 1st Avenue, the Hudson rolls to the sea.

worked, and often reviewed books described it as 'a strange, graceful, readable book...as a book to hold in one's hand and pore dreamily over of a summer's day, it is unsurpassed'  (in contemporary parlance--a great summer read.)  Trading on his initial success, from the same upstairs room, Melville produced Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. 

 In 1847 he would marry and leave his family-home in Lansingburgh,  for New York City, then Pittsfield, then New York, again.  Five books would follow in the next four years, the last one larger, more complex and more multi-layered than all the rest. Ultimately its poor showing would frustrate and discourage Melville and he would forsake literature for the security of a job as a New York Customs inspector. It would not be until the second decade of the twentieth century that Moby Dick would be appreciated as great literature.