purple patches to fail to recognise in Redburn streaks of the purest Tyrean dye. Between Melville and Dana the answer is obvious as to "who fished the murex up?"

"It was with a heavy heart and full eyes," says Melville, "that my mother parted from me; perhaps she thought me an erring and a wilful boy, and perhaps I was; but if I was, it had been a hard-hearted world, and hard times that had made me so."

Dressed in a hunting jacket; one leg of his trousers adorned with an ample and embarrassing patch; armed with a fowling piece which his older brother Gansevoort had given him, in lieu of cash, to sell in New York; without a penny in his pocket: Melville arrived in New York on a fine rainy day in the late spring of 1837. Dripping like a seal, and garbed like a housebreaker, he walked across town to the home of a friend of Gansevoort's, where he was dried, warmed and fed.

Philo of Judea has descended to posterity blushing because he had a body. Melville survives, rosy in animality: but his was never Philo's scarlet of shame. Melville was a boy of superb physical vigour : and his blackest plunges of discouragement and philosophical despair were always wholesomely amenable to the persuasions of food and drink. It was Carlyle's conviction that with stupidity and a good digestion man can bear much had Melville been gifted with stupidity, he would have needed only regular meals to convert him into a miracle of cheerful endurance. "There is a savour of life and immortality in substantial fare," he later wrote; "we are like balloons, which are nothing till filled." When Melville sat down to the well-stocked table at his friend's house in New York he was a very miserable boy. But his misery was not invulnerable. "Every mouthful pushed the devil that had been tormenting me all day farther and farther out of me, till at last I entirely ejected him with three successive bowls of Bohea. That night I went to bed thinking the world pretty tolerable after all."

Next day, accompanied by his brother's friend, whose true name Melville disguises under the anonymity of Jones, Melville walked down to the water front.

At that time, and indeed until as recently as thirty years ago, the water front of a great sea-port town like New York showed a towering forest of tall and tapering masts reaching high up above the roofs of the water-side buildings, crossed with slender spars hung with snowy canvas, and braced with a maze of cordage: a brave sight that Melville passes over in morose silence. He postpones until his arrival in Liverpool the spicing of his account with the blended smells of pitch, and tar, and old-ropes, and wet-wood, and resin and the sharp cool tang of brine. Nor does Melville pause to conjure up the great bowsprits and jib-booms that stretched across the street that passed the foot of the slips. Though Melville has left a detailed description of the Liverpool docks—not failing to paint in with a dripping brush the blackest shadows of the low life framing that picturesque scene—it was outside his purpose to give any hint of the maritime achievement of the merchant service in which he was such an insignificant unit.

The maritime achievement of the United States was then almost at the pinnacle of its glory. At that time, the topsails of the United States flecked every ocean, and their captains courageous left no lands unvisited, no sea unexplored. From New England in particular sailed ships where no other ships dared to go, anchoring where no one else ever dreamed of looking for trade. And so it happened, as Ralph D. Paine in his The Old Merchant Marine has pointed out, that “in the spicy warehouses that overlooked Salem Harbour there came to be stored hemp from Luzon, gum copal from Zanzibar, palm oil from Africa, coffee from Arabia, tallow from Madagascar, whale oil from the Antarctic, hides and wool from the Rio de la Plata, nutmeg and cloves from Malaysia." With New England originality and audacity, Boston shipped cargoes of ice to Calcutta. And for thirty years a regular trade in Massachusetts ice remained active and lucrative: such perishable freight out upon a four or five months' voyage across the fiery Equator, doubling Da Gama's cape and steering through the furnace heat of the Indian Ocean. In those days the people of the Atlantic seacoast from Maryland northward found their interests vitally allied with maritime adventure. There was

a generous scattering of sea-faring folk among Melville's forebears of our early national era; and Melville's father, an importing merchant, owed his fortunes in important part, to the chances of the sea. The United States, without railroads, and with only the most wretched excuses for post-roads, were linked together by coasting ships. And thousands of miles of ocean separated Americans from the markets in which they must sell their produce and buy their luxuries. Down to the middle of the last century, one of the most vital interests of the United States was in the sea: an interest that deeply influenced the thought, the legislature and the literature of our people. And during this period, as Willis J. Abbott, in his American Merchant Ships and Sailors has noted, "the sea was a favourite career, not only for American boys with their way to make in the world, but for the sons of wealthy men as well. That classic of New England seamanship Two Years Before the Mast was not written until the middle of the 19th century, and its author went to sea, not in search of wealth, but of health. But before the time of Richard Henry Dana, many a young man of good family and education-a Harvard graduate, like him, perhaps-bade farewell to a home of comfort and refinement and made his berth in a smoky, fetid forecastle to learn the sailor's calling. There was at that time less to engage the activities and arouse the ambitions of youth than now, and the sea offered a most promising career. . . . Ships were multiplying fast, and no really lively and alert seaman need stay long in the forecastle." The brilliant maritime growth of the United States, after a steady development for two hundred years, was, when Melville sailed in 1837, within twenty-five years of its climax. It was to reach its peak in 1861, when the aggregate tonnage belonging to the United States was but a little smaller than that of Great Britain and her dependencies, and nearly as large as the combined tonnage of all other nations of the world, Great Britain excepted. Vanished fleets and brave memories-a chronicle of America which had written its closing chapters before the Civil War!

But this state of affairs,-if, indeed, he was even vaguely

conscious of its existence,-left Melville at the time of his first shipping, completely cold. It is doubtless true that Maria would have respected him more if he had attempted to justify his sea-going by assuring her that at that time it was to no degree remarkable for seamen to become full-fledged captains and part owners at the age of twenty-one, or even earlier. And Maria would have listened impressed to such cogent evidence as the case of Thomas T. Forbes, for example, who shipped before the mast at the age of thirteen, and was commander of the Levant at twenty; or the case of William Sturges, afterwards the head of a firm which at one time controlled half the trade between the United States and China, who shipped at seventeen, and was a captain and manager in the China trade at nineteen. But such facts touched Melville not at all. "At that early age," he says, "I was as unambitious as a man of sixty." Melville's brother, Tom, came to be a sea-captain. Melville's was a different destiny.

So he trudged with his friend among the boats along the water front, where, after some little searching, they hit upon a ship for Liverpool. In the cabin they found the suave and bearded Captain, dapperly dressed, and humming a brisk air as he promenaded up and down: not such a completely odious creature, despite Melville's final contempt for him. The conversation was concluded by Melville signing up as a "boy," at terms not wildly lucrative for Melville.

"Pray, captain," said Melville's amiable bungling friend, "how much do you generally pay a handsome fellow like this?" "Well," said the captain, looking grave and profound, "we are not so particular about beauty, and we never give more than three dollars to a green lad."

Melville's next move was to sell his gun: an experience which gives him occasion to discourse on pawn shops and the unenviable hardships of paupers. With the two and a half dollars that he reaped by the sale of his gun, and in almost criminal innocence of the outfit he would need, he bought a red woollen shirt, a tarpaulin hat, a belt, and a jack-knife. In his improvidence, he was ill provided, indeed, with everything calculated to make his situation aboard ship at all comfortable,

or even tolerable. He was without mattress or bed-clothes, or table-tools; without pilot-cloth jackets, or trousers, or guernsey frocks, or oil-skin suits, or sea-boots and the other things which old seamen used to carry in their chests. As he himself says, his sea-outfit was "something like that of the Texan rangers, whose uniform, they say, consists of a shirt collar and a pair of spurs." His purchases made, he did a highly typical thing: "I had only one penny left, so I walked out to the end of the pier, and threw the penny into the water."

That night, after dinner, Melville went to his room to try on his red woollen shirt before the glass, to see what sort of a looking sailor he would make. But before beginning this ritual before the mirror, he "locked the door carefully, and hung a towel over the knob, so that no one could peep through the keyhole." It is said that throughout his life Melville clung to this practice of draping door-knobs. "As soon as I got into the shirt," Melville goes on to say, "I began to feel sort of warm and red about the face, which I found was owing to the reflection of the dyed wool upon my skin. After that, I took a pair of scissors and went to cutting my hair, which was very long. I thought every little would help in making me a light hand to run aloft."

Next morning, before he reached the ship, it began raining hard, so it was plain there would be no getting to sea that day. But having once said farewell to his friends, and feeling a repetition of the ceremony would be awkward, Melville boarded the ship, where a large man in a large dripping peajacket, who was calking down the main-hatches, directed him in no cordial terms to the forecastle. Rather different was Dana's appearance on board the brig Pilgrim on August 14, 1834, "in full sea-rig, with my chest containing an outfit for a two or three years' voyage." Nor did Dana begin in the forecastle.

In the dark damp stench of that deserted hole, Melville selected an empty bunk. In the middle of this he deposited the slim bundle of his belongings, and penniless and dripping spent the day walking hungry among the wharves: a day's