Herman Melville, when not otherwise occupied by life’s rigors aboard his whaling ship, the Acushnet, stared out to sea and mentally composed his masterpieces. In Chapter 111 of Moby Dick, he wrote:
“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
“To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian Ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.”
Melville’s florid Victorian prose, like hip hop both loved and reviled, affixes him steadfast to his culture and era, stringing around him like Christmas lights myths and fantasies that expose both the amazing accomplishments of mankind and the horrific crimes it inflicts against nature and itself.
Melville begins the passage speaking of the Pacific — ”Peaceful One” — as a watery grave, ending the lives and dreams of countless people. Nothing is said of ending the lives of countless whales, the purpose for which the ship beneath his feet was constructed.
He is quick to acknowledge he is merely a visitor to these realms, a gypsy rover. He calls the genocidal Californian settlers “the recentest race…
