Afloat On A Sea Of Words

Out Of The Past

James Murray chronicles the great writers who were inspired by Oceania.

IF THE Pacific were ink and its myriad islands desks, it could not have at tracted more writers of a higher calibre than it hss for more than a century.

Moreover, the indigenous cultures of the Pacific are eloquent of the inspiration of its seascapes and landscapes: even your postcard writer seems to rise to greater heights than wish-you-were-here as a re sult of visiting islands that seem not so much to rise as to blossom from the ocean.

Among the authors who have derived inspiration from Pacific vistas, perhaps the greatest is Herman Melville (1819-1891).

For all the grandeur of his creative vision, Melville was born in New York City, and seemed destined for the kind of business career that enables so many of today’s Americans to enjoy Pacific cruises. The depression of 1837 changed his life, how ever, destroying the viability of his and his brother’s business.

In 1839, Melville sailed as a seaman in a ship bound for Liverpool. The voyage was no luxury cruise, but it did provide him with enough material for his first novel, Redburn. After a spell of teaching, Melville decided in 1841 that seafaring was preferable and took a berth aboard the whaling ship Acushnet out of Fairhaven, Massachussetts. After rounding the Horn, Acushnet cruised for six months in the Pa cific, stopping briefly at the Galapagos Is lands to capture sea turtles.

In 1842, Acushnet anchored at Nuku hiva in the Marquesas Islands: a landfall that may be said to have been the true making of Melville the writer. He jumped ship with a mate, Tobias Greene, because they could no longer endure the hardships of life aboard a whaler.

At first it must have seemed to Melville that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire literally in this case, for they were captured by a cannibal tribe, the Ty pees. They were well, indeed idyllically, treated, yet they still feared the reputation of their hosts and left on the whaling ship Lucy Ann, an Australian vessel.

The immediate results of this experi ence were Typee, subtitled A Peep at Po lynesian Life (published 1846) and Omoo, subtitled A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847). Melville’s voyage aboard the Lucy Ann was to lead indi rectly to White Jacket: because of a sit down strike on board (it was an Australian vessel, after all) Melville was jailed in par adise otherwise known as Tahiti for several months. After his release he toured neighbouring islands, signed on another whaler and left the ship in Hawaii.

Melville’s seafaring also provided him

with the material for what is generally con sidered his greatest work, Moby Dick (1851). His saga of Captain Ahab and his pursuit of the Great White Whale, how ever, was not initially well received by the critics, and Melville must occasionally have considered the reputedly cannibal Typees preferable to the critics: after the publication of a succession of books, he gave up trying to live by his writing.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a contemporary of Melville, though they did not meet. Where Melville sought transient adventure on Pacific Islands, Stevenson sought a home where he could stave off the effects of tuberculosis and did so at least to the extent of dying from a cerebral haemorrhage and not TB.

Stevenson studied engineering and law in his birthplace of Edinburgh, His best known work, Treasure Island, owes noth ing of its marvellous evocation of voyage and landfall to his experiences in the Pa cific, for it was published in 1883 and it was not until 1888 that Stevenson, his wife Fanny and stepson Lloyd Osborne sailed for the South Seas from San Francisco.

He was to spend the rest of his life in the South Seas. On his first voyage he vis ited the Marquesas, Tahiti and Hawaii. In 1890 he set off for Samoa and established himself at Vailima, where he was to be come known as Tusitala (Teller of Tales).

Stevenson is buried at Vailima and on his headstone is carved the epitaph he wrote for himself. It ends with the words: “. .. home is the hunter, Home from the hill, And the sailor home from the sea.”

It is an epitaph that also fits Jack Lon don (1876-1916), a writer whose real-life adventuring was the matrix for his fiction.

The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Sea Wolf may be London’s best known works, but it is his travel book, The Cruise of the Snark, that celebrates the Pacific is lands: indeed, the inspiration for the cruise itself was Melville’s Typee.

Despite everything including a lub berly crew London’s creative energy was such that he wrote a steady 1000 words a day on his autobiographical novel, Martin Eden, after the Snark left San Francisco for the Pacific. After 27 such days, London saw something that compensated him for all his travail: the summit of Haleakala, towering out of the ocean.

The following day, the Snark rounded Diamond Head and sailed into Honolulu; the launch from the Hawaiian Yacht Club that came out to meet London carried newspapers with reports that his vessel had foundered with all hands.

He sailed from Hawaii for the Marque sas, fetching Nukuhiva after 60 days with out sighting another sail or smoke.

In Nukuhiva London rented the very house in which Robert Louis Stevenson had lived, and explored the areas where Melville had stayed.

After 12 days in the Marquesas London sailed for Hawaii, where once again he learned that the Snark had been sunk. Ob viously this was untrue, but his credit had been wrecked: he sailed to America on the Mariposa to reassure his creditors, did so, returned on the Mariposa and continued his cruise on the Snark to Tahiti, Bora Bora and on to Suva in Fiji.

From Fiji he cruised the Solomons, where he lived on a copra plantation “as near the edge of screaming savagery as any place to be found on this earth.”

His one novel to come out of this period was Adventure , set on a copra plantation.

It is not his best work. The Cruise of the Snark, plus about 30 short stories such as The House of Mapuhi, The Heathen and The Leper are, however, notable in the London canon.

There are those, notably Irving Stone in his classic Sailor on Horseback, who suggests that the cruise was no more than an unprofitable investment in material for writing. Despite this, London did sell the serial rights to Pacific Monthly for $7OOO a price any contemporary writer would be happy to receive but by 1909 Lon don had had enough. He arranged for the Snark to be sailed to Sydney. There it was auctioned, and was then used for black birding in the Solomon Islands.

Of modern writers, James Albert Michener, born 1907 in New York and still writing strongly, has done as much to cel ebrate the Pacific islands with a single work as any writer. The work was, of course, Tales of the South Pacific 1947): the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musi cal, South Pacific. Ever since, Bali Hai has epitomised the magic of the islands.

Indeed, so strong is that island magic that it inspires the notion that William Shakespeare must somehow have had an account of them; for surely Prospero’s is land in The Tempest is Pacific in character.

As Caliban, who can have his counter part in raucous camera-toting tourists, said: “The isle is full of noises/sounds and sweet airs give delight and hurt not.”

To which Sebastian replied: “I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it to his son for an apple.”

Antonio: “And, sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands.” □