Mark Twain: “Following the Equator” Chapters 1–40: The Pacific

“In Captain Cook’s time (1778), the native population of the islands was estimated at 400,000; in 1836 at something short of 200,000, in 1866 at 50,000; it is to-day, per census, 25,000. All intelligent people praise Kamehameha I and Liholiho for conferring upon their people the great boon of civilization. I would do it myself, but my intelligence is out of repair, now, from over-work.” (443)

The last of Mark Twain’s great travel narratives, Following the Equator, was published in 1897. It is also his last major book published during his lifetime. It shows the same growing pessimism about civilization that we see in much of Twain’s later writing. It is certainly the most critical of the travel narratives. While the previous narratives tended to make fun of the tourist or “the tramp abroad,” Following the Equator is an important attack on a world system driven by greed and exploitation. It is also one of the most important anti-imperialist documents of the turn of the twentieth century. The book documents Twain’s 1895–1896 lecture tour across the Pacific, Australia, India, and Africa. It is a lecture tour through the zones of nineteenth century empire building. The result is a work that hits most of the major points of contemporary scholarship on empire.

It is not a bleak, ponderous text. It maintains much of the lively musings that made Twain’s earlier travelogues so enjoyable, but these are less frequent and are marginal to his larger goal: the exposure of the exploitation of people at the heart of empire. Like the declining population of Hawai’i shows, the rise of Europe accompanied a massive death toll. Intra-European wars of the twentieth century may have maximized the technological capacity to kill, but in many ways the cost in lives of the nineteenth century was just as great. (See Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts to see how empire devastated traditional famine relief structures leading to tens of millions of deaths.)

Twain is aware of the role unfree labor migration played in empire, both the expulsion of excess populations of criminals and the economically excessive to the colonies and the migrations of semi-forced labor to work the plantations and the ships. Twain includes hard numbers on the wages, the costs of contract labor, and the profits of sugar plantations to quantify the extent of exploitation.  It is summed up: “It is easy to understand why the Queensland sugar planter should want the Kanaka recruit: he is cheap.” (463) The labor migrations caused by the growth of plantation in the Pacific had a deep history in the transportation of working class convicts.

Another observation Twain made that was new at the time but would not surprise any historian today is the important role of the missionary in empire building in the Pacific. He exposes the missionaries as an adjunct of the capitalist exploitation of the Pacific, benefiting—like capitalists—from the openness forced on the Pacific by capitalists. They worked to enforce class discipline, bringing just enough education to prepare worker for the needs of the capitalist class, and, most dangerously, advertised the idea the European civilization has something to offer outside of terror and exploitation.

And money.

Finally, for Twain, the global system created by empire is profoundly unstable. A rather funny anecdote suggests this disorder. It is about a child who was born just as the ship was crossing the International Date Line. This child will grow up never knowing its birthday (there was debate whether it was on a Sunday or a Tuesday). This is a problem that is only possible in a world force together through incredible powers. There are many other examples of this type of disorder—cultural and economic—in this book. “The child will never know its own birthday. It will always be choosing first one and then the other, and will never be able to make up its mind permanently. This will breed vacillation and uncertainty in its opinions about religion, and politics, and business, and sweet-hearts, and everything, and will undermine its principles, and rot them away, and make the poor thing characterless, and its success in life impossible.” (457)

Through his tour of the Pacific, Twain was able to reflect on the history of global capitalism in the Pacific, intertwining as it did with empire, and revealed its most vicious consequences. By just travelling through the empires and honestly describing social realities, Twain produced one of the most important political critiques of his era.

 

Mark Twain, “Roughing It” (1872): Part Two

“His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of it which were sent on board the ships). The heart was hung up in a native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook it for the heart of a dog. One of these children grew to be a very old man, and died in Honolulu a few years ago. Some of Cook’s bones were recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ship.” (919)

What does the killing of Captain Cook in Hawaii have to do with territorial Nevada, despite both appearing in Mark Twain’s Roughing It? Both are part of the scope of American imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century and both constituted domains of the emerging American empire, eventually to reach beyond the continent into the Pacific. The scale of the second half of  Roughing It is much larger than the first half. In the first half, we follow Twain as he travels by Overland Stage Coach to Nevada, via Mormon Utah. We learn about the Pony Express and the mythology of frontier desperadoes. When Twain arrived in Nevada he quickly got caught up in the silver mining bubble economy and makes an attempt at prospecting. This effort is a failure (although he was a theoretical millionaire for a few days). This put Twain into a hopeless quandary. He had gotten used to the idea of not working and now he was in need of a job. Twain documents his work history, which is quite impressive. I particularly liked his stint at a bookstore. “I had been a bookseller’s clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave ma  furlough and forgot to put a limit on it.” (744) Ah, that is how I felt as a copy-editor, although my furlough was self-imposed. I am in common cause with Mark Twain. Work (if we absolutely must) should be our own benefit, not for the employers.

Etching from “Roughing It”

Contained within Roughing It is an explanation of how Twain entered into work as a journalist in Nevada. It was not hard for him. Some of his writings had appeared in print before and he was given a staff job as a junior city editor with a salary of $25 a month (later raised). And then he walked a beat around Virginia City. We learn how he managed slow news days, how he got the scoop on the school budget form a competing newspaper. Most interesting is the all too familiar journalistic fascination with conflict, scandal, and violence. Murders, apparently made Twain the happiest man in the territory for it promised something to writer about.

With his job as a journalist secured, Twain eventually become a Western writer of some renown, but he does not focus too much on his career, using the space in Roughing It to discuss the social and economic conditions of the territory. The chapters on the silver boom are a useful study of an economy based on speculation. It was much like a game Old Maid where the deck had 50 Old Maid cards. Most people’s claims were worthless or near enough. So the game became convincing others of the inherent wealth of this claim or that claim. In some cases, this meant even “salting” mines with silver in order to create the impression of future wealth, but only long enough to sell the shares in the mine to some sucker. However, since everyone was in on the game, it does not seem that “exploitation” is the right word to use. Twain says less about the working class in the territory. We know that there were people who worked for wages. This did not mean they forsook the brinkmanship of prospecting.

Much of his concern is with with violence and the legal order. It is not quite right to say that the violence was a product of a lack of state presence. There were courts, juries, police, and executions. None of this really prevented the violence that was integral to the social network. If we take him seriously people’s reputations were tied up into their histories of violence. “If an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire if he was capable, honest, industrious, but — had he killed his man?” (781) Juries existed but seemed to not convict many people (“only two persons have suffered the death penalty.”) Twain associates this violence and vice with the prosperity of the region. “A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.” (798) But crime was not the only sign of vibrancy. Twain puts the emergence of a literary journal at the same level.

Twain next takes us on his adventures in California and Hawaii before closing the narrative. Roughing It is as much a story of Twain’s quest for fulfillment and satisfaction with life as it is a document on the Nevada frontier. I find some commonality with Herman Melville’s early work, where characters existed in a constant state of discontent. As he described the thoughts that led him on his first trip to Hawaii, he confessed this nature. “I was out of debt, but my interest in my work was gone; for my correspondence being a daily one, without rest of respite, I got unspeakably tired of it. I wanted another change. The vagabond institute was strong upon me. Fortune favored and I got a new berth and  delightful one.” (862) His “moral” at the end of the book addresses how creativity emerges from this spirit. “If you are of any acocunt, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are ‘no account,’ go away from home, and then you will have to work.” (960)

The final section of the book explores his half year in Hawaii as a journalist and lecturer. Here we are given a darker side of the U.S. Empire as it was completing its conquest of the islands. Of course, the Empire was alive and well in Nevada as well, but since we only see the frontier there from the perspective of white men. He has a few asides about Chinese, but he simply repeats the stereotype of the model minority: well-behaved and hard working. In Hawaii, we see the full extent of American commercial power over other people through his tour of the islands and his visits to the plantations. This is carefully set aside a retelling of the story of the killing of Cook, one of Hawaii’s first blows against Western imperialism in the Pacific. However, Twain is not really interested in a story of economic exploitation in the empire (this would come later in his work). He is acutely aware at this point of the culture wars, between the missionaries and Hawaiian society. We meet, for instance, Christian converts but no plantation workers.

Early American Honolulu

Herman Melville, “The Piazza Tales” (1856): “I would prefer not to”

Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales, collecting five short stories and an introductory tale, include two stunning stories of resistance and their limits: “Bartleby, The Scrinvner” and “Benito Cereno.” The are often put in the same category as Melville’s greatest prose works, so it is notable that they both have at the core an act of seemingly successful rebellion. The Piazza Tales came out in 1856, collecting five of the pieces he wrote in the previous two years for Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. 

“Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” is endlessly fascinating and can be re-read for new meaning almost every time. The narrator is an employer at a law office, who hires a small group of copyists (scriveners), whose job it is to copy and double-check the accuracy of various of the copies. We have a mini-example of the Pequod here, with a diverse (but much smaller group) of workers, that accomplish their task with little oversight. The profession has rules that its members know. The boss, lacking any bold scheme like an Ahad, is simply content to manage the smooth-working office. Bartleby enters as the workload of the office increases. He is a diligent worker, who comes in every day and does his job, apparently without major defect. He does not seem to eat much except nuts and eventually takes to sleeping in the office. However, he also develops a strange habit of refusing requests from his employer. To all requests he responds: “I would prefer not to,” or some variation of. It is not that he does not do his work. His refusal is only when asked by the boss. This torments the narrator who has authority but is not used to using it. He seems to prefer an office well running without the need to apply authority.

This probably describes most middle managers in office settings, always careful to assert their authority, but afraid to undermine the harmony of the office with a too authoritarian intervention. Having recently worked in an office, I can attest that most of the time discipline was enforced morally. “Don’t you want to help your co-workers?” “Do work that you can be proud of.” Explicit threats of being fired were not there. In this context, Bartleby’s resistance to the authority — and the banality — of office life is quite effective. Bartleby is brilliantly calling the employers’ bluff but forcing him to use more explicit uses of power.  In response to a refusal to cooperative, the narrator responds: “I am seriously displeased. I am pained, Bartleby I had thought better of you.” (660) That power beings as moral pleading, expressions of concern, threats of firing, and eventually the introduction of state authorities. Only the state is able to finally remove him from the office (an act the narrator cannot bear to witness although he precipitated it). Eventually Bartleby dies of starvation, literally bored to death from his job. His strategy may be the ultimate form of resistance and the exact way to challenge the power of the petty tyrants in offices around the world. Instead of refusing to work, one works but refuses to listen to the silly preachings and time-wasting dictates of those with a slightest bit of authority.

“Benito Cereno” is about a ship master who comes across another ship that had just experienced a mutiny by slaves. The transatlantic slave trade had already ended, banned by Congress in 1808, but the threat of slave revolt was still very alive in the minds of many Americans, Nat Turner’s revolt taking place in 1830. The story (really a short novel) is told through two sides. First from the perspective of a fictionalized Amasa Delano and then through an official report. The mutiny actually took place prior to Delano’s arrival, but the enslaved men and women kept the captain, Benito Cereno, alive in order to sail back to Africa. Delano is actually walking into a “world turned upside down” but does not know it. Cereno is commanded by the leader of the mutiny, a former slave called Bado. The reality of the situation is revealed at the end the mutiny is suppressed and Bado executed. This leads to the death of Cereno who is grief stricken by Bado’s death, turning on its head the cliché of the loyal slave.

In some ways, this suggests the fragility of power on the ship, in which captains really do keep their authority with the consent of the crew and the (at times) backing of external state powers. More broadly, the story speaks to the reality of empire in the 19th century. They were apparently ruled by whites, but really functioned through the labor and efforts of the enslaved.

“The Encantadas” reminded me of Mardi in how they toured a series of mystical islands. Lacking a narrative, the story is really more of a tourist guide to these various locations, some with hierarchical states, some left to nature, and yet others as libertarian realms for runaway sailors and slaves. While life if brutal there: full of institutions of power such as jails and gravestones testifying to unspoken horrors. In this sense it parallels the reality of the Atlantic world. Sketch seven of the story even has an example of a war between a colonial state (which proclaimed itself a republic) and a population of creole rebels. “Nay, it was no democracy at all, but a permanent Riotocracy, which gloried in having no law but lawlessness.” (791) As other sketches show, slavery is worked into the dynamics of life on the Encantadas.

However, like the Atlantic world system itself–and the emerging global capitalism that Melville knew about first hand–there are built in wild spaces where freedom can be secured and tyranny contested.  The section on runaways shows this. But by and large we see, in the Encantadas, the brutal extremes that authority will go to assert itself. “Nor have there been wanting instances where in inhumanity of some captains has led them to wreak a secure revenge upon seamen who have given their caprice or pride some singular offense. Thrust ashore upon the scorching marl, such mariners are abandoned to perish outright, unless by solitary labors they succeed in discovering some precious dribblets of moisture oozing from a rock or stagnant in a mountain pool.” (816) It seems to me that “The Encantadas” should be read as a likely description of a world of unrestrained capitalism.

The reality of the Enchantadas

This is the world that capitalism created. Melville was genius at describing it in almost all of his works. Much of his significance for us is in how he exposed the violence of empire and commerce. With this in mind, I think we should learn from Bartleby and “prefer not to” cooperate a bit more often.

 

H. P. Lovecraft, “Collected Stories” (Conclusions)

I have just finished up with the Library of America collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories. While I have read some of his stories previously, I never read through his major stories systematically before.  Five stories wrapped up the volume. “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is about a young student who visits the Massachusetts town of Innsmouth to discover a cult worshiping Dagon, and worse a population of half-fish people. In the end he decides to embrace his family legacy and embrace a transformation into one of those creatures. “The Dreams of the Witch House” connects the Cthulhu mythos to new developments in uncertainty in math and science at the turn of the last century. In this story, a math student investigates the Arkham “Witch House” and learns of its role as a portal. It is particularly interesting for its use of mathematics as a device of horror and the unknown. The student ends up a sacrifice victim of yet another cult to the Elder gods.  “The Thing on the Doorstep” tells the story of the killing of an aparently insane man, who was able to reside in other people’s bodies and even corpses. “The Shadow Out of Time” is about the “Great Race” of aliens who visit Earth through body possessions. Finally, “The Haunter of the Dark” is notable as the only story in the collection with Nyarlathotep as an antagonist.

I avoided reading Lovecraft in my youth, despite an almost total mastery of his works by a fair number of my close friends. I knew the name early enough and he may even be the first American writer I knew by name (saving for children’s writers, of course). Of course, I knew of his works my osmosis and by the massive cultural influence he had. Lovecraft’s works have inspired writings that far surpass in quantity his original works. (Can anyone show me an anthology of stories inspired by the works of Herman Melville?) He has also inspired board games, role playing games, music, a “NecronomiCon,” and more B-films than most of us would want to watch. As I was considering before, there is something odd about this popularity considering the values of the American people, focusing on progress, freedom, personal autonomy, equality (and let’s not forget Christianity). If we look at some of the major components of Lovecraft’s writings we can see that they seem to run at odds with these values. In other words, Lovecraft is perhaps not what Tocqueville would have predicted to be one of the most important cultural artifacts of a democracy.

1. Cargo Cult religions pop up all over the world based on the worship of indifferent, powerful, aliens.
2. Science fails to explain the world.
3. Fear is the primary emotion of humanity.
4. Knowledge should be feared and the curious are punished.
5. The senses are incapable of describing most of the universe.

So what can we make of this?

I am wondering now if Lovecraft’s popularity and cultural influence is akin to the rise of religious fundamentalism or new religious movements in this country. (I cannot speak to Lovecraft’s popularity outside of the English-speaking world. He is certainly mostly unknown in Taiwan.) Perhaps we can return to Lovecraft’s conservatism for an answer to this. The core of his conservatism seems to be directed at the consequences of industrialization: the city, immigration, manufacturing.  In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” a small town is literally left behind by the rest of the world.  What was once a vibrant merchant town because a marginalized fishing town, just barely scraping by.  That trope shows up in other stories as well, showing the entire communities left behind by progress and modernity.  Innsmouth was actually once quite a cosmopolitan place, with many Pacific Islanders living there as a byproduct of New England’s place in Pacific trade. When being left behind, what did Innsmouth turn to but the “Esoteric Order o’ Dagon.” Is this not a reading of late capitalist America.  Never fully industrialized (it is far too big for that), with huge sections of the country filled with truck stop towns, old mining villages, and rust belt cities, America has been hit hard by global capitalism’s tendency to bypass the areas that are not of immediate value. Facing the uncertainty of liquid modernity, people turned to fatalism of the unknown (comforting themselves that it is unknowable), new religions or revived old faiths.  In this sense, maybe we can identify and describe the malevolent external horrors that so terrified Lovecraft and his characters.  Perhaps it is in an embrace of the religious realm that many of us were capable of understanding a world that really is indifferent to us.

I still think that unknowability is politically vapid and works to confine us and makes excuses for inaction, I do think its popularity is at least explicable.

Richard Henry Dana, “Journal of a Voyage, 1859-1860”

Richard Henry Dana’s journal of his 1859—1860 voyage around the world was not published until 1968, at a time when interest in the American empire was at a height due to the growing military escalation in Vietnam and the strengthening movement against the war—and by extension the U.S. Empire. Although I doubt it played much of a role in that discussion, I think it is worthy to point out because Dana’s journal suggests an emerging American empire, but it was not published until that empire reached its mid-twentieth-century crisis.

Most striking in the narrative are the many detailed descriptions of port cities and port life the American Pacific that he helped build during his youth (documented in Two Years Before the Mast). He visited California, Hawaii, Canton, Shanghai, and ports in Japan. Most of the journal examines these places. It is important to point out that Dana did not have a plan to publish this journal and it lacks much analysis of what he was observing. Yet we can makes some important observations about empire in the Pacific through this document.

Canton during Dana’s visit

First, it is clear that all the locations that Dana visited were heavily integrated politically and economically for the purpose of commercial capitalism. Dana’s description Hawaii suggests the union of the political elite with foreign commercial interests and institutional systems of control. The king is admired by the foreign merchant community. Honolulu has a “Seamen’s House”, schools, churches, other institutions of ideological control. Canton was busy with commercial activity (“What a hive of industry is a Chinese town! . . . “Coolie, is the name given to the mere manual laborers in the open air,—the porters, errand runners, hod carrrier.”) It seems that from Dana’s perspective everything was moving smoothly and he was consistently impressed with the commercial vibrancy of these port cities in the Pacific.

Shanghai during Dana’s visit

Another view of Shanghai

Second, we find that Dana—as a beneficiary of U.S. empire—has significant mobility and faced few restrictions to his mobility. We are reminded of Zygmunt Bauman’s argument in Globalization: The Human Consequences that global capitalism turned everyone into movers but those movers were of two types: vagabonds and tourists. Tourists had money, a “good” passport, and the direct backing of an imperial power. Vagabonds consisted of dock workers, sailors, economic refugees, political exiles and others who move because they must. The Pacific ports that Dana visited had both, even though he was clearly a tourist.

Third, (and this is connected to the first point) the port cities were becoming more Western looking due to the presence of institutions of empire. Dana felt most comfortable describing and engaging with these. Perhaps this is a good way to identify imperialism. If you go to a distant land and feel immediately at home, you might be from an imperial nation.

Although Dana spent most of his time navigating among the networks of elite and imperial power in the Pacific (he could hardly do otherwise as the empire was becoming hegemonic by the 1850s), he was a fair-minded observer who spent much of his time detailing the presence of working class people, their labors, and their stunning diversity. Every port had a diverse and international working class that again reminds us of his time on the Pilgrim. Empire may have made things smooth for the imperialists, but it brought in plenty of others for the labor of empire. Sailors, coolies, dock workers, and laborers of all types from China, India, and the West populated the ports. At one point Dana even visited the prostitutes of Canton on the “famous Flower Boats.” He smoked opium, observed some of the entertainment and lasted after only 15 minutes. It is to his credit that Dana seemed eager to understand these port cities from both sides of the class divide, even if he could never really escape his colonial privilege.
This is a good document to keep handy for those who want to study the role of class and power in the emergence of the Western empires in the Pacific. Perhaps a bit more research should be done on the relationship between these mid-century tours and the working class experience of empire. Throughout his career, Richard Henry Dana sustained sympathies and curiosity about working class cultures and work place experiences. To his credit, thirty years as a lawyer did not destroy such attitudes entirely.

A Japanese delegation in Hawaii. Was Hawaii always a meeting ground for the Japanese and U.S. empires?

Richard Henry Dana, “Two Years Before the Mast” Conclusion

The final sections of Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana take us back to sea after a long hiatus on the diverse and changing California coast, where he and the crew of the Pilgrim engaged in the arduous labor of preparing hides. We saw in those sections the origins, perhaps, of global capitalism in California—a region that would help lay the foundation for America’s Pacific empire. In the last chapters, Dana takes a closer look at sailor culture, particularly the role of sailor songs. The class war (rooted in the hierarchical organization and absolute authority of ship masters), described so impressively in the early chapters, remains as well.  It is also notable that Dana shifted to another ship for the return voyage (the Alert). This shows us that the experiences he had on the Pilgrim were not unique but rather representative of life on the American merchant ship in the “age of sail.”

Dana concludes his work with a list of recommendations for the reform of sailor’s life. While he had his problems with hierarchical domination on the ship, he was not in favor of overturning the system entirely. Perhaps he was not on the ship long enough to understand that sailors are perfectly capable of self-rule (18^th century piracy suggests this). Instead of being a revolutionary document, the final chapter is more suggestive of the antebellum social and moral reform movements that touched so many areas of American society.

He begins with the romantic image of the sea and suggests freedom is a better way to provide the maritime workforce than slavery. “There is a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship, and the sailor’s dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies, and fill merchantmen, than all the pressgangs of Europe.” (347) This romanticism is juxtaposed to the tyranny and violence inflicted on that volunteer workforce. (Perhaps not unlike the academic workforce.  We get drawn in by the romance when we are young and by the time we are my age we realize how vile the institutions we once loved are.)  He falls short on advocating democracy as a solution.  The sea, Dana suggests, is not the proper place for democratic values to be lived.  “It is absolutely necessary that there should be one head and one voice, to control everything, and be responsible for everything.” (348) That he would not say this for a nation, I have no doubt.  The sea is a unique place and any interference with resource distribution or the authority of a master might be troublesome in the future. At the same time, he provides evidence that captains and masters often go too far. They act better when passengers are on the ship. Depositions by sailors document abuse after abuse. If a ship works fine with censored and restrained authority when passengers are on board, why not when the captains are free from such surveillance?

Another problem he mentions with authority is perhaps at first glance a contradiction.  The captains tend to come from the forecastle and have poor backgrounds but have been placed in a position as representatives and agents of the elite.  They are akin to our era’s middle management (but instead of pink slips and HR departments they had a lash).

His essential solution to these difficulties is a greater fairness in law.  Dana—who became a lawyer for seamen—sees ultimately a statist solution to the lawlessness of the sea.

In this final chapter, Dana also discusses at length the civilian efforts to improve the lives of sailors such as the Sailors’ Homes, the Bethals, and the American Seamen’s Friend Society.  Dana lavishes praise on these institutions for their work in creating solid institutions of support and religious instruction. He is convinced that sailors are religious and find in the Bible support and meaning for their life, but that the social conditions of maritime work make it impossible for them to live a religious life, making the Bethals essential. He hopes that more religious captains will help.

In short, after documenting the intense solidarity among sailors at sea, their capacity to run the ship, their knowledge, their culture and their common struggles, as well as the brutality of the authority of the ship masters, proposes a series of reforms that miss the revolutionary potential of democracy at the sea.  The reason why this has not been achieved, it seems to me, is that the seas are not the place where people establish themselves to live. Its exploration and exploitation have largely – but not entirely – been done in the interests of capital. The workplace and the economy is the last place that tends to be democratic for it is at this location that our concept of freedom is most confused. As so-called libertarians (the anarcho-capitalist stypes) seem to think, property and the defense of it in law cannot be a tool of oppression and force. Clearly, history proves this false. As long as our seas are the realm of capital, work, and exploitation of natural resources and people, it will be hostile to democracy.
This edition of Two Years Before the Mast also includes an appendix called “Twenty-Four Years Later,” which comes from his 1859-1860 tour of the world.  I will examine his diary of this in a few days as it is included in the Library of America volume, but a few words on its place as part of the book is warranted.  His main interest in exploring the old places he worked at in California.  He even meets some of his old acquaintances (who must have each endured some fame from their inclusion in the popular work). Most striking to Dana is the rapid development of San Francisco, from a small fort into a major Pacific city, looking outward as an entry point for the American empire.

San Francisco, in 1860, looking out on the American empire

Richard Henry Dana, “Two Years Before the Mast,” Chapters 12-23 (Violence, Power, and Diversity)

One striking aspect of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast is just how often the crew seemed to be on the brink of mutiny.  At minimum, the crew was always searching for a way to avoid work but was always careful not to cross a line that would lead to violent confrontation (although this did not always work). This balking at work was called “work Tom Cox’s traverse” according to Dana.  “Send a man below to get a block, and he would capsize everything before finding it, then not bring it up till an officer had called him twice, and take as much time to put things in order again.” (71) It also seems that the plotting of work avoidance was something discussed openly over meals in the forecastle. If liberty days would not be coming from the officers, the crews found ways to seize their own liberty day.

Much of the second section of Two Years Before the Mast covers the Pilgrim and its crew while it stayed on the California coast, trading and engaging in the hide business.  We learn one of the greatest anxieties about sea voyages, particularly to the Pacific in these years, came from fears over the length of the voyage. It was never quite clear how long they would sail up and down the coast before returning home, or worst yet taking a trip to China or other Pacific ports. “All these little vexations and labors would have been nothing,–they would have been passed by the common evils of sea-life, which every sailor, who is a man, will go through without complaint,–were it not for the uncertainty, or worse then uncertainty, which hung over the nature and length of our voyage.” (87) It is strongly suggested that the information was held from the crew.  At the very least, this was how the forecastle seemed to interpret their lack of information. The crews relied on rumors and innuendo to psychologically prepare for the unknown. Lack of communication about things so central to sailors life emerges as one of the major ways that the officers and captains maintained their power over the crews, but it was also one of the potential flashpoints that could lead to resistance. From the perspective of the sailors, a little more respect and openness would have made the voyage, its length, and its odious labor more acceptable. In a sense, they were asking for democratic values to be put in place on the ship.

 

That the sailors saw themselves as less than free is reflected most directly in chapter fifteen, which describes in brutal detail the confrontation between a “heavy-molded fellow from the Middle States” named Sam and the captain, who proceeded to whip Sam in front of the entire crew as punishment for he “jaw.” When a highly-respected sailor John the Swede, intervened he was also punished. Hitting hard is the heavily racialized language of the exchange, suggesting that the line between slavery and freedom on the ship was slight indeed. Sam protested: “I’m no negro slave.” And the captain replied: “Then I’ll make you one. . . Make a spread eagle of him! I’ll teach you all who is master aboard.” (96—97) After Dana explains in detail the horrors of flogging and the brutal impact it had on the fellow crew members who saw their “brother” abused and humiliated, Dana reveals how the captain relishes the entire display, again in heavily racist language. “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!” (99-100) And then, almost mundanely, Dana describes the next days labors, which went on smoothly except for the “dark hole” that hovered over the forecastle, the realization that they all lived under a tyranny. The flogging remained an unspoken reality for weeks on the ship. Anyone who brought it up was shut down by the crew, but it was the most present truth for that part of the voyage and perhaps the central even in the entire narrative.

 

Loading hides on the California Coast

I suppose I only want to say one more thing about the central part of Two Years Before the Mast.  The California coast, due in part to Spanish colonization and the arrival of intense merchant shipping activity, was incredibly diverse and vibrant. Near the hide-processing stations where Dana and the crew worked for long months lived Spaniards, Indians, Hawaiians (Sandwich Island Kanakas), and members of merchant ship crews from may European nations as well as the United States. This required a great degree of cultural flexibility of the crew that Dana presents in striking contrast to the hierarchical and singular nature of the powerful, such as his captain. “The greater part of the crews of the vessel came ashore every evening, and we passed the time in going about from one house to another, and listening to all manner of languages. The Spanish was the common ground upon which we all met; for everyone one knew more or less of that.  We have now, out of forty or fifty representatives from almost every nation under the sun: two Englishmen, three Yankees, two Scotchmen, two Welshmen, one Irishman, three Frenchmen. . . one Dutchman, one Austrian, two or three Spaniards, half a dozen Spanish-Americans and half-breeds, two native Indians from Chili and the Island of Chilow, one Negro, one Mulatto, about twenty Italians, from all parts of Italy, as many more Sandwich Islanders, one Otaheitan, and one Kanaka from the Marquesas Islands.” (153) What brought these people together was global capitalism on the California coast.  They came by different means and via different land and maritime empires but they all reached the coast in service of the God of capital. That service, reflected in never-ending labor and brutal discipline (verging as we have seen toward slavery) was the glue that brought this diverse lot together. Their cultural flexibility, creativity, and openness is striking and, it seems to me, a useful alternative to the mutual indifference and cultural isolation (albeit with the enforcement of respect) of multiculturalism.  Let’s call it solidarity.
Of course there is much more of interest, including his detailed descriptions of the work regimen in the hide trade and the social life in the California settlements (he is brilliant on the relative social and sexual freedom of Spanish-American women).  I may get to some of those questions in my next post.

Richard Henry Dana, “Two Years Before the Mast” Chapters 1–11

First, I should explain the hiatus in this blog.  It comes down to an onrush of work.  I completed revisions on my upcoming book (which is now in the production process), wrote a handful of articles, am still helping with an edited volume, and mostly working rapidly on a book based on the Philip K. Dick posts I wrote back in the Spring.  I have about half of that Dick book drafted out but am going to slow down for a while with hopes that I will have that done in a few months.  I am still unemployed and not eager to return to academia but am finding new pleasure in writing, reading, and thinking, something that seemed to have died while I was in the classroom and the institutions of so-called “higher learning.”

The proper thing about be to return to Home to Harlem, but as a reboot is necessary to get this started again, I will come back to those and pick up something familiar, a collection of Richard Henry Dana’s major writing.  I will start with his Two Years Before the Mast.

This famous work is Dana’s attempt to tell the story of being a sailor from the perspective of the sailor by signing onto serve on the Pilgrim, on a Pacific voyage.  While he is wrong that no voice from the forecastle existed at the time of his writing, his was one of the first popular works to do so.  The immediate question we need to ask is could a Harvard student, from a somewhat privileged background, put himself into the life of a sailor simply by spending a few years as a common seamen.  (We might be reminded by that book Nickled and Dimed, where a sociologist used a similar method to understand the life of the working poor.)  Dana’s methods were sincere.  He worked hard to maintain his distance from the officers, who knew him for a Harvard student, and he participated in the daily work regimen, the culture of the sailors, and documented the frequent contests between sailors and officers from the perspective of the forecastle.  Early in the voyage Dana even physically moved himself from the steerage to the forecastle to show his solidarity with the crew.  That said, Two Years Before the Mast was a polemical text, and was part of the them active movement to reform the treatment of sailors in the American merchant fleet.  It is also, however, a document on the emergence of the American empire in the Pacific.

As Dana shows us, the captain started the voyage by establishing his sovereignty over the crew.  “Now, my men, we have begun a long voyage.  If we get along well together, we shall have a comfortable time; if we don’t, we shall have hell afloat. – All you’ve got to do it to obey your orders and do your duty like men, — then you’ll fare well enough; — if you don’t, you’ll fare hard enough.” (8) It seems to me that power is one of the most central themes in Two Years Before the Mast and from this we take a very important question for democratic societies.  The people who served with Dana were volunteers.  Dana himself was a volunteer.  But that choice involved a surrendering of a great part of their liberty and ability to participate democratically in the decisions that mattered most of their life.  In a way, this is no different from the choice of many people to accept a job, which commands their obedience for eight hours a day.  We set aside our liberty in exchange for a paycheck.  As Dana shows in the second chapter, the feeling of freedom he experienced looking at the sea or enjoying a maritime sun-rise was quickly replaced with the drudgery of work and the tyranny of the officers.  The question Dana is seeming to ask us is, how democratic can a society if something as undemocratic as the merchant ship could exist, but more on this later. In the cast of this voyage, power is more odious than normal because of the clear incompetence of the second mate, Foster, who seems to have gotten the job due to the influence of his propertied father.  Such injustices run through Dana’s narrative and heavily inform his critique of the floating autocracy of the ship.

The central fact remained the ceaseless and brutal drudgery and boredom of the job.  After spending ten pages describing the various duties on board Dana commented: “I have here gone out of my narrative course in order that any who read this may form as correct an idea of a sailor’s life and duty as possible.  I have done it in this place because, for some time, our life was nothing but the unvarying repetition of these duties.” (19) In this way as well, the Pilgrim can work for us as a metaphor for the capitalist work place in a democratic society. While the dream of free markets, unrestrained capitalism resembled frontier exploration or the adventure of the sea, the reality is arbitrary power, boredom, and misery for the majority.

In this environment tensions were high and confrontations with the authority figures were common.  We are reminded of Melville’s warning in Moby Dick that the confrontation of two men, where one has authority over the other but is an inferior man in every way will almost always end in the brutal application of force.  On the Pilgrim, small affairs like replacing molasses for plums or reducing a ration of bread could cause explosions of class conflict.  In the case of the bread dispute, the conflict ended with another proclamation of power.  “Away with you! Go forward every one of you! I’ll haze you! I’ll work you up! You don’t have enough to do! If you a’n’t careful I’ll make a hell of the ship!” (51)

What is perhaps striking is that these simple proclamations of power worked so effectively in shutting down the crew’s resistance.  As Dana summed up a few chapters later, but in a different context, “There’s nothing for Jack to do but to obey orders.” (67) Perhaps such fatalism was designed in the structure of the ship (the geography of power) and its labor regimen.

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”: Technology

As C. L. R. James has shown us, Ahab is the tyrannical rejection of civilization – and along with it progress and solidarity.  While he thought little of the oil wasted when the barrels started leaking, from the perspective of the working class this was an immediate threat to their livelihood – less profits means a smaller share at the end of the voyage.  Even when Stubbs discovered ambergris in a dying whale conned from some French whalers, Ahab cuts his profitable search short.  A significant symbol of this rejection is Ahab’s scorn for and violence against technology.  At the last moments, his struggle against the “white whale” is made even without the support of a small boat.  He is alone, straddled to the whale with only a harpoon and his words.

As readers of the novel know, much of the text is bound up with detailed descriptions of the whaling industry, its methods, science, and work regimen.  From the opening “exerts” until the final chapters, technology is a driving force of the novel, but it is always under the control of the collective knowledge of the crew.  Ahab shuns it.  He prefers to conduct his search in more primitive ways – following the mystical advice of Fedallah, asking other ships if they saw the “White Whale,” and sail by his senses.

The sailors indeed have a strong connection to the technological systems that they support with their labor and the technological systems that make their work possible: the harpoon that Queequeg shaves with is one example.  In a chapter called “The Lamp”, Melville describes the aura that an oil lamp holds for whalemen.  “Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and consellors.  There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiseled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. . . . See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps–often but old bottles and vials, though — to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenished them there, as mugs of ale at a vat.  He burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state.” (1249)  Melville’s descriptions of chopping up the whales, clearing up the ship after harvesting the oil, and filling barrels has a certain beauty that can only come from a artisan describing their craft.  Any other observer would pass over these details.  “Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works.  She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constitution the completed ship.  it is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.” (1244)  In chapter forty, when we see the entire crew engaged in revalry and discussion after hearing about Ahab’s mad plan.  This window into the stream of consciousness of the forecastle is not an image of technocrats, but they are worldly and practical.  They pine for women they do not have, they speak of work (“So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail! While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!”).  Ahab’s stream of consciousness openly admits madness and irrationality.  While the crew is practical, Ahab is transgressive.  “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do!  They think me made–Starbuck does; but I’m demonic, I am madness maddened!” (971)   Perhaps this is a powerful sentiment among those in resistance to power, but when held by those with absolute authority is it dangerous.

He is indifferent to the crew but uses them.  He uses technology in the same way as when he has the carpenter create for him a new leg out of whale bone.

As the novel closes, Ahab’s rejection of technology and along with it reason is symbolized by his destruction of the quadrant.  “Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of they cunning and might; but what after all canast thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no!  not one jot more!  Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with they impotence thou insultest the sun!  Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy: and curse be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heave, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun.” (1327)  Contrast this insanity with the narrators: “While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use.  Owing to the confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log.” (1348)

Now I am not unaffected by Ahab’s transgression, force of will, and ambition, but the rejection of reason, progress, technology, and solidarity makes him a fully odious character and a poor model for radical transformation of society.  Do other characters help us any more?  Not likely.  Moby-Dick may, in the end, be little more than a warning against detached and ungrounded vision.

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick,” Ahab and C.L.R. James

One of the best guides to understanding the character of Melville’s Ahab is C.L.R. James, from his 1953 Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.  In this work, James explores Melville’s works through the lens of mid-century totalitarianism.  James begins with the profound contrast between Ahab and Starbuck – which is in essence a conflict in the American spirit.  Starbuck represents sober capitalism, pragmatism, and prudence.  Ahab, on a  great mission, is quick to reject the economic principles of capital for his vision.  This leads James to suggest that in his time, Ahab would have been investigated by the FBI for subversive activities.  He sees totality, not the petty concerns of daily life.  “Ahab was a part of this striking growth of material progress, of trade and of money.  By his energy, his skill and his devotion to his work, he becomes captain of his own vessel like so many other gifted and energetic young men.  In fact, he is a master of his difficult craft.  But having become a captain, Ahab finds himself in continual revolt against his work, his personal life, and the opinions of the people around him.” (MRC 6)

This is Ahab’s danger, according to James, who is “the most destructive social type that has ever appeared in Western Civilization.” (MRC 9).  To quote James at length here: “For generations people believed that the men opposed to rights of ownership, production for the market, domination of money, etc. were socialists, communists, radicals of some sort united by the fact that they all thought in terms of the reorganization of society by the workers, the great majority of the oppressed, the exploited, the disinherited.  . . . Nobody, not a single soul, thought that in the managers, the superintendents, the executives, the administrators would arise such loathing and bitterness against the society of free enterprise, the market and democracy, that they would try to reorganize it to suit themselves, and, if need be, destroy civilization in the process.” (MRC 9)  Indeed, James explains, Ahab is in revolt against the very Promethean spirit that his profession embodies.  “Fire, power, mechanical creativeness, he doe snot reject.  He knows that they have made him what he is.  He rejoices in that.  But as long as it means an inhuman existence such as he has lived, he will defy it.”  (MRC 10)  What makes this so insidious is Ahab’s individualism and alienation from his crew.  This makes him an alienated tyrant and very dangerous.  His loss of a leg pushes Ahab to full rejection of the world and civilization.  Bear in mind, Ahab always had a fragile relationship with civilization to begin with.  He spent most of his life at the sea and barely knows his wife.  This is reflected in his relationship with his workers.  “The crew are not human being but things, as he called them, ‘manufactured men.’  For him their permanent condition is sordidness.  For a moment he has lifted them out of themselves by the crusade for achievement of his purpose.  And even then he brided them with a doubloon and grog and ritual.” (MRC 16)

James feels that this is the perfect representation of a Hitler or a Stalin,  indifferent to the potential and abilities of the people he uses and consumed by a hatred for the world and a desire to destroy it.  If we accept James’ argument we should approach Ahab with caution the same way we might approach Lucifer in Paradise Lost.  The suggestion is that we should fear totality, because it risks the very Promethean spirit that promises equality, solidarity, and freedom.