Typee

Typee

By Herman Melville.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Introduction to the Edition of 1892
4. Preface
5. Typee
   1. I
   2. II
   3. III
   4. IV
   5. V
   6. VI
   7. VII
   8. VIII
   9. IX
   10. X
   11. XI
   12. XII
   13. XIII
   14. XIV
   15. XV
   16. XVI
   17. XVII
   18. XVIII
   19. XIX
   20. XX
   21. XXI
   22. XXII
   23. XXIII
   24. XXIV
   25. XXV
   26. XXVI
   27. XXVII
   28. XXVIII
   29. XXIX
   30. XXX
   31. XXXI
   32. XXXII
   33. XXXIII
   34. XXXIV
   35. The Story of Toby
6. Note
7. Endnotes
8. Colophon
9. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Introduction to the Edition of 1892

Of the trinity of American authors whose births made the year 1819 a notable one in our literary history⁠—Lowell, Whitman, and Melville⁠—it is interesting to observe that the two latter were both descended, on the fathers’ and mothers’ sides respectively, from families of British New England and Dutch New York extraction. Whitman and Van Velsor, Melville and Gansevoort, were the several combinations which produced these men; and it is easy to trace in the life and character of each author the qualities derived from his joint ancestry. Here, however, the resemblance ceases, for Whitman’s forebears, while worthy country people of good descent, were not prominent in public or private life. Melville, on the other hand, was of distinctly patrician birth, his paternal and maternal grandfathers having been leading characters in the Revolutionary War; their descendants still maintaining a dignified social position.

Allan Melville, great-grandfather of Herman Melville, removed from Scotland to America in 1748, and established himself as a merchant in Boston. His son, Major Thomas Melville, was a leader in the famous “Boston Tea Party” of 1773 and afterwards became an officer in the Continental Army. He is reported to have been a Conservative in all matters except his opposition to unjust taxation, and he wore the old-fashioned cocked hat and knee-breeches until his death, in 1832, thus becoming the original of Doctor Holmes’s poem, “The Last Leaf.” Major Melville’s son Allan, the father of Herman, was an importing merchant⁠—first in Boston, and later in New York. He was a man of much culture, and was an extensive traveller for his time. He married Maria Gansevoort, daughter of General Peter Gansevoort, best known as “the hero of Fort Stanwix.” This fort was situated on the present site of Rome, NY; and there Gansevoort, with a small body of men, held in check reinforcements on their way to join Burgoyne, until the disastrous ending of the latter’s campaign of 1777 was insured. The Gansevoorts, it should be said, were at that time and subsequently residents of Albany, NY.

Herman Melville was born in New York on August 1, 1819, and received his early education in that city. There he imbibed his first love of adventure, listening, as he says in Redburn, while his father “of winter evenings, by the well-remembered sea-coal fire in old Greenwich Street, used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountain high, of the masts bending like twigs, and all about Havre and Liverpool.” The death of his father in reduced circumstances necessitated the removal of his mother and the family of eight brothers and sisters to the village of Lansingburg, on the Hudson River. There Herman remained until 1835, when he attended the Albany Classical School for some months. Dr. Charles E. West, the well-known Brooklyn educator, was then in charge of the school, and remembers the lad’s deftness in English composition, and his struggles with mathematics.

The following year was passed at Pittsfield, Mass., where he engaged in work on his uncle’s farm, long known as the Van Schaack place. This uncle was Thomas Melville, president of the Berkshire Agricultural Society, and a successful gentleman farmer.

Herman’s roving disposition, and a desire to support himself independently of family assistance, soon led him to ship as cabin boy in a New York vessel bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, visited London, and returned in the same ship. Redburn: His First Voyage, published in 1849, is partly founded on the experiences of this trip, which was undertaken with the full consent of his relatives, and which seems to have satisfied his nautical ambition for a time. As told in the book, Melville met with more than the usual hardships of a sailor-boy’s first venture. It does not seem difficult in Redburn to separate the author’s actual experiences from those invented by him, this being the case in some of his other writings.

A good part of the succeeding three years, from 1837 to 1840, was occupied with school-teaching. While so engaged at Greenbush, now East Albany, N.Y., he received the munificent salary