Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life

By Herman Melville and John Bryant

Melville's first and most popular novel during his lifetime, Typee is a provocative and lively account of his exploits in the exotic South Seas during the early 1840s, where he journeyed as a young sailor. This edition includes notes on the text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 1996
• ISBN: 9781101221709

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and poet. His most notable work, Moby Dick, is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

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PENGUIN

CLASSICS

TYPEE

HERMAN MELVILLE was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary-school teacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as an ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Typee, the first of several books based on these adventures (including Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, and White-Jacket), won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married and had acquired Arrowhead farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (where he befriended Nathaniel Hawthorne). There he wrote such major works as Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Confidence-Man, and his tales, including Bartleby and Benito Cereno. Exhausted by this literary production, he toured the Holy Land in 1857, returned home as a lecturer, and gave up prose fiction writing for poetry. Moving to New York City in 1863, he later published a volume of Civil War poems, entitled Battle Pieces (1866). With that failure, he became a deputy inspector in the Custom House, a position he held until his retirement in 1885. These years brought the near breakup of his marriage, the suicide of his teenage son Malcolm, and deepening literary obscurity; nevertheless he continued to write poetry, including the spiritual epic Clarel (1876) and two other volumes, John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891). At his death on September 28, 1891, he left numerous unfinished poems and a draft of a prose-and-poem work, Billy Budd, Sailor, which would not be published until 1924. The ensuing Melville Revival of the 1920s assured the author of the literary recognition he failed to receive during his lifetime.

JOHN BRYANT, a professor of English at Hofstra University, is author of Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance; numerous articles on American literature, culture, and scholarship; and The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. He has edited A Companion to Melville Studies; Melville’s Tales, Poems, and Other Writings; and an electronic version of the Typee manuscript. He is also editor of the Melville Society journals Extracts and Leviathan.

Book title, Typee, Subtitle, A Peep at Polynesian Life, author, Herman Melville, imprint, Penguin Classics

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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First published in the United States of America 1846

This edition with an introduction and commentary by John Bryant published in Penguin Books 1996

Introduction and commentary copyright © 1996 by John Bryant

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

This text of Typee published by arrangement with Northwestern University Press.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce the reading text of Typee, Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Melville, Herman, 1819–1891

Typee : a peep at Polynesian life / Herman Melville ; introduction and explanatory commentary by John Bryant.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 9780140434880 (paperback)

1. Marquesas Islands—Social life and customs. 2. Marquesas Islands—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

PS2384.T8  1996

813’.3—dc20    95-32699

Ebook ISBN 9781101221709

pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

CONTENTS

Introduction by John Bryant

Works Cited and Suggested for Further Reading

A Note on the Text

TYPEE

Preface

Chapter 1 • The Sea • Longings for Shore • A Land-sick Ship • Destination of the Voyagers • The Marquesas • Adventure of a Missionary’s Wife among the Savages • Characteristic Anecdote of the Queen of Nukuheva

Chapter 2 • Passage from the Cruising Ground to the Marquesas • Sleepy times aboard Ship • South Sea Scenery • Land ho! • The French Squadron discovered at Anchor in the Bay of Nukuheva • Strange Pilot • Escort of Canoes • A Flotilla of Cocoa-nuts • Swimming Visitors • The Dolly boarded by them • State of affairs that ensue

Chapter 3 • Some Account of the late operations of the French at the Marquesas • Prudent Conduct of the Admiral • Sensation produced by the Arrival of the Strangers • The first Horse seen by the Islanders • Reflections • Miserable Subterfuge of the French • Digression concerning Tahiti • Seizure of the Island by the Admiral • Spirited Conduct of an English Lady

Chapter 4 • State of Affairs aboard the Ship • Contents of her Larder • Length of South Seamen’s Voyages • Account of a Flying Whaleman • Determination to Leave the Vessel • The Bay of Nukuheva • The Typees • Invasion of their Valley by Porter • Reflections • Glen of Tior • Interview between the old King and the French Admiral

Chapter 5 • Thoughts previous to attempting an Escape • Toby, a Fellow Sailor, agrees to share the Adventure • Last Night aboard the Ship

Chapter 6 • A Specimen of Nautical Oratory • Criticisms of the Sailors • The Starboard Watch are given a Holiday • The Escape to the Mountains

Chapter 7 • The other side of the Mountain • Disappointment • Inventory of Articles brought from the Ship • Division of the Stock of Bread • Appearance of the Interior of the Island • A Discovery • A Ravine and Waterfalls • A sleepless Night • Further Discoveries • My Illness • A Marquesan Landscape

Chapter 8 • The Important Question, Typee or Happar? • A Wild-Goose Chance • My Suffering • Disheartening Situation • A Night in a Ravine • Morning Meal • Happy Idea of Toby • Journey towards the Valley

Chapter 9 • Perilous Passage of the Ravine • Descent into the Valley

Chapter 10 • The Head of the Valley • Cautions Advance • A Path • Fruit • Discovery of Two of the Natives • Their singular Conduct • Approach towards the inhabited parts of the Vale • Sensation produced by our Appearance • Reception at the House of one of the Natives

Chapter 11 • Midnight Reflections • Morning Visitors • A Warrior in Costume • A Savage Æsculapius • Practice of the Healing Art • Body Servant • A Dwelling-house of the Valley described • Portraits of its Inmates

Chapter 12 • Officiousness of Kory-Kory • His Devotion • A Bath in the Stream • Want of Refinement of the Typee Damsels • Stroll with Mehevi • A Typee Highway • The Taboo Groves • The Hoolah-Hoolah Ground • The Ti • Time-worn Savages • Hospitality of Mehevi • Midnight Misgivings • Adventure in the Dark • Distinguished Honors paid to the Visitors • Strange Procession and Return to the House of Marheyo

Chapter 13 • Attempt to procure Relief from Nukuheva • Perilous Adventure of Toby in the Happar Mountain • Eloquence of Kory-Kory

Chapter 14 • A great Event happens in the Valley • The Island Telegraph • Something befalls Toby • Fayaway displays a tender Heart • Melancholy Reflections • Mysterious Conduct of the Islanders • Devotion of Kory-Kory • A rural Couch • A Luxury • Kory-Kory strikes a Light à la Typee

Chapter 15 • Kindness of Marheyo and the rest of the Islanders • A full Description of the Bread-fruit Tree • Different Modes of preparing the Fruit

Chapter 16 • Melancholy condition • Occurrence at the Ti • Anecdote of Marheyo • Shaving the Head of a Warrior

Chapter 17 • Improvement in Health and Spirits • Felicity of the Typees • Their enjoyment compared with those of more enlightened Communities • Comparative Wickedness of civilized and unenlightened People • A Skirmish in the Mountain with the Warriors of Happar

Chapter 18 • Swimming in company with the Girls of the Valley • A Canoe • Effects of the Taboo • A pleasure Excursion on the Pond • Beautiful freak of Fayaway • Mantua-making • A Stranger arrives in the Valley • His mysterious conduct • Native Oratory • The Interview • Its Results • Departure of the Stranger

Chapter 19 • Reflections after Marnoo’s Departure • Battle of the Pop-guns • Strange conceit of Marheyo • Process of making Tappa

Chapter 20 • History of a day as usually spent in the Typee Valley • Dances of the Marquesan Girls

Chapter 21 • The Spring of Arva Wai • Remarkable Monumental Remains • Some ideas with regard to the History of the Pi-Pis found in the Valley

Chapter 22 • Preparations for a Grand Festival in the Valley • Strange doings in the Taboo Groves • Monument of Calabashes • Gala costume of the Typee damsels • Departure for the Festival

Chapter 23 • The Feast of Calabashes

Chapter 24 • Ideas suggested by the Feast of Calabashes • Inaccuracy of certain published Accounts of the Islands • A Reason • Neglected State of Heathenism in the Valley • Effigy of a dead Warrior • A singular Superstition • The Priest Kolory and the God Moa Artua • Amazing Religious Observance • A dilapidated Shrine • Kory-Kory and the Idol • An Inference

Chapter 25 • General Information gathered at the Festival • Personal Beauty of the Typees • Their Superiority over the Inhabitants of the other Islands • Diversity of Complexion • A Vegetable Cosmetic and Ointment • Testimony of Voyagers to the uncommon Beauty of the Marquesans • Few Evidences of Intercourse with Civilized Beings • Dilapidated Musket • Primitive Simplicity of Government • Regal Dignity of Mehevi

Chapter 26 • King Mehevi • Allusion to his Hawiian Majesty • Conduct of Marheyo and Mehevi in certain delicate matters • Peculiar system of Marriage • Number of Population • Uniformity • Embalming • Places of Sepulture • Funeral obsequies at Nukuheva • Number of Inhabitants in Typee • Location of the Dwellings • Happiness enjoyed in the Valley • A Warning • Some ideas with regard to the Civilization of the Islands • Reference to the Present state of the Hawiians • Story of a Missionary’s Wife • Fashionable Equipages at Oahu • Reflections

Chapter 27 • The Social Condition and General Character of the Typees

Chapter 28 • Fishing Parties • Mode of distributing the Fish • Midnight Banquet • Timekeeping Tapers • Unceremonious style of eating the Fish

Chapter 29 • Natural History of the Valley • Golden Lizards • Tameness of the Birds • Mosquitos • Flies • Dogs • A solitary Cat • The Climate • The Cocoa-nut Tree • Singular modes of climbing it • An agile young Chief • Fearlessness of the Children • Too-Too and the Cocoa-nut Tree • The Birds of the Valley

Chapter 30 • A Professor of the Fine Arts • His Persecutions • Something about Tattooing and Tabooing • Two Anecdotes in illustratíon of the latter • A few thoughts on the Typee Dialect

Chapter 31 • Strange custom of the Islanders • Their Chanting, and the peculiarity of their Voice • Rapture of the King at first hearing a Song • A new Dignity conferred on the Author • Musical Instruments in the Valley • Admiration of the Savages at Beholding a Pugilistic Performance • Swimming Infant • Beautiful Tresses of the Girls • Ointment for the Hair

Chapter 32 • Apprehensions of Evil • Frightful Discovery • Some remarks on Cannibalism • Second Battle with the Happars • Savage Spectacle • Mysterious Feast • Subsequent Disclosures

Chapter 33 • The Stranger again arrives in the Valley • Singular Interview with him • Attempt to Escape • Failure • Melancholy Situation • Sympathy of Marheyo

Chapter 34 • The Escape

Appendix • Provisional cession to Lord George Paulet of the Sandwich Islands

Sequel • The Story of Toby

Appendixes

List of Textual Expurgations

List of Textual Emendations

The Typee Manuscript: A Reading Text

Explanatory Notes

INTRODUCTION

Heathens! savages! ay, cannibals!

These are stirring words—indignant, inflammatory, horrendous—and just the kind of opener you might expect for a book on the mysteries of Polynesian life. But this is not the way Herman Melville opens his first book, Typee; instead, he buries it in Chapter 27. Designed to tease readers rather than grab their attention, the line is a mock voicing of the horror expressed by those who would, out of ignorance and prejudice, falsely brand primitive cultures as abominations to God, civilization, and nature. The words come as Melville puzzles over how Typee natives, with whom he had lived for a month, have no government and yet live more harmoniously than Christians. How are we to explain this enigma? These islanders were heathens! savages! ay, cannibals! and how came they, without the aid of established law, to exhibit, in so eminent a degree, that social order which is the greatest blessing and highest pride of the social state? (200). Those exclamation points are a sarcasm registering our pious overreaction to alien cultures.

In a tradition of skepticism that goes back to Montaigne’s On Cannibals and the beginnings of the colonial era, Typee offers far more than the Peep at Polynesian Life its subtitle proposes. It is a romance on religion, politics, and sexuality that would have us discover the heathen, savage, ay, cannibal in ourselves. But more, in frankly confronting the enigmatic Other of primitive life, Melville exposes the dilemmas of identity, and of Being itself. We are defined, Melville seems to say, not only by the necessities imposed by a God and the contingencies of a state, and not only by certain primal facts of sex and survival, but also by the fact that these defining forces of God, state, and nature are in constant conflict. Like the book’s hero, the runaway Tommo, we are also defined by our attempts to resolve those conflicts, to find that in-between mental territory where order and yet full freedom can abide, where Tommo’s loathing of the familiar West but fear of the unfamiliar heart of darkness can compound into one, then dissolve, and then give birth to a broader cosmopolitan acceptance.

Melville’s strategy is to make Tommo’s new primal self-awareness our own. It’s not a bad strategy. Unfortunately, in this book it is fated to fail, not because of the reader’s reluctance to follow Melville into heathenism, savagism, and cannibalism, but because Melville himself gets cold feet. He resists his own liberalism and doubts his skepticism; he runs back to Home and Mother (248).

Tommo escapes the oppression and boredom of whaling life, and we accept his revolt. He runs inland to the Valley of the Typees located on the hazardous island of Nuku Hiva, and we follow. He eats, sleeps, even bathes with the valley’s happy people, and we take that plunge, too. He romances the sensual Fayaway, and we watch. He marvels at the islanders’ idiosyncrasies and benevolence. All this we accept. He is bemused by taboo, baffled by the island religion, and explains away cannibalism, but resists being tattooed. And we take these problems in stride, wondering how our narrator will bring them to resolution. But we find that Tommo is finally less convinced of his rhetoric than we are. Rather than inventing for Tommo a sentimental departure full of longing and regret, Melville has him skedaddle the moment he gets the chance. We are left in Tommo’s dust objecting to his violent retreat and callous betrayal of his island family.

The final irony of heathens! savages! ay, cannibals! is that Melville uses it to lure us to the watery edges of our familiar world and even to dare us to jump into the depths, but he drops the line of rhetoric all too soon and like a cadre of Monty Pythonic legionnaires yells, Run away! This is a metaphysical cowardice that stands in stark contrast to the ontological heroics of later Melvillean characters—Ishmael, Ahab, Pierre, Bartleby, and Frank Goodman. But it is an instructive cowardice.

The problem in Typee—and it is one that makes the book not just a prelude to Moby-Dick but a true work on its own—is that experience, Emerson’s greatest Lord of Life, does not always match ideology. Tommo can argue for Typee’s edenic benevolence, even live it, but, unlike the more accepting Ishmael, he will not commit to it. He will not become a Typee. But Tommo’s condition helps us clarify the hard dilemmas of multiculturalism in our own time. He desires an assimilation with the Polynesian Other but fears the loss of his own native culture, just as any ethnic minority might wonder whether America is the open, cosmopolitan identity it professes to be or just another threatening ethnicity to resist.

If Typee lacks the drama and resolve of Moby-Dick, it nevertheless speaks directly to issues prevalent in our democracy, not only multiculturalism and race but also capitalism and poverty, imperialism and freedom, religion and spirituality, sexuality and identity. Typee is timely, but before you read it, consider three warnings:

Warning 1: This book is not a novel. This novel is a familiar genre offering readers a fairly consistent worldview delivered through fairly coherent characters and plot. While Typee has some of these features, it is also an autobiography based on Melville’s experiences with the inhabitants of Taipivai on the Marquesan island of Nuku Hiva. Accordingly, it is also a travel book about the customs and manners of preliterate, preindustrial life. As such, it is something of an anthropological study written well before anthropology was invented. Finally, Typee is a polemic against Western missionaries and European imperialism. Given these various genres—life and travel writing, natural and social science, religious and political critique—it is best to come to Typee divested of any preconceived expectations of form. Adventure gives way to meditation which gives way to reportage which becomes political commentary which leads to lovemaking which digresses back to plot. In the end, there is more rhetorical strategizing than literary structure here. One might call Typee a romance because it exists somewhere between personal essay and fiction. But even that formal designation pales. Call it, rather, an arrested romance, or, perhaps, just a piece of writing.

Warning 2: This book is dangerous. Or at least that is what many of Melville’s first readers thought. The book was dangerous because it ridicules missionaries and argues that the Polynesians are more Christian than Christians, more civil than the civilized. This message so angered the religious establishment that Melville’s American publisher forced him to reissue Typee in an expurgated revised edition. Melville’s first book, then, was a censored book.

Warning 3: This book is not a book. That is, Typee is not one book; it is at least three. It is a fluid text. This point derives from the previous warning. While Melville’s American publisher issued its expurgated edition, the English continued to publish the original first edition; thus two versions of Typee competed in the marketplace throughout the nineteenth century, and these competing editions elicited significantly different responses from their separate audiences. Typee also exists in a third, manuscript version, which (while it consists of only three of the thirty-four printed chapters) is also substantially different from its counterparts in the first English and the American Revised editions. Each version of Typee is a revision of Melville’s language and thought. Reading Typee, then, not as a single frozen text but as a more tentative, fluid work, which Melville revised in manuscript, further crafted in the English version, and then self-censored in the American, allows us to see a deeper dimension: Melville’s evolving creative process as it struggles with the politics of publication.

To understand Typee for all its dangers—political, metaphysical, and textual—it helps to know how Melville came to make his literary debut.

From New York to the Marquesas

Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819, at 6 Pearl Street on the Battery, Manhattan’s southernmost tip. Much of that area is now a park built on landfill, but in earlier days Pearl Street stretched along the waterfront, and the Melville home stood right at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers, so that in the summer of his first year Melville learned to walk on the edges of New York Harbor. Today, iron railings gird those edges, allowing tourists to lean safely and observe the Statue of Liberty; but the infant Melville toddled the area unfenced in search of the seashells that gave his street its name. Thirty years later, in the voice of Ishmael, the author would describe his old backyard as a magnet for all manner of seekers fixed in ocean reveries. His birthplace was a spot where meditation and water are wedded forever. Melville knew the sea from birth.

But it was economy, not meditation or metaphysics, that pushed him to sea. Melville’s father, Allan, of liberal New England stock and French and Scots heritage, was a wholesaler of high-class imports, which means he lived at the mercy of fashion, reputation, and creditors. Melville’s mother, Maria Gansevoort, hailed from an upstate Dutch patrician family, but her condition was no less dependent upon the Republic’s unstable economy. Theirs was the loving and solid marriage of two business families, and when the economy boomed, they prospered, moving to a succession of houses first in the suburbs of Greenwich Village and then to Broadway. But when the economy went bust, as it did for them in 1830, the Melvill family (Maria added the final e in later years) left the city, seeking refuge for their eight children in Albany, New York, where Maria’s luckier brother, Peter Gansevoort, could help out.

Two years later Melville’s father was dead. Stress and overexposure during a winter storm led to a fever that infected his brain, left him raving, and ended a still-promising life. Twelve-year-old Herman witnessed all this, and the impact of the loss on his personality and creativity cannot be underscored enough.

The family survived with help from Uncle Peter, but also through the entrepreneurial initiative of Herman’s older brother Gansevoort, whose prosperous fur business permitted them to move into fancier digs in Albany’s fashionable Clinton Square. It also allowed Herman and the other siblings to continue their educations. By thirteen, Melville had jobs first in a bank and then as a clerk for his brother. But all too soon the economy reversed once again in the disastrous Panic of 1837. Bankrupt, the Melvilles moved to nearby Lansingburgh (now part of Troy, New York). Gansevoort sought a career in law; Herman, now eighteen, taught school near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where his uncle Thomas Melvill had kept the family farm, and where in later more successful years Herman and his own wife and growing family would settle.

Teaching held no future for the young man, nor did surveying or civil engineering, which he studied for a brief spell. Largely unemployed, he dated girls: Mary Eleanor Parmelee and Harriet Fly. He wrote them billets doux, and he published his first pieces, entitled Fragments from a Writing Desk, one of which relates a young man’s passionate encounter with a mysterious lady who reveals herself to be dumb and deaf! An adolescent pastiche of Poe, Byron, and the Arabian Nights, this apprentice work nevertheless has power; it dwells on silences—the dark woods, the voiceless female—which Melville would later exploit symbolically in Moby-Dick and Pierre. And in Typee, too.

Inevitably, Melville had to travel. Upstate New York at its best would have been intolerable for the young man whose fondest recollections were of his years in Manhattan before his father’s death. But this was depressed Lansingburgh, a rural village at its worst, offering no incentives to stay. Besides, he had been raised, it seems, always in transit: there had been the four residences in Manhattan, the two in Albany, another in Lansingburgh, as well as repeated summer visits to the Pittsfield farm—all in eighteen years. No wonder Herman had an Ishmaelean itch for things remote. Movement was a constant, and economy the motivator.

In 1839, Melville shipped aboard the St. Lawrence as a common sailor in transit to Liverpool. His six-week trip, which he described in Redburn, showed him poverty, brutality, disease, and sexual worlds he had not witnessed even on the seedy riverfronts and canal ports of New York. The year after his return home, he was off on an overland tour of the West by coach, horse, and boat to visit his Uncle Thomas, who had taken refuge from creditors by retiring to Galena, Illinois. Back home again, and prospects still zero, he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet, and sailed out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on January 3, 1841, for what would become four years at sea, first as a whaleman, then as a sailor in the U.S. Navy. What the erstwhile bank teller, shop clerk, teacher, surveyor, wanderer, and now seafarer could not know was that, at twenty-one, he was becoming a writer.

Spermaceti whale oil is a natural lubricant that, when processed, hardens into candles that give off bright, smokeless light. Up until the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania, and the subsequent development of kerosene lighting, whaling was a major industry, and quite lucrative, if your ship did not sink and you did not die. The vessels were slow-moving, floating factories, used for the capture and boiling of sea mammals. It was smelly, smoky, greasy, boring, dangerous work but attractive to both management and labor, for captains and seamen alike shared in the profits. If you could withstand the four-year tours and not borrow against your earnings, you might return home ahead of the game. But these were big ifs, and most whalemen were losers, albeit hardworking and adventuresome losers, who were just as easily found sluicing gold as harpooning whales. Indeed, the California gold rush decimated the whaling labor force, so that by 1850 such whaling communities as Nantucket were virtual ghost towns.

Melville, however, was no such loser. He had no illusions of making a financial killing, nor is there any evidence that he had a sea career in mind. To be sure, his uncle John D’Wolf had been a merchant captain; one cousin, Guert Gansevoort, was a promising naval lieutenant, and another, Thomas Melvill, a midshipman turned whaler. These relatives set an imposing example for their younger kinsman, but it was probably the reading of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast in 1840 that ignited in Melville his longing for the maritime.

Melville shipped out with twenty-five other men: black, white, Spanish, and Irish; some syphilitic, consumptive, or alcoholic; others quite competent. Eight completed the voyage; five died of disreputable diseases; the rest jumped ship at one point or another. Melville spent eighteen months on the Acushnet before the spirit moved him to seek drier conditions. During that time the vessel came into port only twice, once at Rio de Janeiro and again at Santa, Peru. Heading west from South America, it cruised the barren Galapagos Islands, which Melville later described in The Encantadas, and sailed for Nuku Hiva, largest of the Marquesas Islands.

Pacific islands are the remnants of dead volcanoes, which in their eruptive youth rise above sea level to form an igneous mass of dark soil and basaltic ridges. But once the fires die out and the island lapses into middle age, the elements battle with vegetation over possession of the land. Wind and rain erode the friable surfaces in which palms and pandanus sink their roots. Coral reefs eventually surround the exposed, conic mass as it melts back into the sea. And ultimately as the senile inner island erodes away, all that remains is the sandy atoll reef: a circle in the sea.

Nuku Hiva is a middle-aged island: Tall and lush to the windward south and east, its craggy interior ranges, beribboned with lacelike cascades, stretch right down to the sea. The shoreline is indented with deep bays and coves, each the outlet of numerous streams, and all surrounded by seemingly perpendicular ridges that make inland travel so unlikely that natives tend to stick defensively to their valleys. In Melville’s day, over 80,000 people in several tribes and clans inhabited the island, making peace and war as one rivalry or another ensued. These were light-skinned, sometimes blue-eyed, formidable people living off the land and sea in good (i.e., rainy) times, and off their cleverly maintained stores of breadfruit mash in times of drought. Like other Pacific islanders, they had no written language, spoke a Polynesian dialect similar to Tahitian and Hawaiian, and were given to the raiding of neighboring villages for victims of human sacrifice when the gods did not bring rain.

In the nineteenth century, the Marquesans’ reputation for ferocity was exaggerated by the islands’ remoteness from other chains, but it was also corroborated by experience. Marquesan warriors were tattooed from head to foot, shaped their hair in hornlike tufts, stuck whale teeth in their earlobes, and carried really big clubs. Reports of their treachery were shared by seamen as they gingerly skirted the archipelago or nervously anchored in one of the island bays. Tales of natives luring sailors ashore with their fresh water, fruit, and women only to capture, kill, and devour them were rife. So much so that the shipwrecked crew of the Essex in 1820 sailed in lifeboats past the islands for fear of being eaten alive, only to find themselves three weeks later cannibalizing each other.

The inhabitants of Taipivai, one of Nuku Hiva’s remote valleys, had a special reputation for ferocity. From the time of James Cook’s South Sea explorations in the 1770s, they had repelled most European incursions, including two attacks by the American, Captain David Porter, in 1813. On June 23, 1842, Melville and the Acushnet anchored, not at the long deep fjord-like bay of the Taipis (now called Comptroller’s Bay), but at Taiohae, the island’s larger and more friendly village. The bay is a majestic horseshoe formed by a towering basaltic ridge to the north that stretches its shoulders and arms of descending ridges down into an almost complete embrace of the harbor. To the west along the coast are smaller bays including Hakaui, home of the Taioas (Melville’s Glen of Tior). To the east is the village of the Happaa (or Happars), and further east is Taipivai, or Typee.

After eighteen months at sea, Melville had experienced as much of whaling as any rational gentleman might want. With only the brief liberties in Rio and Santa to reacquaint him with civil fellowship, and with every reason to believe that the Acushnet’s Captain Valentine Pease (Captain Vangs in Typee) would leave Nuku Hiva well stocked for another six months at sea, the twenty-two-year-old bided his time at anchor, found a willing co-conspirator in Richard Tobias Greene (his Toby), and on a rainy morning ran away.

Melville enthusiast André Revel has established Melville and Toby’s escape route. From the beginning their plan was to hide out in the mountains until the Acushnet left and perhaps head east to the Happaa village. This was a friendly haven far enough from Taiohae to elude the captain and yet not too close to the vicious Taipis. With the Acushnet situated in the western half of the bay, the most direct escape would have been to touch shore and hike east along the bay and then over an easy ridge to freedom. But there were two impediments: the village of Taiohae proper, inhabited by natives eager to return runaways for bolts of cloth, and the French. By 1842, Admiral Abel DuPetit-Thouars had claimed most of Polynesia for bourgeois King Louis Philippe. Only days before Melville’s arrival, the French had trained their guns on the Marquesas, systematically coercing tribal kings to give up their villages. Before his escape, Melville had observed these imperial operations among the Taioa, and the episode in Chapter 4 involving the fully uniformed admiral’s meeting with a naked native king became the basis for Melville’s subversive comparison of the two cultures: may not the savage be the happier man of the two? (29). Significantly, the young whaler had come to Nuku Hiva at precisely the moment in which that island culture was about to die. But this was a point he did not apprehend until he began three years later to write it all down. His immediate concern was to elude his captain, the natives, and the French.

That meant heading not directly east but first north up the steep ridges to the high basaltic crest and then, if necessary, eastward to the Happaa Valley. At the time of Melville’s ascent, the ridges were forested with sandalwood and palms, but today only a few of the ancient trees Melville describes in the sacred groves of Typee remain, for the fragrant woods of Nuku Hiva were deforested in the decades after Melville’s visit. The crest looms high as before. Its upper reach is massive rock, the exposed skeleton of the mountain’s fleshy soil that is continually melting away into the sea. As Melville and Toby scrambled up the ridges toward the transverse basaltic crest, they could see off to either side steep declivities traced with cascades.

It took a day for Melville and Toby to make the high crest, and they may have imagined only another day’s descent along that crest down into Happaa. But the crest itself turned out to be unscalable, and the adventurers had to go behind it, descending into the island’s interior, where they got lost. Four days of trekking up and down valley walls, along streams, and beside waterfalls brought them not to any Happaa village but directly into Taipivai, the valley of the Taipis. Starving, exhausted, and so desperate (if we can believe Melville) as to risk jumping from a cliff ledge into the top of a tree, they were happy to greet the first astonished natives of the valley, cannibal or not.

Living Taipi

Unlike the large village of Taiohae, which spreads along an open bay, the Taipi villages cling to the steep declivities on either side of a rushing but fordable river that stretches about seven miles down a claustrophobic, V-shaped valley from the inland mountains to Comptroller’s Bay. Like most precolonial islanders, the Taipis formed a tribal society of families and clans controlled by chieftains and priests. This was by no means the open, free, and propertyless society Melville envisions in Typee. Chiefs maintained power by ensuring clan cohesion and by providing work and sustenance for others outside the clan. Taboo kept people in line, and priests kept the taboos. Tattooing was an elaborate social marking system, indicating personal growth, power, and prestige.

With little understanding of the language, Melville had little comprehension of these structures, and he has Tommo openly admit his ignorance. Like many before him, he remarks upon the native’s gazing in wonder at him while he gazes in return: two aliens trying intently to guess each other’s meaning. But for Tommo the process is unidirectional. Repeatedly he finds Mehevi gazing at him with so strange and steady a glance; it revealed nothing of the mind of the savage, but it appeared to be reading my own (71). Here are depths Tommo cannot plumb. Admittedly, Melville had remarkable descriptive powers and he remembered well what he saw, but he recognized the limits of his comprehension, and that inevitably led the young writer to recognize the limits of his identity. Thus what he has the fictional Tommo report is as much a reflection of Melville’s own social concerns and mental anxieties as it is of Marquesan cultural reality.

Accordingly, Melville has Tommo turn Taipivai into Typee Valley, the wish fulfillment of all runaways. It is a utopic Eden, a realm of perpetual hilarity free of the economic upsets that fatherless Melville had himself endured. It is a place where there are no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; . . . or to sum up all in one word—no Money! (126). This is a line similar to Gonzalo’s wondrous speech in The Tempest praising a brave new world without laws and letters (2.1)—a line Shakespeare had himself borrowed from Montaigne, and a view Melville attributes to Rousseau. Here is a healthy, not Hobbesean, state of nature where native benevolence and natural abundance combine to create a world devoid of anxiety. But if all this is decidedly not the real Taipivai, Melville’s intent is finally more polemical than anthropological. His half-lived, half-imagined Typee is a critique of America’s social deficiencies and the inhumanities of capitalism, even down to today’s children starving on the cold charities of Reaganomics, privatization, and what Melville in The Confidence-Man would later call The Wall Street Spirit.

Religion and taboo in Taipivai also baffled Melville. In Chapter 24 he has Tommo come upon the mummy of an ancient warrior propped like a rower in a canoe and facing a skull-shaped prow; it is like Hamlet contemplating Yorick, and the accompanying meditation is equally seriocomic, with Tommo concluding that the eternal rower toward paradise symbolizes the fact, that however ignorant man may be, he still feels within him his immortal spirit yearning after the unknown future (173). But the external features of Taipi religion partake of the stone effigies of bottle-nosed gods and rotting wooden idols that the natives treat familiarly like dolls. In language that facetiously aligns Melville with zealots back home, Tommo calls the Taipis a back-slidden generation, and the mockery of his little burlesque is still amusing in light of today’s evangelist preachers.

As for taboo, we now recognize that this complex system of social restrictions separates classes and sexes, and lays claim to or stigma upon certain properties (contrary to Melville’s notion of a propertyless society). Melville offers no such explanations, for nothing scientific was available to him, but he does have Tommo treat taboo comically, as in Chapter 18, when he describes the restriction against women riding in canoes as an affront to civil courting behavior and gains a dispensation from Mehevi to go canoeing with Fayaway. At issue here is not only Tommo’s joking, which suggests an indifference rather than disrespect for native custom, but also Mehevi’s willingness to risk breaking taboo in order to tighten Tommo’s sexual bond with Taipi culture. The dispensation might ensure his staying.

Perhaps more fascinating to Melville than politics and religion was the Taipi’s marriage customs. Here, a system of polyandry gave women more status than one might expect in a culture where menstruation was taboo. Moreover, the practice of pekio extended connubial rights to the wife’s sisters and the husband’s brothers, so that a married man may procreate with his female in-laws and his mate with the male counterparts. In effect many cousins in Taipivai were half siblings, and this made for a larger notion of family and presumably less infighting. Melville withnessed the sexual freedom of this custom and reports on such odd events as Mehevi’s making love to a young boy and girl simultaneously and old Tinor’s romping with a man other than her husband, but again without understanding their deeper structures.

Melville’s own sexuality, in late adolescence, was typically exploratory and effusive. At home in New York, in Liverpool, and at sea, he had seen a full range of sexual practices. If the twenty-two-year-old had managed to save himself from fornication this long—and the fear of syphilis was enough to make such abstinence plausible—he could not have chosen a safer place for safe sex adventuring than Taipivai. Here were people who had little contact with Westerners and their diseases; they had no comprehension of Victorian morality, and they copulated openly, with various partners, daily, and from an early age, as if sex were somehow natural, healthy, and expected. Melville’s sly innuendos about short courtships in Taipi clearly indicate that the mariner availed himself of the island’s sexual opportunities.

But we have no evidence of what Melville actually experienced, only what he wrote. And what he wrote is an anxious blend of fact and fiction. We constantly feel that Melville is telling us less than what he really experienced, that Tommo is a convenient fiction that suppresses as much as it reveals. Melville suppresses because he is frankly baffled; but he also suppresses feelings he dared not speak, and the tension of what Melville and Tommo do not say gives Typee its power.

Beneath the surface of Tommo’s polemics and bafflements is the unfolding story of his evolving sexuality. Tommo is first attracted to the darkly handsome, sardonic, and impetuous Toby, who more often than not leads him deeper into the island’s sensual interior. Tommo’s mysterious leg wound represents his anxiety over not only his forsaking of Western restraints but also his plunging into sexual freedom. The wound disables and infantilizes him, forcing him to shift attention from dark Toby to the more fraternal Kory-Kory, who bears him like a child about the valley. But when Tommo gives up his guilt and adopts native dress, his leg heals, and Fayaway replaces the men as the object of his longing. This period of transference is richly conveyed in the highly sensual, probably masturbatory fire-lighting scene of Chapter 13. And when in Chapter 18 Tommo takes Fayaway in his canoe, his sexuality blossoms further as he watches her stretch out her tappa cloth dress to catch the breeze, transforming herself into a pregnant sail. It was one of the most arousing scenes in the literature of the day, later captured in watercolor by John La Farge.

But Tommo’s sexuality continues in its ambivalence when we find him entranced on the next page by Marnoo, a Polynesian Apollo, who as a taboo Kannaka can move unmolested from tribe to tribe, speak English, and steal girls from Tommo. The American feels threatened by and attracted to Marnoo, who eventually helps him escape Typee, just as Toby had helped him enter.

Melville’s depictions of the lure of Toby, the beauty of Fayaway, the embraces of brother Kory-Kory, and the handsome ambivalence of Marnoo reveal a young man excited by sexuality in all its expressive modes. Because his subsequent writings, even in the late years, were deeply sensual, some assume Melville was in fact homosexual. But the known facts of Melville’s life discount this assumption; indeed, the very nature of his creativity discourages the easy labeling of homosexual or heterosexual. He is best called pansexual. Tommo’s associates are reflections of his evolving sexual identity, with Fayaway and Marnoo sharing a pinnacle of sensuality that allows one to unite art, nature, love, and society all in one. The androgynous Marnoo is Typee’s sensual cosmopolite whose entrée to both Western and preindustrial cultures makes him the perfect model for a multicultural sensibility. But despite his own sexual growth, Tommo rejects that model of sensuality and politics. The irony is that the young male cannot share in the very cosmopolitan pansexuality he implicitly seeks; he runs away (as before), this time back to home, mother, and proper parlor courting.

If Melville saw Taipivai as a haven from Western authority and inhibition, the Taipis most surely saw Melville’s sudden appearance at their back door as a serious threat to their autonomy. One of the easternmost Polynesian archipelagos, the Marquesas were in 300 c.e. the last to be settled. By 1300 the island sustained a populous society that built stone temples and mummified its dead. However, by the time Alvaro de Mendaña claimed the islands in 1595 for the viceroy of Peru, García Hurtado de Mendoza, the culture was in decline. The temples were in ruins. Nevertheless, Nuku Hivans, and especially the Taipis, resisted European incursions.

Even Porter’s calamitous attack in 1813, which Melville argues inspired the natives to earn their name of savage through fierce retaliation (Chapter 4), had virtually no effect upon the Taipis except to intensify their defenses at the most likely points of invasion, the bay and the western ridge that separate them from the Happaa. Melville and Toby’s utterly innocent incursion from the other, unguarded end of the valley most certainly agitated tribal leaders, as is evident in their nervous questions about the Franee, or French, who had already taken Taiohae. Clearly, the Taipis had