Volume 55, Number 11 · June 26, 2008
Melville's Second Act
By Christopher Benfey
Melville: The Making of the Poet
by Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 238 pp., $32.95
Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine
by Robert Milder
Oxford University Press, 290 pp., $55.00
On August 1, 1860, Herman Melville's forty-first birthday, he was aboard the clipper ship Meteor, captained by his younger brother Thomas, as it made the hazardous passage around Cape Horn bound for San Francisco. A gale arose that day and lasted, as Melville noted in his diary, for three brutal days of 'snow, rain, hail, sleet, mist, fog, squalls, head-winds, refractory stove, smoky cabin, drunken ship &c &c &c.' A week later, as strong winds continued unabated, a young sailor from Nantucket was blown from the rigging to the deck and was killed instantly. After the funeral service, presided over by Tom, the body was tipped into the ocean and the blood washed from the deck. 'All goes on as usual,' Melville reported, 'as if nothing had happened—as if I did not know that death is indeed the King of Terrors.'
Review, 3810 words
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