Date: Wed, 04 Feb 1998 11:37:00 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-TH: A Melville lecture on the South Sea islands


While Herman Melville never achieved the sort of superstar status of
Dickens or Twain, he too attempted a career as a public lecturer. Part of
his repertory was a talk on the South Seas. Although the full text is not
extant, we do have notes from a "phonographist" from the Baltimore American
newspaper on February 8, 1859.

Melville recounts Balboa's discovery of the South Seas: "The thronging
Indians opposed Balboa's passage, demanding who he was, what he wanted, and
whither he was going. The reply is a model of Spartan directness. 'I am a
Christian, my errand is to spread the true religion and to seek gold, and I
am going in search of the sea.'"

Melville wonders if the Europeans will begin to tour the charming isles of
the South Seas? His reply:

"Why don't the English yachters give up the prosy Mediterranean and sail
out here? Any one who treats the natives fairly is just as safe as if he
were on the Nile or Danube. But I am sorry to say we whites have a sad
reputation among many of the Polynesians. They esteem us, with rare
exceptions, such as some of the missionaries, the most barbarous,
treacherous, irreligious, and devilish creatures on the earth. It may be a
mere prejudice of these unlettered savages, for have not our traders always
treated them with brotherly affection? Who has ever heard of a vessel
sustaining the honor of a Christian flag and the spirit of the Christian
Gospel by opening its batteries in indiscriminate massacre upon some poor
little village on the seaside--splattering the torn bamboo huts with blood
and brains of women and children, defenseless and innocent?"

The final paragraphs are the phonographist's own words and it is too bad
that we don't have Melville's. They deal with the colonization of the South
Sea islands:

"The rapid advance, in the externals only, of civilized life was then
spoken of, and the prospect of annexing the Sandwich Islands to the
American Union commented on, with the remark that the whalemen of Nantucket
and the Westward ho! Of California were every day getting them more and
more annexed.

"The lecturer closed with an earnest wish that adventurers from our soil
and from the lands of Europe would abstain from those brutal and cruel
vices which disgust even savages with our manners, while they turn an
earthly paradise into a pandemonium. And as for annexations he begged, as a
general philanthropist, to offer up an earnest prayer, and he entreated all
present to join him in it, that the banns [public announcements] of that
union should be forbidden until we had found for ourselves a civilization
moral, mental, and physical, higher than the one which has culminated in
almshouses, prisons, and hospitals."

Louis Proyect




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