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  u “Six Months at Sea! Yes, Reader, as I Live” Sailor Talk People who have never gone to sea for the first time as sailors, can not imagine how puzzling and confounding it is. It must be like going into a barbarous country, where they speak a strange dialect, and dress in strange clothes, and live in strange houses. For sailors have their own names, even for things that are familiar ashore; and if you call a thing by its shore name, you are laughed at for an ignoramus and a land-lubber. —Redburn (65) M based the above statement on his own experiences aboard the merchant vessel St. Lawrence in . Following the untimely death of his father and the subsequent lapse of the family’s fortunes, Melville joined this vessel as a greenhand and embarked on his first direct experience of the maritime world. This was his initial immersion in sailor talk. The four years he spent at sea from  through  on three whaleships and a naval frigate deepened this immersion and established his self-identification as a mariner and wanderer. The insights , perspectives, and language he acquired during this time exerted a formative , encompassing influence on his early creative development as he transcended the role of yarn-spinner to become an increasingly ambitious literary artist. In this work, I use the term “sailor talk” to refer to the technical terminology used by sailors, to the occupational lore and coterie speech, or coded language, that arises out of the shared experience of particular crews, to the more broadly shared folkloric forms of music, argument, and yarning, and to the discourse, or generalized language, that is used by and to describe seamen. All sailors share the more formalized occupational lingo, but on any voyage the crew develops speech particular to that specific group of people, when the already arcane set of terms that is nautical terminology, the occupational dialect, shades into the more personal rubric of coterie speech. Much folklore is engendered by particularly striking individual expression that is therefore repeated and spread beyond the coterie group and absorbed into the oral tradition of the larger folk group, in this case the occupational folk group of sailors. The broader discourse of sailor talk  02 Edwards ch2 10/31/08 11:22 AM Page 24 includes both the complex mosaic of self-image expressed by sailors and the similarly complex views of sailors expressed by society in general. Throughout his early works, the subtle, shifting voices of Melville’s narrators cast their nets broadly to fish up a tremendous variety of sailor talk upon which his readers can feast. Melville employs sailor talk at all its levels in a more sophisticated, comprehensive , and profound way than any other maritime author. W T At sea, sailors need technical language the way a body needs breath—or a ship needs wind. Consider the richness and depth of the sailor’s relationship to language and to wind. The unambiguous terms of the shipboard language of command translate into highly specific actions that, properly performed, forge a crew and ship into a single machine that harnesses the world’s wind to the navigator’s will. Spoken language is transported from speaker to listener by breath, the forcing of wind from one’s lungs through one’s mouth. Breath, which conveys the signifiers of meaning in the form of speech, was perceived by sailors as a controlled form of wind to the point that they had various superstitions concerning this identification. Prior to , when the Englishman Sir Francis Beaufort created the Beaufort Wind Scale, and even to some extent afterward, sailors used terms directly relating to the amount of sail that could be spread in winds of a particular force. Before the quantified scientific measurement of air currents, sailors’ understanding of wind had an inextricable relationship with the working of the ship. A “t’gallant breeze,” for instance, referred to the speed of wind in which the topgallant sail, the third sail up from the deck on the mast of an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century full-rigged ship, could remain set. Once the wind exceeds that speed, the sail must be furled, or tied into a tight bundle lashed to the spar from which it hangs. When a sailor used a term such as “t’gallant breeze,” he encompassed his personally acquired knowledge of the physical experience involved in climbing eighty or ninety feet up a mast in twenty-five to thirty knots of wind...

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