Melville's Typee and Omoo: Of "Civilized" War on "Savage" Peace

95 ADLER JOYCE SPARER ADLER MELVILLE'S TYPEE AND OMOO: OF "CIVILIZED" WAR ON "SAVAGE" PEACE Towards noon we drew abreast the entrance to the harbor, and at last we slowly swept by the intervening promontory, and entered the bay of Nukuheva . No description can do justice to its beauty; but that beauty was lost to me then, and I saw nothing but the tri-colored flag of France trailing over the stern of six vessels, whose black hulls and bristling broadsides proclaimed their warlike character. There they were, floating in that lovely bay, the green eminences of the shore looking down so tranquilly upon them, as if rebuking the sternness of their aspect. To my eye nothing could be more out ofkeeping than the presence of these vessels; but we soon learnt what brought them there. The whole group of islands had just been taken possession of by Rear-Admiral Du Petit Thouars, in the name of the invincible French nation. (Chapter 2,Typee)1 The "war or peace" theme that runs through Melville's work makes an immediate appearance. The passage in the epigraph announces it, and his first two books develop it. Beneath the narrative embellishments of Typee (1 846) and Omoo (1847) is the story of the "civilized" war on "savage" peace that had been going on in the South Pacific since the early 1800's. The source from which Melville's earliest expression of the "war or peace" theme springs is his experience as a sailor in the South Seas at the age of twenty-three. When in July of 1 842 the whaler Acushnet arrived in the Marquesas, Melville was suddenly confronted with war as a visible reality. His first view of the warships in the midst of tropical peace determined his perspective on all he was to see in Polynesia and influenced his later view of the world. His surge of feeling at the sight seems like the "freshet-wave of a torrent suddenly swelled by pouring showers in tropical mountains" that arises in the heart of the crew at the Bellipotent in Billy Budd, Sailor and ultimately finds its poetic voice.2 The scene brought to Melville's consciousness what would be the feeling of a lifetime , later voiced with greater art, that nothing could be more out of keeping with good and beauty in life than what these vessels signified: war, as the footnote to Omoo's chapter on the warship Reine Blanche will shortly define it, is the "greatest" ofevils.3 The passage showing the warships against the tranquil green heights of the island is the first in a series of pictorial representations in Melville's art that contrast war and peace in such a way as to give a clear picture of what 96 THEMINNESOTA REVIEW values the choice between them involves. Later, such scenes will be imaginative creations. This earliest one reproduces an actual spectacle which assumed for him memorable symbolic significance. A parallel scene appears in Omoo (p. 69; Ch. xix) when another whaler brings Melville to the harbor of Papeete where the French warships loom up again and the idea of the guns of the flagships as "two rows of teeth" is an echo of Melville's "cannibalism" theme in Typee, which could serve as a frontispiece for both books printed as one, but in each case the scene anchors the ships in the reader's memory. In Typee he remembers, throughout the account of the peaceful Typees, that their valley lies not far from the bay into which these warships have come. In Omoo he knows, as he reads of the death of the Tahitians, that their extermination is the result of European domination. Together Typee and Omoo present the three stages of Polynesian history as Melville interpreted them, all of which he could observe side by side as he moved from island to island and from shore to interior. The first is life in a "state of nature" as he witnessed it in the remote Typee valley. The second is the stage of ever-widening encroachment by the imperialist nations for the purpose of exploiting the islands. The third is the period of occupation...