“A Renegado from Christendom and Humanity”: Proposing a Historical Source for Lem Hardy

Thomas Sweeny, an Irish immigrant orphan from New York City, may have been the basis for the character of Lem Hardy in Omoo. Sweeny was one of the first inmates of the first juvenile reformatory in the US and was apprenticed on a whaling ship in the late 1820s. After falling ill on a voyage in the late 1830s, he was left in the Marquesas. He may have been living in the Marquesas for several years when Melville alighted there in 1842. Detailed research and informed speculation indicate that Sweeny’s history may have informed the portrait of the beachcomber Lem Hardy, encountered by Tommo in the early pages of Omoo.