Pierside Clothed animal, Gunboat, Words read
By Jonathan MorseCopyright 2023 by Jonathan Morse
It looked like my city, with my mountains, my harbor, and a little of my architecture. But it wasn’t occupying my time the way I do, so the picture story it told was in a foreign language. The lithograph had been published in 1854, and it referred to a different world.
Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003681551/. As with the other images in this book, this one has been edited to remove blemishes and restore contrast and detail.
An example: this little cut in the bottom row. Get your magnifying lens and study it.
The dogs at lower right are at the same naked doggy romping as the dogs of your time, but a long jacket and a top hat have made the man on the courthouse porch more imposing than you. And then at lower left you’ll see a kind of body not in my city’s current zoology at all: an animal not naked, a clothed beast of burden. Well, we relate in different ways to transport. Perhaps because Herman Melville approached Honolulu from the water side, he recorded this sight of the Honolulu quotidian as if it were unusual. When he wrote it up in Typee, his first book, he had indignation to communicate. On the land side of the harbor, however, there was counter-indignation.
“An apotheosis of barbarism! A panegyric on cannibal delights! An apostrophe to the spirit of savage felicity! . . . The cause of MISSIONS is assailed, with a pertinacity of misrepresentation and degree of hatred, which can only entitle the perpetrator to the just claim of traducer.”
The Christian Parlor Magazine (New York), July 1846, quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 1, p. 432.
That uppercase and those italics were one aspect of nineteenth-century American language. An old man in the twenty-first century, I show my age by reacting with selfassured Roaring Twenties condescension, as if I were young and Dorothy Parker. Perhaps if I actually were young now I’d be more sympathetic to the middle-aged of then. But even if I try to think in a history-neutral way about the scandalous quote you’re about to read, I’m puzzled. The Honolulu of Typee is the metropolis of a little monarchy, and when Melville talks about the monarch he seems to have come close enough for lèse-majesté. But how could he have done that?
Look back to the margin of the cityscape and yes: you’ll see a royal palace. Melville didn’t live in that edifice, however. During his four months in Honolulu he earned his living as a clerk in a grocery store and a pin boy in a bowling alley, and he was so poor that his jacket was homemade from a sail. Kamehameha was no Henry V passing among his soldiers in disguise, either. How could Melville have passed himself off as an acquaintance? How did he get into the king’s biography?
The answer to that question turns out to be “Think genre.” On the title page of its first edition, Typee presented itself as non-fiction.
During Melville’s lifetime, this was his most popular book. It was full of such cannibal delights as the idyll of young Herman sailing a little lake in the Marquesas with a beautiful island girl, and it established Melville in a reputation as an adventure writer which was to last until the baffled reaction to Moby-Dick deleted his name from the book reviews. He would die all but forgotten, unread until his reputation revived after the Great War.
But in the course of the revival Charles Roberts Anderson’s Melville in the South Seas (1939) demonstrated, among other things, that Melville’s “four months’ residence” was three weeks and the island girl’s lake was, geographically speaking, nonexistent. The Herman Melville who wrote Typee, was, surprise, an author. Melville in the South Seas is his bibliography, compiled in surprise retrospect. It devotes 62 pages to Typee’s literary sources.
One title it doesn’t cite, however, is this report of a scientific expedition which made a stop in Honolulu.
“Voyage Around the World Conducted in the Royal Prussian Merchant Marine Ship Prinzess Louise, Commanded by Captain W. Wendt, in the Years 1830, 1831 and 1832. By Dr. F. J. F. Meyen. Part 2: Historical Account.”
The report’s author, F. J. F. Meyen, was the expedition’s scientist, a botanist still known to botanists. He died young (1804-1840) and his ideas were brought to completion by other scientists, but they were important ideas. Among other things, he was one of the first botanists to make use of the microscope, and in the twentieth century the University of Hawaii botanist E. Alison Kay published a translation of the Hawaii chapters of his book. The translation’s focus is expectedly scientific; its title is A Botanist’s Visit to Oahu in 1831: Being the Journal of Dr. F. J. F. Meyen’s Travels and Observations about the Island of Oahu (Kailua, HI: Press Pacifica, 1981). But Meyen was an observer of society as well as flora. Melville couldn’t have read his Reise in the original, but a contemporary English-language journal, Foreign Quarterly Review, did publish a generous selection of translated excerpts – and one of the entries in Merton
Sealts’s Melville’s Reading demonstrates that Melville’s father-in-law was a subscriber.
So if you choose to read Meyen and Melville side by side, this way, you’re probably warranted. The Melville pages are from Typee’s second edition, whose title page omits some of the first’s “non-fiction” detail.
So yes, possibly: young Herman Melville may not have seen the missionary lady himself, or drawn his conclusions about her independently. It probably wasn’t the pin boy but the scientist with the medical degree who diagnosed the king’s complexion while the pin boy was at a distance. But a part of the society that Melville and Meyen both observed in the nineteenth century remains unchanged since then, still awaiting a future. When I tried to introduce Dr. Meyen to the Hawaiian Historical Society, the Society assured me
in its note of rejection that what had distressed Meyen on the street with the carriage was merely a traditional expression of the Hawaiian people’s love for their kings. Thanks to the missionaries, it was now love for the ministers of Christ as well.
I didn’t have the heart to reply with one more Meyen anecdote. But here, for you:
The view from the harbor began changing on the October day in 1914 when a battleship took up station just outside the three-mile limit.
At the beginning of World War I, a German naval squadron based in China attempted to withdraw to European waters but was destroyed by the British fleet in the Battle of the Falkland Islands on December 8, 1914. Knowing what was to follow in the long years after that short beginning (British deaths ten; German deaths 1,871), we may think that history has successfully taught us a way to read the record: that is, pedagogically, in the ironic retrospect of post-kindergarten.
Hans Bohrdt, “The Last Man.” The original of this 1915 painting seems to be lost, but it survives in patriotic reproduction to this day. You can buy it on a coffee mug.
But of course the record is hard even to see now, let alone read. As we try to read, it keeps blurring us.
Consider the footnote-sized example of the single warship from Germany’s Pacific squadron which was left behind in the Pacific: the little gunboat Geier. Twenty years old, mechanically obsolete, and too slow to keep up with battle maneuvers, Geier first carried out some independent attacks on British assets and then, in need of fuel and repair, requested internment in neutral Honolulu. There the Japanese battleship Hizen soon stationed itself just outside the three-mile limit to prevent escape.
Hizen itself had voyaged to Hawaiian waters after an eventful journey through history. Built in the United States for Russia, it had come under Japanese control after
being scuttled at Port Arthur, Manchuria, during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, which was the first defeat of a European power by an Asian power since the epoch of Genghis Khan. Now, from Asia, it was taking sides in a war between European powers. But from Hawaii, which had still been a nominally independent nation within living memory, the harbor view looked placid. “GEIER DECKED OUT WITH FLAGS” and “HIZEN WATCHED OVER TEACUPS” read the subheads on page 1 of Honolulu’s Pacific Commercial Advertiser for October 23, 1914. By the time the story continued on page 2, the gunboat was docked in the school news.
“TOUGH BOYS MAKE GOOD
proclaimed one headline there, while from the other side of the page a subhead reassuringly responded, “No Attempt Is Made To Brave Danger Off Harbor.”
Accordingly, Honolulu’s Pier 7 soon became become a sightseeing stop for travelers with cameras. The German sailor snapshotted here in 1916, for instance,
CITIZENS,”Al Menasco album, San Diego Air and Space Museum
has presumably been holystoning Geier’s deck, because he is barefoot with his pants rolled up to reveal his long underwear. The underwear has become a maritime view under tropical skies. And if the view of the pier from another angle reveals a nest of submarines, the skies over Pier 7 are still sunny.
The German sailors in the prose may happen to have been drilling with the goose step, but don’t worry yourself about that. Says Honolulu’s Pacific Commercial Advertiser,
“There is little chance that [the submarines] have to use their death dealing torpedoes against any foe.”
The other headlines in the image transmit details of the kind that readers in a port city would expect from a newspaper named Commercial Advertiser. A newly arrived ship has experienced bad weather en route, say the headlines, while another ship that has just departed has had an uneventful voyage so far. The early chapters of Ralph Simpson Kuykendall’s 1961 history of Hawaii are little more than a ledger of such activities at the islands’ piers. After all, as Captain Peleg reminded Ishmael in chapter 16 of Moby-Dick, at water’s edge there isn’t much else to see. The Commercial Advertiser seems to have been leaning over the rails at pier’s edge just like everybody else.
Come interest us, it called to its German guests, and the guests responded across the full range of their culture, from languages to sports. This photograph of adult education classrooms at Honolulu’s YMCA, for instance, identifies the learners fully and officially by their rank in the German navy. It dates from November 1916: the month when President Woodrow Wilson won reelection under the slogan “He has kept us out of war.”
But in the mainland United States memories of the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania were still being kept alive, and in July 2016 German saboteurs had destroyed a munition storage depot in New York harbor with an explosion that was heard as far away as Philadelphia and left the Statue of Liberty permanently damaged. In January 1917 there followed the decoded revelation of a telegram in which Germany’s foreign minister proposed offering the territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico in exchange for attacking the United States. Wilson’s election phrase “out of war” had lost its meaning. It was another kind of language that uttered the declaration of war on April 6, but diplomatic relations with Germany had already been broken on February 4.
In Honolulu, the non-linguistic consequence on February 5 was immediate and explosively tangible. Only the Honolulu Fire Department saved the Hawaiian Islands from being cut off from the world. Acting as one, the crews of Geier and all the other German ships interned in the harbor had wrecked their machinery and drained the engines’ boilers, then welded the engines shut by firing the boilers to white heat. Geier was smoldering when the fire engines arrived, and its crew was standing by as if it expected to be martyred.
On the page, image and text came together to depict a day-long struggle against death.
Off the page, the only injury was to Geier’s commanding officer, who rammed his fist in
a rage through the face of a clock just before he and his men were marched ashore. The U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings for April 1935 would publish an essay, “A Day in Hawaii,” by Lieutenant Commander J. H. Skillman, which treated February 5, 1917, as a chapter in the history of tactics. Its materiel included not just municipal fire engines but federal infantry and artillery. Even in the historical moment of February 5, however, an influential part of Hawaii didn’t want to see what was happening. By the twentieth century, the New England missionaries who had reduced Hawaii’s King Kamehameha III to what Melville called a farcical puppet were now a hereditary business and government class exercising its power throughout Hawaii’s institutions – and it was a Hawaii power, not an American one. As late as February 16, the students’ mothers at the Punahou School were intent on keeping Honolulu’s focus at pierside. Punahou was influential in Honolulu, too. It had been founded by the nineteenth-century missionaries to bring Hawaii’s kings into the Christian flock, and one of its alumni in the early twentieth century was a direct descendant of F. J. F. Meyen’s formidable interlocutor, the ruler of Hawaii who had forbidden the lighting of fire on the Sabbath. His scion was a second Hiram Bingham, the explorer of Machu Picchu.
But the khaki pandemic had already been inoculated. On the same day as the Star-Bulletin’s irenic reference to “military aspect and nature,” the Pacific Commercial Advertiser’s front matter was all military aspect and nature. Honolulu learned that day that Geier had been in clandestine communication from the beginning of its internment with Germany’s naval attaché in Washington. Its hospitable band, mentioned time and
again in the Honolulu papers, had supplied the loud music that masked the buzzes and clicks of the radiotelegraph.
The cultural effect was immediate. At Christmastime in 1915, all had been Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht for the crew of Geier and the congregation of Honolulu’s German Lutheran Church. Following a German tradition, the service included a sale of nails to be driven into a large wooden devotional image, with the pious promise that all funds raised by the hammerstrokes would go to the Red Cross. But the devotional image itself was an Iron Cross, symbol of Germany’s armed forces,
and just over a year later the continuation of the Advertiser’s narrative of February 16, 1917 published some of the 1915 ceremony’s actual words, transcribed by Captain Grasshof himself. Culturally, those were an anthology of at least three blood-fascinated rhetorics: the anti-British brandishings of American Fourth of July celebrations in the days before England had offered its help and its fleet to the United States during the Spanish-American War of 1898; vengeful Irish-American patrioteering of the kind to which Stephen Crane’s Pete treated Maggie in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893); and at last, unscabbed and unhealable, German grievance at Italy’s abandonment of its alliance with the Entente powers. Obviously, pathetically, the Punahou of cadets in bridal white had been deflowered long before.
From then, the change of language was inevitable. On June 2, 1918, the army tents pictured on the front page of the Advertiser were pitched on the grounds of Iolani Palace, the Italianate residence that had succeeded Kamehameha III’s little establishment. It’s the only royal palace in what is now the United States, but it’s also only a museum. By 1918, New England’s colony in the Pacific had joined its stepmother country.
By then, the colony was speaking its stepmother country’s language like a native.
Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” is a chrestomathy of the language of
Great War hysteria in 1918 Denver, but the detail below from the Hawaii page you have just read might as well be a translation from the Coloradan. So far as I can see, only one word remains on the page from the vanished Hawaii where innocent American submarines snuggled close to an innocent German gunboat: the word haole. Pronounced “howly” in 2023 Hawaii English, this Hawaiian-language word means “white person.” When it is alternatively pronounced “fuckinhowly” it communicates a negative connotation, but that doesn’t seem to have been applied by the Advertiser’s reporter to the young woman riding a King Street trolleycar on June 1, 1918. There and then, it was just a term of neutral description, as might have been published for purposes of identification in a Wanted poster. On the next day, the process of identification continued with more descriptive words.
But the chivalry seems not to have been acted on. I’ve found nothing in the archives. So far as I know, the lances remained sheathed. Geier itself was repaired in Honolulu and recommissioned as USS Schurz in honor of Carl Schurz, a liberal German refugee from 1848 who served in the Union army at Gettysburg and became a general, a senator, and secretary of the interior, but it didn’t bear that honor for long. On convoy duty off the coast of North Carolina on June 21, 1918, it was rammed by one of the vessels it was escorting and sank. Says Wikipedia, with the nautical feminine in memoriam, “She rests at a depth of 115 feet (35 m) and is a popular scuba diving site.”
One crewman was killed: a native of Honolulu, according to the Honolulu newspapers. But about the young woman with her perilous ribbon, not a word. Perhaps the authorities just weren’t able to find her. But look again at the terms haole above and white woman, of light complexion, and feminine sympathy here.
May it be that in 1917, while the horror was crossing the ocean between the world and Hawaii, a part of Hawaii was thinking back to the days when missionaries still voyaged under sails of bridal white? May it be that an occasional survivor-word which tells us we are good still speaks itself in dead language? ***
The first of Herman Melville’s long voyages ended and the last began on October 14, 1844, when he was discharged from USS United States in Boston. His future fatherin-law Lemuel Shaw, the dedicatee of Typee, was already at his own work of American literature there. Over many years as chief justice of Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court, he had been crafting words to unite the states in a common language. For the nineteenth century, he had ruled in Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842) that to organize a labor union is not to speak unlawfully. For the twentieth, he would rule in Roberts v. City of Boston (1848) that a municipality may lawfully declare that black children are different enough from white to warrant a segregated school system. For the twenty-first, his decision in Commonwealth v. Kneeland (1838) affirmed the last conviction in American judicial history for blasphemy. In the era of the Federalist Society and its Catholic integralism, that thou shalt not may turn out to be a bench order to detain language in a clasp-bound book. In there, thought may go only without saying.
But although it changes with the world around it, language as such may remain an idea comprehensible as such. If you take some air and descend to the depth where the language of Honolulu 1918 rests atop the language of Honolulu 1843, you’ll still, for now, be able to see that. Still signifying and still armed, it will have been awaiting you all along in the dark, reading while it waits.
The wreckage of Geier. https://monitor.noaa.gov/shipwrecks/schurz.html
