Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil



Melville and the Problem of Evil 83
time on a whaler bound for the South Pacific. In several
books he has told us of the tyranny and brutality that drove
him to desert the whaler six months later on a tropical island;
of the ravages that Christian civilization, as represented
by missionaries, French colonial government, and venereal
disease, had made upon the noble savages of the islands; of
the merciless flogging and the attitude it bred aboard the
man-of-war on which he finally returned to the United
States, nearly three years after he had sailed. With the con-
fidence born of having seen wonders rare to most Americans
he somehow slipped into authorship and wrote
Types, his
first book, published in 1846.

Typee is apparently a fairly truthful account of Melville’s
own adventures on the island of Nukahiva.
Typss tells how
Melville, or a young man like him, disgusted with the monot-
ony of sea life after six months out of sight of land, bored
with the diet of salt-horse and mouldy sea-biscuit, and
indignant at the brutality of the captain, jumped ship at
Nukahiva and with a comrade fled to the interior until the
ship was gone. It tells of his life there for several months
among the natives, of the joys of life on a tropical island
among the noble savages, of his growing discontent and fear
of cannibalism, of his escape to another whaler that put into
the bay for water.
Typee is a rather remarkable first book,
and there are many things in it that merit discussion; how-
ever we today are concerned only with traces of the problem
of evil. In
Types I believe that we can see Melville’s almost
unconscious record of his own growing awareness of the
problem.

Now Types occupies an interesting place in the record of
Melville’s development. A first book is always revealing,
and
Typee comes at an especially crucial period in Melville’s
life. He had just completed his college education; “a whale-



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