The farmer is astonished. He replies that, as far as he knows, Master Herman is in New York, safe and sound. He left the farm on March 3 when there was still snow on the ground. It takes a while for Maria to find out, to comprehend, and, finally, to admit that he’s aboard the Highlander, a merchant ship bound for Liverpool. He’d signed on as a common sailor. Later, recalling this voyage, he’ll write Redburn: His First Voyage, Being the Sailor-Boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son of a Gentleman, in the Merchant Service.

But, like the rest of us, he isn’t the product of his own experiences alone. Aside from that, what he’s witnessed on this crossing is commonplace for a sea voyage. For a long time now he’s been living through much more harrowing passages in his dreams. He’d like reality to live up to them. Above all, he’d like reality to surpass them.

Maria has told herself: “We’ll see, we’ll see. In spite of it all, he’s still my flesh and blood.” Yes, and he’s really his own flesh and blood as well, or at the very least, it will still be a little while before he produces a Melville flesh and blood wholly apart from Allan and Maria’s. When he comes ashore he gives himself a shake, takes a look at the sea, turns his back on it, gives it another look, and finally heads off with his long, easy stride into the countryside.

It’s essential that he not go home. Does he take a post as schoolmaster in East Albany merely for the sake of six dollars a week plus lodging? A lodging that consists of a tiny cubicle, but here he reads everything about the sea that he can lay his hands on. It’s a brief, cloudy period, three years during which he enlists and dismisses a number of crews, hires captains and then thanks them for their troubles, inspects his hull, has it recaulked, fills his hold, tests the waters, misses opportunities, regrets missing them, lies in wait for more, lets them slip by, sets off listing, comes back to anchor, wears out line and sail lying in port, sleeps on the glassy waters of the harbor, and suffers profoundly to hear, day after useless day, the stem of his prow—the prow he wants bathed in glory—knocking pointlessly against the quay.

When he feels too much of a familiar kind of blood in his veins—his mother’s blood—he goes out with some frisky serving girls from the neighborhood to maraud the orchards that surround the school. Or else he stations himself at an open window, with a blowpipe and dried peas, and pelts the top hats as they pass by in the street below. But, how to escape from it all? What’s to be done when the spirit of Melville rises up? The one who tears the deck of cards or the petticoat from Herman’s grasp, and silently spreads the charts of his life across the table. They’re all there, each with its star-shaped wind rose. They show the ocean currents like a monstrous, flowing mane, rolling across boundless reaches where it would be fine to be a man. But he’s stuck here, dazed with unhappiness, gazing at these charts on which his course has been plotted out, as though he were staring at Medusa.