But the Marquesans exhibit a cruelty even more directly culinary. They don’t lash out. They caress and they fondle, but they kill and they eat when their man is plump and the aroma pleases them. Here, it isn’t a question of falling into the clutches of a Captain Pease who’ll run you off your feet without letting up so that Miss Valentine can afford the choicest pork chops. Here, you yourself are the pork chop, and the captains of this country will lay you out cold so that their Miss Valentines can sink their teeth straight into your haunches. You are in among the cannibals. But the two rascals hide in the palms and let the Acushnet depart. They still have high hopes for the new life that lies ahead.

Blessed are those who walk in the furious beating of the angel’s wings.

•

Now he’s famous. He’s written Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and Mardi. White-Jacket is about to appear. Typee, the tale of his adventures among the cannibals, came out simultaneously in London and New York to huge acclaim. Stevenson declared: “There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard.” This book, by an outlaw, was ironically dedicated to Magistrate Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts. In August 1847 Herman even goes so far as to marry the daughter of this Lemuel Shaw (Herman never does things by half measures). She’s sweet, innocent, clear-eyed, and shyly smiling. On the promenade, she walks with mincing steps as she hurries to keep up with the long, fluid strides of the deserter. She leans on the deserter’s arm. For his part, he’s preserved that slightly scruffy, ever so seductive look of the rebellious sailor: his head bare and cocked at a rakish angle—just the right pose for a ruffian; his hat in hand, as if he hadn’t had the chance yet to put it back on after walking away from a brawl; unharmed, unblemished, barely a hair out of place, his collar comfortably loosened, his head held high, and a fairly handsome knitted waistcoat inside his jacket. Still and all . . . a knitted waistcoat.

All the women who pass to and fro under the towering elms of the promenade find him highly attractive. And the same is true at the roadway in the distance, where ladies draw up their tilburies to tip their parasols in greeting. The couple responds, Mistress Melville with a kind of semi-reverence, and Herman with a casual motion of the hat held at the end of his outstretched arm. Flocks of young women and ladies in pairs come to greet them, pausing to talk and gossip. Surrounding Mistress Melville and Herman there’s nothing but the swaying of voluminous skirts. Even Mistress Melville, caught up in this vertiginous swell, rocks back and forth like a domesticated wavelet beside her husband. This is the moment when he, Herman, chooses to stay bolt upright, motionless, stony, and silent, with nothing but a very subtle and very agreeable smile descending mischievously right down into his beard. The company trade compliments, exchange smiles, take their leave, and part. Herman and Mistress Melville go back the way they came; the others return to the end of the promenade, where they wait for him to watch as they spin around and swell their crinolines with that supremely elegant motion known as the “love top.” If this move is properly executed, it reveals—and precisely within the bounds of propriety—their delicate feet, their ankles, and the whole embroidered ruffle of their long pantaloons.