The early history of Doctor Long Ghost he kept to himself; but it was Melville’s conviction that he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy, and associated with gentlemen. “He quoted Virgil, and talked of Hobbes of Malmsbury, besides repeating poetry by the canto, especially Hudibras.” In the most casual manner, too, he could refer to an amour he had in Palermo, his lion hunting before breakfast among the Kaffirs, and the quality of coffee he had drunk in Muscat.
Melville was in no condition, physically, to engage in the ship’s duties, so he and Doctor Long Ghost fraternised in the forecastle, where they were treated by the crew as distinguished guests. There they talked, played chess--with an outfit of their own manufacture--and there Melville read the books of the Long Doctor, over and over again, not omitting a long treatise on the scarlet fever.
At its best, the forecastle is never an ideal abode: but the forecastle of the _Julia_--its bunks half wrecked, its filthy sailors’ pantry, and its plague of rats and cockroaches--must have made the _Highlander_ seem as paradise in retrospect. The forecastle of the _Julia_, Melville says, “looked like the hollow of an old tree going to decay. In every direction the wood was damp and discoloured, and here and there soft and porous. Moreover, it was hacked and hewed without mercy, the cook frequently helping himself to splinters for kindling wood.” The viciousness of the crew of the _Julia_, did not, of course, perceptibly enhance the charms of the forecastle. Nor was Melville’s estate made more enviable when the man in the bunk next to his went wildly delirious. One night Melville was awakened from a vague dream of horrors by something clammy resting on him: his neighbour, with a stark stiff arm reached out into Melville’s bunk, had during the night died. The crew rejoiced at his death.
For weeks the _Julia_ tacked about among the islands of the South Seas. The captain was ill, and Jermin steered the _Julia_, to Tahiti, to arrive off the island the moment that Admiral Du Petit-Thouars was firing, from the _Reine Blanche_, a salute in honour of the treaty he had just forced Pomare to sign.
But to the astonishment of the crew, Jermin kept the ship at sea, fearing the desertion of all his men if he struck anchor. His purpose was to set the sick captain ashore, and to resume the voyage of the _Julia_ at once, to return to Tahiti after a certain period agreed upon, to take the captain off. The crew were in no mood to view this manœuvre with indifference. Melville and Long Ghost cautioned them against the folly of immediate mutiny, and on the fly-leaf of an old musty copy of _A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies_, a round-robin was indited, giving a statement of the crew’s grievances, and concluding with the earnest hope that the consul would at once come off and see how matters stood. Pritchard, the missionary consul, was at that time in England; his place was temporarily filled by one Wilson, son of the well-known missionary of that name, and no honour to his ancestor. It did not promise well for the crew that Wilson was an old friend of Captain Guy’s.