With his knife, Melville ripped off his jacket, struck out boldly towards the elevated pole of one of the life-buoys which had been cut away, and was soon after picked up by one of the cutters from the frigate.
“Ten minutes after, I was safe on board, and, springing aloft, was ordered to reeve anew the stun’-sail-halyards, which, slipping through the blocks when I had let go the end, had unrove and fallen to the deck.” Amphitrite had, indeed, interceded with Neptune, and the sea-gods strove to answer Melville’s prayer. But Melville always, even in the lowest abyss of despair, clung passionately to life. And the night he was hurled from the mast he was hurled from among friends, and into waters that washed the neighbouring shores of his birth.
Melville’s long wanderings were nearly at an end. With the home port believed to be broad on their bow, under the stars and a meagre moon in her last quarter, the main-top-men gathered aloft in the top, and round the mast they circled, “hand in hand, all spliced together. We had reefed the last top-sail; trained the last gun; blown the last match; bowed to the last blast; been tranced in the last calm. We had mustered our last round the capstan; been rolled to grog the last time; for the last time swung in our hammocks; for the last time turned out at the sea-gull call of the watch. We had seen our last man scourged at the gangway; our last man gasp out the ghost in the stifling sick-bay; our last man tossed to the sharks.”
And there Melville has left this brother band--with the anchor still hanging from the bow--with the land still out of sight. “I love an indefinite infinite background,” he says,--“a vast, heaving, rolling, mysterious rear!”
“As the vine flourishes, and the grape empurples close up to the very walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein; so do the sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its peril.”--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Pierre_.
“Until I was twenty-five,” Melville once wrote to Hawthorne, “I had no development at all.” When the cable and anchor of the _United States_ were all clear, and when he bounded ashore on his native soil, Melville was in his twenty-fifth year. “From my twenty-fifth year,” he wrote Hawthorne, “I date my life.”