“One arm, its red shirt-sleeve rolled up, exposed the man’s name, tattooed in vermilion, near the hollow of the middle joint; and as if there was something peculiar in the painted flesh, every vibrating letter burned so white that you might read the flaming name in the flickering ground of blue.
“‘Where’s that damned Miguel?’ was now shouted down among us by the mate.
“‘He’s gone to the harbour where they never weigh anchor,’ coughed Jackson. ‘Come down, sir, and look.’
“Thinking that Jackson intended to beard him, the mate sprang down in a rage; but recoiled at the burning body as if he had been shot by a bullet. ‘Take hold of it,’ said Jackson at last, to the Greenlander; ‘it must go overboard. Don’t stand shaking there, like a dog; take hold of it, I say!--But stop!’ and smothering it all in the blankets, he pulled it partly out of the bunk.
“A few minutes more, and it fell with a bubble among the phosphorescent sparkles of the sea, leaving a coruscating wake as it sank.”
After this, Melville ceased reading in the forecastle. And indeed no other sailor but Jackson would stay in the forecastle alone, and none would laugh or sing there: none but Jackson. But he, while the rest would be sitting silently smoking on their chests, or on their bunks, would look towards the nailed-up bunk of Miguel and cough, and laugh, and invoke the dead man with scoffs and jeers.
Of Melville’s shipmates, surely this Jackson was the most remarkable: a fit rival to Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus. Max and the Greenlander were merely typical old tars. Mr. Thompson, the grave negro cook, with his leaning towards metaphysics and his disquisitions on original sin, together with his old crony, Lavendar the steward, with his amorous backslidings, his cologne water, and his brimstone pantaloons, though mildly diverting, were usual enough. Blunt, too, with his collection of hair-oils, and his dream-book, and his flowing bumpers of horse-salts, though picturesque, was pale in comparison with Jackson. Larry, the old whaler, with his sentimental distaste for civilised society, was a forerunner of Mr. H. L. Mencken; and as such, deserves a more prominent mention. “And what’s the use of bein’ _snivelized_?” he asks Melville; “snivelized chaps only learn the way to take on ’bout life, and snivel. Blast Ameriky, I say. I tell ye, ye wouldn’t have been to sea here, leadin’ this dog’s life, if you hadn’t been snivelized. Snivelization has been the ruin on ye; and it’s sp’iled me complete: I might have been a great man in Madagasky; it’s too darned bad! Blast Ameriky, I say.”