Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas
1847
Before Moby-Dick, there was Omoo. Herman Melville, barely out of his teens, jumped ship in the Marquesas and stumbled into an adventure that would become America's first great sea novel. Our narrator has just escaped captivity on a forbidden island and signs aboard the decrepit whaler Julia, bound for Tahiti and beyond. What follows is a wildreckless chronicle of Pacific wanderlust: mutinous sailors, island recruiting gone wrong, days spent drifting through turquoise lagoons, and nights carousing in Tahitian shore villages. Melville writes with the fresh eyes of a man who actually slept in a canoe hull during a hurricane and learned to speak Tahitian before he learned proper grammar. This is adventure literature stripped of nostalgia, raw and immediate, capturing the intoxicating freedom and brutal hardship of whaling life in an era when the South Seas still felt like the edge of the known world. For anyone who's ever wanted to jump ship and disappear.
Editions
X-Ray
“Now, I knew not, that there was any thing in my own appearance calculated to disarm ridicule; and, indeed, to have looked at all heroic, under the circumstances, would have been rather difficult. Still, I could not but feel exceedingly annoyed at the prospect of being screamed at in turn, by this mischievous young witch, even though she were but an islander. And, to tell a secret, her beauty had something to do with this sort of feeling; and, pinioned as I was, to a log, and clad most unbecomingly, I began to grow sentimental. Ere her glance fell upon me, I had, unconsciously, thrown myself into the most graceful attitude I could assume, leaned my head upon my hand, and summoned up as abstracted an expression as possible. Though my face was averted, I soon felt it flush,””
— Herman Melville
“We dropped in one evening, and found the ladies at home. My long friend engaged his favourites, the two younger girls, at the game of "Now," or hunting a stone under three piles of tappa. For myself, I lounged on a mat with Ideea the eldest, dallying with her grass fan, and improving my knowledge of Tahitian. The occasion was well adapted to my purpose, and I began. "Ah, Ideea, mickonaree oee?" the same as drawling out”
— Herman Melville
“Speaking of bones recalls an ugly custom of theirs, now obsolete”
— Herman Melville
“Now, contempt is as frequently produced at first sight as love; and thus was it with respect to Wilson. No one could look at him without conceiving a strong dislike, or a cordial desire to entertain such a feeling the first favourable opportunity. There was such an intolerable air of conceit about this man that it was almost as much as one could do to refrain from running up and affronting him.””
— Herman Melville
“Once in a while, we came in at the death of a chief ’s pig; the noise of whose slaughtering was generally to be heard at a great distance. An occasion like this gathers the neighbors together, and they have a bit of a feast, where a stranger is always welcome. A good loud squeal, therefore, was music in our ears. It showed something going on in that direction.””
— Herman Melville
