The Friend

The Friend
Author: Samuel Chenery Damon
Publisher:
Total Pages: 750
Release: 1919
Genre: Christians
ISBN:

A Game of Chance

A Game of Chance
Author: Andrea Kirkpatrick
Publisher: FriesenPress
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2023-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1039158633

It’s almost impossible to imagine spending eight months at sea “without once putting foot on land.” But that’s exactly what whalers experienced when playing the dangerous “game of chance,” hunting down leviathans for oil and bone—all for a “lay,” or share, of the vessel’s spoils. A Game of Chance is the first comprehensive, in-depth study of British North American South Seas whaling. Author Andrea Kirkpatrick takes readers on a series of fascinating and sometimes fantastical journeys as she chronicles in great detail the story of a largely forgotten industry that operated out of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick ports from the 1760s to 1850. Kirkpatrick plumbed the depths of myriad logbooks and journals to piece together the often-murky tales of an astonishing number of ships. In this treatise covering a century of whaling, she shares details such as ownership, tonnage, voyages, captains’ pedigrees, and names of crewmen, including nascent whaler Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick. Hoping for “greasy luck,” the men who manned these ships found both camaraderie and competition as they hunted the world’s whaling grounds from Cape Horn to Kamchatka, many circumnavigating the globe during their careers. They battled squalls and high seas, scurvy and venereal disease, heartbreak and homesickness—and sometimes each other. Many never returned home, their bodies committed to the deep or buried on foreign land. Written in two parts—landward and seaward—Kirkpatrick’s clear prose and adoption of whaling lingua franca brings this high-risk venture to the fore with authenticity, newly revealed facts, and remarkable stories of adventure.

Herman Melville's Whaling Years

Herman Melville's Whaling Years
Author: Wilson Lumpkin Heflin
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780826513823

Based on more than a half-century of research, Herman Melville's Whaling Years is an essential work for Melville scholars. In meticulous and thoroughly documented detail, it examines one of the most stimulating periods in the great author's life--the four years he spent aboard whaling vessels in the Pacific during the early 1840s. Melville would later draw repeatedly on these experiences in his writing, from his first successful novel, Typee, through his masterpiece Moby-Dick, to the poetry he wrote late in life. During his time in the Pacific, Melville served on three whaling ships, as well as on a U.S. Navy man-of-war. As a deserter from one whaleship, he spent four weeks among the cannibals of Nukahiva in the Marquesas, seeing those islands in a relatively untouched state before they were irrevocably changed by French annexation in 1842. Rebelling against duty on another ship, he was held as a prisoner in a native calaboose in Tahiti. He prowled South American ports while on liberty, hunted giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, and explored the islands of Eimeo (Moorea) and Maui. He also saw the Society and Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands when the Western missionary presence was at its height. Heflin combed the logbooks of any ship at sea at the time of Melville's voyages and examined nineteenth-century newspaper items, especially the marine intelligence columns, for mention of Melville's vessels. He also studied British consular records pertaining to the mutiny aboard the Australian whaler Lucy Ann, an insurrection in which Melville participated and which inspired his second novel, Omoo. Distilling the life's work of a leading Melville expert into book form for the first time, this scrupulously edited volume is the most in-depth account ever published of Melville's years on whaleships and how those singular experiences influenced his writing.

The Great Wave

The Great Wave
Author: Christopher Benfey
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307432270

When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced—Darwinians that they were—that their quarry was on the verge of extinction.” These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is “shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan”; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai’s daughter and becomes Japan’s preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world’s leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre. Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity “seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril.”

Herman Melville

Herman Melville
Author: Hershel Parker
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 1010
Release: 2005-08-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780801881855

Traces Melville's life from his childhood in New York, through his adventures abroad as a sailor, to his creation of "Moby-Dick," and forty years later, to his death, in obscurity.

Herman Melville: 1819-1851

Herman Melville: 1819-1851
Author: Hershel Parker
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 1014
Release: 1996
Genre: Novelists, American
ISBN: 9780801854286

Traces Melville's life from his childhood in New York, through his adventures abroad as a sailor, to his creation of "Moby-Dick," and forty years later, to his death, in obscurity.

Presstime in Paradise

Presstime in Paradise
Author: George Chaplin
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 1998-02-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780824820329

Since it first rolled off the presses in 1856, The Honolulu Advertiser has been an important force in reporting and shaping the news of Honolulu and, secondarily, the Hawaiian Islands. Established as The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, a four-page weekly, it was the first enduring non-government owned or subsidized newspaper published in the Hawaiian Kingdom. Under its first owner, the son of New England missionaries, the Advertiser became the most successful commercial English language newspaper in the Islands. The paper became a daily in 1882 and in 1921 changed its name to The Honolulu Advertiser. Now owned by Gannett Company, Inc., the Advertiser is one of the oldest newspapers still operating west of the Rockies. George Chaplin, editor-in-chief of the Advertiser from 1959 to 1986, has written a colorful and entertaining insider's account of nearly a century and a half of Advertiser history. He covers the legion of personalities that has worked for the Advertiser over the years: owners (from its first Island owner, Henry Whitney, to its last, the Thurston Twigg-Smith family), publishers, editors, reporters, political cartoonists, photographers, and pressroom people. He reports on issues and historical events that had a powerful impact on the Honolulu community and comments on the newspaper's position regarding each: the sensational Massie trial, the dilemma of Hawaii's Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II, the labor movement and communism in the Islands, and statehood, among others. He also recalls the many political figures who have waged their media battles within the pages of the Advertiser.Presstime in Paradise is an illuminating and informative look at the internal operations of a newspaper and its relationship with a community that has both influenced it and been influenced by it. It adds significantly to the growing body of literature on the role of the free press in Hawaii.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville
Author: John Bryant
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 2599
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1119106001

A comprehensive exploration of Melville's formative years, providing a new biographical foundation for today's generations of Melville readers Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2, follows Herman Melville's life from early childhood to his astonishing emergence as a bestselling novelist with the publication of Typee in 1846. These volumes comprise the first half of a comprehensive biography on Melville, grounded in archival research, new scholarship, and incisive critical readings. Author John Bryant, a distinguished Melville scholar, editor, critic, and educator, traces the events and experiences that shaped the many-stranded consciousness of one of literature’s greatest writers. This in-depth and innovative biography covers Melville's family history and literary friendships, his father-longing, god-hunger, and search for the hidden nature of Being, the genesis of his liberal politics, his empathy for African Americans, Native Americans, Polynesians, South Americans, and immigrants. Original perspectives on Melville’s earliest identities—orphaned son, sibling, farmer, teacher, debater, lover, actor, sailor—provide the context for Melville’s evolution as a writer. The biography presents new information regarding Melville's reading, his early orations and acting experience, his life at sea and on the road, and the unsettling death of his older, rival brother from mercury poisoning. It provides insights on experiences such as Melville's trauma at the loss of his father, his learning to write amidst a coterie siblings, his struggles to find work during economic depression, his journey West, his life in whaling and in the navy, and his vagabondage in the South Pacific during the moment of American and European imperial incursions. A significant addition to Melville scholarship, this important biographical work: Explores the nature and development of Melville's creative consciousness, through the lens of his revisions in manuscript and print Assesses Melville's sexual growth and exploration of the spectrum of his masculinities Highlights Melville's relevance in contemporary democratic society Discusses Melville's blending of dark humor and tragedy in his unique version of the picturesque Examines the 'replaying' of Melville's life traumas throughout his entire works, from Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man to his shorter works, including "Bartleby," his epic Clarel, his poetry, and his last novella Billy Budd Covers such cultural and historical events as the American revolution of his grandparents, the whaling industry, New York slavery, street life and theater in Manhattan, the transatlantic slave trade, the Jacksonian economy, Indian removal, Pacific colonialism, and westward expansion Written in an engaging style for scholars and general readers alike, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2 is an indispensable new source of information and insights for those interested in Melville, 19th-century and modern literature and culture, and readers of general American history and literary culture.