Herman Melville, Sailors’ Snug Harbor, and John Turnbull’s “A Voyage Round the World”
Reprinted from the Stephen B. Luce Library on Medium
One of the gems of the Sailors’ Snug Harbor collection is an early nineteenth-century travelogue that belonged to Herman Melville. We know that it was part of Melville’s library because of his signature on the title page. The book also contains distinctive X-marks consistent with marginalia discovered on other books owned by Melville. He even indirectly quotes this travelogue in his own work, Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas, but the value of the work is not limited to Melville’s ownership — it gives a unique perspective into a period in history and the observations of an early British trader writing before the British empire had expanded into the Pacific Islands.
This unique volume is John Turnbull’s A Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804, in which the author recounts his four-year journey traveling to and trading on the island of Tahiti as supercargo of the brig Margaret. While Turnbull initially wrote the account of his adventure for “the amusement and information of his private friends,” he eventually published his account in 1805, and then published a second, revised and expanded edition, in 1813.
Dr. John Rocco, Melville scholar and professor of humanities at SUNY Maritime College, explains that Melville acquired this copy of Turnbull’s work in 1847. While we do not know the exact circumstances of how this copy of Turnbull’s Voyage came into the ownership of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, that transfer may well have happened while Herman Melville’s youngest brother, Captain Thomas Melville, was the third governor of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, possibly in 1877, due to correspondence written by Herman Melville about Sailors’ Snug Harbor.
Sailors’ Snug Harbor’s library was used extensively by its residents, known as “inmates”, who were retired seamen. Some may well have visited the locations described in Turnbull’s travelogue during their careers and one imagines that such a volume might well have been a welcome addition to the library’s collection as a reminder of travels past.
Historically, Turnbull’s account describes a pivotal time in early British relations with the Pacific Islanders. Until the establishment of the Australian penal colony in 1788, British ships had only rarely ventured into the region, and the earliest significant British voyage to the Pacific Islands had occurred less than two decades before, when Captain Cook first arrived in Tahiti in 1769.
Turnbull himself was a participant in one of the earliest trades developed between the British and the islands: the salt pork trade between Tahiti and New South Wales. The first direct salt pork trade from Tahiti to Australia was in 1801, so when Turnbull’s ship, the Margaret, picked up the trade in 1802, he and the rest of the crew were at the forefront of a new relationship between the Tahitians and British traders. This book plays an important role both in our understanding of these early connections and clashes in addition to being an important source for Melville himself in his own travel and literary works set in the South Seas.
These valuable insights notwithstanding, to twenty-first century readers, even the chapter titles may raise eyebrows, including phrases such as “Ludicrous Instance of Simplicity amongst the Natives” or Chapter XXXVI, described as “Miserable State of the Island. — Diseases. Causes of the gradual Decrease of Population. — Trick played upon the Captain. — General Propensity to Theft.” (Turnbull was fond of long and explanatory titles!) Even as we recognize Turnbull’s account for the remarkable perspective it gives us into a time period when Europeans and Pacific Islanders were forging new, albeit wary and mistrustful relationships, it is hard not to cringe when encountering phrases such as the “Stupidity of Otoo” (an Otaheitan leader), especially when Turnbull follows it up by observing that, “I ever found [Otoo] more attentive to a book of pictures than to his reading and writing. He could indeed very imperfectly form some of the letters of the alphabet, but it was very imperfectly, and I am of opinion that there are very small hopes of improving the natives through his example, or that of any of his family.”
Turnbull judges Tahitian culture and finds it lacking because he himself does not recognize his own shortcomings and biases. As we observe Turnbull observing the Tahitians, we are able to see his intolerance for other cultural norms — certainly not at all unique among British, or even Europeans in general — and his own hypocrisy, as he condemns the Tahitians for their self-interest while simultaneously ignoring the entirely commercial motivations behind his own presence in the region.
Twenty-first century mores aside, Turnbull’s book, particularly with the addition of geographic and scientific observations in the revised and updated second edition, was well-reviewed in Britain and was popular enough to also be printed in the United States. It is a good example of the popular British “Voyage” narrative that interested and influenced Regency and Victorian readers, who were eager to learn about places on the globe that were being explored by Europeans for the first time.
We must not downplay the importance of books like Turnbull’s in influencing how the British, and indeed Americans, learned about the globe and its diverse cultures in an era long before the invention of the telegraph, not to mention radio, television, and the internet. We know that Melville was a voracious reader, who both read and owned many travelogues. and that its very survival, as one of the few non-fiction books from Melville’s library to still exist today, makes it important and worth our attention. We hope that this National Park Service Maritime Grant-funded digitization project will make this unique work available to a wider audience.
