AFTER MOBY-DICK, the sinking, Melville, with pseudonyms and anonyms, kept trying to die, as PIERRE . . .
“. . . death-milk for thee and me!”
BENITO CERENO . . .
“seguid vuestro jefe”
and BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER . . .
opening lines, written when he was 34: “I am a rather elderly man.”
and like Columbus, in search of death, he turned to the Holy Land, Sodom, the Dead Sea . . .
“. . . foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog—smarting bitter of the water,—carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & Bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I.—Old boughs tossed up by water—relics of pick-nick—nought to eat but bitumen & ashes with dessert of Sodom apples washed down with water of Dead Sea.— . . .”
and Columbus, following the 3rd voyage, liberated from his chains by the Sovereigns,
(as Melville had been liberated, temporarily, from the chains of poverty, by Judge Shaw,
turned inland
(as Melville turned inland, in PIERRE,
to another scheme: the liberation of Jerusalem . . .
retiring to the convent of Las Cuevas, he began work on the BOOK OF PROPHECIES:
“St. Augustine says that the end of this world is to come in the seventh millenary of years from its creation . . . there are only lacking 155 years to complete the 7000, in which year the world must end.”
“The greatest part of the prophecies and Sacred Writing is already finished.”
thus foreclosing on the future of the hemisphere he had discovered,
. . . condoning and justifying all brutalities against the Indians, as extreme haste must be made to convert the heathen . . .
Melville:
“With wrecks in a garret I’m stranded . . .”
and
“Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.”
Columbus, on Jamaica:
“Solitary in my trouble, sick, and in daily expectation of death . . .”
and back in Spain, 1504, still trying to get to the Court to present his claims and grievances—too weak and ill to make the trip on foot or on horseback—requests the loan of a funeral bier from the Cathedral of Seville:
“This day, their Worships ordered that there should be loaned to the Admiral Columbus the mortuary bier in which was carried the body of the Lord Cardinal Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, whom may God have in his keeping, in order that he may go to the Court, and a guarantee was taken from Francisco Pinelo which assured the return of the said bier to this church in safety.”
. . . to be carried out of his disaster like Ishmael, on the floating coffin . . .