Estamos ante una de las obras más interesantes y menos conocidas de Herman Melville. Publicada en 1850, recoge las experiencias autobiográficas que Melville tuvo cuando se inició como naviero en la marina de guerra. La obra relata las condiciones de vida en un buque de guerra de la Marina norteamericana a mitad del siglo XIX. Crítico, sarcástico e irreverente algunas veces y otras alegre, reposado y lírico, Melville busca en cada uno de los detalles el resorte que le permita reflexionar sobre la condición general del mundo y hasta del mismo cosmos.Herman Melville (Nueva York, 1819-1891). Tuvo que dejar la escuela muy joven y trabajar en los más diversos empleos incluido el de marino. De 1839 a 1844 navegó por los mares del sur. De estos viajes surgieron novelas como: «Taipi» (1846) y «Omoo» (1847), «Mardi» (1849), «Redburn» (1849), «White-jacket» (1850) y «Moby Dick» (1851). ( )

A little disappointing as a novel, more a series of incidents. But still a satisfying look into life on board an American Man-of-War during the middle of the nineteenth century. Exquisite writing throughout. ( )

It took me 63 days to finish Herman Melville’s White Jacket. Admittedly, I’m not a fast reader, and I knew I was in for some dense writing. Reading Melville is like eating buckwheat kishka – you’ve got to take it in small bites. There’s a lot of flavor there, and the language takes time to digest.

(Apparently my reading/writing is generating a lot of food metaphors lately. John Gardner is cilantro, Melville is kishka. It won’t be long before I’m ready for some Dickens pound cake.)

In White Jacket, the narrator describes in documentary detail the workings of a man-of-war frigate. With its crew of 500, the vessel Neversink is the world in microcosm. All the various characters, all the types of work, all the stresses and hardship of daily life, with a good dose of cruelty and tyranny thrown in.

“We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing, never-sinking, world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright; and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral.”

The most striking section of the book (no pun intended) is the graphic depictions of flogging. Melville criticizes the brutality and the arbitrariness of its use – how a captain can flog any sailor under the Articles of War, and the sailor has no redress. Evidently, White Jacket was instrumental in Congress abolishing the use of flogging in the navy.

For all his verbosity, Melville does exhibit a Romantic enthusiasm. Modern readers probably have to pay close attention to catch the humor but it is there. For example, he describes Lieutenant Selvagee, a true 19th Century dandy, with his Cologne-water baths and lace-bordered handkerchiefs, who lacks the cojones even to swear effectively: “Selvagee raps out an oath: but the soft bomb stuffed with confectioner’s kisses seems to burst like a crushed rose-bud diffusing its odours.”

Unlike Melville’s next work, Moby-Dick, White Jacket is weighted more in the real world. There are certainly metaphors, similes, themes, and allusions throughout, but it doesn’t have the dense symbolism of Moby-Dick. You get the day-to-day quality of ship life, the tedium and toil, the human tensions:

“At sea, a frigate houses and homes five hundred mortals in a space so contracted that they can hardly so much as move but they touch. Cut off from all those outward passing things which ashore employ the eyes, tongues, and thoughts of landsmen, the inmates of a frigate are thrown upon themselves and each other, and all their ponderings are introspective. A morbidness of mind is often the consequence, especially upon long voyages, accompanied by foul weather, calms, or head-winds.”

Morbidness of mind? Hmmm, that's kind of a precursor to old Ahab. ( )

Melville’s autobiographical account of life on a man-of-war in the United States Navy in the 1840’s was an immediate success, and opened people’s eyes to the horrors of flogging, helping to get the practice abolished.

It’s an interesting read, and Melville uses beautiful language, wry humor, and a sense of higher spiritual awareness in describing everything from humdrum everyday events to corruption, the abuse of power, the difficulties of 1-2 year long voyages at sea, the incredible practice of impressment by the English Navy, and the practices of the American Navy that led to it being the “asylum for the perverse, the home of the unfortunate” in the makeup of its crew.

Along the way he states that his goal was “to set down the merest trifles concerning things that are destined to pass away entirely from the earth, and which, if not preserved in the nick of time, must infallibly perish from the memories of man.”, and in this, he’s successful. He does tend to get into detail, however, and it was a little hard to follow all of the technical terms on the ship without annotation or figures provided in this edition.

Melville also preaches too much against flogging after describing it, instead of letting readers draw their own conclusion, though he does make good arguments, appealing to the better parts of Christianity and the American ideal. Artistically, he’s far more effective in describing a horrifying, unnecessary amputation, performed out of prideful arrogance and ignorance by the top surgeon, which ended up killing a sailor. Here he lets the action speak, and follows the adage for writers “show, don’t tell”.

Lastly, Melville makes no mention at all as to how sailors relieved their sexual desire while aboard all that time, as masturbation and homosexuality were highly taboo subjects. He also completely cops out by not describing what happens on a shore leave in Brazil, saying “my man-of-war world alone must supply with the staple of my matter”, which was a letdown. I guess what happens in Rio stays in Rio. ( )

This was a fascinating book. Mr. Melville has a way of making even the most mundane events interesting to read about. His "white jacket" virtually came to life with a personality of its own. If you are interested in sea adventures, this, along with Two Years Before the Mast, by Charles Dana, are essential. Do you know where the word "scuttlebutt" came from? ( )