A few years ago, I was having lunch with a Japanese scholar who had a special
interest in Nathaniel Hawthorne and who was visiting Salem for the first
time. His early impressions of the city, he told me, were quite different
from those he anticipated from descriptions of Salem in Hawthorne's works.
Having recently visited the National Maritime Historic Site and the Peabody
Museum, he was surprised to learn how prominent a role the sea played in
the town Hawthorne was born in in 1804. The Salem of Hawthorne's imagination,
he noted, was bordered more by the forest than the sea. The real Salem of
Hawthorne's youth, he went on, was dominated by the sea. Having an interest
in both sea literature and Hawthorne, I've puzzled over the virtual absence
of the sea in Hawthorne's works myself. Was he by nature an inland soul,
or were there other factors at work?
He was born into a sea-going family. His father, his uncle, and his grandfather
were all ships' masters. During his early years Salem was still one of the
busiest seaports in America. He lived most of that period on Herbert St.,
just a stone's throw from the busy wharves, and, as a sensitive and impressionable
child, he must have absorbed many of the exotic sights, sounds, and smells
of those ships and cargoes, seamen and merchants.
Altogether, Hawthorne spent more than half his 60 years here in Salem and,
if you count his residencies in other sea-coast towns and cities in America
and in England, about two-thirds of his life by the sea. One of the major
reasons why he wanted to leave the beautiful views of the Tanglewood Bowl
in Lenox in 1851, where he and his family had been living for the past sixteen
months, was to return to a residence by the sea, whose air and climate seemed
more agreeable to his wife, Sophia's health and, although they eventually
settled in Concord, they had considered a house on Marblehead Neck.
Had he gone before the mast as a youth (a prospect he teased his mother
about as a boy), perhaps we would have had some tales of the sea from him.
By 1853--the year of his first ocean crossing--he had already penned his
roughly 100 tales and sketches and had published four of the five romances
he was to complete. Up to that point in his life, and beyond, most of his
experience with ships had been with vessels in port, another curious feature
of this topic.
Hawthorne considered himself an author. But because writing didn't pay very
well, he was occasionally forced to resort to working at other jobs. I say
"occasionally" because he avoided it as often as he could. It
took him more than ten years to get his first job after college--as an editor
of a magazine--and it lasted just the first six months of 1836 before he
quit. He also remained less than six months at Brook Farm in 1841, where
he spent most of his time shoveling cow dung. Altogether, Hawthorne worked
at jobs other than writing tales for eleven of the thirty-nine years he
lived after graduating from college. But the other ten years of work experience
placed him in an intimate, usually daily contact with maritime activities
and issues.
His first appointment was to the prosaic position of measurer of salt and
coal at the Boston Custom House, a job he held for about two years from
1839 to 1841. When a ship was in port, he rose at 4:00 a.m. to be on the
docks--usually Boston's Long Wharf--by sunrise, to supervise the shoveling,
measuring, and unloading of the ship's cargo, sometimes moving back and
forth between two vessels, until sunset. By the end of the day, Hawthorne
would often find himself smeared from head to foot with what he called "the
sable stains of my profession--stains which I share in common with chimney-sweepers."
While this had its drawbacks, it also sometimes worked to his advantage.
Not being a party animal, on more than one occasion he pointed to his "coal-begrimed
visage and salt-befrosted locks" as an excuse for turning down a dinner
invitation. Clearly, he found very little stimulation in the job. In one
letter to Sophia, he observed, "Everything that I do here might be
better done by a machine. I am a machine, and am surrounded by hundreds
of similar machines." The days were monotonous, bitterly cold during
the winter and oppressively hot during the summer. More to the point, he
bemoaned the fact that his responsibilities "entirely break me up as
a literary man." Hawthorne wrote virtually nothing during this period,
except letters and entries in his notebooks. And that would be the pattern
for his other jobs. In reference to those notebooks, during the twenty-five
years in which he kept a journal, Hawthorne regularly used his entries to
record material for future use in his stories, often recording his experiences
and commenting on how they might be used fictionally. While the routines
of his work dockside may have been tediously repetitive, the characters
he encountered were as varied as the ports they came from. The seamen and
the dock workers were constantly exchanging stories and, sometimes, blows.
There was an intense and often tempestuous undercurrent of life beneath
the grime and grind of the day's unloadings that Hawthorne seems to have
been strangely unresponsive to. One would expect that a writer keeping a
journal filled with notes on interesting characters he had met would have
sketched the rogues' gallery of types he came in contact with, and recorded
the yarns spun during breaks in the work day. But Hawthorne appears not
to have seen much in the line of fictional possibilities there, for--aside
from a few disparaging comments in his letters on the "thick-pated,
stubborn, contentious men" he worked with-- there are few detailed
descriptions of character types and no detailed accounts of unusual experiences.
Perhaps the coal dust dropped a black veil over the star dust. In one of
the journals he kept during this period, there are about three dozen brief
entries on ideas for stories. None of them allude to maritime activity.
In the other journal, there is one description of an old salt, summaries
of a few anecdotes related at the Custom House by a friend, and brief descriptions
of the hold of a schooner, an old man fishing on Long Wharf, the names of
schooners, the arrival of factory girls from England, and a young sailor.
With possibly the exception of the description of the old sailor, none of
these seem to have been recorded for future use in his tales and, to my
knowledge, none appear in his later fiction. In a letter to Sophia during
this period, he comments on the incongruity of observing a butterfly amidst
"the brick stores, stone piers, black ships, and the bustle of the
toilsome men." But it is precisely this kind of incongruity that Hawthorne's
imagination, when active, seized upon. A few years later, he would use a
butterfly as a symbol of artistic aspiration in one of his tales. But here
it only seemed out of place. His fancy, said in another letter to have been
"rendered so torpid by my ungenial way of life," could not, under
blunted circumstances, see the intriguing possibilities in this or, apparently,
in other experiences of the period. The next job that brought him into contact
with the sea was his appointment as surveyor of the port of Salem, a position
he held for about three years from 1846 to 1849. For this assignment, he
substituted a desk for the docks, but the desk gave him a crow's nest perch
above most of the activity on those docks. More importantly, it placed him
within earshot of his subordinates, mostly former seamen who lounged in
the hallway next to his office regaling one another with inflated accounts
of their sea adventures. Only one of those accounts appears in the notebooks.
And, except for a description of a trip he took with his boss's son, there
are no other references in them to his Salem Custom House experience. The
only entry during this period that suggested a story of the sea focuses
on survivorsa of a sea wreck casting lots to decide who will be killed for
dinner! Hawthorne's letters during this period are almost as silent on his
duties as are the notebooks. He occasionally complains about something like
a malfunctioning hydrometer, more often about a non-functioning inspector
who fails to show up for work, or a captain trying to hide contraband, but
for the most part, he was not paying any more attention to the job than
it required and than was necessary for him to collect his fees. Instead,
he seems to have been into watching with fascination the developmemt of
the two children he then had, Una and Julian, whose antics and verbal whims
were faithfully and abundantly recorded in his journals, as if he were the
scribe of two diminutive sages. An example follows: Julian--"Mamma,
why is not dinner supper?" Mamma--"Why is not a chair a table?"
Julian--"Because it's a teapot." Only a proud, and maybe a slightly
prejudiced parent, could see wisdom enough in that reply to record it for
posterity. But that appears to be where Hawthorne was at this point in his
life. Instead of turning over the yarns of his fellow workers for possible
story plots, he was playing with his children, at least until two crises--his
dismissal from the Custom House post and the death of his mother--would
jolt him back to brooding over the darker world of his fiction. But then,
he would fix his attention on the forest-dominated Boston of the seventeenth
century, and on a certain scarlet letter. The third and last work experience
that brought him in contact with maritime activity was his appointment as
consul to Liverpool, his financial reward for having written the campaign
biography for his friend, Franklin Pierce's successful run for the presidency.
This post, which he held from August, 1853 through October of 1857, was
the most lucrative in the American diplomatic service and would make him
financially secure for the first time in his life, and for the rest of it.
Liverpool was one of the most active ports in the world. In the year before
Hawthorne arrived, about a thousand ships left its docks for the United
States alone. As Consul, his major contacts were with ship's captains and
seamen--signing documents for cargo processed through his office, shipping
and discharging seamen, settling the estate of seamen who died in his jurisdiction,
administering oaths, taking depositions from abused seamen, preparing powers
of attorney, valuing goods--all of which activities he received a fee for.
In the more than four years that he held the post, he sent about a hundred
dispatches to the State Department, commenting--sometimes in considerable
detail--on everything from shipwrecks and trade with England, to cruelty
toward seamen. He gave advice, most of it ignored, on how to improve the
merchant marine by establishing training centers, on ways to gain advantage
over England on matters of trade, on laws that needed to be established
to regulate the relationship between the officers and the crews of American
merchant vessels. He was particularly disturbed by conflicts between seamen
and captains, as evidenced by the lengthy comments in his notebooks on the
frustrations he experienced in trying to mediate them. In fact, the notebooks
and letters of this period contain a great deal of commentary on all the
challenges and sources of frustration of his consular duties. Hawthorne
was intensely and competently involved in the administration of his duties
as consul, duties that invariably had a connection to the sea. But again,
he wrote no fiction during this period, and no fiction he would later write
would be inspired by these experiences, at least not those that involved
maritime activity. Hawthorne's friendships suggest another dimension of
his life that might have prompted him to write about the sea. One of his
closest friends, Horatio Bridge, had been a college classmate and became
one of the strongest supporters of both Hawthorne's career as an author
and his political appointments. Bridge pursued a career in the American
navy and periodically found himself on cruises lasting up to three years.
When he was ashore, they took every occasion they could to visit one another.
Hawthorne spent about six weeks at the Bridge family home in Augusta, Maine
in 1837, and about two weeks visiting him with Sophia and Una in tow at
the Portsmouth Naval Yard in 1845, where Bridge was temporarily stationed.
No doubt, the conversations must have turned frequently to Bridge's experiences
at sea. Hawthorne's devotion to his friend is suggested by Hawthorne's consent
to edit a journal Bridge kept on his experiences at sea and in port on a
cruise along the African coast. The book was published with Hawthorne's
name on the title page in 1945. We don't know how many changes he made because
the manuscript has not survived, but one can see the stamp of Hawthorne's
graceful style on every page. This is, you might say, the closest he came
to writing about the sea but in the capacity of a ghost writer for Bridge.
Another college acquaintance and close personal friend is Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, easily the most popular poet writing in the English language
during that period. Hawthorne and Longfellow maintained a regular correspondence
from the mid 1830s to Hawthorne's death in 1864 and got together in Boston
and Cambridge over dinner and champagne to discuss their various literary
projects. Like Hawthorne, Longfellow grew up in a busy seaport town, Portland,
Maine. Unlike Hawthorne, Longfellow's imagination was receptive to those
early-life influences and the sea became one of the most prominent motifs
in his writing. He uses it in ballads recalling historical events like "The
Wreck of the Hesperus," in lyrics meditating on the mysterious patterns
of life like "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls," and in the longer
narrative poems Americanizing the materials of Old World legend, as in the
Norse sagas of Tales of a Wayside Inn. Longfellow titled one of his
best-known collections of poems, first published in 1849, The Seaside
and the Fireside. I'll return to Longfellow in a moment, but first I'd
like to mention one other Hawthorne friendship. On August 5, 1850, shortly
after moving to Lenox in western Massachusetts, Hawthorne took part in a
picnic with a group of revellers who, among other things, ended up drinking
champagne on the slope of Monument Mountain in the midst of a thunderstorm.
There he met for the first time a young author who had launched what seemed
like a promising career with five books published in the previous four years.
That young author was Herman Melville. For the next sixteen months, they
would be neighbors and would become close friends, exchanging visits between
Pittsfield and Lenox, and spending hours in the fields and woods and, in
cooler weather, in Melville's barn, smoking cigars, drinking port or brandy,
and discussing futurity, eternity, and all things visible and invisible.
Melville, of course, had extensive experience with the sea, having shipped
first on a merchant vessel to Liverpool, then on whaling voyages to the
South Seas, and finally on an American man-of-war. Altogether, Melville's
experience as a seaman lasted about four and a half years and all five of
those first books were narratives of the sea. Hawthorne had written an appreciative
review of Melville's first book, Typee, and was acquainted with his
later efforts. About the time they met, Melville wrote a complimentary essay
on Hawthorne's collection of tales called Mosses From an Old Manse.
The book Melville was working on when they met was Moby-Dick. Hawthorne
had just begun to write The House of the Seven Gables. We find ourselves,
therefore, at one of the most dramatic junctures in American literary history,
with two of our most notable authors, at the height of their creative powers.
These kindred spirits were standing at a common axis, around which their
fancies would rotate from their shared concern with what Melville called
the "great power of blackness" he saw in Hawthorne's works, fashioning
their respective masterpieces.
Scholars have identified many of the influences these two authors had on
one another, not only in the works they were currently composing, but in
their later fiction as well. While both Hawthorne and Melville have suggested
that their discussions often took a philosophical turn, there must also
have been many occasions when Melville filled up the silences with anecdotes
of his years at sea. These accounts may have prompted in Hawthorne a recollection
of his adolescent thoughts about going to sea. But they don't seem to have
inspired him to write about it.
In Salem, we like to think that Hawthorne's model for the structure he makes
the central symbol of The House of the Seven Gables is the historic
house on Turner Street, which took its name from the title of Hawthorne's
romance. There is, of course, much to support that claim, including Hawthorne's
association with the house, his discovery of the title of his book in a
conversation on the house, and his description of features of his fictional
abode consistent with features of the Turner Street house. However one omission
in his description would be negligible under most circumstances but resonates
with significance, given the actual location of the house. It is a curious
but intriguing fact that Hawthorne never mentions a sea-side location for
his fictional house.
It is particularly curious, given the kind of writer Hawthorne was, and
given the uses to which the imagery of the sea were being put by friends
and fellow authors like Longfellow and Melville. In Longfellow's "The
Tide Rises," the sea's rhythmic surges and withdrawals become a metaphor
for the pattern of human life, suggesting an element of permanence amidst
the comings and passings of individual lives. In his poem called "Seaweed,"
the sea represents the inspirations and frustrations of human creativity.
In another poem called "Ultima Thule," the search for truth is
symbolized by a voyage to a remote place. As for Melville, in the past seventy
years, critics have identified more symbolism in Moby-Dick than perhaps
in any other book ever written.
My point here is that Longfellow and Melville saw imaginative possibilities
in the subject of the sea that they explore in a symbolic vein. And they
were not the only ones to do so at that time. Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David
Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson all produced literature with
a sea motif rich in suggestive and symbolic associations. Despite the fact
that she may have only glimpsed the sea once or twice on the few occasions
she left Amherst, Dickinson wrote more than one hundred poems with sea images
in them.
These authors were responding to both historical influences and primeval
impulses. Historically, America was, during this period, a maritime nation,
with the vast majority of its population located along its eastern coast,
with a substantial part of that population engaged directly or indirectly
in its considerable world-wide mercantile activity. The immigration population
booms that would shift the center of the country's activity to mills and
factories was just beginning. And the massive shift of the population westward
to the territories would not achieve momentum until after the Civil War.
America was sea-situated, and sea conscious. It is not surprising, therefore,
that the sea is a prominent subject in the works of most authors during
this period.
But there is that other influence, less easy to identify but ultimately
more profound. It is what the poet, W. H. Auden is trying to describe in
his book, The Enchafed Flood, a study of the iconography of the sea,
when he refers to the sea as "that state of barbaric vagueness and
disorder out of which civilization has emerged." Literary treatments
of the sea voyage, he continues, are often quests for possibility, away
from the land-locked world hopelessly bound by necessity. Here Auden identifies
those elemental pulses in all of us, because the sea is in us. As Rachel
Carson once noted, human blood contains sodium, potassium, and calcium almost
in the same proportion as sea water.
We came from the sea and, in some respect, we all continue to feel the call
of the sea, a summons to explore life's conditions and challenges, its tragedies
and triumphs. In another of Longfellow's poems called "The Secrets
of the Sea," the poem's speaker recalls the experience of a landsman
who asks an ancient helmsman to teach him the "wondrous song"
he sings. The helmsman, whose song is about the secrets of the sea, replies,
"Only those who brave its dangers / Comprehend its mystery!" Melville
and Longfellow, Thoreau and Poe, Whitman and Dickinson, braved its dangers,
because they wanted to comprehend its mystery. The question remains, why
didn't Hawthorne? The question becomes more compelling when you consider
the fact that, like his contemporaries, and perhaps even moreso than any
of them, Hawthorne recognized consistently and profoundly the symbolic potential
fo virtually every object he placed in his literary productions. If you're
familiar with The House of the Seven Gables, you know how susceptible
Hawthorne's imagination was to playing over the meanings behind things and
eliciting powerful associations from those meanings. Think, for example,
of the house itself, the elm tree, the cent shop, the antique oaken chair,
the well, the chickens, Alice's poesies, Hepzibah's gloves, the harpsichord,
the organ-grinder, the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, the miniature of Clifford,
Judge Pyncheon's gold-headed can, and the railroad in that work. Also, like
his contemporaries, Hawthorne was interested in exploring the journey-of-life
archetype, and does so in at least a dozen of his shorter works and in most
of his romances. But all of these journeys take place on land.
It seems curious that a man who lived by the sea, worked in sea-related
occupations, enjoyed walking by the sea, had close friends who wrote about
the sea, and whose writings are replete with symbolic journeys should not
have composed any stories of the sea. This is not to say that there are
no references to the sea in his works, but in the few places where they
do occur, they are usually not central to the work's chief interest, as
in the tales, "Drowne's Wooden Image" and "Night Sketches."
In perhaps his most sustained description of the sea, a little-known sketch
called "Footprints by the Sea-shore," Hawthorne portrays his own
fondness for long walks along the seashore in the figure of a young man
strolling along a beach (probably the Swampscott-Lynn seashore), in search
of solitude, a search, he says, that invariably draws him to the sea. The
lighter side of this sketch is the appearance and reappearance three more
times of three young women who flirt with him from a distance and, despite
his desire for seclusion, he flirts back. Between these encounters, he muses
on beach birds, on the shore's rocky outline, and on the flotsam and jetsam
found along the shore. Having felt the summons of the sea, he has gone,
but his presence there is not without some sources of anxiety, even though
the sea is calm. On one occasion, he is struck by "an... overpowering
conception of the majesty and awfulness of the sea." Immediately after
that, he muses over the transience of life as he considers writing his name
in the sand. On another occasion, he imagines the sunken ships and corpses
of the ocean in a tidal basin. A few moments later, the melancholy voice
of the sea speaks of the location of sunken ships and warns the listener
to "let the infinite idea of eternity pervade his soul." As evening
approaches, fretful of the prospect of being haunted by "gloomy fantasies,"
he retreats from the saddened tones of the surf back to humans, presumably
for a feast of fish and chowder with the young girls. There is a delicate
balance in this sketch between its playfulness and its sources of tension,
most of which emanate from associations of death with the sea. In a recent
biography of Hawthorne, Edwin Miller proposes as his central thesis, in
his portrait of the man and the writer, that the death of Hawthorne's father
during a sea voyage when Hawthorne was just four years old was the central
trauma that precipitated a search by Hawthorne throughout his adult life,
and through his fiction, for the lost father. Miller's autobiography has
its detractors, especially those who prefer to see a relatively well-adjusted,
modestly happy, and eminently successful author. But I think Miller recognized
a central fact in the psychic life of this author. In another Hawthorne
story called "The Wives of the Dead," two young women are grieving
over the recent deaths of their husbands who were brothers. One, a landsman,
was killed in a battle; the other, a sailor, drowned at sea. One night,
while the sailor's wife, Mary, is asleep, a visitor arrives to tell Margaret,
the landsman's wife, that her husband is alive, after all, and on his way
home. Overcome with joy at the news, Margaret thinks of waking Mary to tell
her of her good fortune, but decides, under the circumstances, that it would
deepen Mary's own grief, so she goes to bed. A short time later, Mary appears
to awaken, hears a knock at the door, and answers it. A sailor tells her
that her husband had clung to a spar after his ship was wrecked, had been
rescued and was on his way home. Mary now considers sharing her good news
with Margaret but decides not to, for the same reasons Margaret did. The
story ends with the following sentences: "Before retiring, she /Mary/...
endeavored to arrange the bed-clothes, so that the chill air might not do
harm to the feverish slumberer /Margaret/. But her hand trembled against
Margaret's neck, a tear also fell upon her cheek, and she suddenly awoke."
The last three words are intriguingly ambiguous. We are led to ask, "Who
suddenly awoke?" If Margaret, then the two brothers are alive and well.
But if Mary, then the entire scene is a dream, a fantasy of wish fulfillment
in the unconscious world of sleep, by which the grieving wife of the sailor
is able to bring back the dead huband from the sea. That the dream is by
the wife rather than the son of the missing sailor doesn't diminish the
powerful emotions being expressed here. It is not uncommon for humans to
project their feelings on others when the feelings are too painful to bear.
In any event, the image of the grieving wife was certainly one Hawthorne
was familiar with, and his own psychic pain might have been intensified
by the pathetic figure of his mother, dressed in black for the rest of her
forty or so years of life, and rarely coming out of her room during that
period, even for meals. In another of Hawthorne's lesser-known sketches
called "Chippings With a Chisel," Hawthorne appears to attempt
to provide a rationale for his mother's behavior, in the portrait of an
elderly lady who visits a tombstone carver one day to request that he fashion
a monument for her first love, who had been killed by a whale forty years
earlier. The narrator observes, "It was singular that so strong an
early impression of feeling should have survived through the changes of
her subsequent life, in the course of which she had been a wife and mother...
Reflecting within myself, it appeared to me that this life-long sorrow...
was one of the most fortunate circumstances of her history. It had given
an ideality to her mind; it had kept her purer and less earthly than she
would otherwise have been." This is a remarkably sympathetic portrait
by a son who must have felt, on some occasions, abandoned not only by his
father but also his mother. But it may be more revealing if read as an unconscious
self portrait.
In August of 1852, Herman Melville heard a story while visiting Nantucket
of a Quaker woman named Agatha Robertson whose sailor husband had abandoned
her after two years of marriage, only to return seventeen years later, offering
her financial help without revealing a second marriage. Melville saw the
possibilities of a story here, and sketched them out in a letter to Hawthorne,
inviting Hawthorne to write the story. Any number of circumstances may have
contributed to Hawthorne's unwillingness to do so, including the distractions
of Pierce's campaign for the presidency and Hawthorne's preoccupation with
the spoils that would come from Pierce's election. But I think that this
was one of those occasions when a potential story of the sea presented itself
to Hawthorne with all the baggage of his own unresolved conflicts about
a subject that was too painful to touch.
A haunting image relevant to his subject appears in The Scarlet Letter.
After being released from jail, Hester takes up residence with her daughter,
Pearl, in a solitary cottage by the seashore. There they live for the next
seven years, isolated from the rest of the community--the child without
a father, the woman a virtual widow. In this portrait of a child who searches
for her father and a woman abandoned by both her husband and her lover,
we have Hawthorne's own version of the Agatha story, conceived from the
deepest part of his emotional life, shortly after the death of his mother,
and well before he heard it from Melville. It is the closest he would come
to writing it. In Hawthorne's version of the stroy, the child eventually
escapes across the sea to a life of security, prosperity, and happiness.
Perhaps this was Hawthorne's romance of the sea.
Related Readings
Albion, Robert G., William A. Baker, and Benjamin J. Labaree
(1972). "The Golden Age, 1815-1865," in New England and the
Sea. Mystic, Connecticut: Mystic Seaport Museum.
Bridge, Horatio (1893). Personal Recollections of Nathaniel
Hawthorne. New York: Harper.
Erlich, Gloria C. (1984). Family Themes and Hawthorne's Fiction:
The Tenacious Web. New Brunswick: Rutgers.
Herbert, T. Walter (1993). Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and
the Making of the Middle-Class Family. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Mellow, James R. (1980). Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Miller, Edwin Haviland (1991). Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Salem National Maritime Historic Site (1987). Maritime Salem in
the Age of Sail. Handbook 126. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department.
of the Interior.
Turner, Arlin (1980). Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New York
& Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Von Saltza's Paintings used to illustrate essay
1. Engagement of the Brig Grand Turk of Salem and the British Brig Hinehinbroke
May 1814.
2. Bark Richard of Salem passing Baker's Is. outward bound for Rio de Janeiro 1827.
3. Crowninshield's Wharf Salem 1806
4. Ship Glide of Salem entering Bay of Islands New Zealand Sept 1829 greeted by Maoris.
5. Ship Hercules of Salem passing the Mole Head of Naples coming to anchor September 1809.
6. Ship Belisarius Robert Peele Master leaving Salem April 1st 1805
Joseph Flibbert is a Professor in the English Department at Salem State.
The author of a book on Herman Melville, his current research interests
focus on Nathaniel Hawthorne. He contributed a chapter on nineteenth-century
American sea poetry to the forthcoming book, America and the Sea: A Literary
History.