Quo's Reviews > Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life

Herman Melville's early work, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life is definitely not a typical novel & it is also not merely a travel book focused on the Marquesas Islands. Rather, it is a hybrid work, resembling an embellished ethnographic study of a particular area within Polynesia, based on journal notes but augmented by the author's vibrant imagination.


Beyond that, Typee was described as a "fluid text", with a British edition early on & a Revised American Edition, both of which underwent substantial "emendations" or corrections during H.M.'s lifetime, causing it to be called "his most unstable book". While full of panoramic details of lush scenery, Melville also elucidates taboos & class structure among the Typees, a group of people seen as "Edenic", or unspoiled by civilization.

After their arrival at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Archipelago, a place said to be inhabited by "savages" but nominally under French flag, our narrator, Tom ("Tommo") & his friend Toby decide to mutiny from their ship, the Dolly, heading inland with little in the way of food, tools or much of a survival plan. They are discovered by the resident tribe while foraging for breadfruit & instead of being feasted on by the local tribe, thought to be cannibals, are in fact feted.

Just why the locals decide to so honor the pair never really becomes clear but the heavily-tattooed tribe plays host to the mutineers, with Mahevi (the chief) even ministering to Tom's rather mysterious leg wound, a malady that persists. Tom is assigned a kind of tribal valet, Kory-Kory, someone who acts as a faithful aide & caretaker.


He quickly finds the people a point of fascination rather than fear & is additionally tended to by a beautiful, young, bare-breasted maiden with lovely skin & blue eyes named Fayaway, a setting that may have made many early readers blush & caused concern for the book's publishers in both the U.S. & the U.K. We quickly learn that the Marquesans are what we might call polyamorous.

Meanwhile, Tinor, (Kory-Kory's mother) prepares a compote of breadfruit, coconut & local ingredients to nourish Tom & Toby. After being fed & bathed, they are taken to a religious shrine, "Hoolah-Hoolah", a male-only site built on multiple terraces. Our narrator confides that the people who are acting as hosts "enjoy a perfect freedom from care & anxiety, living in an atmosphere of perpetual summer." Their stay is further enhanced by an alcoholic concoction called "Arva", partly narcotic in nature.

When Toby is permitted to go in search of medicine via a visiting ship, with the intent of curing Tom's festering leg wound,local remedies being insufficient, Tom is left alone. And when Toby fails to return, it becomes clear that Tom is a well-tended & even beloved prisoner, hardly free to leave the tribal encampment. Still, he is distracted by the life of the people who have so gracefully accepted his presence in their midst. Freedom might come at a heavy price but then why would he wish to leave paradise?

I was well-disposed to think that I was in "Happy Valley" and that there was nought but a world of care & anxiety away from this place. As I extended my wanderings in the valley, I grew more familiar with its inmates. I was fain to confess that, despite the disadvantages of his condition, the Polynesian savage, surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature, enjoyed an infinitely happier, though certainly a less intellectual existence, than the self-complacent European.

In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few & simple, are spread over a great extent & are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve--jealousies, social rivalries, family dissensions & the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people.

Melville, through his narrator, questions whether the occasional consumption of human flesh, exceeds the savagery practiced until recently in England, including "beheadings for various offenses, with the head placed on a pike in public view, a body carved into 4 quarters & the bowels dragged out & thrown into a fire". The author shudders to consider what changes well-meaning missionaries will bring to the Marquesas Islands.


While Typee does deal with Tom's seemingly pleasant captivity & his eventual plan to escape, it is clear that Melville's intent is also to juxtapose the image of a kind of Eden that he experienced after his own mutiny with the stresses of civilization, which "does not engross all the virtues of humanity, not even her full share of them."

He does comment that "for these unsophisticated savages, the history of a day is the history of a life", suggesting perhaps that for someone accustomed to a more western, "civilized lifestyle", even paradise can grow stale in time.

There is detail about a Feast of the Calabashes, with some religious overtones & while the locals do weave skirts of "Tappa", fashioned from the bark of a Mulberry tree, they are mostly "clad in nature's costumes", with voluminous descriptions of the beauty of the people, both men & women and a suggestion that Tom (Melville) embraces them in part because they are light-skinned, as compared to those he has encountered in the Sandwich Islands, today's Hawaii. "In beauty of form, they surpassed anything I have ever seen, with not a single deformity & nearly every individual capable of being taken for a sculptor's model."


I found it pleasant to spend time among the Marquesans with Herman Melville via this hybrid tale, even though to many readers some of the prose may seem rather heavy-handed, including a rather constant drumbeat that "where civilization has been introduced among those we call "savages", she has scattered her vices & withheld her blessings."

Missionaries in particular are tarred & feathered. The format used to tell this story, the most popular of Melville's writing in the author's lifetime, is roughly akin to another very blended story, the epic Moby Dick.

Some of the language Melville employs is at times overly formal or now somewhat archaic, an example being when he refers to Tom's caretaker, Kory-Kory as his "indefatigable servitor"& inserts words like "scapegrace", an unprincipled person. However, the book was written 175 years ago & language is evolutionary. A glossary of terminology used by residents of Nuku Hiva would also have been helpful.

*In my version of the book, there is an excellent preface by John Bryant, along with explanatory commentary comparing the various editions of Typee, plus appendices covering the British capture of the Hawaiian Islands and "The Story of Toby", resolving his disappearance & eventual reemergence for the reader.

**Within my review are images of the author, Herman Melville; Nuku Hiva looking out to sea; Marquesans on Nuku Hiva in traditional attire.