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Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Melville takes you aboard an American warship for the long voyage home, and his white jacket makes him the ship's unlucky mascot. You will meet unforgettable sailors, laugh at shipboard theatre and hair cutting day, and feel the sting of the cat o' nine tails in his famous protest against flogging. It is funny, strange, and deeply humane. All ninety three chapters are here.
The frigate Neversink is homeward bound from the Pacific, and her crew of five hundred men is a complete society: commodore and captain, lieutenants and midshipmen, sailors, marines, landsmen, and boys. Melville, serving before the mast in a white jacket of his own clumsy making, shows us this world from the berth deck upward.
Chapter by chapter he tours the whole ship: meals and watches, washing days and theatricals, the library and the sick bay, smuggling, auctions, prayers at the guns, and burials at sea. Great set pieces include the rounding of Cape Horn, the massacre of the beards, and the flogging of sailors for small offences, which Melville attacks with evidence and passion.
The jacket itself, lost overboard in the final chapters, becomes his symbol of the sailor's place in the world. The book closes with the anchor going down in home waters and a last address to his shipmates, half sermon, half love letter to the sailors he lived among and never forgot.
Herman Melville shipped as an ordinary seaman aboard a United States frigate in 1843, and White-Jacket, published in 1850, turns that voyage home into a portrait of the whole floating world of a man of war: its officers and crews, its ceremonies, its injustices, and its case against flogging. Melville's author's note, dated March 1850, is shelved first. This text carries ninety three chapters, closing with Cable and Anchor All Clear.
White-Jacket followed Typee and Omoo and came just before Moby-Dick, and it is the book in which Melville learned to turn a forecastle into a world. He had shipped in 1843 as an ordinary seaman in the frigate United States, renamed the Neversink in the book, for a cruise of more than a year in the Pacific and the long passage home round Cape Horn. His author's note, dated at New York in March 1850 and shelved as the front unit, states the fact plainly: his man of war experiences and observations are incorporated in the volume. What he builds from them is at once a sailor's memoir, a tour of every corner and custom of a warship, a portrait gallery headed by the noble Jack Chase, and a sustained argument against flogging, supported by chapters on its effects, its legality, and its necessity, which helped move Congress to abolish the practice in the American navy in 1850. The text, the United States Book Company edition with copyright of 1892, carries ninety three chapters, one more than the ninety two sometimes listed, and closes with Cable and Anchor All Clear.
Edition: Edition of 1892. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 10712.
The first chapter
NOTE. In the year 1843 I shipped as “ordinary seaman” on board of a United States frigate then lying in a harbor of the Pacific Ocean. After remaining in this frigate for more than a year, I was discharged from the service upon the vessel’s arrival home. My man-of-war experiences and observations have been incorporated in the present volume.
New York, March, 1850.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1850. Author died 1891. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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