Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. During a Four Months’ Residence in A Valley of the Marquesas.

MELVILLE, Herman.

$250,000.00

Item Number: 138349

New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846.

First edition of Melville’s first book and his most popular during his lifetime. Octavo, two volumes bound into one in the original cloth stamped in blind with gilt titles to the spine, frontispiece map, both half-titles and 6 pages of publisher’s advertisements at rear. BAL 13653. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper one month after publication, “Captain Ball, With the respects of the author, Westport April 18th 1846.” The recipient, Captain Charles Ball was captain of the whaling ship Theophilus Chase, on which Thomas Melville, the author’s youngest brother, set sail for the first time at the age of sixteen. Thomas’s decision to follow in his older brother’s footsteps was likely due to hearing Herman’s stories of his time at sea which began in 1841 with his voyage aboard the whaling ship the Acushnet. Thomas set sail aboard the Theophilus Chase on March, 18 1846 for the South Atlantic from Westport but was homeward bound by April, at which point Herman apparently visited Westport and inscribed this copy of Typee, just one month after its American publication on March 17th. In very good condition. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Books inscribed by Melville are scarce.

Inspired by Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s new book Two Years Before the Mast and Jeremiah N. Reynolds's account in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker magazine of the hunt for a great white sperm whale named Mocha Dick, Herman Melville travelled to New Bedford, Massachusetts where he secured a position aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841. On January 3, 1841, the Acushnet set sail and traveled to the Bahamas and the South Pacific, and later up the coast of Chile, to the Galapagos Islands, and Peru. In the summer of 1842, Melville and his shipmate Richard Tobias Greene jumped ship at Nuku Hiva Bay in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands where they stayed for several months before leaving the island aboard the Australian whaler Lucy Ann, bound for Tahiti. Melville would return home to write his first book, Typee, a provocative and lively account of his exploits in the exotic South Seas which made him notorious as the "man who lived among the cannibals." "A classic of American literature [and] the pioneer in South Sea romance" (Arthur Stedman).