Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas
Copyright© 2025 by Herman Melville
Chapter 20: The Round Robin—Visitors From Shore
After the captain left, the land-breeze died away; and, as is usual about these islands, toward noon it fell a dead calm. There was nothing to do but haul up the courses, run down the jib, and lay and roll upon the swells. The repose of the elements seemed to communicate itself to the men; and for a time there was a lull.
Early in the afternoon, the mate, having left the captain at Papeetee, returned to the ship. According to the steward, they were to go ashore again right after dinner with the remainder of Guy’s effects.
On gaining the deck, Jermin purposely avoided us and went below without saying a word. Meanwhile, Long Ghost and I laboured hard to diffuse the right spirit among the crew; impressing upon them that a little patience and management would, in the end, accomplish all that their violence could; and that, too, without making a serious matter of it.
For my own part, I felt that I was under a foreign flag; that an English consul was close at hand, and that sailors seldom obtain justice. It was best to be prudent. Still, so much did I sympathize with the men, so far, at least, as their real grievances were concerned; and so convinced was I of the cruelty and injustice of what Captain Guy seemed bent upon, that if need were, I stood ready to raise a hand.
In spite of all we could do, some of them again became most refractory, breathing nothing but downright mutiny. When we went below to dinner these fellows stirred up such a prodigious tumult that the old hull fairly echoed. Many, and fierce too, were the speeches delivered, and uproarious the comments of the sailors. Among others Long Jim, or—as the doctor afterwards called him—Lacedaemonian Jim, rose in his place, and addressed the forecastle parliament in the following strain:
“Look ye, Britons! if after what’s happened, this here craft goes to sea with us, we are no men; and that’s the way to say it. Speak the word, my livelies, and I’ll pilot her in. I’ve been to Tahiti before and I can do it.” Whereupon, he sat down amid a universal pounding of chest-lids, and cymbaling of tin pans; the few invalids, who, as yet, had not been actively engaged with the rest, now taking part in the applause, creaking their bunk-boards and swinging their hammocks. Cries also were heard, of “Handspikes and a shindy!” “Out stun-sails!” “Hurrah!”
Several now ran on deck, and, for the moment, I thought it was all over with us; but we finally succeeded in restoring some degree of quiet.
At last, by way of diverting their thoughts, I proposed that a “Round Robin” should be prepared and sent ashore to the consul by Baltimore, the cook. The idea took mightily, and I was told to set about it at once. On turning to the doctor for the requisite materials, he told me he had none; there was not a fly-leaf, even in any of his books. So, after great search, a damp, musty volume, entitled “A History of the most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies,” was produced, and its two remaining blank leaves being torn out, were by help of a little pitch lengthened into one sheet. For ink, some of the soot over the lamp was then mixed with water, by a fellow of a literary turn; and an immense quill, plucked from a distended albatross’ wing, which, nailed against the bowsprit bitts, had long formed an ornament of the forecastle, supplied a pen.
Making use of the stationery thus provided, I indited, upon a chest-lid, a concise statement of our grievances; concluding with the earnest hope that the consul would at once come off, and see how matters stood for himself. Eight beneath the note was described the circle about which the names were to be written; the great object of a Round Robin being to arrange the signatures in such a way that, although they are all found in a ring, no man can be picked out as the leader of it.
Few among them had any regular names; many answering to some familiar title, expressive of a personal trait; or oftener still, to the name of the place from which they hailed; and in one or two cases were known by a handy syllable or two, significant of nothing in particular but the men who bore them. Some, to be sure, had, for the sake of formality, shipped under a feigned cognomen, or “Purser’s name”; these, however, were almost forgotten by themselves; and so, to give the document an air of genuineness, it was decided that every man’s name should be put down as it went among the crew.
It is due to the doctor to say that the circumscribed device was his.
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