1969 Note from Wesley Marx on Scammon's "Rosebud"

From Wesley Marx's 1960 American Heritage magazine article, which gets at the strange, severe split in Scammon's dual identity as both whaler and biologist:

"At the same time he had been ordering his harpooners to bomb the whales and his flensers to strip the blubber, Scammon was also measuring the girth of dead whales, inspecting the contents of their stomachs, and executing precise drawings of their conformations. The Captain jotted down his detailed observations alongside log entries that recorded the number of whales struck and barrels filled."

And that, as much as The Melville Society's interest in Scammon-as-Ishmael, is what bedevils me about Scammon:  He is a man engaged in the tightly-focused capitalist drive for oil, who doesn't just maintain the idealistic curiosity of the naturalist, but acts on it.

It's as if he is two totally different men. 

Scammon's Rosebud

How do you explain a really exciting find?  And what if you make... three really exciting finds in one day going through Bancroft's Charles Melville Scammon papers?

The big thing, the holy grail, the "rosebud" of Scammon's later literary and scientific life, this is what I pulled out of an unassuming-looking file envelope yesterday.

The seed of the great man's landmark work: the little three-inch by five-inch leather-bound, water-blood-and-oil-stained book of perfectly recorded measurements of whales, seals and dolphins collected in the torrent of bloody commercial slaughter that was our demand for whale oil.

Just to hold it in your hands and to think of what it took to make!  To think that Scammon, who, while commanding so many men and so many whaleboats through so much bloody chaos and fatigue, had the presence of mind to take these perfectly ordered notes.  Notes which no scientist had endeavored to collect, and which no whaler would ever conceive of collecting. 

And to synthesize, more than a decade later, those notes into a book that would change the way we looked at mammalian studies? 

I felt less elation than a sense of awe. Followed by the dreadful realization that a man with less than a high school education had managed what no modern Harvard grad, currently engaged in tweeting "pix" of his free lunch at the Google or Facebook corporate campuses, would even conceive of trying. We are not better men today, I am sorry to say. 

The other two finds were in many ways just as interesting, but more on that later. 

The mystery begins....

Charles Melville Scammon, by Eva Chrysanthe

Some time ago I was given the opportunity to lecture at San Francisco's Maritime Museum Library on one of the real-life men who played a role in the 1863 Farallon Egg War: Charles Melville Scammon.  

Scammon was the premier whaler on the West Coast, and the man who very nearly made the gray whale extinct.  He was also, and paradoxically, the man who wrote "THE" landmark book on marine mammalogy in the 19th century. He entered the egg war's fray only because he'd taken a job with the customs office patrolling the waters of the Bay and beyond.  Being a boat cop wasn't exactly his life's vocation but it was steady work for a guy working on a book project who had a family to support. 

Scammon is a character whose life is so fascinating and whose talents diverged in so many different directions that he really deserves his own book. Separately, I'd always wondered about the middle name - was there any family connection to Herman Melville, the author of the American masterpiece Moby-Dick, or, The Whale? 

Beside the name, there was another significant similarity:  Both men, with notable early successes under their belts, had each written a landmark book that would only be appreciated after their deaths.  And the process of writing those books had exacted a significant financial and spiritual toll on their individual lives. Failure was not just a major theme in Moby-Dick, it's a major theme in the later lives of both Scammon and Herman Melville.


Herman Melville

Shortly before I gave the presentation at The Maritime Museum Library, I contacted the Melville Society in New York as a last-ditch effort to find a connection between the two men. I was pretty sure no one at the Melville Society would get back to me - after all, THEY are Melvillists (Herman Melvillists, at that!) and I am... a cartoonist. At the time I knew that Herman Melville was originally a Melvill (and not a Melville), and that the shared name may not imply any family connection whatsoever, but I thought it was worth asking.

Within an hour, I had received several responses from the board at The Melville Society. Here are excerpts of some of the informal, but fascinating, responses:

"Thanks very much for this request. I learned about (Scammon) a few years ago when reading Dick Russell’s book Eye of the Whale, which documents both Scammon’s slaughter of whales in the birthing lagoons in Baja Mexico in the mid-1850s and his subsequent work as a natural biologist giving us our first comprehensive scientific view of the gray whale.  The change he made from a killer of whales to a person determined to understand and celebrate them parallels to some degree the change of consciousness Ishmael goes though in the process of narrating Moby-Dick as well as the evolution American and world culture toward the whale ever since."

Another Melvillist wrote back more specifically on the geneology:

"As far as I know Charles is not related directly, but chances are there is a link somehow. Since Charles was born in 1825, well before Herman became famous, we can rule out the possibility that he was named after Herman.  This actually happened a couple times later in the century, usually former shipmates recalling Herman, named a child after him.  Melville is French but Scots, and HM's father, uncle, and grandfather were, in their day, fascinated by the prospect that the Melvill's (without the e) were related to the Earl of Leven and Melville residing in Fife, north of Edinburgh.  And indeed they were, so one way to pursue this is to follow the assumption that Charles might also be related to the Scots lineage.  Robert Dundas, Viscount Melville, stands atop a column in Edinburgh, son (I think) of a hero of Culloden, so it was a name that had some history attached to it."

And then more from the first Melvillist:

"I would be FASCINATED to know whether Scammon knew anything about Moby-Dick (whether he was related to Herman or not).  The fact that he was a whaler a few years after the book came out in 1851 makes it possible.   If it were the case, then one wonders if Ishmael’s evolving attitude toward the whale within the book affected Scammon’s own conscious evolution or not. 

"What was it that got you thinking of Scammon and Melville together?  I was excited to see your question because of the accidental way I had come to relate Scammon and Guert Gansevoort with each other.   I am guessing you already know The Eye of the Whale.  If not, Russell himself uses Melville, as well as Scammon, as a touchstone through that book.

"One more thing.  Herman Melville was in San Francisco for several weeks, at least, in 1860.  I don’t remember seeing Scammon among people he is known to have met then, but maybe there are some mutual acquaintances whose names a person who knows about Scammon would recognize.  The place to start on that would be the appropriate chapter in volume 2 of Hershel Parker’s two-volume biography of Melville."

I'll post later on one of the characters who seems to be the link between Scammon and Herman Melville.  Later, because that man's life is surely as interesting as the great adventurers and writers Herman Melville and Charles Scammon.

One more note:  As I was leaving the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at UC Berkeley where I was researching background scenes for Ah Toy (another real-life character who appears in Garibaldi and The Farallon Egg War), I ran into Jon Von Kowallis, the author of The Lyrical Lu Xun, who had quite a bit to say about the environment Ah Toy came out of in 19th-century China. But that is for another blogspot...

Ah Toy, by Eva Chrysanthe

And you think YOU have problems....

Another perfect day at the Bancroft Library perusing Captain Charles Melville Scammon's papers.  The Bancroft librarians were kind enough to provide the actual letters to me today, which are far easier to read than the microfilm.  The letters also really beautiful in and of themselves, especially in this era of digitized everything.

Among all the telling ephemera surrounding the great man's life, this letter caught my eye - it's a nausea-inducing letter from Scammon's publisher, John H. Carmany, regarding the total lack of profitability of Scammon's (posthumously successful) landmark study, "The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America".  It was sent May 29, 1877, nearly 138 years ago.

You can imagine Scammon - growing frail from an undiagnosable ailment and tormented by money troubles - going slightly mad when he opened the letter. Scammon was an enormously talented man, and it appears from his early correspondence that he was a model captain. But in his later career, there are multiple accounts of his losing his temper when he ran into yet another stumbling block, and his outbursts typically only made things worse.

These accounts of his temper appear not when he is a young captain, before his whaling days, but afterward, during the really interesting, thrilling and difficult parts of his career.  I've often wondered if the additional time on the crowded whaling ships may have exposed him to some sort of bacterial infection or virus that affected his brain chemistry, and therefore, possibly, his behavior.  Or maybe he just became ill-tempered as his accomplishments grew greater, and his money troubles grew.

Carmany's letter is provocative.  He starts by claiming that Scammon was in town but declined to see him: "Having see you in town, it strikes me as rather strange that you did not call on me. As apologies are usually looked at as excuses for wrong doing, I certainly need not make any in matters between us, simply relying on facts." Nice intro. 

Carmany goes on: "All attempts to sell your book have failed me, even with the copyright included, and of course I have the 500 copies in sheets on hand, which I will gladly hand over to any person - copyright included - who will liquidate the balance of indebtedness due on publication account."

That's it - no recognition of what a great work Scammon's book was, and no understanding that it would, sometime soon, be recognized as the landmark study in marine mammalogy. (The book also set a precociously modern standard for biological studies in general by focusing as much, if not more, on observation of animals in their natural habitat, rather than relying largely on specimens and skeletons.)

Scammon's own take on the letter is written in pencil, and signed by him, in the space left over on the second page.  You can almost sense Scammon's onset of decrepitude by the worsening script.  In a later letter to Carmany, Scammon's penmanship was so poor that Scammon chose not to mail it, as if he were too proud to reveal how decrepit his condition had become.

Russell on Melville

There really is no end to the surprising twists in the story of Captain Charles Melville Scammon.  His participation as "boat cop" during the Farallon Egg Wars being perhaps the least interesting of all his myriad adventures.

How Captain Scammon, the greatest and most ruthlessly efficient hunter of gray whales - practically their exterminator! - went on to became the greatest and most loving chronicler of the natural life of the same whales remains a mystery.

Through the boxes of Scammon letters at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, I hope to uncover, however partially, that mystery. And to shed light on Scammon's possible relationship to the work of Herman Melville, with whom he shares a nam (Per the learned men of The Melville Society, Charles Melville Scammon is "the very personification of Melville's Ishmael in Moby-Dick", who also goes through a transformation from a killer of whales to a great appreciator.)

In the meantime, there is this revealing tidbit from Dick Russell's 2001 opus, The Eye of the Whale, which is one of only three books I know of that discuss Scammon at any length. After giving some brief mention to Scammon's over-achieving older brothers (including heroic service in the Union army during the Civil War, founding of the Dearborn Observatory and of Chicago's first bank, and enough other accomplishments as to drive the notion of sibling inferiority complex to dizzying levels), Russell mentions that three of the six Scammon brothers were followers of an 18th-century Swedish scientist-turned-mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg.

That the three brothers, with all their scientific curiosity and prowess, would have any interest in mysticism is, frankly, mystifying. But as Russell puts it: "One of Swedenborg's most comprehensive works was The Economy of the Animal Kingdom, in which he described all of life as a marvelous unity, tautly structured according to a grand design."  (Akin to Darwin's larger theory as well as the humanistic ideals on which Darwin's theories were grounded.)

"Certain animals seem to have prudence and cunning," Swedenborg wrote, "connubial love, friendship and seeming charity, probity and benevolence, in a word, a morality the same as with men."

So perhaps it was through Swedenborg's mystical connection with the animal world that Scammon did force himself to wade through the killing bays of his own design, to lovingly measure the whales he had slaughtered, taking the first ever notes on whale anatomy - notes which hold up to today's scientific standards, and which helped us to better understand whales, and thus fight for their protection.

Bear in mind, when we judge this terribly flawed man, what the options were for sea captains in 1850's America. Transporting slaves? Transporting food to slave colonies? If you were a humanist, slaughtering whales to bring light to lamps was probably one of the kinder tasks you could be engaged in.

Cruel choice, it was!  But Scammon, it seems to me, was someone who toiled at his own redemption. How many of us in the modern world can claim to be doing the same?