Five-minute digest

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life

Herman Melville

Summary

Typee, published in 1846, was Herman Melville's first book and his most popular during his lifetime. Based loosely on his own experience in 1842, it is told by a young American sailor who, with his shipmate Toby, deserts the whaler Dolly at Nukuheva Bay in the Marquesas Islands, weary of the harsh captain and the long voyage. Hoping to reach the friendly Happar people, the two men struggle through mountains and ravines and instead come down into the valley of the Typees, a people reputed to be fierce cannibals. To their surprise they are received with kindness. The chief Mehevi protects them, the young man Kory-Kory serves the narrator, whom the islanders call Tommo, and the beautiful Fayaway becomes his companion. Toby leaves to seek help for the narrator's injured leg and does not return. The narrator describes the valley with fascination: its abundance, its customs, its festivals, its tattooing, the taboo system, and the islanders' apparent happiness without money, law courts or poverty. He compares their life favorably in many respects with civilized society and attacks the conduct of Europeans and of some missionaries in the Pacific; in one passage he calls the white civilized man the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth. Yet his unease grows. The Typees will not let him leave, they wish to tattoo his face, and he discovers evidence that they eat the bodies of slain enemies. After about four months, he escapes with the help of a native from another tribe and reaches a boat from an Australian whaler, fighting off pursuers. Melville's narrative mixes adventure, ethnographic description and social criticism. Students can read it as a lively travel story and as an early American critique of colonialism, while noticing that the narrator's view of the islanders is itself shaped by romantic assumptions. Toby's later appearance confirmed parts of the story, and the edition includes the 'Story of Toby' sequel.

Top Lessons

Civilized and savage
Melville questions who is truly savage. Students can weigh his claims.
Related across the library
- The Sign of the Four, Lesson: Treasure and its cost
  Treasure and its cost. Nearly everyone touched by the Agra treasure is destroyed or corrupted by it. Watson is glad when it is lost.
- The Time Machine, Lesson: The long view of time
  The long view of time. In the further vision the Traveller watches the sun swell and redden, life dwindle to crabs and lichens, and finally the sounds of every living thing fall silent. Wells draws on the physics of a cooling sun and the long timescales of geology to show a universe far older and longer than human history. The narrator's answer is practical: even if that is our end, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.
- The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, Lesson: Dawdling has a cost
  Dawdling has a cost. Jonathan enjoys Aunt Emma's cookies and her warm chair so much that he falls asleep, and then he forgets the very thing he came for. Because he starts home late, he has to cross the mountain in the dark. The story makes the lesson gently and without scolding: finish the errand before you rest.
- Understood Betsy, Full Text
  whenever there was anything to fear When they were out walking Aunt Frances took her out for a walk up one block and down another every single day no matter how tired the music lessons had made her the aunt s eyes were always on the alert to avoid anything which might frighten Elizabeth Ann If a big dog trotted by Aunt Frances always said hastily There there dear That s a NICE doggie I m sure I don t believe he ever bites little girls MERCY Elizabeth Ann don t go near him Here darling just get on the other side...
- Rameau's Nephew, Lesson: An honest cynic
  An honest cynic. The nephew admits every vice and accuses respectable society of the same vices hidden. His frankness is disarming, and the philosopher struggles to answer it. Students can learn that candour about sin is not repentance, and that an argument may expose pretended virtue without proving that virtue is false.
Paradise and captivity
The valley seems a paradise but becomes a prison.
Related across the library
- SEC v. W. J. Howey Co., Lesson: Respecting the trial court
  Respecting the trial court. Frankfurter did not defend the offering; he defended a rule of judicial administration. Two courts had found as a fact that the contracts were separate, and he believed the Supreme Court should not reweigh such findings. His dissent raises the lasting question of when an issue is one of fact and when it is one of law.
- Poems: First, Second and Third Series, Lesson: Seeing nature exactly
  Seeing nature exactly. Dickinson's snake parts the grass as with a comb and looks like a whip-lash unbraiding in the sun; her winter light has weight. She models careful looking that is both scientific in precision and spiritual in what it notices.
- Robinson Crusoe, Lesson: Work as repentance
  Work as repentance. Island labor becomes thanksgiving and ordered stewardship.
- Ex parte Milligan, Lesson: Open courts as the test
  Open courts as the test. The majority draws a bright line: where the civil courts are open and able to act, civilians must be tried by them. The old English maxim that when the king's courts are open it is a time of peace gave Davis a test that judges could apply without second-guessing generals on strategy.
- Fathers and Sons, Lesson: Ideas meet life
  Ideas meet life. Bazarov's nihilism is tested by love, family and death, which his theories cannot master. Turgenev shows the limits of ideology without simply dismissing it.
Travel writing
Typee mixes fact and fiction. Students can discuss the responsibilities of a travel writer.
Related across the library
- In Patagonia, Lesson: Truth in travel writing
  Truth in travel writing. Chatwin's mixture of fact and invention raises questions about the ethics of writing about real people. The book invites readers to ask what they expect from non-fiction.
- The Grapes of Wrath, Lesson: Conversion
  Conversion. Casy and Tom move from personal concerns to concern for all.
- Down and Out in Paris and London, Lesson: Hidden labor
  Hidden labor. Diners never see the kitchens that serve them.
- The Last Battle, Lesson: A lie dressed in a lion's skin
  A lie dressed in a lion's skin. Shift does not deny Aslan; he uses Aslan's name to command what Aslan would never command. Because the Narnians have been told that Aslan is not a tame lion, they find it hard to say that these orders are wrong. The book teaches that a true thing can be bent into a lie, and that real faith must know the character of the one it trusts.
- A Child's Garden of Verses, Lesson: Attention widens
  Attention widens. The rain poem moves from near umbrellas to ships at sea—attention growing outward.

Verified Quotes

“the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth”

— Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Chapter XVII (Project Gutenberg #1900).Quote card

Science and the Modern World, Lesson: Mistaking the map for the country
Mistaking the map for the country. The 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' is Whitehead's name for treating a useful abstraction, such as matter with simple location, as if it were the whole of concrete reality. He does not reject the abstraction; he praises its efficiency. The error lies in forgetting what was left out, including colour, value and mind.
The Art of War, Ch. II.6 (Waging War)
There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare The conclusion of Sun Tzu's accounting of the cost of a campaign in men, animals and treasure.
Mother Courage and Her Children, Lesson: Living off the war
Living off the war. Courage's livelihood depends on the war continuing, and each of her children dies at a moment when her mind is on business. Brecht built the play to show the cost of trying to profit from violence while staying clear of it.
The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Lesson: Reading late and partisan sources
Reading late and partisan sources. The Arabic accounts were written down long after the events and shaped by tribal pride, legal concerns and storytelling conventions. Kennedy neither discards them nor accepts them uncritically; he compares them with Greek, Syriac, Armenian and Coptic writers and with what can be known of administration and geography. His method models careful use of imperfect evidence.
Memoirs, Medical lens
Three threads matter for a medical reader. First, the Kentucky breakdown of late 1861: the press called Sherman insane, he was sent home on leave, and his family letters (outside this book) describe despair and thoughts of suicide. Biographers have read the episode variously as acute stress, a depressive episode or an exhausted man's realism caricatured by the press; these are interpretations, and the memoir itself offers only anger and documentation. Second, disease and military medicine: typhoid kills Willie,...

“four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.”

— Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Chapter XVII (Project Gutenberg #1900).Quote card

United States v. The Amistad, Statement of the case and arguments of counsel
the said vessel cargo and slaves while so being the property of the said Spanish subjects arrived within the jurisdictional limits of the United States and were taken possession of by the said public armed brig of the United States under such circumstances as make it the duty of the United States to cause the same vessel cargo and slaves being the property of said Spanish subjects to be restored to the true proprietors and owners of the same without further hindrance or detention as required by the treaty now su...
Reynolds v. United States, Full Text
United States shall consist of not less than sixteen nor more than twenty-three persons while a statute of the Territory limits the number in the district courts of the Territory to fifteen Comp Laws Utah The grand jury which found this indictment consisted of only fifteen persons and the question to be determined is whether the section of the Revised Statutes referred to or the statute of the Territory governs the case By sect of the Revised Statutes the district courts of the Territory have the same jurisdicti...
Worcester v. Georgia, Lesson: A missionary's conscience
A missionary's conscience. Worcester and Butler could have avoided prison by taking Georgia's oath or leaving the Nation, as most of their fellow missionaries did. They refused, believing the oath would deny the rights the Cherokee held under federal treaties and abandon the people they served. Their decision to remain imprisoned rather than accept a pardon on the state's terms kept the case alive.
Munn v. Illinois, Full Text
MUNN V ILLINOIS U S OPINION OF THE COURT CHIEF JUSTICE WAITE MR CHIEF JUSTICE WAITE delivered the opinion of the court The question to be determined in this case is whether the general assembly of Illinois can under the limitations upon the legislative power of the States imposed by the Constitution of the United States fix by law the maximum of charges for the storage of grain in warehouses at Chicago and other places in the State having not less than one hundred thousand inhabitants in which grain is stored in...
White Fang, Part V, Chapter IV
Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished like a flower planted in good soil. White Fang's life at Sierra Vista, where there is plenty of food and no work, is a Southland of the heart as well as of the map.

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life

Summary

Top Lessons

Civilized and savage

Paradise and captivity

Travel writing

Verified Quotes